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Interestingly, I went the other way. Once I found myself ‘addicted’ to screens I got a nice automatic to check time with, and found that it really helped wean me off screens (I can set down my phone now and not look at it all day, and my quality of life and sleep have improved)

This isn’t necessarily true outside the US. The running joke about Greeks is that they are 98% Greek Orthodox (official stats from a while ago) and 40% atheist. You might be atheist and communist (a fairly common combo in Greece) but will still probably roast a lamb on Easter with your family.

Not really - you need thousands of pounds of ordinance to sink a destroyer and no small UAV is carrying that.

US Navy destroyers are equipped with CIWS and AA missiles designed to engage multiple supersonic sea skimming cruise missiles simultaneously. If the destroyers had felt that they were in any danger they would have quickly made mincemeat out of the UAVs. Still curious to know who operated their (fairly capable) drones in such a brazen manner though.

They could go to anyone important who is under investigation/has been indicted but doesn’t know it yet, tell them, then have them do things (data dump from your employer, etc) in exchange for help fleeing the US to Russia.

Good question. Treasury and FCC are VERY different departments. FCC is ~1k people and dominated by political commissioners. Treasury is ~80k people and has politically appointed leadership but also a much deeper bench of career civil servants. Those people will read those comments and will make changes to their proposed rules based on thoughtful comments and feedback from stakeholders. They may not make the change you want, but they will read your feedback and take it into account. If you do choose to comment, DO NOT use form letters or go on rants. Establish your interest, perspective, and authority, and state your position clearly with supporting data. And remember: everything you say goes into the public record

Source: got a large US govt to tweak regs based on data, common sense, 0 lobbying and 0 money.

Speaking from personal experience, it is necessary to update these references, because people implementing them have no choice but to follow the letter of the law. I have worked on govt projects where we had to downgrade to an insecure cipher suite to comply with outdated regulations.

Putting on my govt contractor hat, there may be a business opportunity here to set up VMs running Win95/Netscape Communicator for use by all the civil servants looking to comply with the law. Could charge a pretty penny too - it’ll all get budgeted as “Brexit compliance” costs.

Another example related to children - in 1993 guidance changed from having children sleep on their front to having them sleep on their backs. The result was a reduction in SIDS deaths from 0.13% to 0.035%. However the rate of kids having a flat spot on the back of their heads increased to 47% of 2 month olds. That flat spot pushes the rest of their skull forward and can result in a prominent forehead and misshapen features (iow, makes your kid ugly). Is the trade off between a 0.1% reduction in death rate worth a 50% chance of being ugly?

The bigger problem from a societal perspective is that the “people cowering in fear” often includes the Dept of Justice. Prosecutors are assessed based on win rates, and they know how hard it is to go after a large company with the best lawyers. In some cases, the prosecutors personally know the people at those law firms, and remember them as the best students in their law school class. Would you go after a large firm protected by someone you know is smarter (and better at law) than you? Much easier to focus on the obvious scams and easy wins. This was part of how Goldman got away scot free with extremely questionable behavior like betting against their clients during the Great Recession, or UBS got away with just a fine for laundering cartel money (they sized their teller windows to fit the shoeboxes full of cash that the cartels were bringing in!).

Per other note, everyone in the space does it. It’s a fairly commodity business so paying more or keeping people all year when there are only two months of work would put them out of business quickly. If anything it’s a flaw in the underlying law that creates that seasonality

Unfortunately everyone in the space does it. Hiring 200 FT with benefits that you only have work for during two months a year will quickly put you out of business.

I used to work at a company that hired temps off Craigslist to do fairly sensitive healthcare work. The economics and extreme seasonality made that the only viable approach. Software like this was absolutely critical to limiting what people could do and preventing things like identity theft etc. Strong deterrent effect too- during orientation they would show people exactly what they could see. Not great in a general work environment with FTEs but these tools have legitimate uses.

I clicked that link expecting Linus Torvalds and was very confused. The mononym "Linus" is already taken :-) It would be very exciting to see Linus Torvalds playing with giant amounts of RAM but sadly he doesn't seem to make a lot of videos like that.