Because often these folks aren't actually talented and are just being opportunistic criminals. Lots of things aren't secured particularly well in real life too, but we don't offer well paying jobs to every kid who learns lock picking from YouTube, either.

Admittedly, because these companies being breached have their systems connected to the global internet, they should be taking security a bit more seriously since the culprit may not always be an American or from a country with an extradition treaty. But at this point the risk should be obvious, and the fact they're not properly securing their systems is a matter of not wanting to hire and pay for competent IT staff, not a lack of talent. To use a car analogy: You can't fix the situation of some idiots driving around on bald tires because they're too cheap to buy new ones, by assuming that the problem is that the auto service industry needs more tire installation technicians.

This.

I did the Raspberry Pi thing for awhile and they've got more than their share of annoyances. The big ones are:

Wi-Fi reception sucks. Most people aren't using Ethernet at home and the Pi's built-in Wi-Fi antenna is marginal at best. Yeah, you can work around this by installing a USB Wi-Fi stick, but those alone can end up costing as much as Walmart's Onn streaming box.

Last time I tried to get paid streaming services to work on a Raspberry Pi, it involved manually installing some DRM support that was extracted from Android to make streaming work through the browser, and I'm really stretching the definition of the word "work" here. I doubt the situation has improved much.

Finally, Raspberry Pis are still prone to randomly shitting their SD cards. You basically have to keep spares around to re-image when the unlucky day comes along that it just decides it's time for a new SD card. This will most likely happen on an evening when you're exhausted from work, just put a plate of food on the coffee table and want to sit down for a meal and a movie.

Walmart's Onn box on the other hand, is $25 (as of this posting) and you can just install Kodi from the Google Play Store. It also has clients for all the major paid streaming services, and those also just work without any headaches.

Killing whales for oil seems pretty bad until you realize that we also kill people for oil, too.

It's probably a good thing we can't communicate with sperm whales, because diplomacy would immediately break down as soon as they discovered what we named them.

Unless of course they also named us something like "dork monkeys", in which case both of our species would have a good laugh about it.

Look, we know governments have ulterior motives, but that doesn't change the fact that kids actually are accessing things online that they shouldn't be. It doesn't cease to be a genuine problem just because the nanny state solutions have thus far all sucked.

The reason there isn't much pushback against these age gate laws is because most rational people do agree that kids shouldn't be looking at porn, we just disagree on how that can best be accomplished. Yes, parents should be using the damned parental controls that are present on every modern smart device these days, but many of them are not.

It's better than use our sketchy 3rd party age verification provider, but still is completely pointless if it can be bypassed via a VPN or just going to a site that doesn't care to comply with the regulations. Like remember that story yesterday about Anna's Archive, where the court delivered an absolutely toothless verdict because they have no idea who is running the site...

Realistically, the only thing this will actually be good for is keeping kids off of the major social media networks. At least until the kids start nagging their parents to bypass the age check for them, since all of their friends have "cool" parents who did the same for them.

(emphasis mine)

The flaw in this implementation, as with the age gate laws we already have for porn in Texas and Florida, is that it requires every damn adult site on the internet to comply. The lawmakers haven't been able to get rid of piracy from the internet, what makes them think this scheme will be any more successful?

Realistically, putting the age gate at the OS level (as Apple has been doing) and then just forcing parental controls to "ON" if the user can't pass the age check, is the least insane of the myriad of bad solutions. Yes, there's still the "well, a kid could install Linux" argument, but for the bulk of devices that are likely to end up in the hands of a kid, that's not going to be an option. The best part about a OS-level implementation is that the rest of the worldwide internet doesn't have to go along with it, because all the blocking of inappropriate content happens device-side.

Depends where they fall on the political spectrum. Go too far to the left and you get folks who hate EVs because in their mind everyone should just be living in a walkable city and riding a bicycle. *wink*

Being pragmatic involves realizing that socioeconomic issues are often complex, and if the "solution" fits in a tweet, it's probably not going to work out as you'd imagined it.

It's the auto industry's version of "think of the children". They don't actually give a rat's ass about the workers and would happily replace them with Tesla bots as soon as the math works on a balance sheet. What they're really worried about is their continued ability to sell those big high profit margin gas guzzlin' pickup trucks and SUVs.

Musk is Tesla. I'll eat my words when the stockholders grow a pair and vote him off the island.

I think there's also a point where a company gets big enough that they start inventing positions they don't actually need. Like, I imagine Snapchat having an entire team dedicated to focus testing the cat face filters.

I've certainly bought a few albums when most of the songs are solid, but since my tastes tend to run fairly mainstream, there's also a lot of catchy singles that really are surrounded by filler. Napster (and the various P2P networks it inspired) filled in the gap to let you essentially have your own curated playlists without having to feel like you're forced into paying for a bunch of songs you didn't want in the process. Now though, you can do the same thing with a relatively inexpensive subscription and piracy actually is the more labor-intensive option,

It does come down to personal preference, too. Most of the time I'm not in the mood to listen to an entire album all the way through and just want something playing in the background while I'm driving.

Even that still seems a bit high. What's a Spotify subscription run these days, like thirteen bucks a month? I realize the damages are based on potential lost revenue, but at this point people who aren't paying for a music subscription are probably just using the various legal free offerings instead anyway.

In the old days of Napster, there was at least the argument to be made that people might not buy an overpriced CD with a bunch of filler songs they had no interest in, but nowadays it's really not worth the effort to pirate music.

...and an electric car company owns Twitter.

How the hell does Snapchat need 1,000s of employees? If there was ever any doubt that productivity does not scale linearly...