phlo

The author went with an UG nested in a KG as the legal structure. That's two legal entities. It's a neat workaround to avoid corporate taxes (the KG acts as a pass-through vehicle, for taxes and for liability), and avoid personal liability (which passes through the KG but stops at the UG).

In comparison, AG and GmbH also shield their owners from liability, but require capital deposits and are subject to corporate taxes.

Going with a UG-in-a-KG is an exercise in eating your cake and having it too. It's a cool legal structure that works around some of the limitations of its building blocks. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the people who can build the neat hack for you are going to want to get paid in order to do that.

You have to savour the lack of self-awareness in this one.

Founder chooses the most complex legal structure that's readily-available... and is surprised that this complexity comes with laywer and notary fees.

Founder decides to incorporate a company with the name of a popular brand of kitchen rolls... and is surprised that it's too generic.

After "weeks of correspondence" (and, I suppose, extensive research), founder decides to incorporate a company that's named the same as a Swedish online marketing company instead. Very distinctive. No risk of confusion, ever.

(Published: 05 Sep 2023)

My go-to for situations like these: Assume that the offender _clearly_ didn't mean to behave incorrectly, and help them overcome the mistake.

Person in a public space listening to reels at full volume? Get their attention, then loudly point out that their headphones got disconnected and everybody can hear the audio.

People leaving a train or bus and leaving behind trash? Loudly let them know that they forgot their water bottle or paper bag. If it's a single item, this works doubly well if you helpfully hand them the item, too.

AFAIR they don't do multilingual restreams (automated or otherwise) like some other online events.

They do. There's a team of interpreters at CCC who translate most talks between English and German, and to some other languages. As with most things CCC, it's all volunteer-driven and done on a best-effort basis, but it's there.

When interpretation is available, I prefer talks that are given in whichever language the presenter is most comfortable in. Presenting in front of a large audience is stressful enough as it is, so IMO it makes a ton of sense _not_ to worry about doing that in a second/third language, and delegating that part of the presentation to someone else instead.

There's an amazing talk about DB's punctuality from the 2019 Chaos Communication Congress: BahnMining, David Kriesel. Available in German, and interpreted to English: https://dkriesel.com/blog/2019/1229_video_und_folien_meines_....

My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.

So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.

Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.

Adam Neumann begs to differ.

[Piracy:] When I download a movie this way, I truly own it.

When you download a pirated copy, it's more likely that you _possess_ it, rather than _owning_ it. You are in control of the bits and bytes, they will not just disappear; but since your copy is unlicensed and illicit, the copyright holder could take legal steps to make you delete your copy (and pay for your infringement on their copyright).

Same as I own a DVD disk.

That's different. You own the physical disc, and the right to re-sell or potentially lend out that physical disc. (However, you can't take the data from that disc, and stream it to a public audience on the internet.)

[...] rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB

Depends on your jurisdiction, but in many places it is legal for you to create a backup of a physical disc that you own, and make personal use of that backup. In some places you are allowed to share your backup copy with friends and family (on a non-commercial basis, of course). It gets nuanced.

SRF (reputable) and Hauptstadt (very local, focused on Bern, I'm not familiar, but doesn't look made-up) report on it as well.

As absurd as it is to see (I had my first ski lessons on those very slopes), I think it checks out.

https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/wegen-gruener-pisten-gstaad-...

https://www.hauptstadt.be/a/helikopterfluege-hauptstadt-brie...

I see where you're coming from, and looking at the problem from a purely technical perspective, I agree with you. A password is just a string of codepoints. Accept what you get, yeet it into a password hashing function, and be done with it.

However, in my opinion, for real-world systems, you need to strike a balance between technical and operational, and user experience concerns. If restricting your password space to printable ASCII characters can meaningfully decrease the amount of the tickets that generate half of your ticket volume, you should give it some serious thought.

There are good arguments for both approaches, and the right way also depends on your user base. There was a story about WhatsApp a while ago, criticizing that WhatsApp would only notify users when their contacts' security code had changed, whereas Signal (and other secure messengers) would block and ask for confirmation first. Signal currently sits at 100M+ downloads in Play store, WhatsApp sits at 5B+. The numbers are very vague, but WA has 1-2 orders of magnitude more users than Signal.

In the WhatsApp example, a small change in the process can mean that good security becomes accessible to a pool of billions of users, vs. excellent security to millions. Restricting the password character set (to a sensible set of characters, and with a sensible length limit) comes with no security drawbacks, and good chances of some process/usability improvements. For a real-world deployment, I would argue it's very prudent.

Let's start at the edgest of cases.

Some emoji, for example, are combinations of multiple other emoji, and a given combined emoji may not be uniquely represented by a sequence of codepoints. In the pathological case, this could mean that an OS update on the user's system changes the composition of the same emoji, which might make it impossible for them to input their password. It is probably prudent for a system to disallow emoji passwords.

One step away from Emoji, Unicode also allows for other m̸̱̜̅ͅȋ̴̩̠̀s̸̺͐c̶͈͇͉̐͛̚h̸̤̣̆i̴͍͍͒͌e̴̲̽̓f̸̞̽̊. Chances are, full-on Zalgo passwords can lead to problems. Again, there are probably prudent reasons to restrict some characters. On the other hand, those modifiers exist for a reason, and disallowing phrases in the user's native language doesn't make for great UX.

Towards the more common use of Unicode, there is a pretty good _practical_ reason to restrict the use of some non-ASCII characters: if your system accepts ç, ö and ø as characters in passwords, and non-technical users venture into a part of the world where the keyboard layout doesn't, your helpdesk is going to have to deal with the occasional annoyed customer. From a systems design perspective, those characters seem fine -- operationally, they may cause headaches.

Finally, we've arrived at printable ASCII characters. Restrictions on maximum length (usually 6 or 8 characters), and on certain characters (%, & or :) tend to be based on interactions with legacy systems (e.g. DES crypt() used to have an 8-character minimum), or on bad input handling. Either way, it's probably a bad sign.

I used the same mod to turn a few older, passive hi-fi speakers into Sonos-enabled wireless speakers. They sound (and look) a lot better than the Symfonisk, and putting the DAC and amp right into the speaker enclosure is more convenient than an external amp and wiring.

If you use them to bi-amp speakers with two drivers, the TruePlay calibration works great.

That's fair. I can see the benefits in most of the things you listed. Chances are, this boils down to whether you regard your car as sort-of an extension to your home. I don't, so I'm perfectly happy to have _a_ car available to me at a moment's notice. I understand that many people do, and they'll prefer being able to own a car and really make it their own. The whole car sharing thing is also predicated on good availability of cars near where you need them. It works great for me, in an urban setting; it would be wholly useless if I lived somewhere out in the sticks.

The point I want to make: SaaS, RegArb and the sharing economy are different things. If VW tries to charge you per-hour to use the software installed on your car, then let's talk about abusive software licensing. If Uber skirts regulations to muscle into the transportation market, let's frame the discussion around employment law and transport regulations. RegArb startups make it a habit of framing their business model as something else; and we're all better off if we don't fall for that trap :)

The _actual_ sharing economy is great. Your beef is probably with corporations that masquerade as part of the sharing economy in order to exploit regulatory loopholes (e.g. Uber, Airbnb).

For an example of the actual sharing economy: I'm a member of a local cooperative that owns and maintains a fleet of ~3k cars, distributed across the country at most train stations and in many neighborhoods. For an initial deposit of $1k, "my car" is whatever I need it to be at that moment. If I need to transport furniture in the morning, it's a Mercedes Vito. For a leisurely drive in the countryside at lunch, it's an Audi convertible. And for a quick grocery run before stores close, a cheap Citroën C1 will do the trick. And because the whole thing is a cooperative, per-km prices are around what I'd pay if I owned any of the cars myself.

Sharing is great. Regulatory arbitrage masquerading as the sharing economy, less so.

Not too long ago, process nodes were discussed at μm scale. Extrapolating from the past, I think there's a fairly straightforward way [0] to come up with names for the next few increments.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...

Since you mentioned that this piques your interest: There is an body of research and literature about this topic. The Theory of the Firm [0] is a good starting point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Ah. I hadn't considered credit card churning. Thanks!

(I do have some reservations -- I'm guessing that only a small minority of cardholders attempt to churn their balance from card to card or pay it off before the end of the promotional period. 12-month lines of credit don't come for free, and if the expected average payoff wasn't worth it, credit card companies would probably stop running these promotions.)

Oh, I have no doubt that there are situations where it may make sense to buy things on credit. Houses and cars can often be financed at good conditions. I've yet to see an example where this applies to small purchases.

Klarna offers a variety of payment methods. The 30-day factoring looks fine (3% charged to the merchant, no interest to buyers). But as far as I can tell, any financing they offer beyond 30 days comes with significant interest. Their product page for Ratenkauf [1] says "Es fallen Zinsen an." ("Interest is charged"). When I look at their demo store [2], they indicate a 10.43% APR for a €400 purchase paid over 12 months. This, of course, falls on the right side of the law and has a pretty small risk of ruining people -- still, I don't think there are many scenarios where you'll end up better off after paying 10% interest on anything.

[1] https://www.klarna.com/de/verkaeufer/produkte/ratenkauf/ [2] https://www.klarna.com/demo/de/de-DE/kp/p-sunglasses-de/. You'll have to add the sunglasses to your cart and proceed to checkout.

The country runs on cheap debt. Everything from houses, education, cars all the way to TVs and dresses is financed with long-term payments and low single digit interest rates.

Can you point to a few examples of TVs or dresses being financed in the low single digits? I'm genuinely curious -- as an outsider, my impression of US credit was always one of a system that charged predatory interest. That impression is mostly based on seeing credit cards advertised at 15-25% APR, and hearing stories of student loans with interest rates that approached the double digits (for debt that's not dis-chargeable in bankruptcy, no less).

My point of reference are Switzerland and Germany, which have legal caps on interest rates around 10-13%. Credit agreements with higher interest rates are nullified, voiding all interest claims. As a result, the growing rate for unsecured debt is somewhere in the 8-10% region. (And, of course, significantly lower for secured debt, like mortgages or car leases.)

That's not what the article suggests. The article suggests an ad on a page with an ubiquiti url.

It's both. UniFi is product line of network hardware which is managed by a central controller. The controller is available as a software download, and Ubiquiti sells a few devices that are pre-configured to run it (the "Dream Machine" from the ad, and their "Cloud Key", which is just a PoE-powered mini-appliance that runs the controller). The controller's UI can be accessed either directly, or via a Ubiquiti-run cloud service. The tweet shows the latter, but having recently upgraded my controller, I can confirm that the ad also appears when directly accessing the UI. What's worse, there's a link offering to go back to the "Classic Dashboard" on my install, but it doesn't appear to work.

There's an important distinction here. Laws (and court decisions) are freely available in many (most?) places. Relevant commentary on how these laws are applied tends to be more costly.

I'm not very familiar with the situation in France, but I can offer a data point from Switzerland: The civil code is (of course) freely available online and in PDF format. A printed copy is available for CHF 15 or so¹, both from the federal press and from other publishers who might throw in an index or a keyword reference at the same price.

However, if you're actually looking to apply any of the contents, you'll want qualified explanation and references to jurisprudence alongside the legal text. Affordable commentary² on the civil code start at CHF 250 or so, and the industry standard "Basler Kommentar" to the civil code is sold as two volumes, retailing for CHF 598.- each.

¹ It's a few hundred pages; IIUC the price pretty much reflects the cost of printing, binding and logistics. Key point: Nobody is getting rich off of selling these.

² For the civil code, specifically, you'd be in luck: Some consumer advocacy organizations publish hands-on guidebooks that are significantly cheaper than the usual commentaries. So you might get by on CHF 100 or so. But these tend to not be available for other, less mainstream, laws.

SkyDemon (a flight planning and navigation app) is a delight for subscribers:

* Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees.

* If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy.

* When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email.

This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.

Cool, I hadn't realized that distinction in terminology. Thanks for pointing it out! :)

If you ask for output in EDT, but the date is in December (which is not part of daylight savings time) then should the date output be UTC-4 or UTC-5?

EST is always UTC-4 and EDT is always UTC-5. Both of these exist throughout the year. The only change happening in Spring/Autumn is that some places change which time zone they currently observe.

This also addresses the second problem that you outlined. As long as the query is properly specified (if you want information related to a location, use America/New York; if you want information related to a time zone, use the time zone), you can always get an unambiguous and correct answer.

And to stay with the theme of the article: Chances are, the meeting actually _isn't_ intended to be scheduled for 9am CST, but rather 9am America/Chicago. The key difference being that Chicago only observes CST for half of the year, and most people would probably expect for their recurring meeting to happen at the same local time, regardless of the season.

If the meeting is in _the other_ CST (the Taipei one), there's good news: Taipei doesn't do daylight savings. On the flip side, Chicago attendees might dial in fourteen hours early, so Asia/Taipei is a safer bet, too.

How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

1 Gbps can handle about 8¹ to 40² 4K streams.

¹ 2160p60 on Blu-Ray goes up to 100 Mbps

² Typical 4K Netflix streams are in the 15-20 Mbps region, with a recommended Internet bandwidth of 25 Mbps.

Let's look at the Euro as a better¹ example, and let's take 2002 as the start date².

One year into its existence, a Pan-European Clearinghouse provided clearing services for participating countries.

Six years into its existence, in 2008, credit transfers and direct debit are operational across the SEPA area, meaning roughly that international payments are on par with domestic payments (i.e. no fees, 1-2 days wait time).

Eight years into its existence, SEPA transfers have become the dominant form of electronic payments in the Eurozone.

Since 2017 (fifteen years in), anyone with a SEPA bank account can send money to anyone else in the Area instantly³, and free of charge.

Throughout this time: * The Euro didn't suffer hyperdeflation. * There are ways to recover payments that were sent to mistyped IBANs and/or were sent fraudulently. * Users who forgot their e-banking password can get a new one from their bank and not lose all of their assets.

In 2019, SEPA processed about 22 billion credit transfers⁴. That's about 700 transactions per second, or about a hundred times more than the Bitcoin network is able to handle. SEPA also handled about the same number of direct debits, something that BTC doesn't offer. Best of all: SEPA did all that, without using approximately Chile's annual energy use.

Bitcoin is amazing Sci-Fi, brought to life. It's a testament to Satoshi's genius, to a cyberpunk-y spirit, and to applying game theory in a system that actually kinda works. But given its immense costs for miners, users, and society overall, it's something that falls squarely on the dystopian side of sci-fi.

¹: Mainly because the Euro is a multinational project and not a national currency. And also a little bit because the US banking system is a bit of a mess. But mainly for the "international" aspect.

²: Technically, it was created in 1992 and could be used, in electronic form, from 2001 onward. Still, banknotes and coins were introduced in 2002, so that feels like a good starting point.

³: "10 seconds, or up to 20 seconds in some circumstances"

⁴: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/be-involve...

Just looking at the numbers here, this could just be a case of a sign getting flipped somewhere along the way.

Global Links intends to do a reverse split, replacing 350 old shares (worth 10¢ each) with one new share (worth about $35). For the sake of argument, let's say they mixed up the ratio in their split filing. Instead of doing a reverse split, they do a forward split, replacing each share of old stock (10¢) with 350 shares of new stock (about one third of a cent, each). The shares trade at a somewhat high volume, because each share is worth a fraction of a cent.

Simpson notices that, after a 350:1 reverse split, Global Links ought to have about 1M shares outstanding.¹ He also notices that the current trading price is a fraction of a cent. Small enough to make this a worthwhile experiment. He acquires about 1.2M shares without moving the price too much. He also doesn't question how this was possible to happen within a day or two.

After the split, Global Links has some 100B shares outstanding. Simpson's position of 1.2M is less than one percent of that, so the shares continue trading as before.

¹ He might be combining multiple sources of information here. Perhaps his brokerage doesn't show reference data, so he combines the price he sees in his brokerage's app with reference data from Yahoo!finance or something.

Vapor expands, by a lot. Assuming that firehose delivers ~100 liters per second, you'd also create a steam bubble about 80 meters across.

The title should probably be changed to the title from the article, 'Windows 10 warns [users] to use a "Microsoft-verified" app [when attempting to install Firefox]'.