asr

Tipton’s extra lines of code first checked to see if the coming lottery drawing fulfilled Tipton’s narrow circumstances. It had to be on a Wednesday or a Saturday evening, and one of three dates in a nonleap year: the 147th day of the year (May 27), the 327th day (Nov. 23) or the 363rd day (Dec. 29). Investigators noticed those dates generally fell around holidays — Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas — when Tipton was often on vacation. If those criteria were satisfied, the random-number generator was diverted to a different track. Instead, the algorithm would use a predetermined seed number that restricted the pool of potential winning numbers to a much smaller, predictable set of numbers.

Admittedly, this is based only on the description from the article, which says it is describing pseudocode. But obviously, once this code is found, it's game over. Apparently the audit process for lotteries is terrible enough that this didn't matter.

Compare this with the auto emissions cheating scandal, where the algorithm was complicated in order to hide what was happening, so that the code would not be obvious as a defeat device: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~klevchen/diesel-sp17.pdf (see pages 6-8).

Oh wait: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-d...

...

In all seriousness, I am on your side--zoning laws which never change create lots of incentive problems and prevent central and desirable areas from sensibly adding density. But let's not pretend this is a simple math problem where nobody with sense can disagree--it just leads to demonizing the other side (which there is lots of here).

Among other things, it will almost surely never be the case, no matter how successful YIMBY is, that N=M in the bay area, because adding more housing will increase demand--people will stop leaving to take jobs in Denver/Seattle/Portland, more people will find it doable to move to the bay area, etc.

If you compared the salary of an in-n-out manager to the engineer running the team, or to law firm partners, you'd get a different conclusion.

The fact that someone who's worked for a good chunk of their life at an In-N-Out makes more than a young professional fresh out of school seems pretty reasonable, when you think about it. (Although it still makes In-N-Out an exception, which is too bad.)

Also, it is inaccurate to claim there is "overwhelming evidence" that the ban is not a Muslim ban, and it is an unhelpful ad hominim attack to call anyone who thinks it's a Muslim ban dishonest. The US District Court in Hawaii held that "EO-3 plainly discriminates based on nationality in the manner that the Ninth Circuit has found antithetical to ... the founding principles of this Nation."[3] I.e., it's a Muslim ban. And the Ninth Circuit recently upheld this opinion.[4]

The Supreme Court might overturn the Ninth Circuit decision, but you might want to edit your comment so it's less wrong.

[1] read the article you linked to!!

[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120417zr1_j4... and https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120417zr_4gd...

[3] http://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000015f-2bab-d519-a57f-7fabf1...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/us/travel-ban-court.html

[0] rlegutko.pl/download/en-nieuczciwa-konkurencja-polityka-insight-270320171.pdf, see Chart 8 on page 18.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/4kc8ovgnyf996yn ("we made a conscious choice to invest in downtown Seattle—even though it would have been cheaper to move to the suburbs")

But, counter to the OP's point, I wouldn't assume this is an attempt to move the average; I would guess this is for a number of reasons, including because it's too much mental energy to decide if a product (film) is worth four or five stars, if you rate something you are often just trying to say "liked it" or "didn't like it."

The Advisory Committee that drafted the new Rule 23 in the mid-1960s was influenced by two major developments. First was the suggestion of Harry Kalven, Jr. and Maurice Rosenfield in 1941 that class action litigation by individual shareholders on behalf of all shareholders of a company could effectively supplement direct government regulation of securities markets and other similar markets. The second development was the rise of the civil rights movement, environmentalism and consumerism. The groups behind these movements, as well as many others in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, all turned to class actions as a means for achieving their goals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action

Also, it's somewhat misleading to cite to the history of the class action and ignore current justifications. This is like arguing that U.S. democracy is bad because it was originally a method for a small group of wealthy landowners to control the country, while ignoring the fact that currently anyone can vote. The history of class actions in England, although interesting, does not make the GP comment incorrect. If the modern purpose is only to simplify similar cases, we already have coordination and consolidation.

Health insurance is a mix of pre-paying for predictable and certain expenses with tax-free dollars, a transfer/entitlement system to ensure that more people can afford insurance (by design, your premium does not match your expected risk--either you are pooled with others at your employer, or your exchange account is subject to rating band requirements which means, for example, that in many states old people can only be charged 3X more than young people even though old people are likely to be much more than 3x more expensive to insure), and actual insurance. I'm not sure what percentage of your premium reflects the cost of actually insuring you against uncertain future health events, but it's far from 100%.

This is an interesting article, and some of it applies to healthcare in the U.S., but much of it does not.

The author's point about how Google Shopping is an ad is really not worthwhile. When Google introduced shopping it was a search product, not an ad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping#Change_to_paid...

The investigation was concerned with Google's introduction and promotion of Google Shopping in its search results, not with whether it's a problem for Google to show product listing ads.

When Google shopping was introduced it was a search product, actually, and was not "just an ad." It only became an ad in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping#Change_to_paid...

Compare the laws here: EU (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...) US (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2)

And whether or not you are forced to use a product is a large part of what it means to have a monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers

So even if you don't believe Google, there's at least some evidence that a lot of people actually do like services showing up.

http://www.thecrimson.com/admissions/article/2013/9/10/cours...

Standard oil and AT&T were not broken up because they were conglomerates. They were broken up because they were monopolies in single (or closely related) markets.

I agree the developer needs to take a look at these if he/she has not already but there's plenty of room to improve on those products; I don't think the existence of some mediocre solutions should put the developer off.

Have you tried to use Word's features as part of a mid-size team to manage a complicated document being edited by multiple users? Word's merge is crap.

My old law firm used version control software that appeared to be straight from 1991. So there's plenty of room to solve real problems here.

OP, I wish you the best of luck. But I concur with others, the use case for this product I see is for a team or company to learn to use it internally, not for a bunch of lawyers to use it across firms. So, keep the free tier to attract people who are willing to use it on their own (or in case someone can convince those outside their organization to sign up in order to participate on projects), and then increase pricing to any sort of team.

Also, I'm sure my firm could never have used a cloud-based solution, regardless of security, because we probably had clients who would not allow their information to be stored in the cloud.

Also, because I can speak to lawyers, the diffing needs to be excellent and it needs to be easy to create and share redlines in the ways lawyers are used to (send as a word doc/PDF, etc.). Perhaps this is already there, I'm excited to check it out.

But, the court said, it looks very much like Levandowski did take Waymo's files and use them at Uber, and the files "likely contain at least some trade secrets." So, basically, even if these are weak trade secrets claims and there aren't that many secrets, Uber and Levandowski have looked so bad on the question of whether they stole them that the Court was willing to say "fire him or else."

Here is that order if you're interested: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=244394038... See pages 11-17.

But I think in practice when you see this used in consumer goods sales, it's likely because the manufacturer is exploiting psychology in which unsophisticated consumers do not accurately predict their costs. For example: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/121/2/505/1884013/Shrou...

If you are looking for printers where you can get ink at cost in exchange for paying a bit more up front, that's available now: https://epson.com/ecotank-super-tank-printers

Kodak also did this ~10 years ago [1] but I cannot figure out if they still use this business model.

[1] https://outline.com/7ZNnYV

The reason it matters is that Lexmark has to sue its customers --the ones who signed the contract--in order to enforce a contract right. In the case that the Supreme Court just decided, Lexmark sued its competitors, the cartridge remanufacturers.

For Lexmark to sue its customers would be administratively difficult and is also generally not very good PR. So my guess would be Lexmark will never file that lawsuit.

The most egregious is this one:

cab drivers from city A may drive passengers to city B, but not pick up passengers in city B. Once again, this is not just to protect taxi drivers in city B (because the meter in taxi A may have lower tariffs), but also to ensure a competent driver for passengers in city B.

This is almost always a rule to protect cab drivers in city B. And it's horribly inefficient as it means the cab spends 50% of its time empty. If driving between cities is common, fares have to be much, much higher to compensate drivers for this.

Knowledge of local roads is close to ok, it ties into being a good driver. The other items on your list are nice-to-haves, but at what cost? If tourists really want all this stuff, they can take the cab at the stand outside their hotel or at the airport instead of calling an Uber. But, speaking for myself, I'd prefer to save 10-20 euro on a trip from the airport.

Disclaimer: the closest I have come to Germany is flying through the airports. So feel free to critique my lack of local knowledge.

That's not quite right. The issue of whether or not Uber tried to hide activities from authorities is separate from whether the activity was itself illegal. It's possible to face an obstruction of justice charge even if the investigation you are obstructing is looking at legal activity or ultimately does not result in a prosecution.

For example, Martha Stewart was convicted of obstruction of justice (and lying and conspiracy) even though she was not actually charged with insider trading.[1]

[1] http://coveringbusiness.com/2012/05/15/what-martha-stewart-d...

"Referring to Whatsapp's system of end-to-end encryption, she said: 'It is completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide.'"

The article's headline is "WhatsApp accused of giving terrorists 'a secret place to hide' as it refuses to hand over London attacker's messages." That's misleading/inaccurate to begin with. But the way it's been shortened here just makes it completely inaccurate.

This morning I was having a conversation with my fiancee, who said "if the US government gets a warrant they can open your mail, they can tap your phone calls, they can come into your house and search -- why should your phone be some sort of zone they cannot search even with a warrant?"

I happen not to agree but this is not some wacko view.

Did you know Texas and Oklahoma fought a "battle"? http://dbpedia.org/page/Red_River_Bridge_War