I'm just interested to see how it goes because this is the first time (as far as I recall) that I've seen a company go private for the explicit reason of "Going public caused problems" (and not "Private equity wants to pay themselves with our debt and flip us back to the market in a couple of years").

Now, maybe the private-equity thing is actually what's going on here, and Musk is just either naive about it or putting a spin on it, but if it's actually what it's claiming to be--an attempt to fix the problem of shareholder value distorting things--then it'll be good to see if it works.

I remember an example from a book on probability: You have a test with a 1% false positive rate and a 1% false negative rate. It tests for a condition present in 1% of the population. 10000 people take your test. 100 of them actually have the condition, so you get 99 true positives from that; the 9900 people without the condition produce 99 false positives. By the criteria in the summary, in your population of people who sought further testing, 50% were false positives, but that doesn't make it a bad test.

I feel like, personally at least, how objectionable this is depends on how wide of an area they're targeting. "All of NYC" would obviously be, literally, too broad, but "within 20 yards at the time the murder occurred" seems reasonable. I don't know how small of a resolution the data can get here.

I feel like objections to this need to focus on how it differs from things like a camera or witness seeing your car in the area and reporting the license plate.

It does seem like it needs some specific rules around how large of an area/time range they're allowed to request, since it lacks....friction, in expanding that range, compared to cameras/witnesses. But I don't feel like the entire concept is bad.

Did they sign the code with the expired certificate and then push it out? I would have expected headlines like "Latest Oculus update breaks Rift" over "Expired certificate breaks Rift", if so, but it would make more sense.

If that was the path, it feels a bit more understandable; it's more "pushed out code with something that broke", which is still bad, but not a time bomb.

I don't see the summary or the article indicating that the increased suicides were all done using the same method as Robin Williams. If they were, that would support the implication that the reporting should be less detailed about the method. If it was just a general uptick in suicide across all methods, though, then it seems like wishful thinking to claim that it would have been averted if only outlets had been more responsible. If the increase was due more to thinking along the lines of "If Robin Williams can do it, then I can too", then it's difficult to report on it at all without causing an impact.

I'm not typically working on the web side, so maybe this comparison isn't accurate, but expecting the web developers to know about HTTP headers seems...similar to expecting backend developers to know about assembly. It's a lower level of abstraction that your higher level of abstraction is supposed to prevent you from having to know about. If your higher level hasn't broken down on you before (in a way traceable to the lower level), you don't have a reason to have gone into it. When it DOES break down, I would expect a good developer to know enough about the existence of the lower level to start researching it, but if you haven't run into that class of errors before I wouldn't blame you for being unfamiliar with it.

Why would some people increase their amount of pirating based on other people pirating less? How would they even know other people were pirating less?

If the campaign has reached 21% of the people, and piracy has dropped among everyone the campaign reached, how can the overall piracy level not have changed? Is the campaign SOLELY targeting/reaching people who don't pirate at all?

Are you objecting to the FCC's net neutrality regulations because they're too restrictive or because they're too lenient?

Do the new advisers oppose them on the same grounds?

Why does it matter how long you let the wheel spin up? Isn't the spinning wheel in this scenario just storing energy that was output by the drive over time? And extracting power from the wheel causes the wheel to slow down? You need the thruster to be applying enough force to make up for what you're extracting from the wheel, off the energy you're pulling out of the wheel, and if the one is less than the other then you're not perpetual, right?

In an argument I generally see it used as a shortened version of "That's not a thing that exists," which seems like a legitimate point to make in the cases where it comes up.

Ignoring messages (read: popups) "when going to close a web page"? Of course I'm going to ignore those--I don't think I've ever seen a legitimate security warning when I was trying to close a page, but I have seen a lot of sleazy attempts to prevent me from leaving someone's web site. What action is it that I'm performing by closing the web page that I might be making a mistake with? What alternative path is being suggested to me there, just leave the page up forever?

In the other direction, paying attention to warnings "after interacting with a web site" makes sense--if the site is lying to me about its identity or doing sleazy things with javascript, telling me about that lets me know that I should probably trust it less and at least think twice about providing sensitive information to it or downloading executables from it.

And that's irrelevant for PEOPLE IN APARTMENTS, which is where the thread started and what the grandparent's point about "time spent at the gas station" was relevant to.

The one that irked me (to the point that I remember it, anyway) was...that one Highlander movie with Adrian Paul that made it into theaters. I was a big fan of the TV series already; trailers had the villain doing a bunch of magic that adolescent-me thought would make him a unique threat to be faced. Movie comes out, nothing like that to be seen. The villain's most threatening move is hiding a dagger up his sleeve. Half the TV episodes had more impressive opponents.

I thought the point of the chip was to do some challenge-and-response thing, so that even if the skimmer watched the response it wouldn't give them enough to respond correctly to a subsequent challenge. Am I misunderstanding how the chip works?