Posts by Dinanziame 683 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
I'm not sure what happened that was illegal here? It appears that these people have set their own algorithms to buy and sell their own token, unsupervised, at variable prices. Somebody came up with a better algorithm to do the same thing and made a mint. What's the crime? It's like having a good day on the stock market.
At the moment, my banking app is probably the easiest way, and might soon be almost the only way, to pay my bills. Some banks require two devices to authenticate yourself, so unless you want to use two different PCs you rather have to download their app. The app from the national train company is also the simplest way by far to buy a ticket. The app from the national topography service is very useful when hiking (much better than the one coming with the phone).
Maybe you don't use app stores anymore, but I can say with confidence you are in a very small minority.
I hope Russia loses the war and gets kicked out of Ukraine; but I can't prevent myself from wincing when I read, like in this article, the words "illegal invasion". The expression is at best absurd, and at worst hypocritical. Invasions are not regulated by laws, and cannot be legal or illegal (Which does not prevent the possiblity of war crimes during said invasions, but that's a different matter). For that matter, if you ever entertain the idea of using the words "legal invasion"... please don't. Regardless of the invader, invaded, and motives, it's just wrong.
The price is not set by how much they would make through ads otherwise, it is set to maximize how much money they make. They do a study of how many people would accept paying for $2, $5, $10, $15, $20, and they chose the price point which maximizes how much they make. There is no particular reason to think this would correspond to how much they would make from ads. It's like thinking that plane tickets are set by comparing how much it would cost people to walk instead.
This is also how are set the prices of chocolates, clothes, cell phones, cars, and pretty much anything in life whose price is not regulated.
It would make no sense for them to do that. It's much better to have a billion users who grumble about ads than a couple of thousands who will watch very few free videos.
YouTube is what it is because of two reasons:
1) all the users who use it
2) all the creators who use it
The first reason is more important than the second, because creators can easily be on multiple platforms, it's worth it for them as long as there are enough users. But if you lose half the users, the creators won't come anymore. If YouTube becomes subscription-only, the vast majority of users will leave, and YouTube will die.
Depends on the job. I've found it much harder to ramp up engineers remotely. I normally tell new team members they should ask me questions about ten times a day, and this really goes much better if we are sitting two meters apart. Text conversations are much slower, and video meetings are not so good either.
In this case, I feel a certain numbet of politicians are all too happy to pile on the Taiwan issue and ratchet up the rhetoric, to look good towards their constituents. Taiwan might well wish they would stop raising the issue. Taiwan is de facto a country, and it would be nice if it could be recognized as such, but some things cannot be hurried or forced ro happen.
I once unintentionally created a security vulnerability in the lab website by creating a PHP webpage that allowed users to upload files into a subdirectory — for instance, upload an arbitrary PHP file that would then be executed on request, including executing bash commands. I realized the problem afterwards but didn't fix it, which came in handy later when I needed to grab a data file from my private directory once but couldn't get ssh to work for some reason; I was able to upload a PHP that would copy my file to the website and download it from there.
Technically, it's unfair to say Twitter has lost half of its value since Elon Musk bought it. It had actually already lost a quarter of its worth during the acquisition since it was an LBO. Twitter essentially borrowed $13B and gave it to shareholders, saddling itself with the debt in order to reduce its own worth, just so that Elon Musk and his pals could buy it for only $31B.
They'll probably have to declare bankruptcy to get out of paying the debt; otherwise the company is as good as dead.
The fact of the matter is that ISPs cannot compete with each other on anything else than price, and it's easy to change providers, so their margins are thin. Big Tech providers are not nearly as interchangeable so they have larger margins and make a lot more money. This is similar to how truck drivers are paid very little compared to the companies who pay them.
What does "enabled" mean? Does Internet enable terrorism? Do terrorists use email? Do weapons manufacturer enable terrorism? For that matter, terrorists use cars; do car companies enable terrorism?
YouTube represents what's on the internet, and there's a tiny sliver of that about terrorism. I find it ridiculous to claim that imperfect filtering of terrorism apology videos means "enabling" terrorism.
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