I haven't used Spotify indeed, but I have been working for a traditional radio station so I know quite a bit about that side. It's for me simply hard to believe that Spotify would need more staff than a regular station based on number of listeners, considering so much is automated.

Testing password against local file: about 1 microsecond.

Testing password by trying to login to Facebook, Slashdot, Yahoo, etc: about 1 second.

So if anything it's going to cut down your password test rates from a million a second to one a second. That's already a great hurdle for password crackers. This even before any rate-limiting by those websites kicks in.

Valid point.

OTOH, the Internet - and the fact that this kind of services are streamed with separate streams to every listener - allows for targeting by location. Just like the good old Google AdWords allows local entrepreneurs to advertise to local customers.

Music with the occasional advertisement. Isn't that exactly what traditional radio has been doing for the past decades? Playing music for people to enjoy (broadcast for free), usually with some talk in between by a dj announcing the songs, telling funny things, doing interviews, etc. And most of those radio stations managed to make a decent profit out of it.

Here we have Spotify, doing effectively the same but broadcasting on the Internet rather than the airwaves. Playing music interspersed with advertisements, broadcast for free for anyone who wants to tune in to.

Radio stations have an expensive, power hungry transmitter to pay for. Spotify just needs an Internet connection (I suspect this to be cheaper).

Radio stations are hiring DJs, the more popular ones demanding high salaries. Spotify doesn't have DJs.

Radio stations have to maintain a studio building for the DJs and other staff to do their work. Spotify just an office and a rack in a data centre.

Radio stations are usually limited to a relatively small geographic reach due to the physics of radio waves. The Internet has no boundaries. Larger reach means more potential value for advertisers.

From the face of it, Spotify has many advantages compared to traditional radio stations. Lower overhead, larger potential audience so more advertising revenues. So how is it that Spotify can't keep up? Is the competition of traditional radio really so strong?

Or is it normal that one out of twelve cars that is involved in an accident each year? And by calling it "only" the submitter suggests that the regular accident rate is much higher than that.

FTA:

This already tells a lot on how much the authors of the article know about forecasting vs predicting - this opening line is wrong in so many ways. Tropical cyclones (which grow into typhoons aka hurricanes), tsunamis, tornadoes and other such natural events can not be predicted any more accurate than earthquakes.

Tropical cyclones can be predicted with a similar accuracy as earthquakes: this are the key areas, and they happen with that frequency. That's how much you can predict a cyclone to happen: Hong Kong is affected by about eight tropical cyclones per year, and about two a year will give rise to a T8 or higher signal. That's predicting: we've had years with five such typhoons hitting, and years without any hitting the city. When a cyclone forms (which is never predicted, only observed as it happens - like an earthquake is observed as it happens), meteorologists indeed are able to forecast with reasonable accuracy where it will head, and what strength it takes. This usually leaves a few days for people to react.

Tsunamis can be predicted with even less accuracy: when an earthquake or similar event has happened the presence of a tsunami can be measured, and a quick forecast can be made of when and where it will hit shorelines, and an alert may be issued. This leaves usually a few hours to half a day for people to react.

Tornadoes form without much warning, leaving often mere minutes for people to get out of the way and into shelters - if the alarms sound at all. They, too can not be predicted.

Earthquakes happen so fast, and end so fast, that there is nothing to forecast, no alarm to sound when it happens. By the time an alert is out, the quake is pretty much over.

And there we have the difference between prediction and forecasting. Forecasting is a lot more accurate by nature, as it is reacting to what is already happening, and works quite well for following slow processes such as the formation of a tropical cyclone. I'm used to know about an incoming typhoon a few days ahead, so plenty of time to prepare. Forecasting earthquakes, well, that doesn't work like that.

When you have a dedicated line like that, you'd likely want to run trains ever 15-30 mins or so. Which sounds reasonable for the passenger numbers you give (every 10-15 mins during rush hour would be a reasonable frequency). That's at least how it's done in other parts of the world.

Put in some long distance, high speed, overnight(!) trains in the mix.

Any trip longer than 7-8 hours is great for overnight. A 10-12 hour trip is even better. Like your coast-to-coast trip, 2,000 miles at 200 mph. About 12 hours including stops. Get on the train, have a relaxed dinner, go to bed, next morning you get up, have breakfast, and you arrive at your destination. Well rested thanks to your moving hotel.

Try that by plane - even with a 5-hour flight time and just three hours of additional time wasted at the airports, you'll have to leave early afternoon and get a hotel at destination to make your next day morning's meeting.

Not just on the Internet. It's nothing new.

People tend to visit online forums they like, and political forums are chosen on the ones that support their views (e.g. anti-vaxxers won't visit pro-vaxxer's sites). Before that, people chose the TV channel to watch based on the ones that best supported their views. Before that, it was the newspapers.

Slashdot is to me a bit of an exception as it's a tech site with a primary tech audience that's doing quite some political stories, so the bias in audience is not too political.

I for one would love to see some examples of such "ugly hacks", and also how it should/could be done in a not so ugly manner.

It doesn't work like that in Europe.

Or so we think... The news that I read about it is contradictory, some argue that this is not the case at all. This of course confirms the key issue which is that the negotiations are done all in secret, and that the various governments want to pass the agreement and make it into law in secret, and that only after the fact the general population gets a say in it.

So while there's a lot of talk about the good/bad of this agreement, what it really is going to be (if it ever sees the light), or even what the current status of the negotiations is, we simply don't know!

The most interesting thing (and an apparent hardware error from their side) is that this line actually made phone calls.

They should realise that after a call from the police about the issue. A proper customer service rep should also immediately transfer such a call to a higher level, the moment he realises that it really is the police contacting them, and that there is something going on that is seemingly impossible.

They won't be collecting more data than before. They're collecting billing data as usual - and there's nothing wrong with that. They have to collect that data to send out the correct bills to their customers. The only difference is that they should keep an eye on what they're billing, and unusual costs racked up by customers.

This issue should have set off various flags. First of all I can't imagine there are many residential users that use this much long distance calls (or calls to the kind of premium numbers where the called party gets a share, considering the total amount of the bills - this used to be a very common thing back in the 90s/early 00s). Secondly, the far higher amount of the current bill than the previous bill, another reason for a flag.

The above are routine for credit card companies, and I never hear people complain about that. I've the same experience with my mobile provider, they contacted me when I travelled with it. It's basic consumer protection (and protection of the telco/cc issuer): your credit card is suddenly used overseas, is that you or is your card stolen? Your phone is using roaming, is that you or is your phone stolen? Same for landline providers: your are suddenly using a lot of long distance calls/premium number calls, is that intentional?

If the cost billed have any relation to actual cost made by AT&T, it means now AT&T is also out of a significant amount of cash, not even counting the bad publicity (assuming they actually care about that of course). Having basic monitoring on bills would have saved them all that.

Metric units? In a US government paper about NASA? One would almost get hopeful.