I think this article ignores some of the other tenants of Amazon's corporate strategy. While Amazon is an online shopping behemoth, they are also expanding in to AI, web hosting and Platforms as a Service, financing, robotics, logistics, and lord knows what else. I think if you want a more accurate foil to Amazon, you should look at Alibaba.
What could be a possible solution to the PIN reset? Security practices say that we can authenticate across 3 ways; something you are, something you have, and something you know. Its obvious to me that the something you know is also known by hackers, and I don't think biometrics are going to be overly popular after this. Does Experian send out a hardware token to all users that request a security freeze?
It's interesting that this isn't one of the three traditional ways to authenticate, but it's obviously effective to some degree. Maybe it suggests a new mode of authenticating: some place where you are.
How much validity is there to the FCC's statement that privacy regulation of the internet should be left to the FTC, and that the FTC had existing privacy regulations?
Close to zero. The FTC privacy regulations were struck down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last year in AT&T Mobility v. FTC, in which the court ruled only the FTC had no authority to regulate activities of entities with common carrier status, even for activities for which they are not common carriers. So, even leaving aside the Open Internet Order reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, ISPs that are telcos and for that reason have common carrier status are immune to FTC regulation.
That ruling was the reason.The outgoing FCC majority adopted the privacy regulations it did late last year; they were replacements for the FTC orders that were struck down.
As others have stated here, this is largely a reaction to globalization and immigration issues that have been present in the world's view. Globalization has left a large portion of each country behind. Large multinational firms have moved a lot of their low-skill labor to cheaper markets and developing countries, leaving a large swath of former employees in their wake with very little perceived hope of finding another job at the same level. Whether you agree with the feeling of hopelessness or not, you have to admit that there is a large population that feels that way. You can't tell them that their feelings or views are not valid and that this is good for the world; their world just got ruined for the profit of others.
Pair this with a large influx of immigrants from other countries, and it scares people even more. The constant threat of terrorism has caused people to live in fear, and governments to react accordingly.
All in all, those are some major parts of the puzzle.
In another comment section (Reddit, I believe) there was anecdotal evidence that visitors from Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania regularly outstayed their visas and were notorious for violating a tourist visa, hence the additional checks the US wanted to put them through.
> In another comment section (Reddit, I believe) there was anecdotal evidence that visitors from Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania regularly outstayed their visas and were notorious for violating a tourist visa, hence the additional checks the US wanted to put them through.
I guess it was anecdotal evidence, because the data shows the contrary:
There are a few countries on the VWP that have higher overstaying ratios (Hungary, Chile, Slovakia). Croatia in particular has an overstaying ratio lower than Austria's and Netherlands'. Source: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...
The reason they don't get VWP is the visa refusal rate, aka "US embassy in your country does not want to give you visa".
Using the visa refusal rate as an excuse sounds a bit like circular logic: "We're not going to give you online rubber-stamped visas, because we're currently not giving you many visas." I'm not saying that the refusals don't have merit, but since they are discretionary, the refusal rate may never improve. It's just the perception: "Those Eastern-Europeans seem dodgy to me, so we won't allow them because they'll surely overstay." Yet the reality is that they don't overstay so much.
"In another comment section (Reddit, I believe) there was anecdotal evidence that visitors from Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania regularly outstayed their visas and were notorious for violating a tourist visa, hence the additional checks the US wanted to put them through."
Well, what would you think if we said the same thing about US-americans (remember the term american is also from Colombians) from a number of states?
No, we the EU are one and if you do this to Bulgaria, you are doing this to all of us. This is not nationalism, it's actually the opposite.
Pedantic or Latin American, in my experience; it's not much fun to be forgotten, and I feel their frustration but can't think of a very good solution. "US-American" doesn't really roll off the tongue... Maybe the US could adopt the same ethnonymn as Usa, Japan? :P
Well they are South Americans then. In my experience (my Brazilian friends at least) they prefer being called Brazilian. Nobody except those with an axe to grind or more time than is good for them care that people from the United States of America are called Americans. I really wish people would just grow up and stop caring about stupid little things like that.
Or people for who English is not their first language. In Spanish at least, an "americano" is anyone from the Americas. People from the US are "estadounidenses".
It started with the Mexican-American war of 1846, so that is a viable theory (though the CIA was not yet involved). That's the war Mexicans still teach in every Mexican school with a big famous map showing that California and Texas are Mexican territory unjustly stolen by the USA.
Terrorism in Cyprus? Been living in Cyprus most of my life I don't remember hearing of any terrorist incidents other than an attempted bombing of Israeli embassy in the 80s. There's definitely more terrorist activity in Western Europe than eastern.
I would like to point out the figurative middle finger the BBC is giving to NK. The offensive material that they pointed to are still published on the BBC website, even though the apology stated that they'd be taken down.
How many bugs and spiders rely on mosquitoes as part of their diet? Out of all of the ideas in this article, not once was the impact to the biological food chain discussed. We can kill all of the little annoying things, but how many beneficial organisms are being supported by them?
> There’s little evidence, though, that mosquitoes form a crucial link in any food chain, or that their niche could not be filled by something else. When science journalist Janet Fang spun out this thought experiment for Nature in 2010, she concluded that “life would continue as before—or even better.” I arrived at the same answer when I looked into the same question for a piece published three years later. “There’s no food chain that we know of where mosquitoes are an inevitable link in a crucial process,” one mosquito-control expert told me.
There will always be experts (and journalists) who can't think of the impact of some change. But I believe tropic cascades are a real thing in food webs, and we can't really know for sure that something will have no impact until we do the thing. If there is one thing we're learning right now, it's that these cascades are real and quite dangerous. Now that this is known, no one should in good conscience set off a possible cascade without knowing something about what might happen.
Humans can improve on nature once they understand the impact of an action well, so I'd get behind a well funded study into what effect getting rid of mosquitoes would have — one with an experimental basis and not just a journalist's thought experiments.
That line from Fang continues to be quoted, but I never found the justification in her own article. It's been a bit since I read it, but I recall that she spent the entire article relating the various ways the absence of mosquitoes would damage ecology, and then concluding nothing would change.
Also, Mosquito larvae grow in water and are a source of food for aquatic wildlife.
I seriously doubt that we understand every aquatic ecosystem well enough to know if eliminating mosquitos entirely would be harmful in the long run. And once we eliminate them, there's no going back.
No one is talking about eliminating all mosquitos (despite the headline).
There are over 3,000 species of mosquito. If there weren't any Aedes or Anopheles larvae in the water, other species would expand to fill the empty niche.
The article also places a big emphasis on people driving to the incorrect locations, hundreds of miles away from their intended destination. To me, this is a user error rather than a system issue. Every GPS system has the user confirm their destination address to keep this from happening.
