Sure but it dramatically lowers their profits/revenue, and it will run through their reserves much faster. If they drive everyone out of business at 25-30 a barrel, that'll work for a while (and I'm not clear if even the Saudis or all of OPEC can supply the world's needs without significant investment in infrastructure). Even if they sell it at a low price, there will still be a market above that price for everybody else (at which point Saudi Arabia is just losing money). Sooner or later they'll run out of oil, or they'll want to generate a higher profit margin or more revenue.

There are lots of factors going on here, and you're way oversimplifying them. For starters, OPEC currently provides 40% of the world's oil and about 60% of the exported oil to the international market (https://www.eia.gov/finance/markets/crudeoil/supply-opec.php). So a 10% drop in overall oil demand and maintaining the price means they lose 25% of their revenue, given large fixed costs, that's a larger percentage drop in profits.

One thing worth noting: If there's a 40% drop in oil demand, it means OPEC could be shut out of the market. That's unlikely to be true, because OPEC can pump gas cheaper than most, while there are any number of sources that aren't economical unless the price of gas is higher so if gas got down to 1USD per gallon (laughable I know, but conceptually possible, and it has been that low in my lifetime in the US), OPEC might be the only one that can turn a profit, but as they try to drive the price up, the more other sources can generate gas economically, this caps how much revenue/profit they can make... This is why gas rarely gets up to 4-5 USD in the US (at that price shale oil sources become economically viable, and OPEC knows it'll incentivize moving away from oil

There's a tremendous amount of competition in the international oil market, it is just that OPEC controls the biggest bloc and is the most motivated to drive the price of oil up as it is a huge way to draw dollars into their countries. The people who control the last barrel of oil sold get to set the price. So if OPEC isn't the one controlling that last barrel sold. If there were a 30% drop in global oil demand, that'd drop the revenue by 75%, which would apply serious pressure to the OPEC nations where that represents a significant fraction of their GDP. Saudi Arabia facing a 75% drop in revenue will present a serious problem for the gov't and their ability to stay in power.

Also, at least the US has been a major purchaser on the international market, but we also have a tremendous amount of oil we can generate. It is just that we have needed a huge amount of since the early 1970s (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrimus1&f=a). Notice that the US has been trending down for ~2 decades now (peaked around 3.9mil to 2.2mil recently although there is an uptick from the recent low point... to be honest I'm not sure about the units if those are barrels per day over the year or total per year).

Saudi Arabia and the OPEC nations know this. They know they play a precarious game, and that being too greedy will kill the golden goose. They also know the world is looking to move away from oil for various reasons, and that the golden goose is going to die. They'll need to replace that, prior to becoming a modern version of the "buggy whip makers".

That's not really true. Most folks make small scale experiments to sort out likely costs and benefits before they move forward. Look at virtually every engineering model ever built. You'd try to do it on paper/computer. Then you'd expand to a smallish scale model and make sure that the model works are predicted. Lather, rinse, repeat through cheap experiments that move closer and closer to the real thing until you have enough confidence to declare: This is likely enough to work, to justify more investment, or this isn't likely enough to work out to justify enough investment (there's also likely some amount of opportunity cost, if I had to pick between this and curing all cancers, it would be hard for me to decide how to apportion the investment dollars, they're both valuable).

Doing these sorts of studies is a way that can help to validate various models of anti-poverty efforts at a modest cost (as far as I can tell, without public tax payer money). This won't help us sort out the inflationary issues, and larger monetary issues with a system that gives money to people no-strings attached, but it can help us sort through the question of: Will people continue to work? At what level of income would people stop working? If given money will people put it to uses that are deemed "productive"?

Ultimately, these people are finding and putting their money where their mouths are, and investing in small scale experiments to discover the answers to some important questions that should be understood to some degree before larger investments in UBI are made.

The question is: Is UBI going to similar to the discovery of the steam engine in terms of how dramatically it will change modern society? Or is this an even more over-hyped version of the Segway that in 2000 while still in stealth mode was predicted to completely change how cities are laid out? My guess is definitely somewhere in between.

I know which one you think it is, but as far as I can tell, they aren't spending gov't money, and I think data and knowledge in this area is useful in understanding humans, their motivations, and how they react to incentives...

I think if this small investment can show promising results, we can invest in larger scale ones that might show greater value. I've long considered UBI a sub-optimal idea, but I think it is better than the complex array of poverty programs currently used in the United States. So I'd love to see the US explore ideas that end up with more universal benefits (health and financial), as they're more efficient and hopefully accommodating of edge cases.

I don't think it is technically illegal. I believe it'd be illegal if you were required to pay debts in that currency or if it is non-transferrable. In fact, based upon some quick websearches, I think you've got that exactly backwards. Non-transferrable (meaning it can't be turned into US dollars), is unconsititutional if companies are paying you in it. The reason for this is to avoid Company Scrip and Company Towns (where you can effectively turn workers into slaves, as was commonly done in remote areas for mining and logging). It is perfectly legal for folks to barter anything of value in US dollars. If I want to trade little slips of paper for US money, I don't know of any reason why that'd be illegal vs. paying for blank paper or any other good or service.

Search for: "Coal scrip was deemed unconstitutional if non-transferable in the early-twentieth century" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- They don't have a good citation for the case law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_in_the_United_States -- That's a list of currencies that exist and are doing what this article is talking about. So I'm pretty sure they're legal.

This is like if Google just suddenly started calling Hell's Kitchen something else. Or renamed SOHO for no reason.

Except that as the article notes, the name was actually created a few years ago by a neighborhood nonprofit steering group that residents voted for: The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.

Google didn't just suddenly rename it for no reason. The issue is more subtle than that; in previous times, the neighborhood council decision would either be ignored or take a long time to spread and catch on. With Google's ubiquity, changing it on Google maps has an immediate effect. Whether that's bad and jarring or good and avoids ambiguity, it's certainly new and different.

1. None of these were in “the early days of PC gaming”; they were a decade plus after PC gaming exploded during the Commodore 64/Applie II/etc era. Games like Catacomb, Ultima Underworld, and early ID entries like Hovertank 3D and Wolfenstein 3D had already birthed the FPS genre. Doom was a huge deal and certainly catalyzed things for the mid-90s and established FPSes as a prestige genre (as well as helping the popularity of online play).

2. Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 2 (the latter of which came out the same year as Doom) were side-scrolling 2D platformers. The “2.5D” version was Duke Nukem 3D, which came out like 3 years later than Doom during the explosion of post-Doom FPSes. It was closer to the Quake era than the Doom era. Claiming that it's part of some “big 3” is really weird; it's better grouped in with the rest of the 2.5D-era post-Doom games like Marathon, Heretic, Hexen, Star Wars: Dark Forces, etc.

I mostly agree, though if the license on the generated audio is liberal enough I could see using this to create audio books of public domain texts in a crowd-sourced project. Feed the texts through (which, if distributed reasonably, shouldn't really be a significant privacy intrusion; the information's all out there already) and then save it for future use so it's still available even if the cloud service goes down.

Fuzzing is great, but he doesn't seem to understand what a language flaw is.

In the case of Python, he's found 2 methods in libraries that can call shell commands. Leaving aside that this would be a library issue rather than a language issue, there's no evidence that it's even that.

Python explicitly doesn't have sandboxing. Like most languages (including C, C++, etc), the documented behavior is that if you control the program and environment then you're fully allowed to import subprocess or os and run whatever you want. You don't need to find "hidden" ways to run a subprocess, you can directly "import subprocess" and run stuff.

This is doubly true because of the nature of the modules investigated. The first "flaw" is that mimetools has a deprecated "pipeto" method that lets you pipe to arbitrary commands. But mimetools is already well-known to expose os access in millions of ways (most obviously, it imports and exposes os, so if for some bizarre reason you want to avoid importing os yourself, you can simply run "mimetools.os.popen" directly); no competent programmer would expect otherwise.

The second "flaw" is that pydoc runs a pager program which lets you run an arbitrary command if you control the program environment. Of course, the documentation states explicitly that the specified pager program will be used. It's unclear what part of the behavior here he thinks even surprising. And, again, the pydoc module imports and exposes "os" in exactly the same way that mimetools does.

Earlier this week security-hardened Android build CopperheadOS temporarily blocked Nexus updates on its servers after finding out that other companies have been flashing the ROM onto Nexus phones and selling them commercially in violation of the CopperheadOS licensing terms. The incident highlights an inherent problem in getting open source to be used by the masses

This is FUD. If CopperheadOS prohibits selling it commercially, then they are not using an open-source license. By definition, open-source licenses cannot prevent others from selling the software commercially or otherwise prohibit redistribution or discriminate against fields of endeavor (including business use).

And, indeed, most sources (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) call the Copperhead license "source available" rather than "open source" because of these non-open-source restrictions.

See https://opensource.org/osd

1. Free Redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. ...
2. 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

And flashing it onto a ROM would constitute a derived work covered under section 3 of the OSD.

Unlike the others, DAP's numbers come from billions of visits over the past 90 days to over 400 US executive branch government domains

This strikes me as being a very poor source to use if you're interested in overall desktop statistics. People visit government domains much more often from work than from home, and government workers visit government sites more often than non-government workers do. Alternative OSes are less common in government jobs than non-government positions, and there's probably a skew one way or the other in generic home vs. work statistics.

I'm not disputing that the recent stats cited are wrong, just objecting to advocating what seems to be an inherently statistically biased source as the "most accurate" for this statistic.

"The new version tests another change to notifications in which apps can only make a notification sound alert once per second."

This is definitely a minor thing, but once you've started looking at it should be a lot more limited. A configurable time would be ideal, but if you want to make it a sensible default it should be more like one sound alert every 10 minutes unless you've looked at a notification in between--if you're actually checking messages as they come in you'll still get all the defaults, but you won't have to silence 5 in a row if you're busy or don't care about them.

Yes. The real problem is that Microsoft is advocating for slow-rolling disclosure of security vulnerabilities by hiding patches until the stable release comes out. That's fine, it's not an insane stance, but they're presenting it as though that's obvious and noncontroversial and that there are no drawbacks to their methodology and no advantages to Google's full disclosure policy. That's where they're being disingenuous--full disclosure vs. slow disclosure is one of the more hotly debated topics in security circles, and Microsoft knows it (or should).

If they want to advocate for slow disclosure, they should at least acknowledge that they're taking one side of a controversial topic about which a lot of serious security people disagree, not pretend that Google is just doing something recklessly idiotic and should clearly do things the Microsoft way.

Bruce Schneier summarizes the counterargument here: https://www.schneier.com/essay...

On the surface slow-rolling things seems like a good idea--why show the attackers the breach before you've repaired the wall? The problem with that line of thinking is that it presumes that you're the only one who's found the breach, and that attackers aren't already exploiting it. That's generally naÃve, you have no way of knowing whether a vulnerability is being actively exploited or not.

By disclosing fully, you make it possible for people to protect themselves or to make judgements about how serious the issue is for them. You also make companies take security more seriously in the future, which hopefully leads to greater global security even if the local impact is muddier.

There are obvious trade-offs the other way, as well. But Microsoft
pretending that full disclosure is inherently bad for security is duplicitous.

The Fire has a fine battery life for a tablet, but it's still horrible compared to e-ink readers, which usually last a month or two between charges if you average an hour of reading a day. E-ink displays only draw current for screen updates, so the majority of the time when you're reading (as opposed to flipping the page) the device draws very little power.

The Kobo Aura H2O and H2O2 are both IP67 as well and avoid the Kindle ecosystem. I've very happy with my H2O.