pwdisswordfish2

Flexibilty would have been my first guess. Are there any other reasons besides flexibility?

Many sellers on Amazon have their own stores, be they brick and mortar and/or website. Amazon in these cases is just a middleman processing sales that the third parties are already capable of making themselves. They simply lack the web traffic. This is not true of all the brands carried by Best Buy. Many do not do direct-to-consumer sales.

There are less obvious differences such as the contract terms agreed between brands and Best Buy versus the ones between sellers and Amazon. Those details often are only discovered through litigation.

To suggest Best Buy was already doing what Amazon is doing is nonsense.

Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist.

If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well. Nonsense comparison.

Would the same principle apply to a tech company "privacy policy"?

"We can't guarantee that policy has never been violated."

Perhaps there is a way to make this guarantee: Do not collect the data to begin with.

This article is rather vacuous. At least he should link to the testimony. However, check out this one by the same author:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep4mx4/yale-antitrust-sch...

Why is the Debian-derived system non-booting?

Many years ago I had disk error problem and could not boot. I tried a popular, Linux-based "system rescue" CD and it could not boot without accessing the disk. I tried my own "live" NetBSD USB stick and booted up no problem. No disk access needed.

I stayed away from Linux for many years as a result of experiences like that. I have been using Linux lately and I continue to find more stuff like this that would just never happen on BSD.

I do not understand why people use grub, let alone grub2. There are plenty of other bootloaders. What is wrong with syslinux?

You forgot the key word: modern.

%s/software/modern &/g

In 2020, you are an "engineer" writing "modern" software.

Don't forget the "updates"!

The point is not to "escape" complexity, but to manage it.

Of course, these type of "I hate the word simple" comments are always besides the point. They could be the whines of frustrated, incompetent programmers who continually produce overly complex solutions to relatively simple problems and call it a day. We all know those programmers exist.

It’s almost as if making something ‘simple’ and ‘lightweight’ doesn’t let you escape the complexity of the real world in which you have to use it.

"If this body is concerned with what we are doing with the laws, it should change those laws based on the best interests of this country and its people;"

"however, this body should also note that Amazon will seek to exert control over the legislative process to ensure that Amazon's best interests are represented to the maximum extent that our influence and lobbying budget will allow,^1 even if those interests conflict with the best interests of this country and its people."

1. We spent $16,790,000 in 2019. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... I own the Washington Post. I am considered by Forbes, among others, to be the world's wealthiest billionaire. I am also a registered voter in this country.

Is this a valid reason for not using Go?

I am a holdout.

(Not suggesting I am "smarter" than Go users, but I can forsee issues with Go being controlled by Google.)

This is a very typical response on HN in response to articles/blog posts about issues raised by the Google business.

When these sort of comments rise to the top of HN threads, I am at a loss how to interpret the meaning.

1. Does it mean the commenter and HN voters do not care about the issue (e.g., anti-competitive behaviour)?

or

2. Does it mean they normally would care about anti-competitive behaviour but because they "like" this particular company they do not care?

If the commenter means #2, then it seems like there are some assumptions being made. For example, one assumption might be that if Google is held accountable for anti-competitive behaviour then it will affect the commenter's "web user experience".

However, I cannot see how to arrive at that conclusion. In fact, the commenter states "Build better alternatives and I'm on board."

What if anti-competitive behaviour was an impediment to others seeking to "[b]uild better alternatives"? If holding Google to account for anti-competitive behaviour would remove such impediments, then it seems that the commenter is more likely to mean #1.

The commenter appears to desire the most convenient and quick "service" he/she can get, and is impartial to who provides it. He/she acknowledges that others could build better alternatives to Google. If holding Google accountable for its conduct helps others build better alternatives, this would meet the commenter's needs.

Without further clarification from the commenter, I am going to assume that #1 better represents his/her meaning.

Seems easy enough. What are your requirements exactly? The bookmark would have to be stored somewhere. Some options in order of complexity:

1. In the URL, eg. “example.com/#line1234”

2. In the user’s browser (cookie, local storage)

3. On the server, requiring users to have accounts and be logged in

I mean, they’ve already had “Sandy Bridge”, literally in English. That’s not much better…

Indeed, I do not mean to suggest that shared computing is necessarily a net negative. Sharing a remotely accessible computer among trusted friends/family has always been an interesting idea to me because it would allow such easy communication. The way I see it, this is the core idea that underlies "e-mail" on UNIX. A group of people sharing accounts on a computer. UNIX allows easy messaging between accounts. Another group doing the same thing on another computer. Connect the two computers over a telephone line and now we have messaging to people in another group. Today, if you and I can both connect to the same computer, where we both have accounts, that is still an easy way to do messaging, in my opinion. Computers are no longer prohibitively expensive. There is no requirement that the computer belong to a third party. The ongoing problem however is that there needs to be someone who can administer the computer. It is not easy enough for anyone to do. It seems the "sysadmin" is still needed as much today as in the past.

There are a number of companies focused on making masks in the US. Anyone know the current sales figures?

Unless I am mistaken, NZ did not ask (=require) the general public to wear masks because the NZ government was primarily following information disseminated through the WHO as guidance.

He is no Adam Curtis and HN readers probably dislike him^1, but Ken Loach's most recent film (2019) is about delivery services and the "gig economy". It is called "Sorry We Missed You".

1. His last film in 2016 won the Palm d'Or at Cannes if that means anything.

"Why does FB even have employee medical information and personal finanacial records?"

You are assuming that they have this information. However their argument is that the search terms "could" retrieve such documents. There is nothing here that confirms they possess these purportedly irrelevant documents that would be produced given the current search terms.

Usually lawyers will redact personal, sensitive information before releasing the documents. In the US, some courts make this an obligation. Also, usually there are some search operators to limit the results of the search to usage of the terms only in certain contexts, e.g., like the ones used in Lexis and Westlaw.

It is a new level of irony, hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance to see an unregulated, privacy-destroying tech company whose core business requires ingesting personal information from hundreds of millions of people at an unprecedented scale try to argue that EU regulators, who are probably limited by statute in what they are authorised to do with the information they receive, should not have access to information for the purposes of investigating Facebook's activities.

Would you store the personal data in "the cloud" (i.e., remotely accessible shared computer)

Thanks for posting this! I’ve been enjoing short stories more than I thought after picking up Men Without Women recently. They make for very nice lunchtime reading :D I also appreciate that the list is full of classics. I quite like the feeling of reading an established canon.

Flowers For Algernon never interested me much, but learning now that it was originally a short story, I’ll put it on my list.

Here is a neat pdf of Asimov’s The Last Question, for those who are into that sort of thing: https://docdro.id/GQfVN6o

There is an even easier analysis. If you were designing your own headphones just for your own use, would you have them collect personal data? If your answer is no, then choosing headphones that do not collect data is a logical choice.

The author cites some idea of "trading" ongoing collection of personal data^1 for features but I can't see how that applies here, assuming the user has already paid for the product, e.g., he has already paid for the headphpones.

1. This does not appear to be a one-time, voluntary submission of data by the purchaser. For example, submitting one's name and a product serial number in order to register for a warranty.

Yeah, that’s what I had looked up as well. Pretty interesting. I don’t think I’ve come across an etymology that went from Gothic to Latin to English, but I’m hardly an expert.

>Listen, we're not the US Postal Service

Just forward the letters, man! How hard can it be? I bet they’re looking into every one of them anyway…

It’s kind of funny because in many languages the word for ambassador literally derives from “messenger”. Unfortunately not in English, but the words do seem related in Russian, from what I can gather.

Edit: Also, the school’s Russian teacher only translated the headline?! Come on!

As a links user, I think this is feasible without any help from BBC.

Attention: We have a hostage situation. Might be a world record.

Quick, someone make a political compass meme out of this!

How would that work?

For example, I can access the bbc.co.uk from the command line, retreiving text-only versions of the articles.

The author is obviously not paraphrasing the arguments IA's lawyers will make. See links below for what IA will argue.

https://controlleddigitallending.org/

https://controlleddigitallending.org/statement

https://controlleddigitallending.org/signatories

https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper

One of the canned responses we have observed Zuckerberg make to the media in response has been something along the lines of "Facebook gives people who would not otherwise have a voice a chance to be heard" (words are mine, not theirs).

The web already did that. By advocating that the world use only a single website to "speak", we allowed a single website owner to create a business by charging its users for the opportunity to publish their "speech" to segments of the website's audience.

The reason most of those millions of people "joined" Facebook was not to voice their opinions to an audience. It was to communicate with family and friends. A new mode of communication.

If those people who wanted to voice their opinions to audiences had their own websites, who would visit them? Would they have an audience of millions?

(The term "millions" is used here as an expression for "many", not as an accurate estimate of the numbers in question)

I have heard that there is talk in the US media of doing away with the US Postal Service. AKA Ye Olde Mode of Communication. It is unsettling how far things have come in eroding the American's right to be free from commercial or ideological pandering. There used to be a legally recognised principle that an American could say "No more", and then the pandering must stop. Try that with Facebook or any other "tech" company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...

We are heading toward a future where work is less "work" and presumably people will have to be compensated on some other basis besides "working hard".

That is one premise in the film version of Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.

The inequality in the distribution of capital that has been increasing since the 1970's, while wages stagnate, is at worst a trajectory that takes us to neo-feudalism, or something that resembles slavery, colonialism or caste systems. At best, it's a long-term recipe for social unrest.

FAANG is sitting on vast amounts of capital. Though FAANG employees may loathe the thought, it is arguable that, in the end, the market value is not based on the workers, it is based on the capital. Time will tell.

The relatively high salaries can be viewed as a protective measure to keep these workers from joining competing companies. We already know the FAANG CEOs, e.g., Steve Jobs, made pacts with each other on how much they would pay out for these workers.

The film suggests workers have become liabilities not assets. Workers are costs that can be cut when needed. You can decide for yourself, but when pacts are made to limit salaries, this to me sounds like limiting a cost, not limiting how much they will pay for an asset.

Taking a long view, thinking beyond simply my own welfare, I would have problems ethically working for FAANG. I do not see these companies as contributing anything towards solving the problems we are going to have as a result of the trend to which Piketty has drawn attention. If anything, these companies will be on side of capital not labour, and the "work" they do can be used to keep labour under surveillance and control.