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Comment Re:All that is old is now new again (Score 4, Informative) 17

There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

Comment Size (Score 1) 47

I've noticed when commenting on very well run public systems, nobody brings up huge countries. China, Russia, the US, etc... It's always fairly small countries. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but it seems like the best run organizations are generally fairly small. Small startup companies. Small or medium-sized cities. Or, at a national scale, small countries. It seems the answer to bad management is to keep things as small as possible.

Comment Fault (Score 4, Informative) 101

You put ALL of your data on one cloud provider with no local backup? Loosing that data is YOUR fault. It's a few thousand dollars for a half dozen hard drives to store 50TB. Or heck, 50 100GB M-DISC Blu-Rays for less than that. That's what the Disney Imagineering sound department does - M-DISC backup, live copy on file servers, then secondary cloud backup.

It always sounds like a lot of money to the bean counters until you explain to them the station probably spent tens of millions of dollars producing that content, and all it takes is a corporate meltdown or technical SNAFU and all of it is gone.

Comment CO2 (Score 1) 41

1. Trees absorb CO2 2. Cut trees down and turn them into paper 3. Use paper, throw away, put into ground 4. Grow more trees that absorb more CO2 When paper decomposes in landfills, it does produce CO2 and methane. The methane can be processed into natural gas and used, while the overall amount of CO2 and methane produced, per unit of mass, is much less than what is left as biomass.

Comment Re:Um... (Score 3, Interesting) 97

Aren't most of the stories written around these three rules about ambiguities and loopholes ... The Laws were a starting point, and his fiction was a decades-long exploration of why starting points are never enough.

Yes, and the point you quoted still stands, they are a starting point.

The always relevant XKCD comic explains it well enough: those laws in that order are essential as the starting point. Different order or missing entirely is guaranteed bad. But as pointed out through all kinds of science fiction writing, there are many ways we can understand they are insufficient.

Right now I'd agree they're exactly backwards, or as the XKCD comic described, on track to become a "killbot hellscape". We need even more rules and regulations than that, but as a set of fairly obvious first steps penned 80 years ago, they're pretty blatantly an essential first draft of baseline rules that are missing today.

Comment Re:Let Customers Control Their Encryption Keys (Score 1) 28

Or they'd make private cloud devices and not be in the position of handling the data or the encryption. Maybe they could offer an offsite backup service of encrypted data, but it would be just that: encrypted files that only the user has access to.

I still don't understand why we are relying on datacenters and services for storage, it just invites government overreach.

Comment PDF (Score 4, Informative) 84

"When an institution sends a letter formatted with a proprietary font, embedded in a proprietary format, produced by proprietary software, it is not communicating information but perpetuating a dependency."

This problem has been solved. PDF. I've never received a letter, or any correspondence from a company, institution, or school formatted as a Word or Excel document, and I don't know why anyone would send one in any other format.

Comment Re:Where's my cut!? (Score 2) 56

Yes but also no.

The regulation isn't about "taking a cut", but primarily about financial crimes like money laundering and insider trading. Generally there are age requirements, as minors can't buy stocks or enter into futures contracts, though custodial accounts where the minor is authorized to use it are allowed. Every transaction is also associated with registered brokerage companies, every transaction tied to a taxpayer ID and account information. To participate the government requires documentation with a full legal name and government issued ID, and assorted other information to verify the person's identity.

In regulated markets every step has a paper trail can be tied back to a responsible human, the person who could potentially be jailed or fined for financial crimes.

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