The article is almost gibberish. The proposed law imposes fines and/or a prison term of not more than 5 years, for (1) individuals who know that the data breach law applies, (2) who willfully and intentionally conceal the breach (notably it does not say "fail to notify", but "willfully and intentionally conceal"), (3) in the event that at least $1000 of economic harm occurs to at least one individual.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think the bar for "willfully conceal" is pretty high. I think they're definitely trying to protect "innocent bystanders" who may know about the breach but choose to do nothing for fear of their jobs or livelihoods.

Chicago already has a very good alternative to tunnels: elevated tracks

That is not a good alternative. The elevated trains are *bone-shatteringly* noisy. I was posted on the 4th floor of a building on Wabash and the effect on productivity was MASSIVE. People think it's no big deal because they're "used to it", but having to mute your conference call every 2 minutes due to train noise is a massive inconvenience. And forget walking! After months of nearly losing my mind walking under those tracks, I finally started hunting down hotels that were far enough away from the tracks that I didn't have to walk parallel to them.

Half a year of working in Chicago and I was ready to murder somebody. It was unbelievably unpleasant.

Well, you wouldn't have the expense of digging a goddamn tunnel.

In urban areas, the expense of laying a dedicated through-way for express buses is also extremely high. The land between O'Hare & DT Chicago is very built up; there would be few ways to put in an express lane for a bus without major disruption.

Tunnels dodge a lot of concerns about traffic, safety, land rights, etc. that can add up to big headaches for urban public transit.

Not clear to me that the individual skates will require external power. My bet is that he's planning to have some kind of high duty cycle batteries on board. If the skate (with full battery/guidance/motor systems) can be easily detached from the car and replaced with a freshly charged skate, you just need enough skates "in the queue" to handle the load.

Without the need to run high-power electrics through the tunnel, and no risk of human exposure to high-tension power rails or cables, the whole thing could be much simpler to build and maintain.

Basically all the costs of a subway with more guidance issues at high speed.

Perhaps a more apt comparison would be a bobsled? I suspect that the tube will be designed to turn the train. I'd guess that for turns at high speed the skate will be designed to move up the wall, like a car on a banked track.

I'm sure people still buy DVDs. But measuring a strict binary -- "Did you rent or purchase physical video media in the last year?" -- they set themselves up to report a strange number, since that includes all the people who bought 1 video. Or 2 videos. These are people who have, for all intents and purposes, switched to something else.

In any case, TFA tells the real story, with video sales dropping from $12 billion per year to under $6 billion per year in just 7 years.

Intel's ICC compiler doing a better job of optimizing for Intel CPUs

Um, yeah, optimizing , that's what we'll call it. Optimizing , I like the sound of that.

The more relevant question is, "What *fraction* of entertainment purchasing goes to physical videos?" and the answer is "almost none". But more than none.

The issue isn't Excel. The issue is that executives can't articulate what questions they want to answer, so they give a vague specification of some data they'd like to see. Further, they are averse to any followup questions, because they told you exactly what they wanted.

When you pull that data from 3 different and completely un-integrated sources and put it in Excel and make your graphs all pretty and whatnot, the response you get from the executives is that it doesn't tell the right story or still doesn't answer their (still unarticulated) question. And can the columns be blue? The official corporate color scheme is red but we like blue.

This is just reality. Everybody who does reporting has to deal with these complaints.

you might find a band you never heard of that you really like. Tell me how you listen to their music the next day.

I usually download it from their web site. Sometimes I even download it *while they're playing* so I can listen on the way home.