LOL...you seem reallly bent up about this.

Out of curiosity, what utopia do you live in pray tell?

I pay mine off all in full at EOM....seems a nice way to get some perks, convenience and some cash back....

Not really. These sorts of tests are all stochastic. Your prescription makes science sound binary, i.e., if one assumption is wrong, then it is all wrong. But one if one assumption is x .0095, when evaluating the gloves too means your assumption is x .0096. That means your numbers might need to be adjusted a bit, but, depending upon the math and model, it may not be a radical adjustment; just an adjustment at the margins.

Reagan was on a privatization kick. It resulted in wonderful growth for the Beltway Bandits. Another reason privatization does not work for government is because government is not private enterprise that can decide what markets to enter and which to exit. Programs are mandated by law. Sure laws can change but it is a long arduous path. And you wouldn't want it any other way. Changing things on a whim has brought current U.S. to its knees, and the damage appears to be long lasting.

Want to see privatization at work? Look at the U.S. health system. Those insurance companies use actuaries to determine who gets covered. A good team of actuaries can put a price on your grandmother and her cat and will if you ask them to. As a consequence, we have a health system which can send you to the poor house in under a year because of a medical condition.

DoD is one of the largest organizations on the planet. Saying their failure to pass 8 audits in a row ignores the scale of the problem. First off, it was never built to be audited. The idea of auditing DoD is just like DoD telling a contractor to add this extra special whizzy to their weapons system after it had already been built. It has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort to corral systems that were never built with auditing in mind into sysrtems that can be audited. And those systems are not stand alone, they all interact.

Then the question come up of what software will you use to audit a system this large and complex. They chose SAPs software (for the most part). Ever interact with SAP's ERP? Hell is more welcoming. They chose SAP because no other system was big enough. Oracle is for babies. MS? (okay, stop laughing). In addition, Congress keep mandating new requirements. And new systems are constantly being brought on line and old ones retired. It is like changing a plane's internal mechanisms while it is flying. Ever try to hit a moving target of an engineered system while keeping the system up and running? If you answer no, you do not understand the scope of the problem.

There's no freezing DoD in place so you can perform an audit on it. It is constantly changing. To make matters worse, Congress and Administrations keep changing. Their priorities keep changing. Meanwhile, you must be sure to keep DoD's job of defense up-to-date, and offense must be kept up-to-day as well.

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

Shooting kids is the Number 1 reason kids die in the USA.... do those laws work ?

Oh please...this stat just is bogus.

They took the ages up past 19yrs old, I believe to 20yrs....

Legally you're adult at 18...so immediately that should be cut out of the mix, but also with ages 17-19...you're going to start counting heavily on the gang bangers who are criminals into drugs and drug wars...

Those are NOT children...they are criminal who more and more are being charged as adults.

If you took what most people consider to be actual children...1-10yrs or maybe even up to 12 yrs old....those "gun deaths" numbers plummet.

When those numbers are looked at...more kids die by car accidents.....

So please...get of the fucking high horse on children gun deaths...the REAL NUMBERS show a much different story...

And if you are not from here or don't live here....bully for you, you don't have to live with our "freedoms".....

But frankly I LOVE it here and love my country.

It seems strange to hear your rants while we still have people illegally risking death to get here.....

Look you don't have to like it. You don't have to live here in it.

And if that's your choice...fine. But otherwise it isn't your fucking business how we live here, now is it?

Why do you keep complaining about it if none of this is your problem much less none of your fucking business?

I had forgotten that Apple Card was even a thing because it's so fucking stupid.

Why do you think it is stupid?

I like it...I get cash back on purchases, it gives me on central place to readily check what I've charged each month (THIS is big for me, easy to track and manage budget)....and I get 3% off and 12 mos interest free on Apple purchases....

I pretty much only use one other card...my Costco Visa that gives me cash back on gas (5% at Costco pumps, 4% others )...and cash back on Costco purchases, which along with my Exec membership adds up quickly over the year....

What do you feel is stupid about it?

You people have gone insane.

Stop trying to control every atom of existence and every move people make.

You're sick in the head, not visionaries, not thought leaders.

Go plant a garden and get back in touch with the real world.

No, NOT FARMVILLE!

Or...easy solution, tried and true, age old.....don't use Facebook or any of those other social median apps.

We got along just fine before them....and I can tell you from experience....never being on them, hasn't harmed me a bit, in fact I think it overall has had a positive effect on my life....

Fuck it....

I'm gonna just go back to smoking real cigarettes....

It was MUCH more fun anyway...you got to carry a lighter all the time, play with fire....and flicking ashes at the bar while talking to a girl just felt....right.

Hell, maybe go back a bit further and buy loose tobacco and roll my own.

Pure analog pleasure.....geez I miss it.....

> genuine question - why was this code pushed now

Zuckerberg has aggressively been bribing politicians to enact this at the State level.

Several news stories about it though you have to search for terms like 'lobbying' and 'Meta' as fig leaves.

Gee, it is almost as if the U.S. government needs to encourage homegrown solar panels. If only the U.S. could find such a government.

The problem you get though is what I call the "California Cancer Warning Problem"
Basically, people can only pay attention to so many warnings. The more often people get false or trivial warnings, warnings where they have to continue to get things done as standard, the more likely they are to just plain ignore the warnings.

While hackers might be able to figure out a way to do something malicious without triggering the warning, the warnings back then were worse than useless, because they not only triggered for just about every document, users by default could not assess the document for safety without enabling the scripting. IE I couldn't by default open the document and look at the scripts to assess them (and some of them were only like a dozen lines) without enabling them.

Saying the warnings were necessary also ignores that there have been exploits that didn't even require opening a document to cause infection. Preview was enough.

Basically, if the hackers figured out something clever, just add that to the check. It would still be a better situation than what we had back then.

Even re-architecting might not fix their problem. It depends upon how much their software people are relying upon bot generated code. Given their famous attention to detail, what's the likelihood that they are pushing out code they do not understand because "it worked"? The hardest bugs do not show up in test harnesses. So if they have built up a giant sticky wad of code they do not understand, there's no going through it all quickly if that is even possible. If they re-architect with the same software dependence on bots, they haven't really solved the underlying issue which is the way they build stuff.