Hopefully Google won't hamstring this by forcing you to enable "install apps from any source" setting to use non-Google app stores. If I use an alternate app store I don't want to let apps from just anywhere be installed, I only want apps from that app store to be installed. Apps from anywhere else I want to continue to block.

(What the heck does a PalmPilot organizer have to do with any of this?) Well ... I remember back when they first got popular, my buddy was a software developer at the company I worked for. At lunch one day, he mentioned how he absolutely loved the Palm OS platform, simply because it had so many limitations. He said when writing for the Windows PCs, by contrast? You had so many system resources and so many options, you could pretty much code anything you could come up with. Sloppy code was a non-issue too, on modern systems. Only the coders reviewing the source would know any better. He liked the mental challenges involved in maximizing what you could get from a Palm device with a small monochrome screen and the whole bit.

I feel the same way with movies. All these mega-mergers may give a few big-name film-makers massive financial resources to create new movies. But most of it is unnecessary to make an amazing film. What you need is a great story, and good acting (which really isn't some monopoly held by the big Hollywood stars!). Less is very often more. (Consider how well the first Star Wars trilogy held up over time, using simple backgrounds like a mostly empty desert for Tatooine. I prefer that to the crazy "busy" AI generated scenes in the newer movies.)

That's actual stock, not options. Incentive stock options (the kind executives receive) don't count as income until you sell the stock after exercising the options. Take out a loan against that stock and you've got dollars in your bank account you can spend but no income to report. Now, suppose the loan's structured so that, as long as the stock is worth enough to cover the principal plus accumulated interest, you don't have to make payments on the loan. Do this through a trust so your heirs don't have to worry about repayment either. Every year now you get the full dollar value of your stock awards in cash without having to declare any income. Possibly even without having to exercise the options, depending on how friendly you are with the lender.

Any router running SNMP or a web interface configured to listen on the external (WAN) port should be considered defective and replaced (or reflashed to sane non-braindead firmware). Home networks don't need SNMP at all, and business networks not using enterprise-grade equipment probably don't need it with write enabled. The only access to the router from the WAN side should be SSH using public-key authentication, and that only if you absolutely need it (you probably don't). That solves the vast majority of problems.

Russia, China and Iran trying to inflame the AI data-center debate is like pouring 5 gallons of gasoline on an oil-refinery fire: technically you did make it worse but by such a small amount nobody's going to notice.

If businesses were having problems hiring people in these fields, you'd think that they'd be a) offering higher pay and better benefits to make themselves more attractive to workers, and b) scrupulously avoiding filtering out qualified candidates for no good reason. Yet we don't see them doing either one. Tells me they want to use "shortage" as an excuse to move work overseas or bring in cheap labor from elsewhere.

We pay nurses, doctors, pharmacists, teachers and such crap wages, overwork them, force them to deal with idiotic gig-app scheduling, is it any wonder nobody wants to go into those fields? You have ICE showing up at construction sites arresting or scaring off half or more of the crew, pay them crap wages, and wonder why you can't get construction laborers? You outsource aircraft maintenance to the cheapest firm around and wonder why nobody wants to be an aircraft mechanic? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

That works short-term, but then they become a non-resident with CA-based income which means they have to file CA taxes under non-resident rules. Much less favorable, and leaves them open to CA doing any number of things to tax rules. One would be considering loans secured by stock options (not actual shares) to be income.

Sure the billionaires can leave CA. No loss there, because their money will stay there. That's where the businesses they want to fund are. That's where the talent they want to attract is. And billionaires themselves pay jack shit in taxes, it's the businesses that the money's in that matter. And for that matter, where are the billionaires going to move? Manhattan, Kansas?

None of the middlemen are in a position to do that. It's all done by the manufacturer to name-brand specs. All the OEM does is add 25% to the production runs and sell the excess to the dropshippers. Changing the internals in any way would involve setting up a different production line, and that's too expensive compared to increasing capacity on an existing line. The economics are what made it appealing to buy grey-market electronics from Asia.

Other consumer goods, though, the economics are different. True cheap knock-offs are feasible, and you have to watch out for them. With the plethora of brands schlepping them, you need to be careful not to buy too much until you've actually seen the product. OTOH, if you do find a good one, the weird name doesn't have to be a negative. Just pay attention and be prepared to dump an order in the trash if it's not up to par (and don't buy from that brand again).

That's what most of those brands seem to be: dropshippers carrying OEM versions of products made for larger and more well-known brands. I'm used to dealing with that, techies have after all been getting OEM products from China et. al. since forever since they're often exactly the same thing as the name brands just without the branding on the case. The explosion of different "brands" on Amazon just highlights the same problem we had back then: distinguishing the reliable ones (who sold the OEM version of the name-brand product) from the unreliable (who sold completely different and usually inferior items with visually-identical cases).

I guess it's all subject to interpretation. But to me, a true knock-off is defined as a product trying to trick someone into thinking it's one made by a name-brand manufacturer -- doing its best to copy-cat the original.

What I see on Amazon constantly are Chinese-made products that have no real equivalent I can find with brand-name alternatives, but they all like to use those "gibberish" names made of random letters. And in most cases? The exact same product, or a very slightly altered variant, is sold under multiple "gibberish" names. Pretty sure a lot of these come from the same Chinese factory but they market it under various brands to improve visibility and to pump up sales numbers?

Just one recent example would be one of the "power bank" type charges for your mobile devices that has built-in cables to work with USB-C, Lightning, Micro USB and then standard USB: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF...

Whoever VRURC is, I'm sure it's just another nonsense alphabetic name ... but I haven't seen one quite like this sold at retailers like Micro Center. I suspect it's partially because the Lightning connector is owned by Apple and you have to pay them to obtain certified ones to use in your products? Chinese vendors often just get around these extra costs by recycling/repurposing existing salvaged Lightning ports/cables. Helps allow them to sell these devices affordably.

This was already decided during the original trial. Two things will prevent Xinuos from succeeding:

1. SCO never had a license to the code they claim to own. They had a license to distribute it, but Novell owned the copyrights (such as they were).

2. The code SCO claimed was copied from Project Monterey wasn't in fact copied from there. It was original code IBM wrote and contributed to Monterey (while retaining the copyrights) and then subsequently contributed to Linux (which they had every right to do because the license granted to Monterey wasn't exclusive).

The only reason the lawsuit ended with a settlement was that SCO had lost on every argument and gone bankrupt, so there was no money to pay any judgement against them. I suspect some of the terms of that settlement are going to come back to bite Xinuos, because SCO had managed what everyone had considered impossible: they'd not only angered IBM enough they were out for blood, they'd managed to get IBM's law firm (Cravath, Swaine and Moore, who are a big name) personally angry at them too. I'm fairly sure there's terms in that settlement expressly to make sure that dead horse stays dead and buried. Given that Xinuos isn't bankrupt, and some of the figures behind SCO and the original lawsuit were involved with them last I heard, I expect IBM's attorneys to make great white sharks look cute and cuddly by comparison.

Asking for it in a situation where a user would expect to have to enter it, so they won't find the request unusual or suspicious.

I used to always own at least one console, despite mostly being a PC gamer. I felt like the console was more of an appliance, really. Power it on and it has one job. Even if I came to accept the idea of buying games digitally on Steam or elsewhere for my Windows gaming PC, I never felt like it should be the same experience on a console. It's nice to own a physical library of game titles your friends or family can look through on a shelf and decide what they want to pop in and play. It has "permanence" - even if the game itself requires an Internet connection and supports online multiplayer gaming.

I guess I could be swayed to be less concerned if the manufacturers would play fair with all of it, but IMO, they really don't. As one example? My wife's kid bought an XBox 360 and owned a number of digital games on it. Microsoft decided to ban him from their network permanently, and without any warning or real explanation. He wasn't running hacks or cheats, and he wasn't threatening other gamers with violence or anything of the sort. He did have an odd nickname/handle (something about killing a unicorn?), so he finally decided that's what offended some people and got him banned. After all that money was lost on the console and digital purchases - the entire family decided to never again buy an XBox of any type.

My wife had a similar hassle involving the Nintendo Switch and her favorite game, Animal Crossing. To be honest, I don't even play the Switch so I'm not even that familiar with the whole thing. But it had something to do with her buying the game on a physical cartridge but then Nintendo trying to move everything to digital games only. They provided a means to use the physical copy to authorize your account to download and play the digital one, but that wound up hampering how she wanted to play the game across three different Nintendo Switch consoles she owned while retaining her saved game.

It's not anywhere near one step away. Designing the peptides and getting one or more candidates is the easy part. The next steps are the hard ones, the ones that make pharmaceutical chemists and drug researchers cry:

• Phase I trials to see if it even works as claimed. Expect a 95+% failure rate here. Note that this is where you're going to see the best results for your drug candidate, things never improve from here. The best you can hope for is that they don't get any worse. So if you don't get strong results here you're probably wasting your money.
• Phase II trials to determine the best dosage and pharmacokinetics. Again expect a 95+% failure rate here, and results showing less effectiveness than shown in Phase I.
• Phase III trials to determine behavior in a large sample representative of the target population. Expect a failure rate upwards of 99% here, and a major drop-off in effectiveness. This is where toxicity and serious negative side effects show up, and those can kill your trial dead even if your candidate is working.

Getting through this process will take multiple tries and years of work, assuming you succeed at all. There's a reason they say that the clinic (clinical trials) is where drug candidates go to die.