5,340 karma · joined September 26, 2009
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%98We%20have%20a%20fir...
It lets you into news sites that have some sort of paywall/registration requirement, but that whitelist Google.
Coffee will do more than not kill you; it was recently found to confer a "reduced risk of dying from heart disease and certain other causes"!
<< Compared with abstainers, nonsmokers who drank a cup of coffee a day had a 6 percent reduced risk of death, one to three cups an 8 percent reduced risk, three to five cups a 15 percent reduced risk, and more than five cups a 12 percent reduced risk. There was little difference whether they drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. The association persisted after controlling for age, alcohol consumption, B.M.I. and other health and diet factors. >>
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/coffee-tied-to-lowe...
<< When Mr. Jobs harangues his staff, when he puts the company ahead of his supposed friends, when he shows little regard for his family in the service of building what’s next, he implicitly holds an ace card with the audience who knows how things eventually turned out. Sure, he may have been terrible to be around, but in the end, wasn’t he right about the importance of that dent in the universe? And if he hadn’t been as obnoxious about his aims, would the dent have been as large? >>
The trick with a $75 fine for texting while moving is passengers. If you're willing to ban texting entirely while moving though, using technology to assess small fines could work!
NCMEC has protocols around how to report the images/video, and how to delete it on your end.
I would highly recommend against calling the FBI. You should work with NCMEC, as they have experience working with this stuff and their CyberTipline is one of the major ways that Congress has mandated that online service providers should report this stuff. Plus talking to law enforcement employed by the federal government has a host of risks associated with it:
But that's exactly what happened in the early days of the founding of the US, when Alexander Hamilton negotiated the Funding Act of 1790: "The Funding Act authorized the federal government to receive certificates of state war-incurred debts and to issue federal securities in exchange." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_Act_of_1790
Without the Funding Act, the state governments would've defaulted on their Revolutionary War debt. By assuming the debt of the states, the US greatly strengthened their collective borrowing ability and also brought the states closer together into the union.
The fine for not complying started off fairly low, but has been increased in subsequent legislation. In my experience though, NCMEC is mostly just interested in getting regular reports uploaded to their system. I met with them once, and they have a rough sense for how many reports should be sent over for a site of a certain activity/traffic level, and if the number of repots is zero... then they know you're not in compliance.
Their reporting interface is beyond awful though. Maybe they've improved it in recent years; when I last saw it, everything had to be uploaded and reported manually.
<< Yet if someone like that came to a top venture capitalist’s office, he or she could very well be turned away. Start-up investors often accept pitches only from people they know, and rely heavily on gut feelings, intuition and what’s worked before. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” Paul Graham, co-founder of the seed investor Y Combinator, once said. >>
Paul was right - this meme just won't die.
<< People will probably still repeat that quote, but now if someone does it will be proof that either (a) they didn't do their research or (b) they have an ideological axe to grind. >>
<< After careful consideration, we've decided to transition Shyp couriers, the individuals who complete pickups at our customers' homes and offices, to W2 employees. This move is an investment in a longer-term relationship with our couriers, which we believe will ultimately create the best experience for our customers.
Here at Shyp, we have three different roles that make up the workforce that creates the awesome Shyp experience that we’ve become known for. We have couriers (handle pickups), satellite van drivers (take items to warehouse) and those in the warehouse (handle packing and shipping, etc.). This move does not impact our satellite drivers or warehouse employees, who have been classified as W2 since Shyp launched in March of 2014, due to the specific responsibilities of their role. >>
<< Yahoo’s growth has been flat during her tenure. But recently, almost unknown to investors mostly interested in Yahoo for its $40 billion stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, Yahoo is showing progress. Revenue from the businesses Ms. Mayer created or acquired are growing at an annual rate of 80 percent, she announced in Yahoo’s last earnings update. She also said she expected overall growth to begin this year, which is pretty much in line with her original, optimistic timeline. >>
With a bit more momentum, she could be on track with her original turnaround plan:
<< The turnaround plan created by Ms. Mayer, a celebrated, though recently sidelined, executive at Google, was simple: Stop the downward spiral and increase Yahoo’s revenue within two or three years. After that, Ms. Mayer said she believed she could achieve double-digit annual growth by five years. >>
<< Matej Hrescak, a product designer at Facebook, spent several weeks at the Surf Office on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, near one of the island’s noted surfing beaches.
“I really appreciate long uninterrupted periods of work time in order to dive deep into a particular problem, and having a destination where you’re far away from usual distractions made this possible,” he said. The high-speed Internet, fully stocked office, access to a kitchen and camaraderie of other guests at barbecues, biking trips and other planned group activities, he added, all contributed to his productivity. >>
I wouldn't be very happy if I were expected to contribute to travel or lodging while "co-working on vacation" - or if the trip used up any vacation time.
Then #3 on the bulleted list of six points says, "Username = Email. Don't make people remember a username for your site. You may allow them to pick a username later on that can be used in lieu of their email address, e.g. as the URL for a profile page, but don't force them to use a username to log in."
<< "We do about 30 to 35 major heart surgeries a day. And we have never refused a single patient because they have no money."
The fees from the rich offset the costs for the poor. Patients with money pay several thousand dollars for open heart surgery. But patients with little money — and little hope of raising any — pay very little. They are 60 percent of the cases. >>
<< Until recently, Pennsylvania had one of the strictest home-school laws in the nation. Families keeping their children out of traditional classrooms were required to register each year with their local school district, outlining study plans and certifying that adults in the home did not have a criminal record. At the end of the year, they submitted portfolios of student work to private evaluators for review. The portfolio and evaluator’s report then went to a school district superintendent to approve. >>
Pretty scary that "in half the states, children who are taught at home never have to take a standardized test or be subject to any sort of formal outside assessment."
<< With income inequality continuing to widen, high-end malls are thriving, even as stolid retail chains like Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney falter, taking the middle- and working-class malls they anchored with them.
“It is very much a haves and have-nots situation,” said D. J. Busch, a senior analyst at Green Street. Affluent Americans “will keep going to Short Hills Mall in New Jersey or other properties aimed at the top 5 or 10 percent of consumers. But there’s been very little income growth in the belly of the economy.” >>
Completely agree with you. Also agree that fixing culture is often harder than fixing technological scaling problems!
All that said, kudos to Wikimedia Foundation for addressing the speed issues for uncached pages. Great work!
There's a possibility that showing The Interview on YouTube and other sites will result in online streaming becoming a huge runaway revenue success. But that's a huge gamble to make, especially when the movie is scoring just a 54% on Rotten Tomatoes.
<< Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.” >>
It's probably not a coincidence that Steve Jobs had Tim Cook there to manage core operations, while Steve spent a lot of time focused on reinventing the business.
<< About 600 Long Island Rail Road retirees will lose their disability benefits after a federal agency voted last week to halt the payments, amid a sweeping investigation into what prosecutors have called a major disability fraud scheme, according to agency documents and officials.
The agency, the United States Railroad Retirement Board, which over more than a decade granted disability benefits to hundreds of railroad retirees based on fraudulent medical evidence with little scrutiny, took the action on Thursday during a five-minute meeting at its headquarters in Chicago. The vote approved procedures under which the board will cut off the benefits, which, officials said, are costing the agency $2 million a month. >>
A bunch of the people involved have gone to prison over this fraud:
<< The first terminations came several weeks after the doctor who submitted what prosecutors have said was the bogus medical evidence underlying the applications of the roughly 600 retired railroad workers pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to fraud and conspiracy. The doctor, Peter J. Ajemian, told the judge in January that the retirees were not in fact disabled. …
Dr. Ajemian, who was sentenced to eight years in prison, is among 24 people — including retirees, another doctor and two facilitators — who since 2011 have pleaded guilty to federal charges resulting from of the investigation. Charges against eight other people indicted in the case are pending, and the investigation by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, officials have said, is continuing. >>
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/nyregion/600-long-island-r...
<< By November, when Musk discussed the deal on an earnings call, he sounded exasperated with continued condemnation of the terms he had extracted from Nevada. Calling the deal a “super-good idea” for the state, he said the criticism “kind of bugs me. I thought we got an okay incentive package, given the scale, but not a super-huge one.” >>
If he honestly thinks that a $1.4 billion in tax breaks and free land is just a "okay" incentive package, it explains a lot about how he was able to ask for $500m cash upfront from the state to fund the factory.