I don't see how this is sustainable, and I was a dues-paying member of the IEEE Computer Society for about 20 years and of the ACM for about 10 years. I even attended meetings and donated quite a bit of time to the CS. Minor writing and enough refereeing to become a "senior referee" at the end. I think they are doing some important stuff, but there are costs... And eventually I stopped paying dues. (But now I'm also remembering a database conference that may have been paid for by my employer.)

By the way, I used to read the magazines I received cover to cover. That time actually became a significant negative factor. Lots of good stuff, but too much time required. On that front I think the main effect of paperless publishing will be to significantly reduce the incentive to read all of an entire issue... Why not just ask an AI to summarize the parts that are most relevant to my work?

So if you're going to push me for an overall assessment, I think it's a net negative and will make the ACM less relevant. Perhaps even imperil it's survival.

But I also have a solution approach to ignore: What if the ACM supported books with special webpages to address the time problem? Each computer-related book would have some QR codes pointing to the errata, a bibliography, a searchable and dynamic index, and even forward links to later work on related topics. Kind of a post-publishing future bibliography? In this fantasy, at least the publishers would be providing some funding to sustain the relevance of the books they are selling.

I think you have lost track of the current priorities of the DoJ. But perhaps time for the old joke? Unfortunately I can't remember the exact form of the quote that underlies the joke. A Russian guy? Something about "Behind every great fortune there is a crime"?

I actually think there are two ways to become excessively rich, and crime is only one of them. The second way is to be lucky, though the luck can take various forms. Most common form is inheriting the profits from a parent's crimes.

So the joke is that the old saying is obsolete because these days you use some of the loot to bribe the cheapest politicians to fix the law so that it's no longer a crime. Investing in politicians has had an obscene RoI for a long time now.

Ignoring the problem has yet to make it go away.

And I strongly disagree that today's google sincerely cares about anything except getting more money.

Why did you quote "not simple". You made me think I had written that, and I certainly don't think so. Maybe you should have used bold for emphasis?

Now I think you're mostly referring to the publishers. Funny business that, even before Amazon tipped over the table. Most of the books they publish are failures that don't even recover the cost of the first print run. I've heard numbers from 80% to above 90%, but that was a while ago, and largely from a delivery driver who delivered fresh books while picking up the unsold ones. The profits were entirely from the bestsellers, and of course the publishers love opium-like books for that reason.

I acknowledge that things have probably changed now. I've already mentioned the Amazon problem, but I also think AI is offering new ways to assess which books might become bestsellers (resulting in fewer books making the first cut).

I'm trusting Michael Lewis on this, but I don't think that applies to the members of the exchanges, and the high speed traders are members. The fees for trades are limited to the little suckers like you and me.

Well, also I've read some of the proposals for transaction fees, and none of them seem to make sense unless the current transactions are without fees.

Thank it for its cooperation?

Fishing for Funny in the dark. Pretty sure I didn't get there, but also expressing my disappointment than no one else got there first.

Getting away from funny, but 'modern capitalism' is supposed to be based on a kind of adversarial model. The companies want to sell us as much stuff as possible with the highest profits, while we are supposed to be trying to find the best values to force the companies to offer better products at lower prices. But the powers are not balanced in this 'game'. Individuals are acting alone and mostly in ignorance, while the companies continue to become larger and increasingly powerful. From this perspective, collecting customer information is like ammunition for tomorrow's attacks on the customers' credit cards.

Some stories are worth more discussion than the standard scrolling time allows... I think Slashdot should allow for some stories to move down the front page more slowly than others.

Quoted against the censor trolls. My degree of concurrence is complex. Goes back to Fermi...

Seems obvious enough that the phishing website will ask for the google login information if that is the target of the phishing scam. Possibly disguised as one of those authorization requests to link and login from the google account?

Pretty sure I've seen a bunch of these, but not a significant fraction of the phishing spam I receive each day. I'd estimate that about three to five false negatives slip through on a daily basis, though the false positives have been mostly eliminated. I'm "tracking" about five email systems and it is interesting to see the differences in the volumes and kinds of spam targeted at each email system, but mostly I only use one of them. Microsoft's Outlook had a major spam storm a few days ago...

I still think the best way to address the spam scam problem is to go after the money, but that would call for working with the potential victims and no one (running a major email system) cares that much about the peasants (like you and me). I can't yet decide if the "countermeasure" described in this story is more or less laughable than average. But I'm predicting the spam will continue apace.

Quoted to deal with the censor trolls, and in this case I do agree with your sentiments even though I think the comment is kind of orthogonal to the main topic. But your Subject is still relevant if "this" is taken as referring to the money part of it. Education as a for-profit business is mostly a problem and rarely part of any solution. My mind is boggled by the "valuation" of $2.5 billion.

Some years ago I did spend quite a bit of time taking online classes, mostly on EdX and Coursera. However, they were not worrying about the money at that time and I think that is a large part of why some of the courses were pretty good. They were teaching for love of the game and exploring the new tools, though not too adventurously. I remember a pretty good philosophy course run by Michael Sandel and an excellent Python course from some Rice people. The Rice course was especially innovative in the evaluation system, which leveraged students to test each other's games. I know that course was still running some years later, though they had switched from Asteroids to Pong as the main game.

On the negative side, I felt that most of the courses were too dependent on long video lectures. I thought the solution approach was obvious. but I never saw such a course among the various ones I took from various universities. What I am looking for would involve testing up front to find out what I don't know and then the course would guide me to relatively short videos where the points of my ignorance were addressed. Perhaps in the form of a video of a teacher explaining each teaching point to a student whose ignorance matched mine? The tricky part would actually be in figuring out the depths of my ignorance, so I imagined the distractors would be designed to find out where to "place me" within a network of knowledge at each stage of the course. My goal would obviously be to learn as quickly as possible with minimum time. Anyone seen such a beast? (Been some years since I went back to the books...)

On the financial side, my fantasy was that they would charge for strictly proctored exams. If you can pass the tests, then you deserve appropriate certificates and stuff. However I actually doubt that approach would be financially viable. The prices for the exams would have to find a tricky sweet spot. High enough to pay for the course material but also low enough to get people to pay for them. Even worse, I don't see myself as a paying customer for such a system. Much as I enjoy learning new stuff, I'm too old to get much benefit from any more certificates or diplomas...

'Nuff said, but now I feel like I need to clarify that I'm not an expert on garbage. Probably not an expert on anything. Purely a dabbler?

Perhaps a substantive comment to follow, but not here.

s/regard Musk/regarding Musk/

Okay FP, but I think that's a weak approach. They would simply play the same game and try to devise new ways to cheat under the modified rules.

I think the fundamental problem is the lack of friction. There is no cost to trades, so more trades are always better. On that basis I think a transaction tax, even a tiny one, would be the best fundamental solution. Without friction the engine will accelerate without limit until it explodes. But I also think it's too late and the next market implosion will be much worse than anything we've seen yet.

And so far no one has cited Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. You know it's old news when someone has already written the book...