https://www.propublica.org/art...
Oct. 1, 2018

The IRS is incredibly efficient at bringing in revenue. The more money you throw at the IRS, the more revenue they bring in.
So naturally, because of their ideological opposition to taxes, Republicans have been massively defunding the IRS since 2011.
Unsurprisingly, this creates massive deficits in the Federal budget, which is something that Republicans are ostensibly against.

Fully funding the IRS would close the budget gaps without any other action by Congress.
Republicans could have their cake and eat it too, without being seen to raise taxes.

SAT 'Adversity Score' Is Abandoned in Wake of Criticism
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...

Of course, they're only somewhat abandoning it. Even though they've ditched the monolithic "adversity score," the separate socioeconomic criteria are still being made available to schools as context for students' scores

NB4 claims of anti-conservative bias

I am careful in all such interviews to say that Facebook is fine for anyone who likes it, for whom the plusses outweigh any minuses. I state that it's just wrong for me, myself, or others like myself. How can I not be "right" about that?

At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.

Last year, Oracle taunted Amazon into abandoning Oracle.

10/2/2017: Oracle's Ellison: Amazon & SAP Use Our Database Because We're Better
https://www.lightreading.com/e...

I'd say that two years is pretty quick for replacing and re-engineering a non-trivial chunk of your infrastructure.

This post is a perfect example of the garbage that the right-wing noise machine loves to produce and amplify. It's aggressive, dishonest, makes far reaching conclusions with no factual basis, feeds a persecution complex, and treats the left as some kind of boogeyman responsible for all that is bad.

Projecting is another strong suit of the right-wing machine.

FFS, the President of the United States just revoked the white house pass of a journalist, supported the action with a doctored video from an Infowars contributor, and threatened to revoke the pass of another journalist.

It's not liberals' fault that the right wing immerses itself in conspiracy theories and lies.

If the right wing would clean up its own house, a cartel of megacorporations wouldn't have to.
Your victimization is self inflicted.

I remember digging into the preliminary draft that's mentioned in TFA. Here are the two highlights:

First they had to figure out the "correct field strength" that wouldn't cook the rodents.

Then they cycled that just-below-cooking field on and off over the course of 18 hours per day, for two years, over the entire body, beginning (for the rats) in the womb

AFACT, there's nothing in the published materials that implies a relationship exists between the study and human health..

The USPS has an office with hundreds of people, staffed 24/7/365 and all they do is decipher pictures the OCR can't figure out.

If those guys/gals can't fill in the blanks, someone at the sorting facility has to try and decode the address. From there, it goes to the dead letter warehouse.

The problems that "AI" are intended to solve tend to be so large that, if the algorithm is not hitting 99.999% success, there's still a non-trivial amount of work for humans to do.

E-mail/document retention policies are not a get out of jail free card.

If the company can "reasonably foreseeable" the documents will be needed, they're obliged to preserved them, lawsuit or not.

At the bare minimum, a judge will tell the jury to interpret destroyed evidence in the worst possible light for the destroyer.

In a worst case scenario, depending on your jurisdiction, destroying evidence will spawn a separate civil lawsuit or a criminal prosecution (fines and jail time).

Destroying evidence means you're stupid or hiding something much worse.

Microsoft's solution to insecure code was to graft on a layer of insecure security code.
They tried. But the hackers are trying harder and winning.
Again and again and again and again.

The value of [coin] is completely arbitrary and doesn't matter.

If SWIFT wants to grab a million Bitcoin and declare that only those million Bitcoins will be part of their network, then who cares what "the market" thinks Bitcoin is worth? "The market" will treat those coins as if they're dead. Meanwhile SWIFT says 1 Satoshi = 1 US Dollar, making a SWIFTBitcoin worth 100 million USD and they're off to the races.

Except for the small problem that Bitcoin's throughput sucks, which is why various alternatives like Ripple have popped up. Ripple 'only' divides into 1 million drops, but the end result is still a finely grained transaction ledger.

Once you take away all the arbitrage pump and dump stock market hodling bullshit, it's easy enough to see why you might rely on a company like Ripple. All that matters is for the platform to be fast, stable, and have at least four nines of uptime.

Your cynical take on the insurance industry kind of makes me want to say "fuck it, hack all of the companies, all of the time, and let God sort it out."

Target was certified as PCI compliant a few months before they were hacked.
They only problem is that the PCI audit would never have caught the memory scrapers that were used to infect Target's point of sale systems.

Most of the major credit card hacks in recent memory involve companies who've been certified as PCI compliant.

I'm not against audits, but it should be nakedly obvious that the audits we have are not the audits we need.

All of which is to say that having insurance companies cook up security standards doesn't mean anything will become more secure. /The PCI standard has a section on vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. It should be considered the bare minimum, not a reasonable security goal.

Once money is involved, it's no longer free speech, it becomes "commercial speech."

Commercial speech operates under a different set of rules, with significantly more restrictions.
"False or misleading" commercial speech is explicitly against the law.

There is some wiggle room for "puffery" (world's best hamburger.)
There is also some wiggle room as long as warnings or disclaimers are included.

Some warnings and disclaimers are what we'd call "compelled speech," because the government requires businesses to say them.
Compelled speech is pretty much the opposite of free speech.