It looks like if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Unfortunately the time has passed where "good" will be good enough to avoid catastrophe. The only question is when it hits. It might be less than 20 years away based on the magnitude of El Niño this year.

Comcast's problem is that PONs are significantly more reliable as they don't need all the active equipment distributed across the service area without adequate backup power. They have a lot less system that is more expensive to run, and being the only player was what made their system work. $50 is a reasonable price for service, less for customer acquisition.

You keep using that word in the narrow terms of a computer programmer who just finished a training course where they drilled in the technical meanings of "authorization" vs "authentication".

However, a news article for the general public is not constrained by that context. The dictionary says that "authorization" in general is permission to do something. If you prompt an AI to do one thing with your bank account, then you didn't give it permission to do something else entirely, even if it got the logon credentials to do so. It wasn't authorized by you to do the other thing.

Here's another example: It's wartime and you got drafted. Usually you're not allowed to kill people, but the government handed you a gun and you're now authorized to kill enemy soldiers. That doesn't mean that you can just shoot your comrade next to you in the trench. And you certainly can't make the claim "But I was authorized to shoot Corporal Smith. You gave me a gun, after all!"

Consider a human analogy: In many cases, people give financial advisors access to one or more of their accounts so that the advisor can make trades or other transactions for the benefit of their clients. However, if an advisor suddenly starts making transactions that do not benefit the clients or are contrary to their agreed instructions, then that activity is unauthorized, even if they have login credentials.

I now am dependent in part for my livelihood on paypal. Going to check my contact info there now.

https://informationr.us/

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

****1/2 "Customers say that this is a great small modular nuclear reactor. They like the compact size and the fact that it's not too much power for a data center or industrial site. They especially appreciate the ease of setup and that the ultimate waste disposal question has been deferred yet again so that they don't have to worry about it. However, some customers report problems with cost overruns, vaporware, and availability of suitable fuel. Some customers note a larger terrorist attack surface per megawatt relative to full-sized reactors and question the security arrangements. There are also reports of real-world reliability problems with the novel design, with one customer reporting a catastrophic meltdown in their urban installation."

A single plant is more efficient, but adds a decade (it feels) to the timeline.

Ah, I had missed Trump accounts because they originally couldn't hold individual stocks according to how congress defined them in the legislation. I was not aware Trump and co were trying to do an end-run around the legislation by arguing that the law doesn't prohibit corporations from donating individual shares.

However, that's a pretty new development, is controversial, and its unclear how it would really work, especially in tandem with the other rules.

What have you got against Nazis?

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Its a little tricky too, as children generally don't have suitable investment accounts that can hold publicly traded shares. I'm doubtful they even legally can open those accounts.

So what are they going to do, issue a gazillion single paper share certificates? What a shitshow that would be, the fees and shipping alone around dealing with that for a single share would be nuts, not to mention the hassle of redeeming them, and the untold numbers that would be misplaced or destroyed. And I'm still not sure children can own them, or sign the agreements required to get them.

What else could the do? Create beneficial trusts for every child? Whose going to administer that? and again the fees and management expenses around it would be nuts all for a $150 space-x share?

It might be reasonable for him to set a bunch aside, and as children reach adulthood, let them claim them at that point.
If the idea is that the kid can't sell it or whatever until they're an adult anyway, its probably fine. It'll be income maybe when they receive it, so that could work out badly for some kids though, if they have to sell it to cover the taxes on it, because they don't have a job yet. Especially if its appreciated to a couple thousand or something. (How are splits etc handled, do they get one or more? Or worse... reverse splits on a single share?)

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.