Yeah you're right. I totally saw him looting and beating up cops. You're analogy is apt! Apt I say!

Nope, they're all in on creating bullshit experiences for their audiences to pump their bottom lines. Amazon's complicit because it's their bottom line to say nothing. He'll, with the bullshit known as drops, they get a new monetization scheme from the publishers releasing on Twitch. Tip to bottom, the system is corrupt and will only get fixed with suits/legislation. Ah the power of capitalism.

Since their alerts rework, you've never really needed any more potatoes than what you can earn in nightwave once you've played long enough. Theres a point early enough in your playing life with the life of the game where there's incentive to buy, but never an obligation which I think can't be said for more aggressive game monetization systems.

Damn, the only damn thing I remember about this game (played a couple hours this weekend before deleting) was the damn hip sway. It would be deemed extreme even for runway models. For an action hero destined chosen one, it's frankly laughable. The rest was just boring.

Many standard messaging apps do allow for archival and compliance. Any of these companies probably only short list apps that are officially compliant. That's not to say that people were side-stepping "official" channels to communicate in the dark, which is what I imagine This fine captured. I suppose the lack of oversight from the bank's was so prevalent to incur this wrath.

As an employee of a huge SAAS offering, I assure you you're unable to beat the economies of scale you can get with cloud offerings in general.
Generally people who hate cloud are either worried about job security or those that are micromanagers. I'd argue personal projects aren't strictly the best place for cloud, but for anything larger you'll see the benefits immediately.
My previous job worked at a private company that stood up their own datacenters, and it was a pain in the ass to ever deal with standing up new services. It was a complete drag in productivity and it wasted a ton of time diddling ourselves getting N levels of approval
(not strictly a cloud vs hosted but feeds into people's mindset ) before then needing to wait on vendors filling orders, then DS people to actually install them.
If I want a new service, I can add some k8s descriptors and go to town. Worst case, we get a manager to whilelist some new expenses to scale up the instances.

Wear your star. Really, what's the harm?

(ugh that joke is low, even for me...)

I dunno. Like so many other things in politics, it looks like the used statistical probability. I was curious and found:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Basically you have superdelegates. If 51% of them said they'd vote 100% without a doubt that they're voting for HamSandwich, then we all basically know its going to happen, but its still not safe to call the race, since 1% is a very tiny margin of error. A few delegates for HamSandwich could have a heart-attack and now you're only at 49% of 100% voters. So let me push my magic margin to 70% of the 100% confident voters. If that's MY (yes editorial control and all that) bar to measure a sure win, then I can call the race even if not everyone reports, or has even voted yet. When was the last election people waited for Hawaii to cast their votes before predicting a winner? Oh yeah: Never.

So you're saying half their customers are liars or that half their customers believe in lies, or that half their customers don't trust -anyone- to tell facts from lies. I'm really confused.

As with all journalism, or at any time one person communicates with another. The point at hand is that Facebook has decided to make itself a news source. Beyond that, they decided to control the flow of news information that you see. That's a fact. So what's your comment really asking:

Can there be bias (no matter how small) in a news outlets representation of news? Absolutely. There is no objective person, and there is no objective system written by humans that is objective. You either stop reporting news (relying on users to spread real/BS to their friends themselves), or people accept that there will be a systemic subjective analysis of information.

Or are you saying that fact checking as part of journalism is flawed and should just not be done? If you're debating the merits of fact checking as a critical aspect of news, then I don't think anyone will ever be able to talk to you about anything which isn't cultivated by your own original built-in prejudices (most of which we can't even identify).

My favourite and sad story of inherent bias came from a podcast a while back. The study goes as such.
As a man/woman ask someone the first thing that comes to mind when you say the word "academy".
Statistically (at least in North America) if you're a woman, the responder would reply "Awards".
If you are a male, they would say something like "school" or "education".

This happens regardless of the responder's sex/gender and I couldn't believe just how broken it was, so I did the blind test myself with a few dozen people with my partner and I as the test speakers. It was amazing that something like 75% of the responders fell into their expected word responses. The findings are far from compelling for my small case, but the original study clearly had weight.

Well, if you can't attack the topic 'fake news' then attack the people involved in the discussion. That's the way I win debates!

Ticket retailers are both a monopoly and an oligopoly. Essentially all retailer has a monopoly over a given venue. The venue may be allowed a small amount of ticket blocks which are used for their own purposes (direct sales, gifts, charity, marketing, etc..) but the vast direct-sales come through a single distributor.

Those ticket distributors are largely an oligopoly, since venues only want to deal with reputable outlets with large market shares in order to maximize sales.

All of them (Venue, Talent, Distributor) have a very shaky interest in eliminating scalping at all. Tickets are sold, the stadium is filled, most people are happy. Scalping only hurts one group of people: Consumers. In the long long term, people will be so jaded with going to 'ticketed' shows that the attendances will drop below capacity. That also hurts the smaller acts far more disproportionately than the rich ones (which have a more captivated audience to saturate the scalping tax). The arts dies and we all point fingers at one another instead of 'fixing the problem', whatever that looks like (I've given my 2 cents in a different post).

The first problem is simply enforcement. First, the individuals must live in the US (commonly not the case) to prosecute. Secondly, one needs to specifically identify legal vs. illegal forms of ticket buying/scalping, which doesn't seem trivial (based on the article summary anyway).

If scalping is legal (in your local jurisdiction, etc..) then the sky's the limit. Having bots buy your tickets or you mashing your computer is the exact same stupid thing.

Here's one possible system to defeat scalpers: Have a lottery with CC numbers held ahead of time when enrolling. If you want to enrol in the lottery without a CC, you must physically walk to a ticket retailer and leave some other form of unique ID. Hold the lottery open for a few weeks then start randomly drawing winners eligible to 'win' the right to pay for the tickets. If all the tickets aren't sold in that period, they go into the classical sales model and get sold FIFO.

If the tickets were brought by means not intended or allowed from the distributor, have a clause that can cancel the ticket at any time if found in violation of purchasing regulations. The person buying the 'now counterfeit' tickets will get burned and they may end up not using grey market tickets again. To protect legal resale, have the venue/distributor put up a system to verify that the tickets are legit and transferable. Once a purchase has been 'blessed' for transfer, add the ticket number as a legitimate ticket for interested third parties to verify. A system like this also helps inform the populace that there's an easy way of telling a legitimate ticket from a bogus one. Maybe eliminate tickets all together and just have online accounts, with transfers managed in-site. Ticket sales fraud would essentially die.

But, you know nanny state and all that. Idiots deserve the right to get soaked/ripped off, etc.....

They do when their native printing device (phones/tablets anyone?) don't have every print driver known to man pre-installed ready to go.

"which would kill the existing net neutrality rules and greatly weaken the FCC's ability to protect consumers."

Cool, now ISP's can be sued for copyright violations through their pipes! The most likely outcome will be that EU three-strikes regulations will seem pretty generous after the lobbies get at the bill that fills this regulatory void. My presumed outcome is that ISP's will disable service if a subscriber is accused of being in violation of copyright. The threat of direct law suits are just too high to simply give nominal protection to their customers (a large number of whom actually violate copyright laws daily). Oh, but there's some form of arbitration which makes Youtube's take-down system seem fair and balanced.