That would make a $500 million dollar difference so in the end, it doesn't really matter.
I love it. Everyone’s claiming a $5 billion fine is insignificant, so there’s no room to argue the tax savings from writing it off is meaningful.
Readit Newsdjakjxnanjak commented on Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2019 Results [pdf] abc.xyz/investor/static/p... · Posted by u/mrep
djakjxnanjak commented on Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20% ir.aboutamazon.com/news-r... · Posted by u/cs702
They're not a Startup, they've been "going for growth" for a 1/4 of a century, eventually you need to make a profit to justify your Market Cap. Just because profit isn't a goal for AMZN doesn't mean it's not a vital financial metric.
Revenue is up 20% year over year. The growth is real, not just a goal.
djakjxnanjak commented on EU opens Amazon antitrust investigation theverge.com/2019/7/17/20... · Posted by u/Tomte
I'd love to see how this applies to store brands and shelf placement in retail stores as well.
I've noticed this comment constantly pop up on Amazon antitrust discussions. It's not the same thing.
Retail stores buy the products they put on their shelves, at wholesale prices. They then mark up the prices to a retail price charged to the end buyer when they resell the products to the end buyer.
For store brands, the store still pays for the goods up front, but they're usually just buying white-label products from suppliers that don't need to make up for marketing expenses, and so the wholesale prices are cheaper.
There is no competitive concerns here because the product maker has already been paid for their goods.
Amazon isn't being investigated for the products it buys from its suppliers. It pays for those and so it can do whatever it wants. It's being investigated for the products it doesn't, i.e., the "Marketplace" of third-party sellers where Amazon is using its internal data gathered from the third-party sellers to compete with them. There is a competitive concern here because Amazon controls the marketplace and is using its market position to compete against these third party sellers.
There is no comparable analog to the physical/retail world because such an arrangement doesn't exist in the retail world.
Contrast to ebay or etsy, which are all third-party sellers. No competitive concerns there, because they aren't trying to compete with their own sellers.
>Retail stores buy the products they put on their shelves, at wholesale prices. They then mark up the prices to a retail price charged to the end buyer when they resell the products to the end buyer.
Why is this difference salient? This process of selling, reselling and markup recurs for years. Economically the outcome is the same as the store charging a fee like Amazon, just with the payments split up and time shifted. If you doubt that the same power imbalances exist in brick-and-mortar, read about how Walmart squeezes suppliers.
djakjxnanjak commented on Going Quiet: More States Are Hiding 911 Recordings propublica.org/article/mo... · Posted by u/danso
I wish I had more concrete information, but I remember hearing about one police department treating bodycam recordings in public and in private places differently for this reason. I imagine the officer would tag it when they left their shift or offloaded the footage.
In general, I've heard reviewing the footage is a huge undertaking and an unexpected burden. I wouldn't be surprised if, like many backup systems, they're not often tested and found to be insufficient when they go to pull a video...but, then again, they also deal with evidence which has similar requirements.
A system with enough manual control that the officer has the task of tagging and offloading the footage sounds like a system where inconvenient footage will be mysteriously deleted.
djakjxnanjak commented on “How Couples Meet” Chart twitter.com/DKThomp/statu... · Posted by u/dankohn1
What's really interesting to me is the temporary flattening in "met online" around 2000 - 2005. What caused that?
My theory: it's the transitional period between online dating as a novelty, and online dating as an obvious default for youth who grew up online.
Dotcom crash made online-anything less attractive?
djakjxnanjak commented on FTC Approves Roughly $5B Facebook Settlement wsj.com/articles/ftc-appr... · Posted by u/CaliforniaKarl
Search queries reveal a lot.
Do we consider people making search queries on Google to be non-users?
djakjxnanjak commented on Strava cuts off Relive dcrainmaker.com/2019/07/s... · Posted by u/tomverhoeff
If you're on Android (maybe even if you're not?) you can use Google Maps to share your location with specific people for a specified time, or indefinitely.
The iPhone Google Maps app has the feature, although I haven’t turned it on so can’t say how well it works.
If you had that protection, what would you do if your phone was lost/stolen and you wanted the number transferred to a new SIM card? You lose your number forever if it was impossible to transfer. If there's some way to transfer it, like showing your passport in person in the phone company's office, a hacker can pretend to be you and do that too if your account is valuable enough to be worth the risk. Ultimately, you're still trusting the phone company not to assign your number to somebody else, and that's what they're not good at.
I guess I’d like the ability to delegate the responsibility of updating the ownership of my phone number to an entity of my choosing. The phone company would only be able to update with this entity’s go-ahead. Services could specialize in this kind of work so identity verification would be a core competency, and I could pay more for better protection.
In my opinion, Microsoft's implementation of MFA on Office 365 (at least our instance) is broken. SMS MFA is inadequate and should not be used, the SS7 network is apparently trivially hackable in some circles and text messages can be rerouted. So they want us to use MS Authenticator, great. However the 365 login screen always has the "Sign in another way" option in which I can just bypass the Authenticator app and use an SMS text. I cannot remove my mobile number from my profile to disable the option to SMS text because they are worried about me losing access to my app. I don't know if this is a limitation of Office 365 through our VAR or what, but it just seems pointless to offer an Authenticator app if there's an easy way to fall back to SMS and no way to disable SMS. If someone has my password and can reroute my text messages, a fancy shmancy Authenticator app is pointless. If this is not how it is for others with 365 I would love to know that, I hope it's not a limitation or policy put in place by our VAR.
Does anyone know if there’s a way to prevent your SMS from being rerouted, or get a special protected number?
The ability to do this would not mitigate Microsoft’s responsibilities here, but at least it would allow some people to help themselves.
The IBM keyboards produced from 1960–1990 are better than anything Microsoft puts out today: faster to type on, more ergonomic, much more reliable, sturdier, ... and of course much more expensive to produce. For particularly nice examples, take a look at these, https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Beam_Spring_Keyboards
Or pick your favorite other vendor. Pretty much all of keyboards sold in the 70s–80s were better than anything available at mass scale today. Back then computers were competing head to head with typewriters, and the best electronic typewriters were really nice to type on. I’m partial to the Canon typewriters of the early 1980s with nice Alps switches, but e.g. some Olympia typewriters of the early 80s were deliciously clicky.
For at least the 2 decades from 1980–2000, pretty much every change in mass-market keyboards was driven by cost cutting. It’s not too surprising that quality degraded.
Even if we assume we can’t change the basic keyboard shape, one of the important features that Microsoft (and most other) keyboards have dropped since the 90s is that further-away rows on keyboards used to be elevated above the home row in a sort of step-like pattern. This makes it much easier to reach the tops of those keys, and therefore speeds up typing them. The original designs from the typewriters of the 60s and 70s were based on research done by Honeywell and IBM and imitated widely, but later keytop profiles (including for modern Microsoft keyboards) were designed by people who didn’t understand the reason for the design, and just imitated a progressively watered down form. (Indeed an even more aggressive step than the ones used on those old keyboards is ergonomically preferable for most typists.)
* * *
All of Microsoft’s fancy lab studies seem to me like A-B testing all of the possible choices of features for a penny-farthing bicycle without ever considering adding a chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny-farthing
If what we care about is ergonomics (which is to say, reducing static strain on muscles in the hand/arm while using the strong and efficient part of the main finger flexors’ range of motion to type, and reducing the finger and arm motion required to reach the keys), then the Maltron from the 1970s is much better than any of the dome-shaped Microsoft keyboards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltron
Better still, my favorite concept is a never-mass-produced ergonomic keyboard design called the DataStealth from the 1990s, http://web.archive.org/web/20000601172323/http://www.protomi... which is in my opinion the most anatomically informed design ever seriously undertaken, developed by an expert from first principles.
But also check out this awesome IBM patent from 1964, https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=63415.0
Or see the Japanese TRON project keyboards, http://xahlee.info/kbd/TRON_keyboard.html
Or more recently, Keyboardio, https://shop.keyboard.io/