Precisely. The whole story is a "greenwashing" fraud.

...at least we know in the hands of Uncle Sam, it won't be abused.

"...They are known for their resistance to heat, water, and oil,..."
"...they are persistent and don't break down over time..."

Feels like the latter is a completely predictable result of the former.

...but I know a lot of charities that would be delighted and thrive on $4 million a year.

I like how they frame it as some sort of tragedy, when they control their own purse strings.

...but isn't compelling customers to connect to your ecosystem to simply use your product (particularly when this wasn't part of the original terms of service) pretty obviously an anticompetitive violation of their antitrust agreements/evasions?

"at least it's real (leftists) talking about things (leftists) care about"

FTFY.

The only place you might be able to speak your mind for a moment before getting banned without appeal or explanation is r/unpopularopinion and even that is only a brief respite from the compulsory doctrinal lockstep. r/NeutralPolitics isn't bad either.

I mean, to be fair Reddit DOES fully align with Google's goals politically so them regurgitating each other would be on-brand.

Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to literally connect every fucking thing to the internet with tissue paper systems that were known to be blatantly insecure?

No, no, you just go ahead and connect your refrigerator, toaster, coffee machine, and front door lock to the internet for "convenience", safe in the assumption that your government is doing exactly the same thing for critical infrastructure for "reasons" that have more to do with not losing allocated budgets than any actual value.

FOMO and idiots overwhelm what I would say was a reasonable prediction of how informed consumers would behave. The error here was in assuming consumers were faintly aware of their own self-interest and still retained some ability to defer gratification.

The fact is, despite people bitching constantly about not having enough money, too high of rent, and having miserable lives never able to make ends meet, they still cheerfully drop $20/mo to six different subscription services to watch movies on their $1200 phone and buy a $8 latte every morning with a credit card that is nearly maxed out.

Don't blame /.'s "unrelenting upmoderrated pessimism" for getting it wrong; in fact, I'd argue that /. posters weren't cynical enough. /. to recognize that common sense is truly dead and that the sheeple who formerly skated for free on Netflix would cheerfully and instantly buy their own account, guaranteeing that every other service is now going to implement draconian sharing-policies because it's clearly the route to big profits.

I use a toeprint to unlock my phone. If they force me to use a finger (pick one, any one), it will lock out after 3 tries and then will only unlock with something I know.

It does take more time when paying with "touch", the cashiers look at me like I'm not doing it right.

Humanity created plenty of beautiful, wonderful things before governments got into the business of protecting the rights of authors and creators.

Creators will still create stuff, I have no doubt.

I'm a little confused by who is supposed to be caving to the threat here. It's a paid database, so I assume that Thompson-Reuters/Refinitiv aren't thrilled; but it was apparently stolen from one of their customers, not directly from them, so their reputation for security competence isn't really affected; and I suspect that most of the people paying for access to this sort of database need something authoritative that ticks the "I'm really trying to know my customer, really" box when feds or auditors come around; so even a reasonably fresh and reasonably large leak is still of limited value("So, you decided to reduce costs by basing your compliance efforts on data of unknown completeness, potentially subject to unknown modifications, sourced from unknown criminals? Very interesting...") as an alternative to continuing to subscribe.

If anything, it seems like its release would be largely positive: probably lots of interesting leads to be followed up, both with regard to what the creepy data broker types know and the things they know about the people they consider relevant, by people who are in no position to afford access normally(if it's even something you can just purchase if your money is green enough; rather than being offered specifically to potential customers known to be in financial services; not just anyone with a checkbook).

Heâ(TM)s arguably not wrong that VMwareâ(TM)s offerings outside of their core product are kind of inchoate(though, in fairness, itâ(TM)s not like the âhyperscale cloudâ(TM) guys donâ(TM)t all have a stable of shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks that surrounds the core of services that people actually care about or trust); but that seems like a pretty shabby excuse in this context; where it would have been trivial to just not fuck with what people were using and liked while making the alleged investments in glorious future VMware; then letting the value proposition of that help sell it.

As it is, itâ(TM)s hard to read this as anything other than an awkward(and almost certainly temporary, nobody ever genuinely stops trying to boil the frog once they start); climbdown after recklessly spooking more customers, harder, than intended.

What I read (between the lines, since the actual lines don't fucking explain):

- they were getting divorced anyway (both the husband and wife have different teams of lawyers)
- someone at the wife's law firm clicked basically "ok let's call this marriage done" in some online portal
- the husbands lawyers didn't see anything wrong with that
- the judge said "okey dokey, you're divorced"
- the wife's lawyers said "wait! No! We want to undo that"
- the judge said basically that the court had followed the procedures it was supposed to, and if the wife was angry, she should file against her law firm

My inference is: very wealthy couple getting a divorce, arguing over how much she should get. Her law firm accidentally said "ok we're satisfied close this case" and his lawyers instantly agree.

So yeah, her law firm is upset because now not only are they not getting a fat % of the overly optimistic alimony they probably claimed they could get for her, they absolutely are legally exposed to get sued for that full amount themselves.

The hilarious result would be if his law firm helps her sue them. Even funnier if he pays for it.

Could we finally have stumbled on something that both political sides of this country can agree on?

Fair point on orders vs species, my sloppy use of language.

So yes, some coral species are going to fail; that's the nature of specialization.
As long as the ecosystem is stable, specialization is an evolutionary advantage meaning specialists can outcompete generalists. Once things get shaken up, specialists die off, generalists survive until the next stable span as specialists start to evolve into the new niches.

That's how it's worked for a *billion* years. Evolution requires death.

Assuming humans are somehow responsible to fix climate into the Holocene optimal forever with sea levels NEVER AGAIN CHANGING and ecosystems NEVER AGAIN CHANGING is absurdist fantasy.