I think it's part ignorance, part exceptionalism. Backdoors sound simple, and if you're thinking about physical backdoors people are generally pretty good at protecting them. That this is largely because they have a lot of characteristics not shared by digital backdoors is easily lost on most people. These folks also tend to believe that THEY will be perfect stewards of backdoors, and anybody who loses control of them is just less competent.
For me personally the difference is that with social networking I'm reacting to something someone else posted or vice versa, which makes it organic. Being cold contacted on the other hand generally results in exchanges that feel stilted and weird to me.
One big factor is simply that a customs authority can dictate whatever process it wishes for ships who want to load/unload cargo there.
It's also not just customs, there are a ton of ancillary processes related to berthing - things like harbor fees, environmental documentation etc.
I know of at least one case where, as recently as ~2015, a shipping company had to keep around old machines with IE8 because that was the only way to interact with authorities at a given port.
The one thing I miss about old docking stations is that they were basically a bunch of dumb wires. I've had to power cycle my Thunderbolt dock a couple of times because its software managed to hang itself.
I use a Dell Latitude with Thunderbolt docks and for the past two years I have had consistent problems with the Thunderbolt dock in one location, while in the other location I frequent the Thunderbolt dock has been rock solid. In the problematic location I have gone through three different Dell TB16 docks despite staying current with device driver updates, and finally gave up on the TB16 model and went with a D6000 which has been stable since its installation.
That's definitely a thing in some configurations. I had a T580 that really didn't like Lenovo's own dock under Fedora 29. Smooth sailing with every other machine I've tried, though.
What floors me about this article is that the data comes from phone users who have installed TruMotion based software. In other words they know their driving behavior is being actively tracked, and they STILL use their phones while driving.
I have to think a good amount of these people are actually unable to make the choice of not using their phone while driving, presumably because the habit is so deeply ingrained.
The fundamental problem with incentives is that they're asymmetric in nature: The incentivee has a lot more time (and direct motivation) to come up with a way to game the incentive than the incentivizer can spend when setting it.
The only real way to address that is to revise incentives on a frequent and regular basis — but who wants to do that? Certainly not legislatures.
That's true. I found a lucrative opportunity recently and identified and removed the bottlenecks that were throttling my earnings through bad processes on the client's side. As a software and network engineer, I found much faster ways to get things done. I am working on an app to make it even faster.
That is what flat rates do - the side willing to work for a flat rate optimizes the processes to make that rate work for them.
Now everything gets resolved in one service call, but my effective hourly rate is high enough to work around every inefficiency. I have an incentive to find everything that is wrong with that location and fix it regardless of what the original service call description says. That is just a starting point as far as I am concerned.
If that company invested a small amount in producing technical training for field technicians and bolstering staffing at their inexpensive offshore call center, I would have had meaningful competition. I imagine if they hired consultants, they would see that as a report.
I hold unique institutional knowledge like undocumented direct phone numbers to relevant people at client organizations that I have a very big incentive not to share.
If I were writing the constitution for a representative democracy today, I think it would include mandatory sunsets for all legislation.
Yes, this would lead to the legislature spending a lot of time just reauthorizing existing legislation, but I would argue that the majority of new legislation being passed in modern representative democracies would be better off as revamps of existing legislation anyway.
Would you apply the same rule to a software codebase? Perhaps if nobody can be bothered refactoring that code, it’s not needed anymore and should just be deleted?
Sunset provisions are a pain for anyone who administers the law or makes plans for the future based on it. Laws that depend on the current date are bad, and stable legal institutions are good. That’s why we incrementally “reform” the law, rather than periodically replacing it like some depreciating asset.
This assumes you don’t have gridlock in the House/Senate, so it’s a bad idea.
We already have govt shutdowns when we can’t pass a budget, imagine if a law that legalized gay marriage was allowed to expire, or one that granted people health care or immigration status.
Even if a non-discrimination law only expired for a short period of time, that would be enough to do real damage to people’s lives.
Other countries have solved this issue simply by automatically forcing an election if a budget is not passed. Their representative are somehow able to overcome ideological differences and pass legislation once their jobs are on the line.
If the civil rights act requires over 1/2 votes to extend it and it doesn't gather that much support, maybe it should sunset. The budget votes are different because they require 2/3 of the votes which is what allows the minority party to block it from passing.
The problem with this is that there may be laws that are highly valuable for poor people (e.g. minimum wage, workplace safety, building/fire codes), but irrelevant for rich people/politicians and thus end up way way down on the priority list compared to, let's say, budget laws or the next big tax cuts package.
A mandatory sunset provision can only work if the legislators act with the interests of their country and constituents first and their individual pockets second, which isn't the case any more in many Western democracies. The US are just the most obvious example where Republicans blocked everything Obama tried to pass through.
Gridlock problems are particular to two party systems. A modern constitution would also include voting methods that don't result in a two party system.
You could also reduce the risk by the constitution itself being exempt from sunsetting and enumerating crucial rights and services therein.
Anyway it's not something that's ever going to be implemented anywhere, so it doesn't really matter if it could work.
While originally created for a very different purpose, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan and other logical languages would be a great basis for computer code.
The difference between your cake and real life programs is that business processes tend to be rife with exceptions and details — frequently exceptions that are unknown at initial design time.
The whole reason for the existence of iterative processes like Scrum and friends is that your premise doesn't hold in the world of software, because then we could just use a waterfall process and be on time and budget every time.
