FateOfNations

The only segnificant difference is that with stock buybacks, they have a bit more control over how and when it happens.

Investors have turned dividends into a religion. They must come every quarter like clockwork and never decrease; otherwise, it seems like there's a five-alarm fire and the place is on the brink of bankruptcy. It is irrational but reality.

For a while (currently?) there was SEO "wisdom" going around about not putting dates on content so that search engines would treat the content as "evergreen" rather than "stale".

Most of the population there is interested in those dates for non-DST-related reasons. They will want to know when Ramadan begins and ends, regardless of whether it's used to determine DST.

Whenever I've heard about someone having problems publishing a fork on the App Store, it was a trademark rather than a copyright issue. If you fork it, you must completely re-brand it to publish it on the App Store.

"Block access" doesn't capture what happened. A court with personal jurisdiction over the website operator ordered them to take it down under threat of fines and jail time. Websites are operated by humans, who are subject to the laws of their local community.

Amazon has a program (Amazon Vine Voices) that enables sellers and brands to send select customers pre-release items for review before the product goes on sale. Sellers/brands can also do that outside their sales platform. Note that these are almost always "free products in exchange for review" and are supposed to be appropriately disclosed.

It's about the actions of the business, not the person experiencing the product. If John Doe submits a review that says, "I bought and used this product, and it sucks," a business can't edit that to say, "I bought and used this product, and it was amazing." That would misrepresent the reviewer's personal experience.

Well, that's a review for fulfillment, which may or may not be done by the same entity responsible for the product. Many review forms aren't clear about whether they are asking you to review the specific product or the entire transaction experience.

It seems like they used "non-profit" in that sentence to mean:

"an undertaking being conducted for a purpose other than making a profit"

…rather than…

"an organization that has been recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as being organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes as set forth in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code."

Newfold Digital, which owns Bluehost, is the only entity with a commercial trademark sub-license agreement from Automattic per the recently updated WordPress Foundation Trademark Policy:

https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/#:~:text=If....

Digital First Media/MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper publishers in the US, runs its 100+ local newspaper (NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, etc.) websites on WordPress.

It can have some added effects for more modern vehicles. For example, if the AC is running in my car, the engine auto start/stop is disabled.

ICAO, the international organization which maintains the standards for travel document interoperability does have a public key directory that a reasonably large number of countries now participate in. The beauty of international organizations is that the individual members don’t all have to be on the best terms with each other.

https://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/PKD/Pages/default.aspx

I was reading through the Synapse bankruptcy court filings, and oh jeez, is this a mess:

> Synapse often used multiple Partner Banks to service different functions for the same Fintech Partner. In certain instances, end user deposits through a Fintech Partner were deposited in an account at one Partner Bank, while end user withdrawals through that same Fintech Partner were processed from a different account at a different Partner Bank. This business model makes it both essential and difficult to reconcile transactions and ensure end users receive access to the correct amount of funds due to each end user.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68458190/synapse-financ...

This fintech product model, with multiple intermediaries and service providers between end users and the depository banks, is a house of cards. Is running your bank-like financial services product as an actual bank that hard? These technology companies seem to want all the upsides of being a bank, with none of the responsibilities.

From my perspective, the big gap is that these depository banks aren't maintaining the customer and transaction data for the beneficial owners of the money they have on deposit. They seem like they should be the ones ultimately responsible for safeguarding the customer's funds. In the middle of this, the Federal Reserve dropped this gem about KYC non-compliance for one of the banks involved, swearing that it has nothing to do with the Synapse bankruptcy.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/enfo...

The primary "special privilege" is that the extension is shipped with the browser and hidden. The API itself is available to any extension developer.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...

Probably not. It's part of a bundled extension used to support Google Hangouts.

It's an API that is available to extension developers. The wrinkle here is that Google bundles a hidden "Hangouts Services" extension in Chrome with permissions for *.google.com (the extension's ID is the "nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome" referenced in the examples).

Chrome extensions can access CPU and GPU statistics via a public API that any extension developer can use. Google Chrome comes bundled with a hidden "Hangouts Services" extension, which has permissions for *.google.com (that extension's ID is the 'nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome' referenced in the examples). That extension has a function that will return those stats when called from JavaScript running on a webpage. As a result, any JavaScript running on *.google.com can get the current CPU and GPU utilization.

Apparently, this system statistics API is generally available to extension developers. The underlying issue is that they bundle a hidden "Hangouts Service Extension" with Chrome. Zoom, Teams, etc. would have access to this API through a Chrome extension, although they wouldn't have the advantage of having that extension pre-installed.

Criminal charges are appropriate in situations where a human (or group of humans) acts with malicious or reckless intent that harms (or could harm) the community. Self-driving vehicles reduce (but do not eliminate) opportunities for malicious or reckless acts related to vehicles. Criminal charges would remain appropriate in situations where an operator or manufacturer (and/or their employees) are malicious or reckless concerning a vehicle's design, manufacturing, or operation. It's important to note that just because someone was injured or died doesn't mean that there are malicious or reckless acts involved.

This isn't a novel issue: the courts and legal system regularly deal with defective products, including vehicles, that cause injury or death. If a defective product causes damage, the injured party is typically compensated financially for their loss. They even have frameworks for determining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life in monetary terms.

I wouldn't be so quick to do that. A potentially defective self-driving vehicle is a more serious matter since it could affect many cars and will likely attract much more scrutiny and further investigation… which, in this scenario, would quickly reveal that the vehicle was under manual control at the time of the incident. Now, you have a traffic ticket and a criminal obstruction of justice charge.

No, it didn't get a citation.

When humans break traffic laws, it's often because they decide to break the law or do not take appropriate care to ensure that the law is followed. As a result, the process focuses on personal responsibility and accountability for the driver's actions. That framework doesn't map onto self-driving vehicles; we probably shouldn't be trying to force it to fit. Treating a self-driving vehicle that violates traffic laws as a defective product is a better way to frame the issue.

I'd compare it to a situation where a car runs a red light: it could be because the driver wasn't paying attention, or it could have been because the brakes failed and couldn't stop. The breaks could have failed because they weren't properly maintained or because of a flaw in the design. Who is responsible and what appropriate accountability looks like depends on the details. If the driver wasn't paying attention, they should get a citation for violating traffic laws. The operator/owner (the registered owner) should get a citation if the breaks aren't reasonably maintained. If there is a design flaw, a regulatory agency should address the issue with the manufacturer to ensure that the problem is corrected. If the manufacturer was reckless with its design or manufacturing practices, it and/or its employees should be held accountable for those choices.

The update to the law that requires a brief explanation of what is carcinogenic is helpful.

Tl;dr: The military requires that its diesel vehicles be able to run on jet fuel to simplify logistics.

Apple and Google have agreed on a standard for the anti-stalking functionality. Everything else is still separate.

At least not federal wiretapping. It would be wiretapping in the subset of states that require all parties to the communication to consent to monitoring/recording, which includes California, where Facebook/Meta is headquartered.

The point is that the government could pay 100% of the cost but chooses not to.

A number of aspects of the design of Pandas make more sense if you know it's background. It originated in a quantitative finance environment where it's common to be working with time series data. It grew from that in to a more general purpose data manipulation and analysis library.

> I know it's unpopular to praise Tesla here, but in my view they deserve some credit for sitting pretty at SAE L2 while everyone else seems obsessed with quickly impressing investors with a half-baked rush to L3 or L4.

My concerns with Tesla are primarily about the safety implications of how it's automation capabilities get marketed, rather than the hardware itself… I also don't "get" the obsession over the "vision only" approach, which seems like an unwarranted compromise to me.

"Tech culture" intersecting with safety critical products and services indeed needs to be reckoned with.

and on top of that, the pedestrian was crossing against a red (do not walk) light. Lots of human factors issues in this incident from all sides (driver, pedestrian, Cruise executives, regulators, media, policy makers, etc.)… The technology issues don't seem particularly profound.