thrmsforbfast

>> But it has the net effect of pushing the tax burden down onto smaller companies who are competing with the Amazons of the world.

I.e., even if we need a solution to "sclerotic tax increases", this is not a good one, because the solution only works for massive companies.

I've known this information about my friends and neighbors for the better part of the last decade. In most states this is public info and you can even look it up from a web form using name, zip, and dob.

But now it's in an app so the world is ending.

I'm actually OK with that. We're always complaining that companies don't take security/privacy seriously because there's no incentive to do so. See e.g. the Equifax HN threads. Having a person in the C suite who'll end up in jail if the company seriously fucks up is, IMO, a net positive for the world.

I'm sure startups/consultants will step in to provide regulator compliance as a service as well, so maybe not even that.

It's not like people will be thrown in prison because their DB wasn't patched quickly enough. They have to knowingly and intentionally lie to the federal government in an annual report.

The bill defines covered entities in Sec. 2.(5)(A) and 2.(5)(B). In particular, companies with less than $50,000,000 in gross receipts and information on fewer than 1,000,000 customers are not covered by this legislation.

And even if those apply to your local coffee shop or whatever, Sec. 2(5)(B)(iii) further limits the definition of covered entity so that businesses that do not provide 3rd party access to information are not covered.

So Starbucks and other huge coffee chains/retail shops are the only organizations that would have to re-evaluate data collection from their public Wifi hotspots, and even then might be exempt depending on what they are collecting and how they are using that information. And, I should point out, these companies will need privacy experts on staff anyways, so this provision is highly unlikely to cause them to shutter their in-store Wifi networks...

Additionally, some of the more onerous requirements only apply to a subset of covered entities with yet larger gross receipts and yet larger numbers of tracked consumers.

But, unequivocally, your locally owned mom & pop coffee shop is excluded from consideration under this provision multiple times over.

Ideally the code would be part of the peer review process, but code review is really expensive, so who knows how that would play out.

It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good.

(e: forgot to say: nice work!)

My very first interviewer (intentionally) didn't spec fizzbuzz correctly. The real test was whether the candidate listened to the customer's/lead engineer's spec instead of jumping to conclusions.

Fortunately, I was just entering college and hadn't heard of fizzbuzz before. I passed the "test" but for the wrong reason.

There's a whole field of law about bankruptcy. In particular, questions about how to value assets are obviously a big component of bankruptcy law.

I imagine "it's complicated" when it comes to intangible/intellectual property like patents, brands, etc.

In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party...

"Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.

For a very specific definition of monopoly (in particular, monopoly over use of a specific resource, not monopoly in the market sense).

In that same sense of the word "monopoly", private property == monopoly.

Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success.

I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable.

But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.