nickff

4 ms·

1.
by nickff 5d ago
You're describing the 'private attorney general' theory/idea, which I'd believe if class-action lawyers were taking less remunerative cases that offered more public benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/
2.
by nickff 5d ago
MS Word was a descendant of Bravo and Gypsy on the Xerox Alto, not ND-NOTIS. NOTIS is an interesting footnote in the history of software, but PARC's influence on early microcomputing is well-known and recognized. [1] https:/&#x2F
3.
by nickff 5d ago
The 'tipping point' for class actions is usually the class certification, not a final judgement by the court. Class actions are absurdly expensive for defendants, largely due to the scope of discovery, and they also cause problems
4.
by nickff 5d ago
Many places have a ‘small claims court’, which is very similar to arbitration. The issue is that class action lawsuits are very profitable for plaintiff lawyers working on contingency, so those are the cases that get brought.
5.
by nickff 7d ago
> "According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines." This removal of surplus-age is common in the automotive industry, and one of the reason
6.
by nickff 9d ago
Excluding foreign competitors is a classic ‘regulatory capture’-style approach. Regulatory capture is (typically) a ‘bootleggers and baptists’ scenario where there are both good and bad reasons to enact the rules.
7.
by nickff 11d ago
The Soviets attached cannons to space stations, and the Chinese are believed to have deployed space-based weapons. The USA is actually a laggard in this field.
8.
by nickff 11d ago
The Libyans gave up their WMD program shortly after the USA invaded Iraq…
9.
by nickff 14d ago
> ”This is what capitalism's all about. Take as much as possible and give as little as possible if you want to win. Ideally, give negative amounts.” Your description is vague enough to encompass every system that I’m aware of, from
10.
by nickff 14d ago
Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If someth
11.
by nickff 15d ago
As the saying goes: “the dose makes the poison”. Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.
12.
by nickff 15d ago
One of the very early Nick-names for the EPA (shortly after its founding) was “Every Polluter’s Ally”, as it was viewed as more emitter-friendly than the state regulators which preceded it.
13.
by nickff 17d ago
That statement does not say that CAMP had agreements with all property owners, and it is possible that they did not have an agreement with this one.
14.
by nickff 18d ago
There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A It's
15.
by nickff 18d ago
This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actuall
16.
by nickff 18d ago
Cellular modems seem unlikely, because both they and the service plan they'd need are too expensive to be justified by any benefit to the manufacturer.
17.
by nickff 20d ago
Most of the planning for possible conflict between the USA and China is for a more limited conflict, such as an invasion of Taiwan.
18.
by nickff 22d ago
Not at all, but the term for routing and placing the components is ‘layout’. Floorplanning usually refers to the laying out of larger blocks of the circuit (with the blocks themselves already having been laid-out).
19.
by nickff 22d ago
Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.
20.
by nickff 22d ago
There are plenty of examples of democracies which began after the American Revolution, and subsequently devolved to single-party states.
21.
by nickff 22d ago
I didn’t say that either of those two were the result of multi-party democracy; I was trying to give the GP a variety of examples of single-party government, with different origins. Please note that the comment I replied to has been substan
22.
by nickff 22d ago
North Korea, China, Russia, Uganda, etc. are examples of one party taking over; the USA is just a country that has one party (you don't seem to like) with most (but not all) of the political power at the moment.
23.
by nickff 22d ago
I am not an American either, but there is a great deal of work on this subject, and the two-party system is actually one of the most resistant to single-individual or single-party takeover. The reason is that multi-party systems are vulnera
24.
by nickff 25d ago
> "One zener diode might be all you need." It would... if you're willing to just let the thing draw up to 0.1W all the time, and fail catastrophically if anything goes wrong with the zener or the supply is more capable th
25.
by nickff 25d ago
Phone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I sus
26.
by nickff 25d ago
It doesn’t matter that they can’t get past 3D-S, because the whole point of what they’re doing is checking what security features are enabled for a card, and whether their address and other validation data will pass. The fact that the scamm
27.
by nickff 26d ago
My employer is a small business that has an e-commerce website that is attacked by fraudsters trying to validate stolen credit cards or obtain customer information hundreds of times per day. Operations like CloudFlare are the only way to fo
28.
by nickff 26d ago
It is very challenging to distinguish individuals interested in privacy from bots acting maliciously or with reckless indifference. If you devise a way to do this more effectively than Cloudflare, you should start a business to sell this as
29.
by nickff 28d ago
The FDA has been failing to complete inspections on multiple types of facilities (drug and food) for a long time, since at least 2018, and it seems to have deep issues with its staff, culture, and/or management: https://inve
30.
by nickff 29d ago
Yes, I enjoyed Kranz’s book as well, though I thought it was quite different. If you liked that, I might suggest “Moon Lander” by Thomas J Kelly, which was the basis for the “From the Earth to the Moon” episode “Spider” (also excellent). Yo

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