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I know this comment may not be well received, but I do not begrudge EA for forcing online play. The view of games as a single payment of 60 dollars is no longer viable as a business model due to a number of reasons ranging from used games to piracy. The games as a service model limits the loss developers have on a game while allowing them to have more money to develop other ips or to keep the game updated.
The thing I do have a problem with is the way in which companies like EA view the services part of games as a service. At the moment instead of creating an environment where a consumer would enjoy the features and multiplayer functionality that can come with online play, it comes across as EA sitting over the consumer's shoulder making sure we didn't steal their stuff while also holding out some stuff the player can buy in front of his face. |
Software development is always a gamble of prioritization - There isn't any need for some malicious intent ("HAHA DRM THEY'll NEVER SEE IT COMING")... If you prioritize the server/client model, implementing 'offline mode' becomes an extra feature that can be thrown out when time gets tight towards the end of the development cycle, it doesn't matter how "trivial" it is to implement.
I would agree with what most of the users are saying in this case, that having offline mode would make the game much more enjoyable. However, that doesn't mean that EA was deliberately trying to screw over their users, that doesn't mean that this was all some giant hoax to get as much money from people as possible - it just means that the game fell short of expectations. Give them a few weeks to sort out some bugs (and for the modders to mess with their code...), and I suspect we'll see a much more usable product. |
It is a shame what game devs and publisher become. They were so devoted to make a good game. A game with a good story, good jokes and sometimes teaching you some lessons. Nowadays, there are just a few of these kind of games. Today they only care about profits. I loved EA, because they had the games I loved. Battlefield or C&C for instance. Why FFS did they had to add a campaign to Battlefield? Whatever, if you look around, you will see many many games, which came out just recently, where you can definitely see the greed of the publishers. Diablo 3 with its fucking stupid RMAH, Dead Space 3 with the stupid day1 DLC. Oh, while I come to talk about it. DLCs are the worst thing that could happen to games and gamers. You pay for content, which is already on your disc, WTF?! Or for some bullshit nobody needs! Don't get me wrong, if they would make a nice and proper Add-On, I'd buy it, but why should I pay even a single dime to get the classic Max Payne skin for Max Payne 3? I boycott this shit, and I will do so. I will even forbid my children to buy that kind of shit.
And that is the reason, I think, why DLCs are so popular. Sure, on the one hand you have this idiots who are willing to pay some extra cash to unlock everything right after installing the game because they "do not have the time" to do it by themselves. Why do you even want to play a game then? Go and watch a damn movie, faggot, games have to be challenging and rewarding. Movies are made to sit down, watch and do nothing at all! |
I'm not making an argument about the quality of LoL or saying that you should hate it for the same reasons people hate Sim City. I'm just pointing out that it seems like an odd choice of a game to highlight as an alternative in a thread about how we hate EA for pushing microtransactions.
I thought I made it pretty clear that I wasn't bashing League when I said it was the kind of game EA wants to pretend they are making. Or when I explicitly said that it is a better game.
Comparing League's successful always-online, microtransaction-based game with EA's shitty and reviled attempts to do the same is an interesting conversation. It's just a very different one from the one we've been having on this thread so far, so bringing it up without engaging in that conversation was a bit confusing. |
You shouldn't be suprised by NHL being last.
Football is fucking popular in USA = Madden/NCAA well sold.
Soccer is played everywhere on the globe and is the most played sport = FIFA is fucking popular.
Hockey, except for Canadians and North countries, isn't the most popular sport = NHL being not selling like others. |
Why are people in such uproar about it? yeah, always-online DRM is a shitty, terrible cash-grab of a game model as demonstrated by Diablo 3.. so DONT FUCKING PLAY IT, how hard is that?
I really don't get it, who was anxiously awaiting a SimCity game in the year 2013? I was playing that shit on Windows 95.. its a dated style of game, why get so invested in it that you're outraged when this happens? There's so many different games to play with amazing graphics and gameplay, broaden your horizons instead of playing a boring reality simulation game. |
Reading comprehension FTW:
> She also provides a big list of all the positives that online access offers, again all focusing on multiplayer and ignoring the fact that some people just want to build a city.
> Of note on that list are these two items:
> *Our servers handle gifts between players.
> *We’ve created a dynamic supply and demand model for trading by keeping a Global Market updated with changing demands on key resources. |
IMHO corruption is rampant. Oversight seems to be a failure. The legislative actions of both major parties are bipartisan only when it is horrific for the citizens. The only solution seems to be much smaller government. They can't exercise a power they don't have. I realized halfway through Obama's first term that my vote for him was a terrible mistake. I changed my party affiliation last election and voted third party. No regrets what-so-ever. |
See, you and I look at money two entirely different ways. You seem to think that money is primarily a way of compensating someone for their work, I get the argument there but I don't agree with it. To me, money is a way to establish resource allocation.
Look at a somewhat different, yet completely relevant case. I'm an architect, my job is designing "intellectual property". The buildings I plan out, they don't exist outside of the schematics I come up with. The building gets built, should I be allowed to continuously charge people for using my idea, the building I designed? Do you have a good argument for why I as the person who thought up the building design, don't deserve to get paid every time my building gets used?
So let's assume copyright doesn't exist, someone writes a book gets it published and then BAM! Someone else takes said book, attaches their name to it and pawns it off as their own. As long as the author can in fact prove that they are the author of the story and no the pretender, as far as I'm concerned, that's an easy lawsuit for mis-attribution of credit. The other person didn't write the book and in putting their name on it like they did is essentially lying to the customer, grounds for legal action I think. Now, if the second person were doing nothing but giving out free copies, nothing remotely wrong is happening. Now, the champions of copyrights and patents like to claim her that this effectively removes incentive to do things like write a book or compose a song, or a make a movie. These seem like legitimate claims, and if they are, I'm sure you'll have no problems producing the evidence that that's the case, that in a world with no intellectual property law work incentives for everything from making software to making music disappears.
For patents, prove to me that patents create an incentive to innovate that otherwise would not exist. The argument sounds decent, but I think the idea that there will always be money to be made in solving problems sounds pretty decent too. |
That is a gross misunderstanding of how (most) certificates work. In particular, the roots do not know the private keys of the certificates they sign, and the authorities that sign intermediate certificate authorities do not know their private keys.
In general, certificate signing is a multi-step process in which one party, we'll call them Alice, generates a private/public key pair and a certificate signing request (CSR). The CSR does not contain the private key of Alice. Alice then sends that to her certificate authority, who we'll call Bob. Bob receives the CSR which will contain a name Alice wishes to protect, something like "skydrive.example.com" and [some other identifying information]( which the certificate authority has the responsibility to validate correspond to Alice.
Alice will receive in response a certificate that contains the thumbprint of her public key and other information specified, as well as information (cyptographic signature) proving that the certificate authority authorized and authenticated that certificate. Sorry for all the "auth" words.
Finally, when Alice needs to send information to a client computer, the client computer will make a request to a website usually using a protocol such as Transport Layer Security
So, in essence, no, it does not make certificate authorities irrelevant. As far as anyone in the field is aware, no actor, whether a state actor like the NSA or otherwise, has the computational capability to break high-strength RSA encryption. What the NSA could do if they have the root keys is engage in a man-in-the-middle attack to communicate to a computer what a certificate for a particular site or service should look like, including what the certificate authority ought to be or the thumbprint.
[Microsoft's EMET]( an exploit mitigation software that businesses and concerned individuals should consider installing, enables certificate pinning for Microsoft domains and others.
[Google Chrome's source code]( performs certificate pinning for most Google domains, the Tor project and even Twitter.
In summation, or " |
No the gov't is not stopping you...you're too chicken shit to do the right thing. |
in simple terms, the one OP is mentioning deals with records the cell phone companies keep. The carriers in the Us have been collecting data on where the phones have been for years. The government has gone to these carriers and asked for the data they are collecting, which the carriers turn over. The court stated that these are currently business records and while people may not want them collected, until someone passes a law stating these are not to be collected or that these are an individuals records and not the company's records, the government can get them.
the |
This should help calm some spirits momentarily who think Police and the gov't are on collision course to strip all rights. SOURCE- This is all first-hand experience being that I am a Sheriff Deputy.
As far as locations, the way our 911 cellular system works as soon as you call typically within 5-10 seconds your location is typically triangulated to within 50 yards and is show on their mapping screen, complete with overhead photographs to show terrain, housing etc around you. Verizon is typically spot on, AT&T sucks a majority of the time only showing what tower the phone is using, which obviously can be a rather large area. So your location information is already being used 'by Police' every time you call 911.
As far as using phone locations without 911, the only time the major carriers will release the information without a warrant/court order is if LEO can articulate a life is in danger- I.e- someone calls saying their daughter was just kidnapped- Call Verizon, they triangulate the daughters phone to get her location, (hopefully) give coordinates to LEO to find the girl, or at least her phone.
Another example- Last month the local Indian Reservation Marshall's Tahoe was stolen. There was a company phone in the vehicle that we figured we could use to track the vehicle (no, they didn't have Onstar). After the call was placed to Verizon by he Marshall's department to ask for the phone location, Verizon wouldn't release it without a court order because it wasn't a life-threatening case. And that was with permission to get it.
The data can be EXTREMELY valuable when it comes to tracking burglars/thieves who steal phones and aren't smart enough to turn them off- that of course is after filing the paperwork with the court and getting the proper legal paperwork. Also it is often used to track the heavy weight drug dealers- NOT the people who have a nickel of weed. Again, after proper paperwork being filed. It's not as simple as walking in and saying 'Yo, what's up Judge? We need to track this dude so just sign here and we will leave you alone.' There are plenty of Judges out there who are looking out for over-stepping and abuse of power, they just don't make the same headlines as the bad ones. So to those who think all LEO and govt are out to trample the rights of Americans, there are Judges out there trying to protect the people as best they can.
Also- someone else already alluded to it, but just about every app out there asks us our location for better interface. Plus, how many people out there post on various sites where they are, what the doing, where they have been etc...often it's not hard to find out someone's habits just by seeing what they post for the world to see.
Before people down vote this to shit I hope they read that I agree the govt is growing in its surveillance/tracking operations, and I don't like it either. I don't feel that anyone, whether its the govt, LEO or your neighbor should be able to make a call and find out where you have been or where you are without due process or life-threatening issues.
Technology is out-pacing the laws meant to keep govt in check. Laws should keep up but sadly that isn't the case.
Oh, and the necessary cliche public service announcement- If you don't do anything wrong then you don't have to worry about..
Also- can we keep all the trivial 'what ifs' to a minimum- we can do that for the next year discussing every possible scenario and both sides of it. |
This is not how constitutional law works. The government doesn't have an automatic pass to seize information and property under the fourth amendment just because there is no historical expectation of privacy.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your car for example, that can only be overcome by a warrant or probable cause with exigent circumstances. The people did not have to petition their legislators to protect themselves from the government when cars were invented, because the courts took an expansive view of the 4th amendment to protect anything where you would have a reasonable expectation of privacy
We don't just have an expectation of privacy for inside our houses and inside our pockets. |
Katz v US agrees with the Smith v Maryland logic.
Katz decision was that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy within a phone booth (with closed door) or in your home with a phone conversation. But it does NOT cover metadata, only conversations. And then, if there is a warrant, then even phone calls are NOT covered. The warrant is the exception to your reasonable expectation of privacy.
So the SCOTUS will probably never rule in a way that would satisfy people who think police shouldn't have metadata collected. It is in fact, the basis of law enforcement.
Particularly, eavesdropping existed back in the 1790s, and it was not put in as a constitutional amendment, because eavesdropping is so difficult to prove; everyone is in charge of protecting their own communications--only your property is protected by the government from unreasonable searches and seizures.
The second SCOTUS does rule in such a way that would satisfy people who are concerned about privacy: it would be legislating from the bench, and it would immediately overturn thousands of convictions in which lawyers will argue that their clients were arrested by metadata confirming their guilt (e.g. Y contacted Z hitman) without a warrant. It would mean that undercover police can no longer operate without a warrant. It would make it impossible for the gov to investigate a criminal organization that switches its phones constantly. It would make financial crime impossible to prove connections for the jury.
In fact, FISA came about after Nixon wiretapped people without their knowledge and without a warrant. FISA was specifically established to provide cover for specific foreign investigations that cannot operate with warrants since they are very high-level operations going after very intelligent nations (then the FISC was established for warrants in cases that involve US persons and to avoid blanket surveillance; and they had the ability to review very sensitive evidence that adversaries cannot know without endangering lives). |
We need to pass more laws protecting our citizens from our own government. Since the Internet wasn't around 200 years ago, our forefathers didn't write laws about it to protect our citizens from misuse of higher authority. The government should be scared of its people, not the people being scared of the government. And technology wise, the NSA spying and police obtaining information without warrants or laws to protect us is a bit frightening. |
Correct- just dont get so hung up on the term 'warrant'. There still needs to be a court order. Which requires submitting paperwork to the court, having a judge review it, and sign off on it.
It isn't like Police call just call any random phone carrier and ask 'So where was John Doe last night at 8pm...yeah...ok...cool thanks' then run down and arrest you for something that happened at 8. And on top of that, the location data only tracks the phone, not necessarily the owner of the phone.
I said before that the legal system doesn't keep up with technology, and it sucks for all parties. Victims who can't receive help because appropriate charges can't be charged, suspects who escape proper prosecution because laws aren't in place and yes- even in some cases public protection from gov't where there aren't laws in place to protect the information.
I must be the odd one out here in the general thinking of Reddit- I hugely respect the privacy and rights of individuals. The abuse of LEO and gov't power only leads to further mistrust and also eventually leads to lawsuits, court cases etc. Those who abuse authority and power should be held 120% accountable- the extra % is to show others that it won't and shouldn't be tolerated.
I propose this- instead of starting the typical Reddit circle jerk of 'police abuse power and stomp on our rights' why not start petitioning your local representatives and phone companies. I imagine that with enough public pressure things can and will change.
With all the stories about about the NSA and such, I don't see why a private phone company can't emerge who says "Our customer's information privacy is our main priority and concern. We will not release ANY information without an appropriate warrant." Their customer's would enjoy added levels of their information security and depend on it. Once they violate it- customers would leave.
Btw- the 'nothing to hide' comment was made poorly in jest- sometimes sarcasm is hard to convey via just words. |
So based on some details in this thread & article, I would guess they were locking down the tablets via a WiFi auth system (Maybe a RADIUS server) coupled to a profile. This would allow the firewall to filter requests within the building but allow normal home outside of their network. One question is how did they get on the network after purging the profile? Public access Wifi is one route, MAC based authentication is another, and lastly distributed passwords (like student ID Number).
Seems rather trivial to simply lock-down/filter the access via MAC address/login between X:XXam and X:XXpm internally. I do this with my corporate users all the time. While MAC Spoofing can occur, an alternative is to simply VLAN the WiFi traffic so anyone connected will get filtered. |
well you are wrong about that one sorry to say. Comcast doubled everyones speed for free if they live in or around the bay area. they offer up to 105mbps if you live anywhere near the west side. some places arent hooked up for it yet, but for example my old house on the northern end of Ocean St. currently has 50mbps service and has since the beginning of the summer.
" Comcast will automatically upgrade its Extreme 50 customers to its Extreme 105 plan. That service will go from 15 megabits per second upstream and 50 megabits per second downstream to 20 megabits per second up and 105 megabits per second down. " |
Do you have any source for this claim? We have heard the same thing a bunch of times: Coming to Linux once Netflix has their HTML5 player running, coming to Linux once Google releases Chrome for Linux, coming to Linux once Google releases ChromeOS. It hasn't materialized yet; SteamOS isn't even claiming to support Netflix on dedicated hardware from what I've seen. |
I wish, I might have saved my speedtest results from before and after, but the did it right when we were supposed to renew our "year contract" which ensured we got the "special contract" cost; when they pulled a good ol' we dont offer than plan anymore. |
OK, read carefully. I do electric utility planning for a living. It is clear that you don't. My post is about bulk power, not about commercial customer billing, which is largely irrelevant to the economics of solar. I never claimed that PV installations at commercial sites are economic in Texas from a customer's point of view. You've shifted in that direction.
> I think the idea that solar is "more valuable" because it generates in the peak of summer is a myth.
This is ERCOT''s day ahead wholesale energy prices ? Hey -- sun's coming up soon. See how prices stay in the 20s through about 2pm, then get into the 30s? Hey, more sun then! Sunset in Dallas tomorrow (Oct 29) is around 18:30, just as the price starts coming down.
So you can "myth" all you want my friend, but these are the actual wholesale prices (day head) for ERCOT (Texas) on October 29, 2013 (if you click on Oct 28, of course). Notice how the actual price, in $/MWh, is higher during daylight? Notice how PV generates more electricity during daylight? On the wholesale market, PV is more valuable than flat generation. Am I beating a Texas-sized dead horse yet?
> See, they have to go through the cost of sizing equipment and, ultimately, generation capacity based on the worst-case scenario to avoid blackouts.
No, that's not what "they" do. For starters, the "they" is a variety of different entities: the electric companies, the generators, the PUC, the RTO, etc. The outage standard itself is one day in ten years. That's the standard commonly used. There are a number of ways to go at this, but here's what most planners do:
Figure out peak load forecast -- that's peak hour on peak day. It can be helpful to look at the peak 10 hours or so, to see if they're in the same temporal range (time of day, season).
Assign a capacity rating for each generator during that time period. Gas fired generators put out less power in the summer, for example. Relying on water to cool your nuclear unit? You might have to derate because the cooling water might exceed design specs. Etc. Assume that no generator will be down for scheduled maintenance during this time, but include EFOR (effective forced outage rate) to derate generators based on the probability that they'll be broken during the hour of greatest need.
Do the same thing for intermittent -- using a variety of stochastic and deterministic tools, determine the effective capacity of intermittent generators during the hours when the peak is expected. That is, what is the probability that the wind turbine or PV panel will generate during the hour that we have peak load? The answer depends quite a bit on when we expect that peak to be, in terms of season and hour. This metric is often known as capacity credit or capacity value ( not capacity factor). In ERCOT, PV will get a 100% CV, non-costal wind 14.2%, and coastal-wind 32.9% during peak load. Go figure.
Account for transmission constraints.
Do N-1 and similar planning, where a single transmission or generator outage is modeled to see if the system can handle it during peak load.
That's how it is done my friend. You'll note that it's not worst-case scenario , but rather planning based on expectations and probability. You'll also note that the peak loads come at specific dates and times which are forecast-able, and that means the generation of wind and solar at that hour is also forecastable.
Your comments about how individual customers' bills are handled shed light that just because PV is a wise investment for some customers doesn't make it a wise investment for all, but it does nothing to help us understand whether or not it is a good investment for a utility on a wholesale market system (hint: sometimes yes, as evidence by the significant number of ground-mounted utility-scale projects going in the ground, today, in a number of US states). |
The issue is not their planning. They are a service, and they ARE needed, even if some random people live without electricity or almost none and act as though the world would be better off without it. You can't then go and tell these giant places that are needed right this minute that they need to downsize, when it's really not that simple. This would also cost jobs, something everyone hates and complains about (thought it's inevitable when there are shifts in work force, currently the large one is from manual style jobs to more mental labor ones.) and not something anyone does lightly, I mean imagine being the guy that fucked over everyone working at the power plant in your area because you wanted to "go green." or some shit and you had to hire outside help into the are because no one had that form of education? You would be the devil to that community.
And then you get into infrastructure issues. You can't just downgrade giant places that are already working right now. It would probably cost a crap load of money just to change over to different style machines in order to work on lesser loads for god sakes. And then you take into account abandoned building that STILL need to be taken care of, especially if it's a dam of some kind, so now you have this thing that used to pay for itself now just costing people money. Then you factor in costs for whatever new infrastructure that needs to go up to pay for people, be it a switch to solar or nuclear or whatever the case is.
God the list just goes on and on and on. It's absolutely not simple. And it's not something that these places can really "plan." for as they are needed at the level they are at now, and actually in many cases MORE than the level they are at now and are unable to start making changed before a decrease in need because well, people need what's already going on.
They only "need." to be profitable as much as everyone "needs." electricity. And for the time being, that's very very very much so. If they start to falter, so does everything around them.
The |
A for-profit lamp import company, locally-trained or not, would have to raise prices to cover operating costs, which reduces the pool of potential customers to only people able to afford the higher price. The current heavily-subsidized £5 is already 25% of a kenyan schoolteacher's income. Raise the prices higher, and impoverished people will still know it's a good investment to buy one in the long run, but may simply be unable to save up the money to afford one.
So, while the business model may be more sustainable, it also means people too poor to afford the lamps go without the benefit of having said lamps. This is probably contrary to the goals of Solar Aid, which is not fostering local business, but providing nighttime illumination for the poor. Also, there probably aren't a lot of solar lamp startups in kenya, so it's not like charities are driving out local competition (as is the case in food aid). |
The whole point that the information gets out there is because we decide to put it there.
All these convenient tools of communication and storage that you put your data into.
But none of those magically appeared, they where made by humans. The same way your mail doesn't magically appear on your doormat, it is delivered by a mailman. If he wanted to your mailman could read your mail. If he really wanted to, your mailman could read your mail without you noticing a thing.
But you trust your mailman not to read your mail.
Every digital service, is essentially the same as a mailman, they deliver your data, it is handed to them and they hand it to you. They could read it if they wanted to. Even if it is encrypted, it is likely encrypted using their algorithm with their software, you trust that software and algorithm to do what it says it does. Software usually has multiple layers, created by multiple companies, all of which could potentially access your data.
All software was made by humans and is managed by humans, even if it seems secure now, that can soon end with a patch or some scrutiny. The company that made your software will someday, somehow be able to look at what you use it for.
You should be looking for the company that you can trust with your data, even though they can read your data, you trust them to only do so for spam detection and virus scanning. The company that is 'most encrypted' might not be the most trustworthy, because no matter how encrypted, they might still be able to read your data and sell it.
Also this raises the question, how much do you trust your mailman? Do you even know him? |
Also placing your hands on a sharks nose will immobilize it. The energy from your body overloads the sharks 6th sense (sensing electricity). |
If they were just directing readers to your article, that'd be awesome. But that's not what happens.
The problem is that blogs and competing publications will sometimes take information from your article - including hard-earned investigative material or quotes from hard-to-get interviews - and rewrite it on their page with their byline. According to my publisher, it's completely legal as long as they include a hyperlink somewhere in the article.
So, essentially, you'll get an entire article that looks like it was written by a different writer for a different paper, then at the bottom of the last graph there is a three word hyperlink to the original source. Which nobody is going to click on, because they've already read the article.
As someone who works for a smaller publication, it's a huge issue because the larger papers trump us in the Google results. Meaning somebody can search for an issue I worked long and hard to report on, and the guy who took five minutes to steal my shit gets the click. |
I know, and I don't think a free publication should be paid for things like that. But both cases hinge on intellectual property rights, and highlight how journalism is inexplicably subject to a different set of standards than other kinds of material.
If you burned a CD with a bunch of popular songs and sold it, or if you re-cut a major movie and uploaded on your YouTube channel, you would face criminal charges or fines regardless of whether you had included a message saying they were created by someone else. At the very least you'd be served with a cease and desist letter, and you damn sure wouldn't be able to keep making money off of it.
For some reason journalism has a different set of rules. Maybe it's because you don't have to pay for newspapers anymore, or that everything you could possibly want to know is just two clicks away, but people just don't value news the way they used to. A lot of people seem to think articles just appear, or that reporters get a whole bunch of information handed to them by the government and all they do is write it up.
I spent probably 100 full hours on one post-Sandy article last year, filing dozens of OPRA requests, digging through hundreds of pages of esoteric FEMA documents, tracking down sources and spending hours interviewing them both on and off the record. While this was going on I was still responsible for the rest of my work (two articles per day), meaning I averaged about 55 hours per week.
Finally the thing was published, and within six hours it was the top story on a competitor's site. Their article contained ALL of my quotes, un-paraphrased, and two complete graphs that were copy-pasted verbatim. The "writer" included his own byline, and only attributed refernced my publication once, in the second graph, with a tiny, one-word hyperlink. My name wasn't mentioned at all.
Because his publication is much larger than mine, his "article" showed up immediately under the "News for" banner on Google, while mine didn't even show up on the first page of search results. I predictably flipped shit and my editor even called his to complain, but it's apparently perfectly legal and they had no reason to take it down. They didn't even apologize, saying "It happens all the time. I'm sure you'll do it to us eventually."
The upshot is three-fold: our small company suffers financially, while a bigger news company is rewarded for stealing; my editors are less likely to assign similar stories in the future, because there was no return on the investment of time and resources; and I get no credit or recognition from the public or potential employers for what should have been a huge breaking story. Residents stormed a federally sponsored public hearing a week later, and each one of them referenced the article written by my competitor.
Sorry for the rant. But if you're wondering why the media spends so much time covering Justin Beiber's dad and we only find out about government corruption from people like Snowden, I think it's largely due to the massive devaluation of news in America.
Aggregation sites and blogs that comment on news get more views and make more money than the publications responsible for producing the news in the first place. There's just no incentive for reporters, editors or publishers to try anymore. I've won three awards in the last 12 months, and I currently make $22,000. I can't get a better job anywhere because large, national publications keep laying people off and 20-year veteran reporters are applying for mid-level general assignment jobs.
You hear all this shit about the music and movie industries suffering due to piracy and lenient intellectual property laws, but journalists have it worse than anyone and no one gives a shit at all. |
If you are posting it with the intent people will follow it and download free stuffz then you should be liable for that.
If I post a link with the disclaimer that I don't condone anyone using the link for copyright infringing purposes does that somehow make posting the link okay?
What about .torrent files? You could make the argument that you can download a .torrent file for the purpose of inspecting swarms without actually downloading any of the content described by the .torrent
What about magnet links? They don't even point to a particular internet location, they just ask the DHT network "does anyone have a torrent file with this hash?" |
In your hypo, you would almost certainly face the exact same charges your friend was. In most US jurisdictions, the concept of constructive knowledge applies in drug possession and related crimes. It doesn't matter to anyone - cops, judges, lawyers, juries - if you ACTUALLY knew what was going on. If it's in your car, you SHOULD know what's going on - you are considered to have constructive knowledge - and can be found every bit as culpable as the person with actual knowledge/actual possession. |
I don't think Google is currently in the fiber business to make a direct profit per subscription per se. I think it'll be a while before they get their return on the investment, rolling out infrastructure is pretty expensive.
The reason seems to be to give people access to high-speed internet, not to make money directly from the subscriptions. Google also has a lot of other projects to provide internet access, for example through free long range wireless access points in poor countries. A connected world eventually means they can serve more ads, and Google has an extremely long-term vision when it comes to ads, they're continuously planning and anticipating their position in the market for the next 2-3 decades.
They aren't developing self driving cars to sell cars either, they are making them so you can be served contextual ads about what restaurant your car should drive to to serve you food, which would often be a restaurant that pays Google for that service. |
I don't think that's true at all, the profit margins are there, that's why Google is doing it. Your cable provider tells you that it can't invest in infrastructure because it exists in an oligopoly and game theory dictates that these companies do as little as possible as far as capital expenditures while keeping prices high (no competition in the market means no need to compete based on price). This market structure is what is allowing Google Fiber to have such widespread success and why many American towns are taking it upon themselves to develop fiber optic networks. |
Long story short long, what's wrong with IP is that the system has been completely taken over and warped to put all the power of the rights-holders (generally megacorps like Disney and RIAA members) and take all the power away from the general public.
Copyright and patents started out as tools of censorship and repression in England. Then after a couple of hundred years, people fought off that oppression, but kept parts of the system (greatly modified) as a way to pay authors and inventors.
When the US constitution was written, the writers wanted a way to make sure that people could get paid for their ideas and inventions, but they were also very aware of how copyright and patents had been used to fuck over the general public in England. So they put all these time limits on copyright and patents. The deal was that the government would give you a time period to make a reasonable profit from your creativity, then it would go to the public domain where anyone could benefit from it, modify it, build on it, change it, or do whatever they want, all at no cost.
The whole concept was built on a fair trade. The public domain was a huge and crucial part of the original intent. Way back when, copyright lasted for 14 years, and only applied if you registered for it. So there was waaaaay less copyrighted material. If you had a hit, they let you get one extension, that was it. 28 years tops. This was intentional, because having a robust public domain is how we build our culture. Ideas and inventions are supposed to be shared by everyone. It's central to how we grow as a society.
Over time, copyright kept getting longer and longer and the public domain (the part that you and me and everyone else is supposed to benefit from in exchange for our government giving the creators a time-limited monopoly) stopped growing. Back in the 1970s, they made it life of the author + 70 years, and they made it apply automatically, so you didn't have to register it.
So now we have a situation where big megacorps have locked up what should be all rights be OUR culture so they can keep sucking profit out of it forever. And predictably, copyright and patents are being used much like they were in 16th century England, as tools of repression and censorship and a way to keep the little people down.
Under the original copyright system we started out with, all copyrighted material made before today's date in the year 2000 would be fair game for you to do anything you want with, unless there was an extension which took it back to 1986. But thanks to the corporate takeover of Congress nothing after 1923 is in the public domain or will enter the public domain for many years.
Think about this for a minute. If we hadn't kept extending copyright, all kinds of stuff would be available for you for free, to do anything you want with, right now. The entire catalog of the Beatles. Most of Michael Jackson's biggest hits. All the good Star Wars movies. ET. Casablanca. Citizen Kane. The Catcher in the Rye. All those old Looney Toons cartoons. Deep Throat. Steven King's It. Lionel Ritchie's Can't Slow Down album, in all its soft rock glory. And that's just the stuff that would have had copyright extended. Things that hadn't been extended from the entire 1990s would now be yours - ours! - to build on, remix, repackage, deconstruct, sell, trade, copy, read to our children, etc. But instead, we have to pay rent on these things forever. And yet almost none of that money actually goes to the artists who created the material. By far the lions share goes to rightsholding organizations that have done almost nothing to add to our culture.
Worst part is that the part of Congress that pushes for more draconian IP laws is usually the Democratic party, because Hollywood supports the Dems. So even if you're a good little liberal, the person you voted for is probably screwing you when it comes to free speech and the internet. Examples: Chris Dodd (traitorous assfuck now shilling for the RIAA), Patrick Leahy (treacherous snake largely responsible for SOPA PIPA . |
2 things, the adapters and the fibre itself.
There are 2 real types of adapter.
The first one is direct connect and what you would normally refer to
as a HBA. (Host Bus Adapter).
They act like extensions to the motherboard.
If you open your box you'll have the nic, graphics card and stuff all crammed into whatever expansion slots there are on the board. Fib HBA's are like the slots.
Normally you'd use fibre HBA's for stuff like attaching remote storage drives, SANS and shit.
They don't talk internet at all.
(They can be just as fast as something plugged directly into the machine).
The second one is obviously NICs.
You can and do get Fib NIC'S. (normally gig or 10 gig).
A good 10 gig nic will set up back about $500-1000 and the switch you wanna plug it into around 10K.
You can aggregate traffic on Fibre NIC's to get silly bandwidth.
The fibre optic cable itself comes in a 2 types too.
There's Multi Mode. (carries signals in both directions using all kinds of wavelengths) and Single Mode. (carries light in one direction using 1 wavelength).
Multi Mode fibre is determined by it's quality. (called OM or Optical Mode)
Old stuff like OM1 can carry OK ish bandwidth across a bit. New stuff like OM4 will get you 10Gb/s up to around 400 meters. (and that's all)
Single mode fibre setups dont have that problem but are fecking expensive and capable of stupid transmission rates over very long distances... in 1 direction so if you wanna use them you need need lots both ways and all of the associated toys and you're not getting that at home. |
The options at this point are cooking every animal existent with global warming or possibly eliminating a few species already on the brink with wind power.
Preserve their DNA for future recreation and get about elimination of fossil fuels, in a hundred years when we have something better bring them back. |
Out of [20 billion]( Let's do some math.
1,000 birds is .000001% of US birds.
28,000 is .00014%
200,000, the suspicious outlier, is only .001%. That's one-thousandth of 1%.
Conversely, thousands of humans die every year from fossil fuel pollution. Best try sparring with someone unfamiliar with Google and math.
EDIT: At 200,000 per year it would mean one every 2.5 minutes night and day, regardless of weather. This figure assumes that the power plant is lying about bird deaths by over 2 orders of magnitude. As in, saying 99.5% of the deaths aren't happening.
I had trouble finding the weight of an average bird in Nevada, but since they have a lot of vultures and condors, I'm going with the high figure of 8 ounces each. That would mean there is 50 tons of birds falling from the sky because of this installation. If that were the case, it would be a logistical nightmare to clean up and that's not even counting all the damage the mirrors would suffer. |
After waiting for over an hour for Belkin customer support, I got through and luckily came across my problem: my modem to router and router to computer cables were swapped. I had this set up before and it didn't effect the connection, so either it might have been something affected in the update, or some other coincidence that coincided with the re-connection. |
Dividends aren't everything.
In fact, in many ways capital gains are preferable for many investors (other investors prefer dividends. Depends on their tax situation).
If you own a stock, then you own part of the business.
The company investing back in the business (rather than paying the money out) increases the value of what you own.
You can then sell that share whenever you want (not just when they decide to give out a dividend) and create a tidy little profit for yourself, which is taxed at half of the usual income tax rate (mostly because it is not income from work, but rather income from investment activities. The government wants to keep people's money in the market, and out of their bank accounts, as hoarding money is bad for the economy).
By avoiding paying out dividends, you also get to avoid all the complicated psychology issues that come with dividends ([e.g. signaling](
. |
For anyone landing here that wants to support this decision of Verizon's, and sadly I know there are many that will because they think that only average users should be considered in a policy, I have this little rant I ask you to read and respond to.
If Verizon advertised their new caps when I bought their service, I would gladly accept them, since I knew upfront the product that I was buying. No, strike that. If Verizon advertised these caps, I would not accept them, I would bring my business elsewhere (assuming I had choice, and that there was not a system of legal monopolies on internet providers). As a consumer, I buy or choose not to buy what I want based on what is advertised to me. It should be illegal to advertise something as unlimited, or not advertise a cap, and then introduce one when it is convenient to you. This is a clear case of false advertising, and if our cable/internet companies did not pay off our lawmakers (lobbying), they would be pursued like any other company.
Imagine you own a restaurant, and advertise unlimited meals all year for a one time fee of $250. You collect your money, and then half way thru the year you tell the excessive users that 250 only covers 200 meals, since most people don't use that much anyway. This could be grounds for a lawsuit. Why are large companies suddenly above the law. In 1215, there was this tiny document called the Magna Carta. In it, was stated, that the King of the land should not be above the law. Now we allow our large corporations to be above the law, and pushovers in the world are not only accepting this as OK, but are actually supporting this.
If that example does not quite explain it to you, imagine other companies doing this. You pay for a subscription music package, but anything over 100 hours, and you are in the top usage tier, so they decide to cap you. How about, you buy a season pass to some event hall or theme park. After 20 uses they say the season pass was only $xx so, sorry, its now revoked due to excessive use. You paid for unlimited access to a commodity, and have now become limited. The economics of this type of agreement are that high usage accounts are paid for by low usage accounts. This is a company wanting to take advantage of low use payments, and then forcing out anybody who uses the advertised system. If you wish to put limits, create a tiered system that is advertised as such. I can go to a ball park and buy a 5 game pass, a 10 game pass, or a season pass. You bet your ass if I bought a season pass and they limited how many games I went to I would be extremely pissed off. If I wanted to be limited, I would have bought a limited package.
Let's go for one more example. Imagine if planet fitness started denying access to people that use the gym more than 5 times a month. Well 90% of our customers never show up, so you are in the top 1%, coming in here and using the service you paid for. Your membership will be cancelled if you continue to use it.
"Sorry you bought a service that said it was unlimited, but my company is too big to have any consequence leveraged against it, so I'm just going to do what I want." The fact that large businesses can get away with advertising one product, and then switch it after negotiating a contract or service agreement, pisses me off to no end. The fact that dumb asses then roll over and say, they understand, and that the companies are not in the wrong because most people don't actually have a good use for this, does not piss me off. It makes me sad for the future of the human race. It is this attitude that will allow the owners of this country to slowly strip away every ounce of freedom and power you have as a consumer. Whether YOU use that much data should not matter. You should be infuriated that a company can advertise one thing and then deliver another. But when you roll over, and say that the consumer that is using the service they paid for is the one in the wrong, you are now a part of the problem.
Since I have stated over and over what the problem is, I leave with a solution. If this is really hurting their bottom line, offer a pro-rated discount for anyone using under the new limits. Since, obviously, they are implying that it costs them $$/byte of data transmission, offer discounts to anyone that is not using a full amount of the service. I mean, this DOES imply that someone paying 100/month is not actually getting 100 dollars worth of service when they 'only' use 1TB/month. They should be getting a 90% discount, because 10TB/month obviously costs the full price of the subscription. I understand equipment and infrastructure means only a portion must be data use, so more realistically, anyone using under 5TB/mo should get a 10% discount on their bill, and anyone using under 1% should get a 30% discount on their bill. I bet no one would be up in arms over this. As it allows people to continue to get what they paid for, and adds an incentive to helping the company manage high data use that is obviously costing them per byte of transmission.
Sorry for the long rant. I get really pissed off about some things. This is all my opinion, so maybe others are right and just because the majority of people are not using a service that they are paying for, the minority people that are should be punished. |
As a former soldier, we have no influence on politics. Furthermore, we're aware that the government we're employed by isn't always acting in the best interests of the country or its people. Most of us were people doing a job as best we could, in shitty, sometimes horrific conditions. You may not like some of the things the military does, but again, some private mopping the floor doesn't make those decisions. In fact, we're obligated to serve regardless of our personal opinions. It's the bedrock of the US military... We serve at the pleasure of a civilian government. And for the most part, that's an excellent way to have things done.
You want to find someone culpable? Look in the mirror. The military does what it's told by lawfully elected civilians. Want to change what it does? Vote for the changes you want. We're there to carry out your will. |
Because progress and profit are inversive of one another. |
I'm an IT Director for a 911/PSAP. regardless of what the FCC mandates, 911 centers and affiliated service providers have been slowing working the the technical details of accepting SMS/MMS and other video and text based services into their software and hardware applications. This will in no way be a quickly implanted system. the technical, political, and most importantly financial limitations of these systems means it will be a long time coming before your average PSAP can accept any of these new technologies.
Hell, most psaps are still working on becoming Phase2 Compliant allowing the triangulation of cell phone locations for simple 911 calls.
Add to this the fact that mot PSAPS get their funding from Land Lines fees which are disappearing at an alarming rate, where are we suppose to get the funding mandated by someone like the FCC.
acceptance of sms/mms/txt messaging is at least 5 years out. and that is for the communities with the funding. |
Does that not seem overly broad to you? I admit you've found the definition, but Franken was arguing that it was very restrictive. I'm not seeing that at all.
There are four "or"s in the first part, which means if it's any one of the four it could violate the statute. (1) Primarily Designed, (2) No demonstrable commercially significant purpose, (3) marketed by its operator to offer good or services in violation of title 17, or (4) marketed by a person acting in concert with the operator to offer goods or services in violation of title 17.
If I'm reading this correctly, then a website could be primarily designed for a legitimate commercial and economic purpose, but if it's merely marketed--and it doesn't even have to be by the operator who is doing the "marketing"--then it can be brought down.
I assume a person acting in concert with the operator would be the users. Like the people who upload videos to Youtube. I'm not seeing how Youtube isn't going to get shut down. (Well, besides the fact that they are the richest company in the world--but for the sake of argument--what about the all the start-ups that are similar to youtube?) |
I don't know about Chrome, but in Firefox you have to hit enter twice to start a new sentence on a new line. If I hit enter once while typing my cursor goes down to the correct spot and it looks fine until I hit [save] and then it is all on one line. |
The Wii is an amazing console to mod. Nintendo doesn't make a big deal about it and even lets you use their network and the hackers are smart enough to leave the company and online play alone.
I don't blame Sony for fighting the modding community when it starts to cause damage to other players, but at the same time they should NEVER take away features from legit players because of modders. In the big picture, the modding community is insignificant, unless they start to cause damage like they did. |
I understand and appreciate the fact that Google wants to retain its business but what I was saying is that they have never had a wide reputation for being a "good guy" in the industry. My point was that this is a business decision, not a moral decision. It's good for Google to not want SOPA to pass, but there's absolutely no reason to editorialize it and say it's because they are on "the side of the people" or what have you. |
These words show a total lack of understanding of legal terminology.
No. It shows a deep knowledge of how to brew fear and anger. You don't raise a mob by talking about infringement. You don't rally the populace to your cause by going on a crusade against "infringers". These words do not show stupidity or ignorance. They show manipulation and deception. |
Come on, you should know better. If the government says something's an accident, we should immediately assume that it's a lie, covering up some secret draconian plot, even if there's no evidence for this or even a rational motive for why the government would want to do it. All this did was piss off people for 3 hours and make them much less likely to support web censorship, suggesting absolutely no motive. But of course there's nothing's wrong with suggesting it was an "accident" and not a true accident, because no one's saying it really is a conspiracy, just that it's possible.
Anyway, what actually happens is people see stuff that's genuinely wrong, like certain instances of web censorship, and so they get upset about it and for good reasons too. They channel their anger at the agent responsible for this injustice, in this case the government. They're so mad at this enemy that they welcome anyone who attacks it, as it's reinforcing what they believe to be true. While what they originally believed about web censorship being bad was in fact true, they're now willing to support any idea that attacks "the enemy", especially when it takes less than a second to upvote. They solidify an "us vs. them" mindset, and when anyone attacks someone who is on the same side of the issue as them, they view them as part of 'them' who supports everything they're against, and downvote them to oblivion without bothering to consider their arguments. |
I'm not sure if that comparison holds on more than a surface level. There are many cultures existing relatively peacefully in impoverished, even quite dire, circumstances. The majority of Hindus in India, for all their poverty, don't seem to have violent niche groups shouting death to infidels.
Same for the vast numbers of impoverished Christian and Buddhist rural Chinese, who have very hard lives and often are up against belligerence from their own provincial governments.
It's probably more that the Middle-East is a bit of a basket-case politically, with conflict all over the place. So many Muslim children grow up in a society familiar with violence.
So I don't think it's as simple as saying "if roles were reversed" between Christians and Muslims. I think it's a combination of familiarity with war and violence, and particular messages in Islam (eg. the "infidel" and "martyr" things) that play directly to emotions of revenge, death and superiority.
I do think it's true that other religions have - over time and after long histories of similar conflict - downplayed those more inflammatory aspects of the religious message. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Islam per se, but the language, as it is taught, perhaps should be adjusted as other religions have adjusted, to suit the complexities and grey areas of the modern world. |
It's the same issue with the wide perception of Christianity, political parties, and many more institutions. It is so rare for us to see anything but the radicals because they're making the statements and putting themselves out there. Is it right for the quieter and more peaceful members of a group to remain passive? No, but do you blame them? How easily it would be for them to instantly be lumped in with the radicals and I know for sure that they wouldn't want that. It's an innately prideful thing that we all suffer from: we don't want to be viewed as the bad guy or as the crazy guy. |
Ah religion...the cancer of humanity. It all just needs to go away so the rest of us can just live our lives like decent human beings. With all the discoveries we've had in space how can anyone still believe a 'god' single handedly created everything? All religions are simply fairy tales. Does this mean I 'hate' religion? Sure. Does it make me want to go scream my views and opinions in their faces? No. Do I want to kill people that make fun of or don't believe in my religion? Nope, not one bit.
You don't need religion to just be a damn decent human being. I don't need a god to tell me not to kill other humans or steal their stuff. I don't even need to pray to a god to pass my exam because I alone hold the power to control my destiny/fate/future/life (pick one). It's completely fine if you believe in some higher power, just don't try to convert me over to your beliefs and we will have no issue. It's as simple as that. Because I know religious people will 'hate' me for posting this, proceed with the downvotes of anger because I insulted not only your religion, but everyone's at once. It will just prove my point even further that religion is a cancer upon humanity and it is the sole reason we have so many wars and conflicts. |
It's outrageous. Yes.
I'd caution against thinking something is "incomprehensible" though. That's somewhat of a dangerous line of reasoning.
As in, it would be incomprehensible for somebody to blaspheme against X.
Really, I'm a bit dismayed and unsurprised. When the "Arab Spring" was occuring (I hate that term BTW), I knew that those camera-facing "freedom fighters" would be 60% if not 80% as bad as those they were replacing -- at least in terms of civil liberties (perhaps not in terms of outright genocide). Yet, CNN et al (+ general population) took them as their word. You know who else was a freedom fighter and beloved? Mao.
I'm not saying revolution/change wasn't necessary. But, democracy (as opposed to capitalism) is a slow process. Well, more accurately, Democratic-Republics (are slow to birth). Consider America was a country centuries in the making -- traced back to Locke, Hobbes, the magna carta, etc. We were founded on seas of blood, philosophy, and the ripe conditions of historical change.
Even consider modern examples of post-WW2 countries like Japan, Germany, etc. Now, these countries were already fairly receptive to Western culture (the Germans being largely Christian/Anglo and the Japanese being a unique, extremely conformist society). Korea too for many the same reasons as Japan (though I'd argue Korea, despite or perhaps because of its immense growth, has an immense disparity between economic prosperity and civil rights, but that's a Charles Dubois / Booker T. Washington style discussion for a different time).
None of this considers the complex myriad of unfortunate events, political / covert faux pas (to put it lightly), and a general under-education of the Middle East; all of which only serve to complicate the problem. Let's say the problem being to democratize those areas -- or cynically, to western-ize them (if one prefers).
Often, the catalysts to change are bloody. It's rare when they aren't. But, the actual change is slow. To be cynical again, it's probably when those that hold the beliefs die more-so than any great achievement in social discord. The youth grows up with access to western luxuries, a better life, the ability to provide for their families (ideally), etc. Really, that's what almost all non-psychopathic human beings want in life -- rather than religious zealotry etc. Obviously, there are tiers of values -- such as achievement, freedom, etc. But, I think these religious crusades really belie other issues.
I could write a whole separate, pandering paragraph to the pitfalls of capitalism (and the seemingly "build up / tear down" nature of it), but meh just go read Das Kapital; I'm lazy. But, I'd argue, even the "exploited" life of a corporate slave is much better than (objectively) than those of many middle easterners / Muslims (of Africa, Middle East, etc). We could argue what "makes one happy" (e.g. Mexicans and South American self-report as happier than "western" nations such as U.S.), but the nature of happiness is another discussion as well. |
I can't even take it seriously, let alone harm someone. It was the product of pure ignorance and intolerance and wasn't even put effort in. And what happened with Islam being the religion of peace or did we forget about that when some jerk made a movie mocking us? To answer your question: a real Muslim shouldn't kill or behead anyone who makes fun of us and our religion, if Christians did this then the population on earth would be at least half of what it is. |
Are we finally going to tell these idiots to STFU? We should never kowtow to inferior people when they are offended by our behavior. They should strive to be like us, we shouldn't strive to appease them.
Yes, they are inferior. Any culture that can be trolled to the point of total chaos and murder over an insulting Youtube video is INFERIOR. There was a time when people didn't try to appease inferior cultures. We did what was right regardless of how inferiors felt about it. Eventually the came around.
Anyone who wants to back down to avoid angering insane people is a disgusting coward. |
I feel like efficiency on it's own is an insufficient metric to evaluate progress and usefulness of a design, since you can't just stack 20 super efficient but weak processor cores together on a die and expect to get something that has anywhere near 20x the performance of a single processor. So perhaps the 20 small cores works well for you because all you have to do is serve up a simple web page or something so you can really dynamically scale your system and it is efficient and great. However, there are a ton of tasks that that really won't work for. |
All of your examples probably have tons of money and research in their development. But if some fool tells me AIDS can be cured with chocolate or I see an iPad advertised for $50- then my bullshit meter will go off the charts. All I am saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Also, I am an IT professional. When it comes to PCs I KNOW what sounds too good to be true and there is NO single app that will magically fix everything that could be wrong with your computer.
Lastly compare your |
Consider the product placement - It's basically following the principals of the Nigerian scams. Use whatever form of service to communicate with the victim(s). Then do SOMETHING or place some piece of information that will immediately cause paranoid or aware people to disregard the request (in this case, having it ran at 3am).
Once you have it placed, your goal is simply to get people to buy it up - in this case, people who don't have computer security, and there computer is running slow. If you have a potential audience of 5 million viewers, and only 1/10 actually pays attention to the add, and 1/1000 purchase the product - and you sell it at say, 10$ / product, you net 5000$ in cash - not half bad. But more likely it's 3 easy payments of 9.99$ - or upfront for 25$, and if you buy now you get this easy registry cleaner for just 5$, and half the people will buy in so you more likely get 20000$ out of the deal. The add probably costs 10k, you run it for a week or so, and may net something like $150000
(Note I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass, more to illustrate the point).
So in the end, it's a scam add. There are two many warning bells to someone who is even half way literate with technology. But that isn't the audience, it's the people who work late shifts, or have a couple jobs so don't have time, and don't have the knowledge to call the BS on it. |
what is "too good to be true" - did you know research has found a possible cure for aids? an entirely new way of dealing with cancer cells? That Nasa is working on - of all things - a startrek styled drive.
Did you know that printing of 3D metal objects is being pushed forward by Nasa?
Did you know that the greenest city in the world is being built in the middle east?
All of the above sound too good to be true to some degree - but I assure you, to some degree they are all very true.
A program that cleans up your computer and speeds it up is not too far fetched - a program that automatically detects programs that are not core to the system and gives you the option of turning them off would do exactly this. It would be like going into MSCONFIG, and manually determining what starts up. You can shut off virtually anything from there - to the point of potentially breaking your system.
So to be perfectly honest, there isn't anything that is "too good to be true" only things that are "probably too good to be true". And that is the inherent problem - scams are developed to target a select group of people. Usually the ones who are not technologically literate to realise that it is probably just a scam. And this group of people probably trusts the business having the adds on their programs to have done some background checking - when they forget, business have 1 goal - make money, not protect their consumers from BS adds. |
Obama vetoed the bill before the Senate entered anything about it into the minutes of the Senate, which means he gave an advisory opinion on a House draft. |
Think about that, in a non-ironic-karma-whoring context. |
It's ok to pirate Game of Thrones because hurr durr INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE
Straw man and a red herring all in one.
>that you knowingly and willingly provided them
First of all this is a blatant misrepresentation of the scope of the information Facebook collects and shares as well as the level of user authorization of this collection and sharing. Second it ignores that Facebook's explicit purpose is sharing data. What if I don't use any social networking sites? CISPA isn't limited to them. It would cover all sites and I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to say something like "But when your bank's webpage wants to share information about you that you knowingly and willingly provided them, suddenly the tune changes." You sort of ignore this in your puerile analysis though.
>suddenly the tune changes
False equivalence. All of my activity online is in no way the same thing as a movie.
>Don't mention anything about the free and open internet
What are you talking about? A 'free and open internet' is all about clearly defined boundaries on what privacy is and is not protected and under what circumstances. Most if not all of the complaints about privacy online stem from a lack of consent and disclosure. Do you know how many services are tracking your activity on this very page? Do you know that by visiting this page you've agreed to their terms of service even though you've probably never even seen or read it?
> "Freedom of speech" (which has become a euphemism for piracy)
It hasn't. At all. You just don't understand the point being raised when people say freedom of speech conflicts with copyright enforcement on the internet. When people raise this as an issue they're talking about non-infringing protected speech being shut-down either intentionally or collaterally by copyright enforcement. They're talking about overbroad site closures shutting down whole forums to stop a few bad links or clearly fair uses getting taken down.
>"Freedom of speech" or privacy: you can't have both.
Obvious false dichotomy and one that ironically undermines the point you were trying to make about copyright in a parenthetical in this very sentence.
>You guys would make Goebbel's proud. Not a shred of intellectual consistency.
And Goodwin's law. Should have figured a post so full of misrepresentations and outright fallacies would end with the biggest one of them all: reductio ad Hitlerum. |
I think if your brother cashes out, he'll miss the real bull market in bitcoins. These things climb a wall of worry, as there are constantly people with one foot out the door, planning to jump out if the price starts to drop. Once a noticeable drop happens, there's a rush for the exits, which leads to others losing faith and jumping ship, and pretty soon the price is down significantly, as was the case today. But i f the fundamentals are strong , then they will soon march their way back up, surpassing the highs and lows of yesterday--only to suffer another sell-off from a higher price--and so on.
The question then is: has your brother bought Bitcoin because he was trying to capitalize on a temporary rise, without any opinion on Bitcoin's long term feasibility? Does he believe Bitcoin is secure and will continue to be used without major problems going forward? If not, today was probably the time to sell. But even so, it might not be anymore, if it's reached it's short term low and he thinks there is still some upside before the currency unravels. You don't want to sell after a sell-off, unless you are sure the price will keep going down. If it's due to head back up, you hold fast and cash out then. But he should sell now if he really thinks Bitcoin will keep dropping and not recover--which is possible, but only if the fundamentals of the Bitcoin are actually unsound.
But I think if one has confidence in Bitcoin, and believes it has long-term potential, leaving now is a mistake. There will only ever be a certain number of Bitcoins (think it's 26 million, someone correct me if wrong please). If it one day becomes a highly used currency on the order of the dollar--or even representing as much value as a currency of a smaller nation--then it will easily go much higher, as each entrant into the Bitcoin market will cause each extant Bitcoin to gain in value in what might be the biggest currency deflation in history.
Bitcoin right now is possibly the best currency play of all time (second only to Bitcoin when they were so cheap they were almost free, before the market began to use them and gain confidence in them to bring them as far as they've come already), and it is possible to get in (even now) extremely cheaply compared to its potential.
BUT this all depends on the continued effectiveness of Bitcoins. If it ever turns out there's a way to counterfeit them, the Bitcoin will die. If it turns out the network is vulnerable and can be crashed such that your money is inaccessible, or the record of who owns what can be lost--it will die. It must be impervious to large scale hacking or attacking, and from government control, for the Bitcoin to remain viable.
But if it remains viable in this way, then the relative anonymity, freedom from control, and extreme fungibility of Bitcoin will make it very big and very widely used, and it will one day cost thousands of dollars--and perhaps hundreds of thousands. I'm not a top tier programmer, most people aren't, to be able to read the Bitcoin source code and comment on its security, so we really only rely on the opinions of people we hope are expert enough to know and aside from that--only time will tell.
If I were your brother, and that quarter of a million dollars was only some of my net worth, I'd keep all my money in it unless I wanted to gamble. If it were all my money and I wanted to play it safe--I'd take maybe two thirds out, but leave the rest.
Personally, I think the fact that the Bitcoin is secure up to this point, and now represents more than $1 billion of value, is a good sign. And if someone is willing to speculate, it could go much, much higher, especially with another financial crisis in the same vein as Cyprus--much bigger if the country in question is bigger.
EDIT: a few minor changes |
echoenabled.com, appears to be a service that was discontinued months ago. Which is why it would be trying so fast, a poorly written script that tries again when a request fails. I actually do not see any of these requests coming from my browser.
All the idvisitor are calls to other sites also owned by the Washington Post, who owns Slate.
content.ad is just an ad agency.
troveread appears to be part of social reader. Nothing to worry about there, just a service they are using for their site.
...just go read their front page.
slatev.com is just another domain owned by the washington post.
scanscout.com at a glace appears to be a domain for a video\ad hosting service.
...microsoft ads? |
So... some random dude on the internet is pissed that the ACLU won't go to bat for him in some random situation that doesn't constitute an efficient use of their sharply limited resources.
Oh, and said random dude also magically knows that they spent more resources denying him help than helping him would have taken. Because said random dude is apparently an attorney who understands the full situation, and not at all angry that he didn't get what he wanted.
Taking your premise at face value, I can see how you would be upset. Right up to the point where you sit down and think about how you are looking for help precisely because you know you don't fully grasp all aspects of the situation and the people who do are telling you to you don't have a good case.
You might want to consider that they probably know better than you. That "just a letter" you wanted? Are you absolutely sure that wouldn't have required them agreeing to be your legal representation? Because that's exactly what it sounds like. |
So this is highly exaggerated.
I've got a degree in computer engineering and am attending Georgia Tech for a PhD in robotics. I specialize in computer vision (I'm published in IROS) and there are a number of things wrong with this article.
For instance, they say they can estimate the age of a person, detect gender .
That is really hard to do and researchers have been trying to do it on pristine close-ups for a while and still haven't had that much success.
Facial recognition is generally pretty slow for large databases and requires high resolution images where the subject is facing the camera. Glasses and facial hair often mess it up. For examples, look up PCA, ICA, or LDA.
Tracking a person or guessing ethnicity is certainly a possibility though. |
I'm hardly a Facebook fan, but Whatsapp just isn't a real IM client. There's no way to send a message over Whatsapp from a computer like I can with Facebook. If Whatsapp had a way to message people from a computer, I'd jump on that in a heartbeat. But right now the easiest way to IM friends on their phone through my computer is with Facebook.
I hate having to stick with Facebook, but it's my only option. They've made the most versatile IM client that works on every platform I can think of (including HTML5), and it has by far the biggest userbase. And I can't message people with Kik or Whatsapp from a computer. And since I spend a lot of time with a computer with a full keyboard (Computer Science student), it's much easier and faster to type on that than on a little glass screen with my thumbs.
Facebook gives me the freedom to message from my computer, and Whatsapp doesn't. I really really don't like Facebook, but their IM system is the best I've ever used. I can use it in a web browser, so it works perfectly on my Linux computer, but it also works on my iPod touch and on my Android phone. Once Whatsapp decides to be a real IM client and make an HTML5 client, then I'll take them seriously. But right now, Whatsapp feels more like an April Fools Day joke than a legitimate product.
The fact that the overwhelming majority of people I know are on Facebook and very few use Whatsapp is only part of the reason I prefer Facebook. But until Whatsapp makes an HTML5 client, I just can't even consider using it, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people who would prefer being able to use it on their computer as well. |
The spam was annoying. The idiots are annoying. The privacy issues are annoying. You know what got me off Facebook? My grandma and Aunt. I've always known they spend hours a day on there, but I had no idea to what extent.
They were going across the country on a vacation, and asked me if I could log onto their accounts to "bank their points". I was kind of puzzled at the suggestion, but most games require you to play every day in order to get a higher tier of bonus points, etc.
That's when they hit me. "I'll give you $50 if you do it each day this week." [Whoa, sure.]( "It should only take you about 6 hours." Hold the fucking phone, what?! I want to emphasize something there. "Only 6 hours." Piss off, that's not even worth my time. Maybe when I was 12, but no dice.
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that this is a daily thing for the two of them. They both have poor health; they are both obese (my Aunt is severely obese). They sit for quite literally 1/3 of the day minimum, just to get imaginary points on fucking Facebook games? Point and click, mindless Flash games?! We've told them time and time again that this needs to change, but we get brushed off every time. Fuck Facebook. I quit that day (~1 year ago) and will never look back. |
Is there anyway to coral the shitty users and keep them in facebook? I am really enjoying Google+ lately.
Keep G+'s learning curve high enough to weed out the trash. I'm already starting to see more garbage pop up in the trending section... And then I hear about facebook in decline.
Don't want to see an exodus to G+, don't want G+ to try to make it easier for folks to piss all over it.
Perhaps its inevitable... Hoping the tipping point isn't hurdling towards us anytime soon. The second there's a considerable userbase people will pour into it for lack of a ghost town. |
Yea, it's not as if any teenager has ever invented anything useful in the past](
Edit: |
Well we [hugged it to death]( anybody want to |
Are you insinuating that reading a shortened, more concise version of the article equates to unintelligence? Because I, for one, think this |
Mr Musk himself provides the best example. Paraphrasing: If the Airline industry were to fly a plain once and then throw it away, it would be impossibly expensive to fly from one coast to another.
Less than 5% of a rocket launch cost is fuel. Everything, well nearly everything, else is one time use. Salvaging the first stage and eventually the second stage, you can shave off millions of dollars of the cost to launch into space. It cost's about $10,000 to lauch one pound into space right now. If he can salvage the rocket, Elon Musk can cut the cost in half and maybe even more. |
Hazardous materials be damned. Production personnel (in the U.S.) who build lead acid batteries work in terrible conditions. The cost of healthcare for the companies is crazy. They work in constant fear of heavy metal poisoning. Wearing a shit ton of PPE in a plant with no A/C (because of the lead fumes) is hard. They have to shower before all breaks and lunch. The typical work day is a 10 hour shift. They aren't paid well. Layoffs are common. Every time I saw an employee, they have a look of desperation on their faces. Not one of them cracked a smile.
The last time I was in a manufacturing plant, I was almost in tears. |
Google is turning into a bunch of assholes. They officially went corporate and are obsessed with growth like any other company. God forbid you make a few billion a year and its good, but no, you have to invade peoples lives track all their shit so you can send specific spam to their inbox. And stop trying to make google + happen. Social is over rated. Now real ID on youtube and everything else on the internet. If they wanna grow profits how about larry and sergie stop wasting tons of cash on their dumb pet projects like glass, phones, self driving cars and all the other bs. Probably a couple hundred million a quarter. |
Corporate personhood is incredibly misunderstood. It's actually an essential part of a functioning economy. Fundamentally it allows a business to continue to operate independent of its owners. And by I operate I mean things like the business itself can own property, be sued, and continue to exist. Without corporate personhood, if the owners of a business die then the business dies with it. If the business makes a huge loss, the owners are liable for it, etc. The business needs to exist as it's own legal entity - independently on the owners. This is called corporate personhood. All manner of fuck ups would occur without it. It's not a bad thing. |
Reposting my comment from below)
Corporate personhood is incredibly misunderstood. It's actually an essential part of a functioning economy. Fundamentally it allows a business to continue to operate independent of its owners. And by I operate I mean things like the business itself can own property, be sued, and continue to exist. Without corporate personhood, if the owners of a business die then the business dies with it. If the business makes a huge loss, the owners are liable for it, etc. The business needs to exist as it's own legal entity - independently on the owners. This is called corporate personhood. All manner of fuck ups would occur without it. It's not a bad thing. |
Well frankly I don't think they have anything to lose. Let's say that Verizon sues Netflix for defamation of character (libel) and (of course) lost revenues and various other monetary damages due to said defamation [puts fake lawyer hat on]. That means that Verizon would have to prove that Netflix is lying and that there are not fucking their customers over. That means producing documents in court on the record that specifically details exactly how their service works. And if there's even a hint or a whiff of impropriety on the part of their service, they'd be opening themselves up to a class action lawsuit on the order of millions of customers and millions if not billions of dollars in damages. |
Not completely true, when I worked with ADSL and DSLAM configuration it was possible to get 5mbit or more upstream. However the Signal to noise ratio is split between up and download speed meaning that to get 3mbit upload you would cap out at 8-9mbit on optimal distances. Therefore it's much better to provide the customer with 24mbit and restricting upload to 1mbit to gain SNR for the downstream carrier wave. |
Well someone severely misinformed Netflix's PR department.
Netflix's issues on Verizon have historically been peering issues due to transit ISP's not holding up their side of the deal. This is not something Verizon can magically fix on a whim. And actually, Verizon blaming Netflix is true because it is (indirectly, and slightly outside of their control) their fault. The reason the transit ISP's are throwing a fit is because of video streaming (largely Netflix, using over twice what YouTube does) making traffic massively imbalanced in recent years. When traffic is imbalanced the company sending the most data pays. So, since the transit ISP's won't pay what they agreed to upgrades are stalled and nodes get congested.
Netflix, however, can bypass this issue by making a CDN on Verizon's network (you know, just like normal high usage companies such as Akamai and Limelight). Which they should have done a loooong time ago since it massively improves service to customers by reducing the number of companies their data has to travel through. Especially since they mostly send data and receive next to nothing.
A month or so ago that is exactly what they finally put in motion, and a few months before that they did the same with Comcast. Comcast customers saw immediate results after the deal was signed because they started working on it before the details were settled. Unlike this case where neither Verizon or Netflix started work in until after the deal went through.
Because of this it may be a few more weeks to a month before Verizon customers notice a change, but once the CDN is up and running you shouldn't have any more issues. If you have issues after it is up however, THEN AND ONLY THEN will it even be possible for it to be solely Verizon's fault. |
It's because of the way peering agreements work. Verizon and Cogent have connections at a peering point, or they peer directly. They both pay equally for the physical line, but they pay settlements based upon total traffic that went over the line. If the traffic is equal, then there is no settlement. If one side sends more than the other, then they have to make payments to the other company.
The reason they limit your upload, aside from async/sync issues, is to limit the amount of traffic that they send to their peer. This way, they're almost always receiving the settlement money. |
ADSL2+ spec only has a portion of spectrum dedicated to upstream. In the case of normal ADSL2+, it's around 25KHz to 120KHz, where as the download is from (minus a bit of buffer space), 128KHz to 2.2MHz. You have 2000KHz of spectrum for Downstream and only around 100KHz of spectrum for Downstream (although it's lower and can pack more bits at a given distance due to less attenuation).
In order to get more upload on ADSL1+, you can use stuff like ANNEXJ or ANNEX M, but nothing gives you more spectrum enough to make a huge difference on upload.
You physically can't go high on upload on ADSL,otherwise it's not ADSL, and you need different chips, etc, and use something like SHDSL. Plus then there are spectrum usage rules in place on copper phone lines as well. |
Coax Cable is also asymmetrical. Most CATV plants have at least 700MHz (50-750MHz) of spectrum TO the customer (this is by historical design of a headend-> customer network design).
When two-way networks were designed, they gave a few, small, noisy bits of spectrum at the bottom (below channel 2) to return path. These were mostly for feeds back to the head-end for broadcasts, as the idea of using cable for internet. So it's typircal to see only 5-30 or 5-42 MHz that is designed into the equipment to return to the headend.
It's not a matter of the cable operator deciding to give more channels to upload, it's that they would have to get equipment manufacturs (amplifier makers, etc) to change their standard to allow more return frequencies, and replace all of their amplifiers in the process.
I have seen some Chinese amplifiers with returns from 5-200MHz, but that eats into the lower channels, and may cause problems (regulatory wise) with putting, essentially, transmitters in everyone's home that can talk on frequencies that high. Additionally, higher frequencies attenuate faster, so more return-path equalization would need to be done to compensate.
The way that cable companies get around upstream issues, is by placing more and more fiber nodes closer to people, serving fewer customers, to allow more of that small spectrum to serve a user. |
Netflix is doing everything they can do, but they are the small guy in this situation, like it or not. Verizon and other telecoms could completely kill Netflix streaming service if they decided it was worth the negative publicity, and there would be nothing Netflix could do about it. Verizon doesn't have much to fear by doing this because a) it looks like they will prevail in killing net neutrality, which would grant them the leeway to do something like this without getting into trouble and b) killing Netflix streaming would piss off customers who would have no choice but to continue to pay Verizon each month because they have nowhere else to go (service monopoly). |
After comcast's 25/10 "fastest we can offer" and AT&T's 15/8 "2nd tier", I went local. I pay for 25/2, and more often than not, I get 30/10. |
If we pay for a certain bandwidth speed then the connect should not be throttled until that speed is exceeded.
This is where the whole issue really gets tricky. Residential connections are shared 'best effort' connections, so what you truly are paying for is Up To that speed, if everybody else isn't trying to at the same time. The reason for this model is that is would be prohibitively expensive for residential customers to access the internet otherwise.
Businesses pay for dedicated connections that do not have throttling and are not shared. For instance 10Mbps connection can comfortably handle an office of about 25 people (this can vary a lot depending on type of business). This connection comes at a cost of about $1,000/month, since it is that speed to the carrier, and through their network out to the internet. Obviously most residential customers would be unable to foot that bill.
One of the major issues with the internet lately is that the data consumption rate is skyrocketing past the average levels the residential networks were planned to be able to handle in the shared architecture. Sure, the carriers should be upgrading their infrastructure and some are, but it is not easy, quick, or cheap to upgrade networks to the extent that they need them. Along with the technical challenges, the financial challenges can be significant. ISP routers are very expensive, easily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A lot of that equipment needs to be upgraded in the rest of the carrier networks as well, all the way down to the local distribution points. Going out and purchasing all of the hardware can be really tough, especially when the existing equipment probably has not hit the end of it's planned lifecycle. This ends up tying into the messes that are caused by being shareholder driven companies. |
I hate to admit that I've been out of the loop in this. Can someone |
There is a simple fix for this. I watch a lot of HD content on YouTube and I used to be really frustrated by buffering and stuff...especially on the app on my TV (wth is it buffering to?). Anyhow...most ISPs reroute YouTube traffic. If you block the IP ranges that they are rerouting you to (Google them to find them) the traffic goes directly from YouTube to you...I now watch hour long+ shows and concerts in full HD with no buffering. |
I know for a fact that it was FiOS's problem that YouTube was practically unusable to me for a couple of months last year. I argued with Verizon several times over the phone complaining about it and they always tried to pawn it off on Google. They ran all of their "tests" to show that my connection was working fine. I even told them that I wasn't disputing getting my proper speeds ([because I clearly was]( but that there was something wrong specifically with YouTube. They refused to accept fault for it even though I told them I could tether to my phone and get perfectly fine streaming.
So, I got so tired of the runaround that I actually did the research and narrowed it down to THE router that was causing the problems. I was able to prove the router (owned by Verizon) that had a peering relationship with Google was a choke-point and the amount of bandwidth going through was much much more than it was provisioned to allow. I found that since Verizon was a Tier-1 ISP, they directly peered with Google and paid Google for the size of the pipe. The fix for this would be simply paying for faster speeds (which is what you're supposed to do when you're tapping out resources).
I wrote an e-mail to their top tier tech support and gave them all of my evidence. I got back a small "thanks" e-mail that still insinuated that it was Google's fault and not theirs. Eventually, after a couple of months, things just started working like normal. I don't know if they implemented my solution or my traffic just started routing differently but there was definitely a fix somewhere in the chain.
If you want to see my e-mail and evidence, you can [view it here]( |
As an A.I. Researcher I'll never understand why people fear A.I.. Its honestly not as scary as some people think and for the love of god its not 'summoning the demon'.
A.I. offers a lot to the world because it has the potential for singularity, along with being able to have a Utopian society, if made correctly. That said, before someone jumps down my throat on the made correctly ; Just like when building a bridge if you don't have your materials made right or equations done right, the bridge is going to collapse. Same goes with A.I. if you don't do it in a slow, organized manner you have the chance of creating something psychopathic, but this will only be the case in first generations A.I. aka weak A.I.; it will have a hard time understand morals, while high level A.I. will be able to understand it like a human does, but sensationalizing something by comparing it to summoning the technological devil is childish and moronic at best .
Also on that note, how can an A.I. really cause so much chaos if it is kept in an environment that is controlled, especially one in a weak A.I. stage of development; before anyone jumps down my throat again and gets all Jeff Goldbloom on me and goes "Life finds a way..." YOU CAN DO THIS , if we can keep deadly disease in an isolation room, we can keep an A.I. contained in a simulation while in development. So I cannot see any A.I. being able to cause any harm while in a weak A.I. state being development on.
Another issue that comes up is replacing humans, well that's where transhumanism comes in, and the placements of technologies with A.I.. An A.I. has the ability to be more intelligent than humans, and in reality thats a good thing, because it gives us the tools needed to make the technology to amp up our own intelligence to match or beat an A.I.. Transhumanism gives us this ability by either meshing humans with technology, or using our DNA and engineering better minds/bodies. When it comes to placement of A.I., it should be up to a board of people, for example I would hope the board would not give an A.I. control of a military nuclear missile gird(Look at you Skynet), but I would place an A.I. to work mundane jobs and other less responsible work, but again this is only if we never go through transhumanism(Which I hope we do, but that depends on how the metameme of our culture develops). |
Funny how the scariest thing for a statist like yourself about the free market is monopolies. Yet you promote government, a violent MONOPOLY, as a solution to this. Do you not see the irony?
No, because no matter how much you cry about obama allowing guns into federal parks, the government is not a monopoly. It is our government which we control by voting.
Under libertarianism, a company like AT&T would have a complete monopoly and you probably would still be using dial-up, isdn, or very low speed dsl for internet with zero other options. They could alter your internet traffic all they wanted to avoid competing video services. AT&T would also be the only cell network as they could just claim all spectrum for themselves and use jammers to keep anyone else out.
Without regulation, any tactic you can dream up that would help a large company stay a monopoly will be used. It is silly to think a business would not protect its monopoly when zero laws or regulations prevent it from doing so.
Do you not get how free market works?
I don't even want to think about the monopoly utilities would have without regulation. Electricity would be damn expensive.
>It's much harder to compete when companies use government to pass regulations in their favor limiting competition, than with a company which can only use voluntary means to compete - not force.
Name them, talking in generalities does nothing. Right now we break up monopolies, so I would love to know what monopoly you are talking about.
>Companies do not operate in a vacuum. Customers also have agency. There are consequences. Would you live in a town where walmart controlled all the roads? Would you patronize walmart if it did such a thing?
That is cute, people today don't even move to get around stuff like that, even though moving actually can get around stuff like that. Under a libertarian society, moving does nothing because walmart has control in every town. AT&T would have control in every town. There would be no where to move to to escape the monopoly. And since only a small few would even protest it, they have no voice or power because the monopoly still gets enough business from those that don't want to live their lives around protesting the monopoly.
One of the key features of our system today is you get protections as a consumer without having to be a 24/7 activist. That makes life so much better. Think of how terrible your life would be if the only option you had was to stand outside walmart every day with a sign protesting them while other consumers who just want to live their life ignore you?
>Governments pass restrictions and no matter how destructive or stupid they are you have to follow them or you get caged or killed.
Name the most destructive and stupid regulation you can find that absolutely harms the majority of people. And I would say name a federal one, a state one, and a county/city one. I don't want you claiming a town's franchise agreement that affects 30k people and controlled by the local voting population is your best example of overbearing government.
>So 70% of people cannot organize to open a competing store? Surely, that's a huge market right there.
Not a chance in hell. You wouldn't have suppliers for goods to sell. Under libertarianism, walmart can have agreements with every supplier that says they are not allowed to sell to anyone else under penalty of a fine so large they would go under if they tried. The suppliers have no choice but to sign contracts like that because walmart is a monopoly, they either sign the contract or go out of business.
This is the problem with libertarians. You are very small minded, you can't comprehend the ins and outs to a situation. Libertarianism allows a company to use every possible anti-competitive tactic anyone can dream up.
>but relying on same said consumer to get government to regulate somehow works...
It is working very well. The biggest failures are in industries that don't directly deal with consumers, such as wall street and the oil industry. But even BP got reigned in with their oil spill, the only thing we didn't see was criminal prosecutions. You definitely aren't going to get any civil or criminal penalties in a libertarian society.
In a libertarian society, the government won't fund lawsuits, studies, evidence collection, etc. The people are on your own. If someone dumps toxic waste on your land, good luck winning in court in a libertarian society. You will have to spend millions to prove that toxic waste is toxic and prove it is harming you in some way. The government won't be there with their own studies and their own evidence collection to make a case. Good luck fighting the company with a consumer boycott when you are the only person harmed and no one else is going to care. (Or hell, the consumers could be in another country and the locals may have zero ability to boycott or protest anything)
>With government the majority impose their preference on the minority - by force. why is that better?
Name the worst example you can think of. Your generalities have zero meaning. |
In addition to what other posters have said about the efficiency of centralizing, there are other issues that go with having a generator in every car on the road.
Your car burns motor oil. It shouldn't need to burn it, but it does. An electric car only needs enough lubrication to keep the axles moving. Burned motor oil is an incredibly unpleasant substance that is rarely handled properly. Many of our small-scale pollution problems come from things like motor oil being dumped into a creek.
Your car emits noxious gases everywhere it goes. Catalytic converters have helped, but there's no doubt that electric vehicles will have less effect on, well, everything they pass. I live downtown in a major city. If I leave something on my balcony it is covered in a thick layer of exhaust grime within a week. I'm not happy to breathe that shit. The plants in a nearby park are not helped by the major commuter route through it.
Noise pollution. We go to enormous effort to ensure that major roads are separated from our suburban neighborhoods so homes will be quiet. This results in an unnecessarily circuitous road system that wastes the time of every commuter and a great deal of energy. Electric vehicles are practically silent. The level of noise in a downtown area is sufficient to cause hearing loss with daily exposure.
Now suppose we start putting inductive charging loops at stop lights. While you're waiting for the light to change, your car is getting a nice boost in power. You get charged based on an RFID tag, or maybe the loops are solar powered and put there by the city. Perhaps the carpool lanes get a third rail. Charging an electric car is so flexible that you can create all kinds of incentive schemes and infrastructure innovations that would be unthinkable with a toxic substance like gasoline. |
As someone who does research in solar, I can tell you an alternative transparent conductive oxide is definitely of interest. The TCO is one of the most expensive steps in thin film solar cells (have you priced a high volume sputterer recently? Not to mention target costs). This paper points to an interesting possibility, and I'd love to see what happens if they can get a higher aspect ratio on the wires (realllly long ones). At this stage, they can get only get ~65% transparency, pretty consistent in the 400-1000nm wavelength range. If they could replicate they Ag transparency they'd really have something here. I could definitely see this knocking off 0.10-0.30$/W if something like this could be implemented. Which is pretty critical when First Solar is sitting at 0.80$/W. |
Did you read the article?
Minecraft offers shit that pirating it doesn't offer. There's an incentive to pay, to join the paying community of Minecraft.
Likewise, why do you think people buy TF2? Yeah you can pirate it, but in the end you'll just end up playing with a few people. You want the full experience, you'll end up paying for it. If you don't want the full experience, you probably don't enjoy the game much anyways.
You're thinking is old fashioned and anachronistic in this day and age.
Ruby on Rails makes money from licensing certain rights to for profit companies. Anyone else can use it for free.
Basecamp is another model that works.
Photoshop is expensive, and buying it doesn't offer much over not buying it. Hence, why it's commonly pirated. Still, Adobe makes a lot of money from corporations and universities licensing it, because everyone is used to using it .
Likewise, a while back Microsoft decided to blank everyones desktop in China who wasn't using a certified Windows system. A huge outcry forced Microsoft to change it back. You know why Microsoft was wiling to do so? Because they want people to use Windows. They'll rather Chinese PC users pirate Windows than Apple OS or use Linux. Long term, it ensures a future customer base for Windows, and when the Chinese system advances enough, MS will be there to profit.
China is a less developed country than the US. The price of software is way higher relatively for them than it is for us. It would take an idiot to license software there when instead they can pirate it for free and increase their competitiveness. Chinese companies will eventually be willing to pay licensing fees, when the system has progressed to that stage.
And your comment about the Chinese software industry is wrong. Yeah there's a lack of R & D in software that's easily pirated, but there's a lot of R & D in things that are hard to pirate, such as ali baba. |
When you say, "stealing", you are making copyright infringement sound like something it bears no resemblance to. It confuses people's ideas about the issue, by equating two completely different actions, one of which many people intuitively think of as wrong .
If somebody decided that, from now on, they would use the phrase "murdering 8-year-old girls" to describe copyright infringement, would you be so nonchalant about it? Would ask people to see past this one phrase? Would you patiently explain that it's not meant to exactly correspond to the legal definition of the same phrase? Would you call objections "pedantic"? |
You know nothing of piracy if you think the end user of a pirated game really needs any skill at all. The standard way these things are handled is that you download a torrent, which contains the game data and a fixed executable - in 90% of the cases, all you need to do is install the game and copy a file from folder A to folder B. In the rest of the cases where the copy protection does something astonishing you may need to do some tricks, which are usually listed out in an accompanying text file. |
You make a good point, I think the word "stealing" is used to evoke emotion. You tell someone they are stealing, you are making it obvious that it's wrong. The pirate has justified it as not stealing, so he doesn't like being called a thief. I guess that's the real issue. I've pirated quite a bit of stuff, I can't say I plan on stopping any time soon. I do have a lot of reason for doing it instead of simply "I want free shit" but I can't justify it legally. It's illegal but i can get away with it. Morally, it's wrong too, but I can live with that. I don't think people who create things should just sit back and accept piracy either.
I think it's pretty obvious I'm not trying to debate the word stealing because I want to make it seem like piracy is right. I know a lot of people probably do that. I just simply think "stealing" doesn't represent what is going on. Piracy doesn't make you go into debt. It could possibly make it so you can't make a living off the work you do, but that's not technically stealing. You could possibly argue you just stole someone's dream away or something, but you still didn't steal their money or anything else for that matter. |
i signed up for a news provider and downloaded a movie and it virused my computer burned my house down. |
That may be the great endearing lesson we take from Turing's tragedy. But Turing himself was much more than a brilliant mathematician that was ruined by society.
I argue that Turing's greatest lesson to us all is that the greatest of our failed endeavors can become the world's greatest successes. The failure? The goal of proving mathematics during the 1900's. From Peano arithmetic to Principia Mathematica, mathematics and logic was caught up trying to fit all of arithmetic into a neat little package of logical rigor. Thanks to Godel's incompleteness theorems, this entire dream collapsed. It was the end of an era, but also the beginning of technology as we know it.
Alan Turing, I think, should be best known for recognizing that even if we could not prove everything, we should try to compute everything. And although he soon realized we couldn't compute all the things, the ideas that he gave for this thesis (the Church-Turing thesis) ended up being the foundation of computer science today. From a mere thesis came the digital age.
That's just a little story from a computer scientist who doesn't only care about what society did to Turing, but what Turing did to society. We marginalize the man if we only ascribe him to his tragedy. Let's not do that.
Edit: Forgot the thesis isn't proven, and oops 90's (heh). |
But it is the same, pedophilia and homosexuality are both sexual attractions which are not voluntary, right? Pedophilia doesn't entail sexual contact, it is only the attraction. |
That may well be the best " |
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