Re: Bullies
That sounds a bit like saying that the US wants to ban Russian oil so it can sell its own oil at higher prices.
454 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2017
Downvoted due to apparent inability to use people's proper names. It has been my experience it is not really possible to have an intelligent discussion once names are replaced like this.
That applies equally to people on the right (e.g. those who cannot bring themselves to say "Al Gore" and instead use a last name that rhymes) or people on the left who think it's cute to to describe players they disagree with in this manner.
I do not know if and to what extent Chinese companies would be able to control their components remotely or whether is has been configured to transfer information.
However, it would be a perfect ploy to build that in so it can be used to keep the USA (and other western nations) from interfering with the annexation of Taiwan.
"Recall your Navy or we'll cripple your countries by disabling cars, utility services, telecommunications, medical appliances, and so forth."
Of course, they could already achieve a popular revolt simply by robbing the people of "their" TikTok-access, but that's for another topic.
The (presumable) author wrote, "The good thing about code is that you can swiftly tell if it's bad. Just try to run it."
If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, "just run it" has been a pretty common way to "ensure" that bad code "works". Who cares that the programmer submits 37 round individual statements to the database server to store the information he collects in a single web form? Or that a record is copied in its entirety every time a single field is updated in order to create a history of changes?
Want to bet that the DoJ is already getting calls from politicians about ensuring that the need for transparency only applies to businesses - and then only to businesses that don't provide services for them?
Some years ago I attended a keynote speech by Colin Powell. He said that when he was Secretary of State the the department was a bit behind technologically, but that the department made great strides since. "These days Secretaries of State are running their own mail servers", he quipped.
Legislators could outlaw it if they wanted to.
Given how helpful location data has been in determining who exactly was present within the geo-fence around the US Capitol building on Jan 6 2021 it is doubtful they'll ever limit location tracking.
One cannot help but wonder if the issue with the minor would have been avoided if the he had been fired instead of being allowed to resign.
Along the same lines, how many more victims did he make at subsequent jobs because he was able to hide the reason for leaving the job where he was caught?
One of the 'rules' about these work events is that you're supposed to forget what people tell you when they're drunk - whether it's about their personal or their work life.
Probably an easy thing to do when you're drunk yourself, but quite impossible when you either don't drink or drink responsibly.
You're right that (the threat of) publicity is often the only way companies will end up doing the right thing, but Cubik is not off the hook yet as far as financial compensation goes in this case.
"Cubik was ordered to pay Mr T €3,000, with further damages to be determined at a later date."
Too bad this case wasn't in the US, though. Dreading the company dinners after the pandemic - always seem to be one or more coworkers who get drunk and insist on driving home themselves. HR Handbook says managers must step in at that point and call a taxi, but I've yet to see that happen. One wonders why these events are even organized when even management admits that certain people are likely closet alcoholics.
Virtually every country meddles in the business of other countries, and understandably so.
And, of course, every country tries to thwart meddling into their own affairs.
In my experience this meddling is only condemned if it doesn't suit their own position, though. To wit - a number of years ago a contingent of young people from a certain western European nation traveled to the US to help the campaign of their chosen candidate. Since this trip was partially funded by an established political party this was illegal under US election law.
Unsurprisingly, the party leaders did not act when they were alerted to this issue.
Didn't the e-mail from the Democrats National Convention that was published by hackers (Russian or otherwise) reveal that the DNC had actively worked to sabotage the Bernie Sanders campaign - in favor of Hillary Clinton?
If I recall correctly this lead to resignation of the Chair of the DNC (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) only days before the annual conference of the DNC.
This type of result of rent control is not uncommon. In areas where landlords have a limit on the annual increase they have little choice but to increase the rent by the maximum - simply because they can never catch up if they don't.
In areas without rent control it's not common to see annual increases, because the tenants will move if they're squeezed too much. That leaves the landlord with one or more months of lost rent, additional costs for advertising, cleaning and fixing up the place, and so forth. It takes years to catch up from that loss and thus tends to provide a pretty strong incentive to not increase the rent - or at least limit the increases.
I suspect that the increasing service charges are driven in part by tax policies in certain areas, as well as Airbnb's own charge structure.
Service charges are often taxed differently and tend to incur lower charges by the platform itself compared to rental fees.
Same thing is happening on other platforms - sell a book for one cent/penny and charge a hefty "shipping and handling" fee.
The question on whether or when a foetus becomes a person is the main issue.
Roe v Wade inferred that the answer was "never", although most people would disagree with SCOTUS on that.
The yelling and mudslinging back and forth between the various camps will never yield a positive outcome until the question of whether/when personhood applies is answered.
Convince the pro-lifers that a 20-week-old foetus is not a person (based on medical arguments) and they might join the other camp.
Then work your way up from there until you're back at the 40 or so weeks that Roe v Wade allowed and a similar ruling may pave the way again in the future.
In the US of A it really depends on the state where the employee works (or resides). For instance, some states requires (lunch) breaks whilte others do not. Some states require employee access to their personnel file, others do not.
Then there's the distinction between hourly and salaried workers. In many regards hourly employees enjoy more protections than salaried ones.
A lot of the "voter suppression" rules are deemed essential for election integrity by western European countries. To wit: voter ID. Try voting without one in western Europe... for that matter, in some EU-countries it is even illegal to leave your own premises without an ID-card. In other words, you won't even be able to travel to a polling station without an ID-card - let alone cast your ballot.
To be fair, there are some practices that reek of voter suppression, but progressive countries tend to address those specific issues rather than removing any and all perceive barriers - many of which are deemed essential to free and fair elections.
@Philip - a well-written reply, but the premise seems to be flawed nonetheless. While Doctors did indeed regulate themselves (with even heavier government regulation on their profession), they have also been known to be shortsighted, slow to acknowledge the validity of new information, be fraudulent, engage in conspiracies (e.g. Tuskegee), plagued by misplaced pride, and a host of other maladies.
All from real Doctors...
I caught that too:
"a self-attestation from any third-party software providers"
I've been deeply involved with vendors, enterprise applications, NIST, PCI-DSS, regulated industry, and the like for decades and I can assure you from personal experience that such attestations aren't worth the bytes they occupy.
For that matter, audits often don't uncover issues - in fact they frequently don't even look for them. Worse, many audits rely on interviews with management. This is true for external audits and internal audits are even more problematic.
In my opinion, a couple of things must be in place:
- Ask the people in the trenches and guarantee confidentiality.
- Make the auditors and executives personally liable for proven negligence and inaccurate (or false) statements and claims.
- Set up an external reporting solution.
- Automatically publicize issues x days after notifying the responsible parties - even when remediated.
I take umbrage with the comment about "really willing to spend over $100 for internet [you can use 4G mobile broadband]".
When I purchased our (rural) home 8 years ago I checked with both Comcast and Verizon. Based on my address they both assured me that they provided broadband service there. Closed on the house, only to discover that did in fact NOT provide service here - just in the census area our address falls under.
Ended up getting DSL-service from Verizon - $60 a month for 3Mpbs. The cost is now up to $105 a month and the speed is down to around 1Mbps.
Mobile service is very spotty, even with a booster. In addition, virtually all mobile plans (including 5G) available in our area have a data cap of 50-100GB, after which the user is throttled to "3G speeds" - which generally means less than 512 kbps.
So, $110 a month instead of $105 for 150 times the speed is not bad at all. As for the $600 customer portion of the dish, that's quite a bit less than the $72,000 Comcast wants from me for running a cable to my house.
My situation is not unique, and in fact not as bad as it is in many other (mostly rural) areas.
The company I work for had just spent tens of millions 'upgrading' the offices to 1950s open work areas (long tables, sometimes up to 80 people in a single area). Then came the pandemic and virtually all 50,000 employees have been working from home since then, vacating the 'upgraded' work tables the company was so proud of.
Time and again the company announced mandatory "return to the office", but SARS-Cov2 didn't cooperate.
The longer it lasted, the more the workers balked at 100% return to the office. In a fairly recent staff survey more than 90% responded that they would not accept mandatory time in the office.
The latest decision has been to "encourage" (vs. earlier "compel" or "mandate") people to work in the office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The offices will be more or less closed on Mondays and Fridays.
You're right - to a degree. A number of years ago I purchased GEs Bluetooth lightbulbs precisely because the fine print stated that they required no internet connection.
Not long after I had installed a bunch of them they stopped working properly. Did some digging and found that my firewall/proxy server was blocking communication from the (required) phone application. The application violated two of my rules: traffic to China and pr0n servers.
I contacted GE and provided the details, but they could not have cared less.
It was kind of fun to return the bulbs to Lowe's (Home Improvement Box store in the US) after the 90-day return period, though.
Store clerk: "Sir, we really cannot take these back since you bought them almost half a year ago."
My reply: "Well, I'm not keeping them - they started communicating with a known pr0n [I uttered the full word at the service counter while surrounded by other customers] server in China."
Store clerk (whose face had turned a few shades darker): "Eh - would you like the money returned to your credit card?"
West Virginians already seceded once. There are a lot of people in rural Virginia who believe it should be done again.
Doesn't help either that 40% or rural Virginians don't have access to broadband internet access (or even high-speed internet access).
Of course, once they do have broadband (in the next 10-20 years or so) they'll be using it for social media and to watch TV - which is projected to take more than 25% of the global power supply at the data center level.
The sales tax rate in Loudon county is 6%. of which 4.3% is state tax. The difference is levied by the county (and sometimes towns.) The average sales tax in Virginia counties is 5.6%.
The effective average real estate tax in Loudon county is a whopping 1.08% - more than twice what it is in some other counties. The median for counties in the state is probably around 0.7%.
Color me skeptical, but given the propensity of the Chinese government to spy on its own citizens I wonder if the fine isn't a result of DiDi's refusal to share the data it collected with the government.
Granted, this is conjecture, but not without cause.
I used to really like Yamaha digital pianos, until the keys on our Clavinova started sticking.
Replacing them is expensive and Yamaha has steadfastly refused to stand by its product from the very beginning when owners started having this issue.
It's possible that the problem has since been corrected, but I have lost faith in Yamaha's digital line-up.
Not sure why Amazon is hanging this on a custom internal chat app. My (Fortune 500) employer recently announced that we can now enable self-censoring in Slack.
The bot will make suggestions if people use words that are deemed problematic by the company, like "dummy value", "brown bag lunch", "man-hours", "soft skills", and "he".
"User demographic matters".
I remember a project about fifteen years ago were the target group was "older people living in mobile homes in Arkansas who only have dial-up internet access".
The Millennials (who were hip, modern, and should be listened to by us geezers, according to the brass) went to work and created a hip and modern web site with all the whistles and bells available at the time.
Lots of joking about the target group by said Millennials.
Eventually the site was launched. Bounce rate on the home page was over 90%. They seemed to be unable to understand why the "older people living in mobile homes in Arkansas who only have dial-up internet access" never got past their 5 MB home page.
This begs the question of what constitutes appropriate actions to counter a move by an instigator.
Would Japan have surrendered with the conventional bombings and dropping two nuclear bombs, which combined killed between 300,000 and 900,000 civilians?
Would Germany have fallen without the bombing raids by the allied forces, which killed 570,000 and 800,000 civilians?
Today's (western) culture no longer accepts this as ethical or acceptable. Unfortunately, adversaries tend to abide by different ethics. Worse, they make the western reluctance/refusal a key part of their strategy.
As for "removing the word RUSSIA on envelopes", one would expect great support for such initiatives given the removal of anything from western societies that is even remotely linked to its troubled past.
This is all well and good, but:
- The average user doesn't really care (or understand) privacy. Facebook would not exist if they did.
- All this wrangling makes the EU appear to care about privacy, but European countries do their share of legally collecting data on the public and tracking people.
- European governments violate the GDPR all the time. PII is routinely shared via e-mail (unencrypted). The consulate/embassy of my own country sent my PII (full name and DOB) from the USA to the EU in the subject of a message, for instance.
- Europeans are obsessed with PII - to a level that is not (yet) tolerated by Americans. Requiring DOB for train tickets or museum passes - and then printing them on the tickets/passes? Unthinkable in the USA.