The CTO said in the press conference that the lander's comms system post-landing is designed to look for a good lock with Earth, and if not, switch arrays. I think he said the window is 15 minutes to establish and verify a full carrier lock. Because of the limits of the ground stations and their procedures to instruct the lander to move past that sequence, they weren't able to get it all completed in 15 minutes, so the lander would switch arrays (there are two with two antennas each) and the whole process restarts. He did say in the presser that the team expected it to be solved soon and get the lander out of its comms loop. But that suggests they're currently getting less than 15 minutes of data at a time, and the time to recycle means they're probably not getting a full four windows per hour. He also said they use data error detection/correction on the transmits so while they expect to get all of the data, there's clearly overhead for integrity that eats into the max data payload.

The IRS wouldn't care as long as the taxes were paid, and since he played in national marketable securities, the broker is required to report full cost basis data, so there's no fudging the profit/loss. Except...this guy's 1099 probably didn't get generated until last week. (The trade was in 2023.) The broker's transmission doesn't get processed immediately, he files an extension in April 2024 to October 2024...yeah no, the IRS is not flagging insider trading on the basis of a 1099 filing, otherwise the target will be in a different country long before they see that 1099.

The SEC will notice simply because of the large size of the trade. This guy bought over 46k shares ahead of the deal. The PR announcing the deal said the 30-day average price, prior to announcement, was nearly $47. That's $2 million of stock. Back of the envelope, he would've needed at least $600k in cash to buy on margin, assuming standard 30% maintenance (and the willingness to pay margin rates). He might as well have bought a Ferrari and drove it in front of SEC HQ revving his engine...

There's a columnist at Bloomberg (sub required to read articles) who writes frequently about insider trading and securities fraud. His shtick is "is fill-in-the-blank securities fraud" and you will be amazed at some of these financial crimes cases. Frankly, this one is boring, run-of-the-mill insider trading.

One of the regional supermarkets in the Northeast US (Wegmans) just ended their scan-as-you-go program about a year ago, outright telling customers it was due to shrink. And their version required you to go through their app (you would use your phone's camera to scan barcodes) and connect to the store's Wifi. So even with all of the personal data they were collecting (supermarket loyalty account, your device info, etc.) people were still stealing.

Irony was, when they shut down scan-as-you-go, they added a new bank of six self-checkout kiosks...

Because their rewards program incentivizes use of reloadable cards. You get two stars (their rewards currency) per $1 spent when purchases are charged to a reloadable card, but only one star for other payment methods. (You don't earn stars for topping off a gift card, though they do sometimes offer star bonuses if you reload a certain amount or reload from a particular source, like Paypal or Venmo.)

I've never run a Starbucks card down to $0 but I assume in person it would act like a split transaction and the barista will ask for another payment method to make up the balance. Maybe in the app it's different and requires you to have the full balance? But most ecommerce platforms I've used with an in-house gift card know how to split the transaction so this is not a hard problem for Starbucks to solve. Perhaps it's intentional to "encourage" a reload as WA alleges -- except you have to go in person to the store anyway, so one could just order in person and split the transaction...

One can argue that if you're interested in reloading the card, you're participating in Starbucks Rewards. In that case, I'd argue the scummy part is earning/burning stars and not the minimum reload amount...Stars expire after the 6th month they're earned and you can only redeem at predefined amounts. And if WA wants to whack that, they're going to have fun going after most ecommerce rewards programs *cough*Shopify*cough* and credit card rewards programs.

For traditional media there is no longer "the" headline for a story...print media in particular, the headline in print may be completely different from online. There's SEO involved for online headlines, space constraints for print headlines. See:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-check-out-this-column-on-headlines.html (NYT, 2015, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan)
• https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-new-york-times-headline.html (NYT, 2017, Stephen Hiltner)
• https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/insider/lessons-learned-from-the-print-hub.html (NYT, 2023, Sarah Bahr)

In your pharma example, if the drug is not well-known, the print headline would likely go out with "New Drug" (people may not recognize the first word as the drug name -- per Margaret Sullivan's criteria) but the online headline would use "[drug name]" (scores better in PageRank). Ten years later, after it's become a blockbuster drug and everyone knows "the Provasic lady" from the annoying TV/streaming ads, it's referenced by name in the print headlines: "FDA Pulls Provasic From Market As Patient Deaths Grow".

You're absolutely right about click-bait headlines. Traditional print outlets, though: headline writing hasn't been simple for them since the 2000s.

No, the US government was skeptical of the NBC sale, because the buyer was Comcast (major/largest cable TV and Internet service provider) and would result in a vertical transaction and possible monopoly. And GE "owned" NBC originally by way of RCA; that's when the government forced GE to sell NBC (meaning they sold RCA). GE got NBC back in the 80's...by buying RCA (again).

If anything, GE shareholders like me were pissed, because the company was cratering due to the 2008 financial crisis and NBCUniversal was the one financial bright spot and printing enough cash (think The Today Show) to help pay the dividend. The buyers knew they were desperate, but the premium that Comcast paid was nothing compared to what they would have if GE had waited until the late 2010's to sell NBC.

The TV programming you're referring to is/was a NBC campaign called "Green Is Universal." It was launched in 2007, before GE started hawking NBC to buyers (2009). Yes, I remember one year they worked environmental themes into their scripted shows, specifically a set of crossover episodes (maybe the Chicago Fire/Med/PD universe?) involving a major power outage as a plot lines, but each year they worked eco themes into their news programs and sometimes their unscripted (i.e. reality) shows, and it was a one-off thing. The last press release for the campaign I found is pre-Covid (2019), well after Comcast took full ownership of NBCUniversal.

A merchant who charges a credit or debit card processing fee is still subsidizing customers paying with top-tier rewards cards or using business/corporate cards, at the expense of customers paying with a basic no-frills card. See Helcim's Visa interchange fee schedule as one example. A Chase Sapphire Reserve (Visa Infinite) is more expensive than a Chase Sapphire (Visa Signature) to process. But a Chase Ink Business (Visa Business Signature) is more expensive than the Reserve. And a Visa business debit card can be more expensive than a basic Visa personal credit card.

Nonprofessional photographers who shoot in RAW format. Exposures add up quickly on DSLR or mirrorless.

Sadly Alaska Airlines is the leader in this space, and the best they could come up with was an E-Ink version of a real-life baggage tag. Of course, you use Bluetooth and NFC on your phone to transmit the tag info and enable the device, but the tag itself can't transmit a signal AirTag-style.

Yours for the low low price of $70...

Even better is in Japan, where ANA integrates the bag drop into the check-in kiosk. It automatically weighs the bag, and once you've tagged it, the door closes and sends it off to security to be scanned. No lugging it past a bunch of counters or showing ID.

They hand you a claim check/tag from the baggage tag attached to your bag. There's a small amount of responsibility on the passenger to confirm that the claim check has the correct name and destination before walking away. The blame goes to the counter agent for tagging the bag incorrectly; part of their job is making sure the bag matches the traveler's identity and their boarding pass.

Public IPv4 address != Elastic IP address

TFA links to Jeff Barr's blog post with a very clear table. Resources in a default VPC get a public IPv4 automatically and AWS currently doesn't charge for it, mostly because it's not persistent and you lose it if the resource isn't active. An Elastic IP has always come with a charge ($0.005/hr) because you get to keep it, even if you aren't actively using it. Going forward, both public IPv4 and Elastic IPs will be charged @ $0.005/hr.

Now the question is, when will AWS support IPv6 for Elastic IP?

Large accounts are known to be able to negotiate lower rates than published, especially for services like S3. Not a stretch to think Spotify pays lower than retail.

Passenger agrees to carrier's Contract of Carriage when purchasing a ticket. United, for example: "Fares apply for travel only between the points for which they are published. Tickets may not be purchased and used at fare(s) from an initial departure point on the Ticket which is before the Passengerâ(TM)s actual point of origin of travel, or to a more distant point(s) than the Passengerâ(TM)s actual destination being traveled even when the purchase and use of such Tickets would produce a lower fare. This practice is known as âoeHidden Cities Ticketingâ or âoePoint Beyond Ticketingâ and is prohibited by UA." It's basic contract law. The provision is not illegal or unreasonable. Saying the term is unfair isn't a defense...

One John likely wouldn't make it past security...passenger's date of birth is usually required at booking under Contract of Carriage, there'd be a mismatch when checking ID. And even if the dob matches, you couldn't link a frequent flyer account to the ticket -- carrier would shut down the account and take the points bc terms prohibit sharing of an account.