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Educate yourself a bit when it comes to the significant components of a machine you rely upon more than anything else you own.
If you're a computer guy, do you understand why you may need to replace a power supply or a bad stick of RAM? No reason to distrust a tech telling you about an equally important part of your car. Same concept, just different contexts.
The stereotype of the assrape mechanic sadly lives on, but with the advent of the internet, and car forums, an hour of reading can teach you plenty, and likely tell you if you're in serious trouble, or if you went to a bad mechanic.
You'll pay more at a dealership, but you're guaranteed genuine OEM parts, factory trained techs, and a warranty on the work done. |
There is no excuse to be a 'hapless consumer' anymore. If you don't trust the recommendation, google it. That's all it takes most of the time. Educate yourself a bit when it comes to the significant components of a machine you rely upon more than anything else you own, it'll save you time and money, and it makes sense as a consumer! My own car costs money to maintain, just because I do the work myself doesn't mean I don't check manuals and forums for the best course of action!
If you're a computer guy, do you understand why you may need to replace a power supply or a bad stick of RAM? It may not cause a boot loop or a BSOD yet, but eventually it's gonna be a big problem. No reason to distrust a tech telling you about an equally important part of your car. Same concept, just different contexts.
The stereotype of the assrape mechanic sadly lives on, but with the advent of the internet, and car forums, an hour of reading can teach you plenty, and likely tell you if you're in serious trouble, or if you went to a bad mechanic.
You'll pay more at a dealership, but you're guaranteed genuine OEM parts, factory trained techs, and a warranty on the work done. |
I have a 2012 Ford Focus with Sync. I bought it 2 years ago when I got my job and holy shit Sync must be the biggest pile of shit ever. I can't count the amount of times where I turn my car on and Sync just won't start at all...like the touch screen? Solid Black. About 1/5 times it will turn back on after ~2 minutes, but the other 80% of the time I just drive in silence because I'm too disappointed that I would need to pull over and restart my car completely for another attempt at Sync working.
What could be worse than that you ask? Well, I paired my Verizon Droid Razr Maxx phone to the bluetooth service that Sync has. If you attempt to stream ANY music, doesn't matter if built-in, Pandora, Google Music, Slacker, etc. it RANDOMLY skips songs and once it starts, it never stops. -usually- it will be 10 seconds into a song before deciding to skip the song, but sometimes it can be like 30 minutes on longer trips. The only way to temporarily disable it is to rewind to previous song -> let play for greater than 5 seconds, restart said song, skip that song, and then rewind 1 more song. You don't want to know how long it took me to figure that out.
The happy ending to all of this is that I just got an oil change and they asked if they could patch the Sync on my car and I of course said yes. The patch fixed the skipping completely, and I can probably say that it saved maybe about 2 years of my life due to blood pressure alone. |
It is simple. First, we don't know what these panels cost. If they cost $20,000 a piece, it might actually not be feasible to deploy them on a large scale.
However, I fear the truth is more nuanced. The panels probably don't cost that much. Even if they do, it may be that when the costs of highway maintenance, power generation, and the benefits of wide spread IT access are considered, that the high initial cost is justifiable. Unfortunately, it is not that simple.
Lots of powerful interests stand to lose a lot from the widespread roll out of distributed power generation and IT access. In many cases, the very same companies, workers, and experts we would be looking to install, troubleshoot, and maintain these panels would be putting themselves out of a job. |
Not every company asks the government for $1m to conduct their R&D.
This is literally a kickstarter for R&D, not even for an end-product.
They have done calculations, in a basic sensationalist way that shows very little information or statistics. I simply do not trust them.
Let's talk about [cost](
$5,270 for 20x 195cm * 99cm = 20x 19,305 cm^2 = 386,100 cm^2 = 38.6 m^2.
They estimate US has 31,250 square miles, which is 80,937,128,448 square metres. It costs $5,270 for 38.6 square metres... We end up with $11,050,224,531,631, or 11 trillion dollars.
They say it will give three times as much power, so let's make it into 3.65 trillion dollars to completely power the United States.
This is on a solar panel that will hold 113 pounds per square foot, is extremely reflective (therefore hot and impossible to drive on in sunny days) and is extremely thin and glossy. So they would need to add a top layer of extremely thick and minimally reflective glass. This would result in A) a drop in efficiency and B) an increase in cost. |
If you read their numbers as much electricity as the us consumes is based on panels sited at the border of Canada, with their textured glass that reduces efficiency included. If the panels were sited in Texas they would produce much more.
For the costs, using your numbers the cost of electricity would be 9.3 c/kWh when averaging over 10 year lifespan. Solar roadways says that the panels are very reusable, so only what needs to be replaced have to be. So since solar panels last about 20 years, the average electricity cost would be 4.6 c/kWh.
If you sell the electricity at an average of 9.3 c/kWh, not only would you have paid for the panels, but you wold have earned as much as the panels cost in additional electricity sales. This means that the panels would provide a net income equal to the cost of the panels, or for powering the US it would mean 3.65 trillion. If the price of the solar panels was halved, and electricity was sold at the same price of 9.3 c/kWh, the net income would be three times the cost of the panels, or 5.475 trillion dollars.
[Some numbers]( that I found puts the price of asphalt, the top layer at least, at $7.66/sq.m., or one fifth of the cost of the solar panels. This means that the solar panels in the solar roadways panels provides several times more net income from the sales of electricity then cost of the top layer of asphalt on roads.
All this though is besides the many other functions of the solar roadways panels, like that they can act as the power grids of the future by providing space for power cables, and also has space for data cables like fiber optics, and one big continuous wi-fi network.
When doing numbers, you have to put them into context. |
Because everyone here is imagining laying flimsy, off the shelf rooftop solar panels cracking under the pressure of a car. They read the headline & the misinformed comments & all the sudden they are an expert.
They also think this is merely a hippy dippy alternative energy thing, instead of all the massive benefits that would come from having a snow/ice free road system, including reduced potholes due to the asphalt not expanding & contracting.
Unfortunately, the people in charge have no more brain cells than the people here spreading their misinformed opinions as fact, and they too will imagine regular solar panals being laid end to end by a bunch of pot smoking liberal hippies, cars sliding around on glass while it shatters...
So this will never happen until we actually vote for fucking smart people & make it worth their while to make decisions based on research & factual evidence, instead of voting for the same 70 year old morons, barely capable of operating their own cell phones, who rely on their limited imagination & what their gut (& lobbyists) tell them to do. |
Let's do the math. We have the power:
So using a district in the state I currently live in as an example:
It costs for this PA district, for snow removal, totaled $18 million for 11,000 snow lane miles in the 2012-2013 winter, which is the number of miles lanes that get snow treatment. The standard lane width on highways is 12 feet (about 4 meters), so we have 4 meters 11,000 miles of area, or 70 million square meters. The snowfall totals in Philly are on average not so bad, maybe 20 inches or so, for a total of about 35,000,000 m^3 of snow. Now, snow is pretty loosely packed, about 10% the density of ice. So we'll call it 3,500,000 m^3 of ice. Ice has a 334 kJ/kg heat of fusion, and a density of 910 kg/m^3, so we are looking at 3,200,000,000,000 kg of ice each winter to melt, for a total of about 1.08 * 10^12 kJ, or about 300,000,000 kWh. The best bulk deals on electricity are like 8 cents per kWh in a state like PA, with cheap energy. So your bill comes out to (drumroll please): $24 million per year over the same area. Please let me know if you spot a mistake anywhere.
So, it costs more, by my math. And I was being generous. In reality, a lot of the heating elements will heat things other than the snow, like the road, dirt, liquid water from melted snow, and so on. Snow can start at under 0 Celsius, so you would have to heat it up before it even starts to melt, a consideration I also removed. I also ignored maintenance as these elements break, the costs of installing such a complicated system in the roads, which will make the process a lot more tricky, and the fact that rainfall freezes as ice, which means they need to be on longer.
And because of the scaling, this process loses even more badly in snowier areas (Chicago averages over 30 inches per year, for instance). Plowing 5 inches or 10 inches isn't that different for a plow truck, but it's twice as much work for our heating elements. In areas with less snow, it looks better, but in areas with less snow, is it worth spending a lot of money for expensive snow-proof roads? I feel there may be higher priorities.
The reason is simple: water takes a lot of heat energy to change, owing to its chemical structure. It has a very high heat capacity and heat of fusion, so it takes a ton of energy to melt ice into warmer water. Changing the phase diagram is easier than moving about it, or simply pushing the snow out of the way is also an easier option, which is what we do. Again, if you feel I have made a mistake, please point it out. |
Windows:
MPC-HC
OS X:
OS X Mplayer Extended
Linux:
MPV |
Only problem with that is that by using channels in between, you eliminate the time-slot negotiation that happen between WiFi stations on the same channel, this leads to more in-flight collisions and decreases the WiFi quality on both your own network, and all the neighboring networks you overlap.
Edit: |
Americans already are, and have been for decades, required to pay taxes on items they purchase online.
It does not matter if you bought something:
on the internet
by phone
mail order
by carrier pigeon
or you drove to New Hampshire.
You are required to calculate the difference between the tax you paid at time of purchase, and how much your home state sales tax is. Then you have 3 months to cut a cheque.
Just because you have not been doing it doesn't mean you have not been committing tax fraud.
I realize you don't like paying taxes. But things cost money. And 30% of your state income is from sales tax. Yes, arguably, we should raise your income tax instead - as sales tax is regressive. But since nobody is clamoring to have their income and property taxes raised: we are where we are. |
Google literally controls your search results, in other words they control the information you get to see.
If google can (and does) filter search results, what makes you think Microsoft doesn't do the same thing? Other than search engines, your only other option is going to a library to get information.
Having the power to alter search results means they choose what you see and do not see, that is censoring. If google so wishes, they can and will censor as they please. Every time you do a search, the results are based on a arbitrary algorithm developed by Google, they literally choose what you see.
edit: If Google removed/blocked Yelp, or anyone for that matter from their results, you would probably never have known they existed. |
I never claimed they did. And that was not my point
I said this before you offered clarification that you were talking about images. I thought you might be taking about articles.
Anyway. I do mostly agree with you. The problem is, I think it's sad, but not evil. It's just the way Google works. They provide a service that billions of people use and they need to make some money from it.
They also would still make money if they provided a thumbnail to click on or a full image to click on. If you click on "view image" on Google images, you're taken away from the page. If you click on "view page" you're taken off the page. It's the same end result. They don't make any more money. It just makes google more useable and, unfortunately, causes you to loose page views
So, in conclusion, my problem is that you are acting like they make more money from directly linking to images when they are really just making as much as they did before with the thumbnail linking. They're not in a giant conspiracy to deprive the artist like you're acting. They're making the end experience easier for the user and making just as much money as they were before. Unfortunately, this is when it started to effect you
The big problem here is that both you and Google want to make money. Google started interfering with you making money, without making more money, and you then acted like they were stealing from you. |
Fair point. Scepticism would be more appropriate. But you can argue for cynicism not being incorrect, just less appropriate.
My cynicism leads to believe this article is click bait, i.e., I assume the worst about the journalists who published this article, and that has lead me to be sceptical about their claims.
> Skeptical means “having reservations”. Someone who is skeptical will not easily be convinced, will be hard to persuade.
>
> The main meaning of cynical is “believing the worst of people”, or as NOAD says, “distrustful of human sincerity or integrity”. By extension, it has come to mean “doubting something will happen”, which can be somewhat close in meaning to skeptical in some cases, but not generally.
>
> As an example, in the sentence “John is skeptical about the motorway extension”, you could replace skeptical with cynical without altering the meaning. In the sentence “John is skeptical about global warming”, you could not do this change. Likewise, in “John has a cynical attitude”, you could not use skeptical instead.
FWIW, Oxford Dictionaries lists cynicism and skepticism/scepticism as synonyms in both US and British English so it doesn't seem to be a UK vs US English usage issue (I'm guessing you are in the US because you wrote sKepticism with a K, I'm in the UK so use a C). |
To clarify, I was strictly correcting /u/gpsfan claim that Google bypasses the image host for displaying full content. The full sized image thing is a bit more complex.
Disclaimer - I'm not Google, but worked on a (very limited scope) webspider once, so this is an area that once held my interest.
> Images up to about 200 pixels are at 100% and are absolutely copyright infringement, unless some court want to say that nothing under 200 pixels is "art" so can't be copyrighted. Many images are at least 1/5th scale, which is derivative work category not fair use.
You are right in so far as that courts found that this does in fact infringe on copyright, specifically display rights, unless Fair Use is in play.
But these thumbnails do not fall outside of Fair Use just because they are not shrunken down or edited. Fair Use includes taking the original copyrighted work and using it for a completely different purpose - in this case, taking an image that most likely is meant for entertainment, and instead using it as an index for content discovery.
It's the same reason a neighborhood book club is allowed to print blown up scans of book covers on a recruiting poster. Copying the cover would be infringement by itself, but in the context of a recruiting poster it is there as a comment on book club interests, or a suggestion to read the book. It does not claim copyright, and unless they edited out the book title and author's name, even provides proper accreditation.
So as long as Google Image Search is considered to act like a search engine instead of an image gallery aggregater, they are covered by Fair Use.
> Google are parasitically using the hosting server's bandwidth as part of their image search interface.
Google are letting the server decide. If it allows hotlinking, then yes; if not, it shows the thumbnail.
This is an instrumental difference, because it means copyright holders can enforce their copyright - many hosts that monetize images disallow hotlinking, or will instead display a modified image with a banner with instructions on how to get the full image. Better yet, it means that every time someone wants to see the image, Google has them request permission from the original source - and that your image host chose to grant the right to see the image. If you allow hotlinking, you are extending the same rights to see your work to people that use your site as you do to people that shared a link via Email or on Facebook, or use Google Image Search. If you want to force people to go through your site, you need to limit this, and Google lets you.
This highlights the crux of the problem - the ad-based monetization model does not fit with the original concept of web hosting, which was to share information freely in a modular fashion. People have this notion of a "webpage" as being one thing, but browsers, webspiders and copyright law all see it as a whole bunch of separate works that may or may not show up on a screen at the same time. So if you are requiring people to go through such a webpage to see your content, it is up to you as host to adjust your web server to enforce this limitation on non-webpage content - which is a problem because by default web hosts are set up to just grant access to anything for everyone, so you are not enforcing any copyright. Could Google bypass your limitation? Probably, but then they would be breaching the limits of Fair Use, making it copyright infringement.
> They are straight up robbing image-hosting sites of revenue.
In two separate lawsuits I read on the matter, this was highlighted as incorrect. In one of them Google made the counter-case that they provide more traffic than they "rob" (both passively by providing Google Search, and by active means like preventing related results from showing entire collections of images from a single site, so that people are driven to the site after the discovery phase). This was dismissed as "valid but inconsequential", as the more important thing was that the court decided that there was no competition - people using Google Image Search to find an image would not have been on that site to begin with. |
The main problem being that it is generally not covered. Going through the court's decision history, (as almost all rulings come from past precedents set) we can't find anything even related to this situation. This is because it has to be a competitive monopoly in one select field harming another, (does not apply, Google is a search engine harming a review site) or irrational pricing in specific ways. Here are a few that come closer and their rulings.
>Theatre Enterprises v. Paramount Distributing, 346 U.S. 537 (1954), no evidence of illegal agreement, however film distributors gave first film releases to downtown Baltimore theatres, and suburban theatres were forced to wait longer. Held, there needed to be evidence of conspiracy to injure
Not related but, some crazy distortion of this case could be used to argue some points against Google, though easily refuted.
>Tampa Electric Co. v. Nashville Coal Co., 365 U.S. 320 (1961) Tampa Electric Co contracted to buy coal for 20 years to provide power in Florida, and Nashville Coal Co later attempted to end the contract on the basis that it was an exclusive supply agreement contrary to the Clayton Act §3 or the Sherman Act §§ 1 or 2. Held, that this did not affect competition sufficiently.
Not related, just showing how tough it is to prove your argument in favor of claiming loss of business.
>Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, 506 U.S. 447 (1993) in order for monopolies to be found to have acted unlawfully, action must have actually been taken. The threat of abusive behavior is insufficient.
Ofc Google has not yet done anything, so no matter what, nothing could be done yet.
>Swift & Co. v. United States, 196 U.S. 375 (1905) the antitrust laws entitled the federal government to regulate monopolies that had a direct impact on commerce
This would be your best bet in a case to argue since almost all of these cases involve pricing or money exchange which Google is not doing. Yelp could argue direct loss but Google would argue it is indirect loss which the court would most likely side with Google.
And just for extra, here is how the football rulings you mentioned earlier could go based off this similar case if argued properly.
>Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. 551 U.S. 877 (2007) 5 to 4 decision that vertical price restraints were not per se illegal. A leather manufacturer therefore did not violate the Sherman Act by stopping delivery of goods to a retailer after the retailer refused to raise its prices to the leather manufacturer's standards.
I am not saying that charges couldn't be brought up or that Google couldn't be taken to court with decent reasoning, but ultimately it would end in favor of Google if a settlement was not reached before hand to avoid court costs. There just simply aren't enough cases in general of plaintiffs proving their point and the court will already rule this in a "non-suspect" like way, favoring the defendant without a strong reasonable argument proving monopolization. Some of these cases, such as an example of the internet cable industry, are clearly abusive and monopolizing, but are still ruled fine and legal thanks to good argument and reasoning. This is why we all hate TWC, AT&T and Comcast. Of course they were more careful and used state laws to further execute theirs, a good lawyer can go pretty far with loop holes and lack of specific proof of violation. This all together is why Google would win this case in my belief.
Sorry for the long read and lack of good ordering of the court cases, I got lazy with my organization. |
Even if the phone companies retain the information, the NSA can simply access their computer system and collect the information clandestinely. The only thing the USA Freedom act does, is mandate someone else has to foot the bill to store all that information. |
And I still see submissions complaining about 'repost'. More people read it if re-[submitted]( at different time, not a ' |
What follows is highly paraphrased (obviously), but I might also be misunderstanding some of his points or even putting words in his mouth. In my opinion, this article is worth the time it takes to read and I would be hard pressed to find ways to shorten it while still retaining the full value of what's written.
Some people are good at using general concepts to enable ever-increasing levels of knowledge, skill, and understanding.
Some people are not good at that, partly because they've never been properly exposed to those general concepts, partly because they're not even aware of the existence of those general concepts, and partly because they don't think that it's their job to understand those general concepts.
Some people are just from a different planet.
How do we enable the first group to proceed unimpeded while helping the second group on their way and preventing the third group from consuming all the resources? The proposed solutions focus on society's role in teaching (general concepts) vs. training (specific actions), corporate responsibility in addressing the issue, and developer responsibility during the creation of new abstractions. |
If I were to leave you a comment that pissed you off, you can maybe only see my IP address. That would just tell you who my ISP is. You cannot see my Mac address (and therefore find my house on Google maps). But if you told me to click on that website that you setup, it could read my IP address and mac address, therefore giving you the ability to know where I'm located. Then you can proceed to harass me to an even greater degree. |
So I work for an ISP, but not in customer service. I get this IM
Rep:
uh oh, facebook is down again
Me(sarcastically cause I think she knows her job):
we have a critical ticket on it!
Rep:
it's not in compass
Me:
lol, yeah.. its not customer effecting, just job effecting
meaning people have to do their jobs
Rep:
so we wouldn't want to post a known issue with customer unable to access a specific site so that we can handle calls about it more effeciently
Me:
I was joking about the ticket
Rep:
so we need to trend it, ok
Me:
Are you kidding?
Facebook was down here on our network as well.
Rep:
nope, f/b for us is blocked
but logged in remote to my home pc and cannot get logged in
seems to be same issue as yesterday, cannot get onto f/b from iphone app either
Me
Um...
its going to be a Facebook issue then
not a mycompanysname
Rep:
well customers don't know that, so they call to complain they can't get into f/b
Me: Facepalm |
Ah, I see that you too have heard the arguments made by the RIAA's Paul Clement last Monday. You have your interpretations, but...
it seems a stretch to me that a whole new category of defendants who were never included from the outset of copyright law in 1909 and onward are suddenly by default included in the application of that law because ad hoc reasons appear that are claimed to justify it. And the reasons again ignore the fact that no individual is doing all the claimed harm. Statistically, it's a whole lot of people, each distributing 1 or 2 copies of the song. Easier than sharing tapes? Sure. Larger scale per person? Not really.
Besides, I think it's pretty obvious Congress hadn't foreseen this category of automatically distributing noncommercial person in 1999, considering the fact that an informed appeals judge had to be told how filesharing works 12 years later.
Although I'm not really eager to rehash something that's already been filed in briefs and argued in court, but in the extreme, as Judge Thompson argues, how much do you think Congress intended to leave a filesharer liable for? 1000 songs * 750 = $750,000 all the way up to 150,000 per work =$150M?!
EDIT: |
Who knows what their algorithm is really doing, for one thing. The engineers told the MBA kids one thing, and the MBA kids told the press people another. So who knows what is really happening within the network.
Also in CDMA based systems, the neighboring cells interfere with each other. So as one cell becomes more and more loaded, it will cause some additional interference to a neighboring cell. This may lower the other's cell's capacity. By how much; its too complicated to answer. Though it is not huge. |
Who knows what their algorithm is really doing, for one thing. The engineers told the MBA kids one thing, and the MBA kids told the press people another. So who knows what is really happening within the network.
Also in CDMA based systems, the neighboring cells interfere with each other. So as one cell becomes more and more loaded, it will cause some additional interference to a neighboring cell. This may lower the other's cell's capacity. By how much; its too complicated to answer. Though it is not huge. |
To expand on this and tie it back with SOPA --
Once registered, your domain name is tied to the web server that actually hosts the site through DNS. This maps your server's IP address (for fun try typing "72.247.244.97" in your URL bar, welcome to a world without DNS) to the registered site name.
SOPA wants to force DNS to prohibit the resolution of this IP address based on a "claim" that you are hosting copyrighted material. Your website doesn't go away, but the people out there looking for it can no longer find it. Imagine driving through a new town, asking for directions to the pirate bay. Everyone knows where it is, but they aren't allowed to tell you. It's censorship in the most elementary form. |
As a current GoDaddy employee, I totally support the move. Here are a few things to keep in mind when moving the domain -
You will need to remove the privacy feature for the domain, or "domains by proxy." The only way to do this is by going [here]( Keep in mind you will need to sign in with a DIFFERENT customer number than your normal one. Should me in an email you got when purchasing the domains.
Unlock the domain, and get the authorization code FOR EACH DOMAIN. This can be obtained by navigating to your "Domain Manager." Once you are there, you can check mark the domains to unlock multiple domains at one time, or click on each domain to get to the "Domain information" section.
Make sure that the administrative email on file for the whois of the domain is correct. This is where the authorization code will be sent, and where your new registrar will also send an email.
Once the domain has been unlocked, privacy removed, authorization code sent to your email, and whois verified, the domain is now ready for transfer. Contact a new registrar, purchase a domain transfer (Should include an ADDITIONAL year of registration for your domain) and give them the authorization code. Domain transfer will take a few days, but once this step has been completed, usually no further action is needed. |
So he needs 19k to write an autostart script or is he going to write yet another media player that's horribly crippled and only plays from a particular path on removable media. This guys doesn't look, sound like, or claim to have the connections to determine or aggregate what people actually want. He looks like an absolutist GPL type that doesn't know any better.
In short here's the problem with his idea. He wants to create a "free" standard and reference implementation to compete with Blu-Ray. But he knows that actually can't be accomplished so he moves his goal posts without readdressing what problem it would solve. The goal is no longer to compete with Blu-Ray. What is this goal? There is nothing stopping somebody somebody from boxing an SD card with an autoplay script that plays the movie on VLC which could also be included on the card. |
i was being a little round-about in my post. You hinted that patent law should be modified in the U.S. to not allow patenting of some ideas:
> policy ... in this country
i assume that is policy around the granting of patents. But you didn't give any examples of how that policy should be amended; instead come up with a conspiracy around corporate influence, hatched out by Corporate America and that is the reason the patent system is screwed up.
But assuming we're going to change patent policy, as a good for all - what will that new patent policy look like?
Any change would certainly mean that people that currently hold patents will have them revoked, and new patents in these areas will not be granted. A lot of ire comes from patenting of software, e.g.:
audio and video codecs
data compression
sorting and searching algorithms
the idea of searching local device and the internet with one search command
[storing documents in XML](
[having Flash in a browser](
[gif](
[zip](
These are all novel ideas, that the patent office believes qualify as an invention. If you want to re-write patent law, you have to decide if software algorithms no longer qualify as novel ideas.
i am a software developer - i make my living writing code - and i believe that software should not be patentable. If i invent a novel method for doing something: i should not be allowed to patent that. A lot of people believe it as well (Wikipedia: Software Patent Debate
Do you believe that patent law should be updated to not allow the patents that Apple and Google currently have?
In this article, the judge didn't say that the patents are, or should be, invalid. He said both sides have valid patent infringement case . The judge was grumpy that both sides refused to license the patent to the other.
So it's not about over-broad patents, it's about a patent holder trying to keep the advantage of their innovation. Do you think patent holders should not be allowed to keep every advantage of their granted patent?
Or do you think patents should be done away with? |
It wasn't originally hacktivism. That grew out of the whole anti-Scientology thing. Basically the mainstreams idea of Anon Internet Super Heroes overpowered the original self proclaimed IRC users and channers. The original internet users claiming to be anon regularly attacked websites because it was funny. (It really was funny, especially the Hal Turner thing)
When the whole Scientology thing started it really was "for the lulz" but eventually it split as some anonymous started to actually care about stopping Scientology instead of just trolling them really really hard. The ones interested in trolling lost interest in the Scientology thing when the church started ignoring them. While the ones that actually cared about bringing down the church grew larger as they became more mainstream. The ones that kept trolling were The Oldfags and the ones that cared about the church were the Moralfags. Everyday there was arguments about it on /b/ and eventually the Oldfags just kind of disappeared and Anonymous spread out of it's self containment on IRC and the chans. |
Pinch-to-zoom is not a worthy patent? I spent over five years working with [clunky Windows Mobile Phone and Tablet PC ui's]( before Apple improved things. Pinch-to-zoom is one of the key improvements to touchscreen ui's. If it were so obvious/easy why wasn't it done already? As a software engineer/product developer I am continually reminded of how people underestimate how difficult it is to design great features - coding them up is almost always far easier.
This verdict rewards Apple with a 17 year monopoly which means the Market's cash will feed a company that is actually able to innovate well. Allowing Samsung, and thus Google to piggy back off of Apple's innovation is not good for society, not so long as companies find it so difficult to innovate well. I want to see resources flow into Apple so that it can expand it's business and school the world. Expand their war chest to help them fight the TV industrial complex so they can improve it. |
No. It is not the first. If you're looking at fiber alone, then Verizon has beaten Google a long time ago, having started rollout of FiOS residential services back in 2006. If you're looking at the speed (1Gbps), it's also beaten by EPB's 2010 rollout of 1Gbps FTTH. If you're looking at that $70/mo price tag, it's been beaten yet again by Sonic.net's 2011 rollout of 1Gbps FTTH.
Who cares if a bunch of small time companies have already done it? Why does that matter to someone not in an area served by them?
>Google was given exclusive benefits in Kansas City. They were given free space in city buildings and free power, then had vast amounts of red tape cleared for them by the government. Google's contract with the city's government even explicitly allows them to leave in two years with no penalties and gives them the right to cherry-pick customers.
The reason people are looking to Google is that they have the size and recognizability to influence people (including governments) and the funds to bankroll the huge initial investment.
Google has an incentive to provide better internet at more affordable prices that other ISPs do not because they are invested in Youtube and the Google search engine which both would benefit greatly from more consumption.
>Time Warner Cable and AT&T, the established Kansas City ISPs, are probably not going to do so well in this market. But nationwide? Nobody will be affected. Consider this - if Google's 1Gbps testbed is going to cause a change, then why hasn't EPB or Sonic caused a change? Why has Utopia and the various other muni gigabit ISPs not caused this change yet?
No one thinks that Google Fiber in 1 city is going to change shit. People think that other ISPs will improve their speeds based on the threat of them expanding or if they're dumb, waiting until Google actually get to their areas. This is exactly the reason small time ISPs have changed nothing: there is no threat of expansion.
>Number one - Google throttles connections.
Wow! Google throttles! So fucking what? Do you see in the bottom of the speedtest where it says faster than 99% of the US? Yeah. That's the important part. My speedtests currently show I'm slower than 85-96% of the US (based on when I run it), so I and many others are understandably not too concerned that google fiber throttles down to a "measly" 300 down 50 up (especially when comcast's packages usually cap out at 5 up).
>Okay, you're bored of hearing about throttling and router restrictions. Let's take a look at a gigabit, and how you'd use this much speed. Netflix? Not with streams being limited to 5.4Mbps. YouTube? Nope, their CDN usually maxes out at 50Mbps for me in tests on the aforementioned gigabit server, and the most I've ever seen (highest 4k bitrate video on YouTube) was 70Mbps for a fraction of a second. Streaming 4K video? YouTube compresses it to 31Mbps, so once again, that's no reason for a gigabit. Torrenting? Sure, you can max out your line with torrents, but unless you want to have Google catch you, you're going to be restricted to torrenting Linux ISOs and WoW updates
First off, you're going to be paying at least $70 a month (Comcast's 30/6 is $73) to get speeds that will max out YouTube at 31Mbps. And then just barely. With Google Fiber you get at least 10 times that speed. (For comparison, Comcast's Extreme 105, the fastest offered in my area, is 105/10 and costs $200 per month.)
Second, you can't just say that Google is going to catch you if you torrent. What magical devices do they have to do this? Why are they going to be more successful than other ISPs? |
This may be one of the dumbest "pitchfork" moments I've ever seen. ISPs have the right to say
"Look, we're giving you 300GB of unlimited internet bandwidth a month. For normal internet usage, this is MORE than enough to satisfy your needs. We understand if you happen to go over that cap every once in a while. We also understand that people are downloading music and movies. We KNOW there are ways around this, that's why we're giving you grace periods in between alerts and dings. That's also why we're giving you up to 4x before any real action is taken. And the action that is taken is a slap on the wrist. No legal ramifications. Don't be dumb and you won't be caught."
I understand the hivemind hates ANY idea of ISPs cracking down on ILLEGAL file sharing, but look, we all know it's illegal. Should it be? That's up for debate. But it currently is. We all know the ramifications if we get caught with P2P files. The majority of the posts I'm seeing is just mindless raging about "blah blah net neutrality blah blah". While Net Neutrality certainly has it's place (eliminating draconian government measures that try to keep media from the public, etc), I can't help but feel that the majority of people feel that Net Neutrality should let them do whatever they want however they want to. Guess what? It doesn't. Net Neutrality is there to keep oppressive regulations away from online merchants and LEGITIMATE sites. Does torrenting allow for SOME legitimate use? Yes. Is that the majority of it? Fuck no. And we all know it.
Arguing against ISPs protecting their product from being used for currently illegal activity, is like arguing against a storage facility for putting up a security system. I really feel that the majority of the arguments I'm reading are going more and more along of the lines of "But I want to illegally download shit and you're making it hard for me to do that, STAHP!"
Do I download movies and music? Yep. Sure do. Do I do it at a rate that inhibits my internet usage? Nope. Sure don't. I have friends have TBs full of games, movies, and music. Does their usage get throttled? No. This is not going to implement some sort of ISP Overwatch that comes to your house and takes your kids while you're asleep. They are not actively monitoring your service, they are looking for specific tells on downloading. |
Rather than bore you with every detail about how my job works, I'll try my best to keep it simple:
In a completely unregulated industry that requires expensive infrastructure and a significant investment, you will have two scenarios when someone demands a product:
1) Very few companies will make the investment and the first company will score a monopoly if the cost of infrastructure is high enough.
or
2) Nobody will make the initial investment.
The monopoly is dependent on the cost of infrastructure because it’s unlikely anyone will rush to build redundant infrastructure and compete on price. Even if they do, their prices will barely compete due to cost of infrastructure. Not exactly an easy or attractive market for a small business.
I sell electricity to large industrial users, which serves as a good example of effective and necessary government regulation. When it comes to electricity at the moment, nobody will compete without government because of the cost of infrastructure. It costs a lot of money to get you wired into the grid and maintain the lines.
In deregulated states where I work, you still pay a government regulated company (local utility) to get the electricity from the grid to your door; however that’s where the monopoly ends. You can pay for the generation of the power separately (generated by an ESCO, or Energy Supply Company).
These ESCOs then actively compete for business (which I broker). This drives down generation costs and encourages innovation. There are dozens of choices for power for any one facility. |
Rather than bore you with every detail about how my job works, I'll try my best to keep it simple:
In a completely unregulated industry that requires expensive infrastructure and a significant investment, you will have two scenarios when someone demands a product:
1) Very few companies will make the investment and the first company will score a monopoly if the cost of infrastructure is high enough.
or
2) Nobody will make the initial investment.
The monopoly is dependent on the cost of infrastructure because it’s unlikely anyone will rush to build redundant infrastructure and compete on price. Even if they do, their prices will barely compete due to cost of infrastructure. Not exactly an easy or attractive market for a small business.
I sell electricity to large industrial users, which serves as a good example of effective and necessary government regulation. When it comes to electricity at the moment, nobody will compete without government because of the cost of infrastructure. It costs a lot of money to get you wired into the grid and maintain the lines.
In deregulated states where I work, you still pay a government regulated company (local utility) to get the electricity from the grid to your door; however that’s where the monopoly ends. You can pay for the generation of the power separately (generated by an ESCO, or Energy Supply Company).
These ESCOs then actively compete for business (which I broker). This drives down generation costs and encourages innovation. There are dozens of choices for power for any one facility. |
I have COX internet as part of my rent, so I don't have an account with them. So whenever I go over the limit the link on the splash screen fails and they want me to call their support. Since I don't have an account they can't do anything. But resetting the modem fixes it. |
The way I understand this is that before you can print something, you first have to posses the computer model for it. Those aren't hard to create. All you need is a good drafting program. I personally like 3d max but there are a ton of others that can produce a 3d mesh or model of whatever it is you are trying to make. Just about any physical object can be modeled with a high degree of accuracy by even a novice given the right toolset to make real world measurements and the know how to translate those measurements into the 3d model. Consider a Lego block. Anyone with even a bit of experience with an autocad could turn out the model for it in short order.
Another thing to consider is the eventual creation of the 3d scanner (they may already be a reality, if not they soon will be.) this notion that only the maker of the physical object can supply the 3d model for it is incorrect. |
I really liked their software and ran it on my Mac Mini. Once they announced that they were dropping software and going strictly hardware, I went back to XBMC. Best move ever. They XMBC team really picked up their game while I was using Boxee. |
This article makes a fantastic point, the infrastructure to have automatically fixed typos crowd sourced to the public is already in place for Amazon and the Kindle. However, I no longer download ebooks from legitimate sites after buying the books. For one, I enjoy having an actual copy of the book, even if I end up reading the ebook version most of the time...
In addition, I have found the illegitimately gained(pirated, obviously, though in nearly every case I own a hard copy of the books in question, except for a few) EBooks tend to have fewer typos, simply due to the fact that anyone who receives a book can then proof it and then reupload said works to their favorite trackers and download sites.
In fact, I've personally done this on several occasions; With Mercedes Lackey's Jousters series(pdf->epub/mobi ended up with the title+author right in the middle of text several times per page, many typos in two of the books), several books by Tamora Pierce(mostly typos), and a bunch of other authors, including David Weber, Jim Butcher, Brandon Sanderson, and Eoin Colfer....
That said, it's a real pain in the ass to fix, because in some cases you need to convert from a format that you can't edit manually to one you can via calibre or other conversion software, then you need to read the entire book(generally easier on an e-reader whilst keeping track of your location in the editor. Then you need to catch the errors and fix them, meaning that you could simply miss some...However, this can become easier depending upon the book, as some books tend to suffer from c->e or D->CL(lower case) in high incidences and you can use some regex to find them quickly and then manually review all of them at once.)
Sorry for the rant that went rather off topic. My point is that typos tend to only be a problem for those who buy and then read the legitimate product, as there are people such as myself who proof pirate copies for others to enjoy without such issues. For the foreseeable future, this will continue to be a problem, but hopefully typos and other formatting errors will decrease as conversion software becomes better and the publishers and distributors fix their processes. |
Stop conflating things. You are correct that Linux is doing great on servers, but when people say that Linux is not doing well, they almost exclusively mean that it is not doing well on the desktop . Gnome had a grand plan "10 by 10" to have 10% market share by 2010. Did that happen? Nope. Why? Because with the exception of Ubuntu and Linux Mint, there aren't any well-polished distros out there. Here's a list of polish that Windows and Mac have that Linux distributions don't:
nice looking themes by default - Ubuntu and LinuxMint are two notable exceptions; and this includes the requirement that Qt, KDE, and Gnome apps all look the same, oh, and any apps that use the crappy X drawing utilities (XCircuit, XTerm, wacom-tools, and all Tcl/Tk programs) need to be replaced with modern equivalents
installing proprietary drivers - again Ubuntu and LinuxMint are two notable exceptions
kernel support for proprietary drivers that support all features like buffer passing (which is important for laptops so they can switch between nVidia/ATi graphics and low-power Intel on the fly, and also for every single ARM vendor in existence )
hardware audio mixing (now that basic hardware support is worked out, it's becoming notorious for mixing in software, even though ALSA uses the hardware just fine)
no support for optical-out audio ports - it just doesn't exist, or if it does, the SNR (harsh buzzing sounds, doesn't happen on Windows) is way too low
wireless networking drivers are still crap (this is extremely important because Linux gets new drivers by downloading them, not off of CDs, so networking is vital to update your system to get new/updated/working drivers, and you're left in a Catch-22 situation if networking doesn't work)
support for Styli and touchscreens - you continuously have to muck with settings, there's no centralized calibration tool (wacom-tools is dead with recent X's), and why does every stylus or touchscreen have to emulate a pointer?
OO/LO Calc is not as good at more complex things that are extremely useful for both home and business users; I'm talking about pivot tables, autosort on columns, and macros that launch when the document is opened; and it can't export to XLSX
Writer is not as good as Word at opening huge office documents; no, LaTeX is not a good solution (keep reading); it also doesn't import DOCX very well, and can't export to DOCX
Creating templates in Presenter is much more difficult than in Powerpoint, it also doesn't import them very well
LaTeX sucks - there are 40 table packages, none of them work the same way or support the same options, and some are even mutually exclusive with each other; the learning curve for it is way too steep; no, LyX sucks as a GUI for LaTeX, because all you're doing is creating LaTeX commands with a GUI, not visually modifying the document the way you want it to look when printed; and while Kile is an excellent IDE for LaTeX, you can't output to a non-PDF modern office format to let your professor review/edit it for you
Dia looks like ass compared to Visio, seriously, do the same flowchart in both, keep in mind which makes it easier to do common things (hint: not a bunch unrelated niches), and take a look at the outputs; also, nothing can import or export Visio drawings
Gimp is finally listening to their users with the most recent release (single window mode, etc.), but they still have issues: they are trying to update their filters all at once instead of by piecemeal (although work has been done, it hasn't been accepted upstream yet AFAIK) when it would allow Gimp to have a much smaller update cycle because they could port filters to the new API whenever they were needed instead of letting the current usable form of Gimp rot because they haven't made a large release in 5 years; although it support more image formats than I will ever be able to count
the fabled Android SDK/API support is still MIA, and this single feature alone would help real, current, existing companies/developers to port their apps to Linux extremely easily and drive Linux adoption (as well as keep the nice features of the MacOS app store)
Fragmented support for ARM devices - everything from the Beagleboard to Android phones to Raspberry Pi (although this is being worked on) - my Beagleboard has the Zippy2 addon but the Ubuntu port is oblivious to it because the hardware support on ARM sucks, including support for the proprietary graphics drivers, these things should be plug-and-play because the Beagleboard addons all have unique IDs accessible via SPI bus to their onboard EEPROM
Wine is the best thing Linux has because it lowers the cost of porting applications to Linux; although I think developers should focus on supporting Microsoft Office, Steam and its games, iTunes (many Linux people think it sucks, but if you want to attract people who like iTunes and want to keep their Apple devices iTunes is a requirement)
there is no good alternative to Visual Studio, period - support for various VCS's, more languages, and more varied platforms hampers these efforts, but the Qt development tools are maturing quite nicely
The bottom line is that Linux developers will always have the lions share of development support to support desktop users if Linux continuously has a tiny market share on the desktop. And Linux will always be insignificant on the desktop if Linux developers and supporters don't accept certain tradeoffs, like proprietary graphics drivers (because the open source ones currently SUCK and with Steam being ported we need non-sucky graphics drivers now ). This means allowing proprietary kernelspace drivers for devices, support for Apple devices and software, and supporting Steam as a lever into the desktop market.
Here's the best part though: Microsoft gets exponentially weaker for every linear increase in Linux market share. Why? Because they are currently a monopoly because their office suite only runs on their operating system (it runs like shit on Mac, and if you notice, Apple has put a lot of effort into their own native office suite that can read/write Microsoft formats), IIS, Exchange, and AD servers only run on Windows (although Samba is finally getting good enough to be a legitimate replacement). Without their office format lockin, they cannot maintain their monopoly in operating systems, and without their monopoly, they cannot maintain their office format lockin. So for every percentage point Linux increases, the long-term effects of this decrease Microsoft's power (and percentage) exponentially until they will become just another software vendor that support open and honest standards that don't get ramrodded through ISO (I'm glaring at you OOXML). They know this, however, and so they are trying to keep their monopoly with Windows 8 by starting their own app store. Steam obviously doesn't like being locked out of that market, so Valve is expanding to other operating systems in case they get locked out of Windows.
And that's why Linux currently has a golden opportunity with Steam that is literally being dropped in their collective lap. But the lack of decent low-power hardware support (DMA-BUF), PulseAudio generally sucking it up in terms of latency and software mixing (gee, maybe the two are related), and the complaints that Steam is just DRM (yeah, so? It's DRM that many people think is a fair tradeoff, and allowing people the freedom to run it on their Linux systems seems to be a win for everybody except for people who want all software and media to be free, if you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to install it).
And before you start attacking me for not understanding the issues, I use Linux on my home media server, on my ass-old laptop, on my desktop, within WebOS on my HP Touchpad, on my router (DD-WRT, I love you Buffalo), on my Beagleboard (as a server, on a robot, and for low-power cluster benchmarking), and even at work (where I am not an IT employee, I actually use Linux to get non-Linux and non-software development related work done). The only thing I consistently use Windows for is gaming, where all of my games are through Steam for the express reason that when Steam comes out for Linux all of my licenses will effortlessly transfer so I can run the same games on Linux. I have developed software that tried to fix the issues I listed, and I try to understand copyright and patent law and how it applies to open source software and hardware development. It's a pretty low debate tactic to continually claim that your opponent just doesn't understand the issues, so please don't do that.
Sorry, this kind of turned into a rant and I'll probably be downvoted to hell for it, but fuck it, it needs to be said. |
An artist
When was the last time you saw an artist lobbying for stricter copyright protections, colluding with ISPs to implement draconian anti-piracy systems, or conducting mass lawsuits against thousands of people? Sure, artists benefit from copyright law, but lately, it's been wielded almost exclusively as a hammer by middleman corporations. Record labels, film and TV studios, publishers; these corporations are scared to death of the power the Internet gives the common man to break their control over our culture's media. They fight back with copyright law.
Today's copyright debates are not about artists. They are about the corporations that benefit so strongly from the intellectual monopoly of copyright. Do not mislead readers by implying that copyright law exists to benefit artists.
> has every right
Despite the name, copyright protections are a privilege , not a right . An artist (not middleman corporation) does not have a human right to not have his publicly released music endlessly copied over a global communications system designed exactly to facilitate the easy copying and distribution of information.
> to stop people from using
So is this part an attack on fair use, or what? Are you saying that exceptions to copyright protections should not exist at all?
> their own creations.
Everything you have ever created is a derivative of something that already existed. The same is true for me, the same is true for the people who are reading the comment, the same is true for everyone. There are no creative works, only derivative works. Incidentially, this is why we need a strong public domain -- so we can freely derive our own works from those that really impact us -- and it's why Sonny Bono and related copyright extensions are such a big deal. We aren't too far from the point where the public domain will have been largely closed off for a century . An artist that does not value the public domain has never had one. |
these corporations are scared to death of the power the Internet gives the common man to break their control over our culture's media. They fight back with copyright law.
They're scared because people like you pirate everything the second it gets released (not 14 years like the original copyright in the constitution). They lose money and they have every right to make money off of it and to protect their property. Small artists need copyright or else big corporations or funded people can take their work and "get rid of the artist".
>Today's copyright debates are not about artists. They are about the corporations that benefit so strongly from the intellectual monopoly of copyright. Do not mislead readers by implying that copyright law exists to benefit artists.
There is no monopoly because IT BELONGS TO THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE. Oh look I created a drawing and I'm making money off of it. Here you come saying, "HEY YOU! You're a monopoly, give me your design right now so I can use it and make money off of it!".
>Despite the name, copyright protections are a privilege, not a right. An artist (not middleman corporation) does not have a human right to not have his publicly released music endlessly copied over a global communications system designed exactly to facilitate the easy copying and distribution of information.
Last time I checked, copyright was included in the Constitution. Just because it's not in the Bill of Rights, does not mean it isn't a right.
>Everything you have ever created is a derivative of something that already existed. The same is true for me, the same is true for the people who are reading the comment, the same is true for everyone. There are no creative works, only derivative works. Incidentially, this is why we need a strong public domain -- so we can freely derive our own works from those that really impact us -- and it's why Sonny Bono and related copyright extensions are such a big deal. We aren't too far from the point where the public domain will have been largely closed off for a century. An artist that does not value the public domain has never had one.
This is the most BS I've ever heard. I can create original works and so can everyone else. This is your pathetic excuse? |
Even with everything that's happened, pirating this game will only make things worse down the road when they release the next sequel. EA just sees pirates as potential sales, if you really want to contribute to forcing EA/Maxis away from this bullshit, do no play this game. Forget it exists, play some other city building game, spend time with loved ones or become the next superhero. I don't care, but pirating is the reason we've been given always on DRM. |
Significant computation" that could be done on the computer its running on.
Source:
Diablo
Diablo 2
Borderlands
Borderlands 2
Fate
Torchlight
Torchlight 2
Titan Quest
And the thousands of other offline games with random world and/or loot generation. |
So in order to get this malware you have to:
Enable side loading of apps (disabled by default, permanently disabled on AT&T devices iirc), which you would only have done if you knew what a .apk file is in the first place.
Open a bad E-mail on your phone.
Open the attachment that comes with a suspicious e-mail.
Click the "install" button like you are sideloading an app.
Depending on the malware, you may have to open the app. |
Whether it increases or decreases the cost of a device depends on what it replaces. On the XBox One, for example, it appears they are using it as a cache for the unified system RAM-- allowing them to use less-expensive DDR3. Sony's PS4 lacks the high-speed eDRAM cache, so they've gone with 8GB of GDDR5 as their system RAM.
Same with Intel's efforts-- if the eDRAM pool makes the iGPU fast enough to get rid of discrete GPUs, that will be a reduction in cost. |
It's hard to post about this and not bring up current/recent events. This is not a partisan rant so don't even go there. Just take a moment to hear me out.
This whole government needs to protect us (from each other and everything) has moved into a new phase. It's literally turning into a real life version of minority report. If they feel you could be a threat in the future they are going to get you. This is no tinfoil hat moment. This is really happening.
If you missed it, you can see Obama talking about a lot of this during a speech while standing in front of the United States Constitution [here]( This is some scary shit my friends.
People are up in arms over what Edward Snowden released. They want to argue about his character and not discuss what is actually going on in our government and intelligence agencies. They built this system to build profiles on ordinary citizens. Not to stop terror attacks. Note Prism didn't help to stop the Boston bombings. Even if you don't have a favorable opinion of Snowden just pay close attention to whats going on.
When I talk to people about this subject they usually go into some left vs right tirade. But I bring up an individual they have never heard of and it seems to tone that down a bit.. Here goes..
For all of the people saying they are not looking at your personal data. This is how it works as described by a NSA whistle blower.
"It's a different entity. Instead of if being foreign surveillance it's now domestic. The real grad design is in every domain, think of a domain as an activity, a specific type of activity, phone call or banking transactions. So if you think of graphing each domain and turning each graph into a 3rd dimension the trick now is to map through all the domains in that 3rd dimension pulling together all of the attributes that any individual has in every domain so that now they can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out to show your entire life over time."
William Binney was a NSA agent for nearly 40 years. Considered one of the greatest mathematicians and code crackers in our intelligence community Helping to bring down the USSR with a program he created called [Stellar Wind]( William Binney was a hero for outing Cheny, Wolfowitz, Tenent and Rumsfeld under Bush. With proof that they were subverting the Constitution with his program.
I don't think there can be anyone more "American" that someone that helped to defeat the USSR and end the cold war.
Lastly I will come back to Snowden because this quote falls in line with what Mr Binney reviled under Bush.
"You don't have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion form somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you're ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis. To sort of derive suspicion from all innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer." - Edward Snowden 2013 |
I think there's more to it than meets the eye. It's not as simple as it's underhanded and clandestine and shitty and generally craps on our rights. I'm not naive enough to think this is so we can listen in to foil terrorist plots or even to identify the bad guys lurking in the shadows. It's not about what could happen today or tomorrow, it's about whats going to happen 5 or 10 years from now.
This is a preemptive strike. And it's been going on for a while. The gov't has come to realize that there is one foe they will really never have a grip on. And those are the ones whose words are spoken in 1's and 0's. In much the same way that the pirates always seem to be one step ahead of the MPAA and the RIAA. All the gov'ts fear Anonymous and Wikileaks as general examples. As there are more Mannings, Snowdens, and Assanges they have more to lose because the status quo gets harder to maintain. The powers that be have wised up to the fact that the "wars" of the not too distant future will be fought, at least partially on a digital battlefield. In that battle, information is ammunition and he with the most bullets will win. Sort of how they say that history is written by the victors. This is Minority Report in action folks. With enough data on anyone, actions become predictable with much more accuracy. If you know which bird to stifle before the squawking gets too loud, you effectively deny the resistance a chance to resist. This has gone on within politics since the beginning. (Watergate as an example) Information is a weapon, its currency. It's everything. They won't need bombs to win when it's a war of attrition.
I apologize for being so long winded and I really don't know how to |
Breakdown from Newegg on parts:
GPU: MSI R9 270 GAMING 2G (V305) Radeon R9 270 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 HDCP Ready CrossFireX $179.99
PSU: Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus - 700W Power Supply $79.99
Ready made box: AMD A10-5800K Trinity 3.8GHz Quad-Core APU (CPU+GPU) with Radeon HD 7660D, MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 A75 HDMI USB 3.0 Micro ATX Motherboard, CORSAIR 4GB DDR3 1333 Memory & Rosewill MicroATX Case with 300W Power Supply $259.99
HD: Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive $64.99
So the main components come to a total of $584.96 before tax/shipping. Now this is going off of what was the mid-priced AMD pre-assembled combo. Swapping the PSU and putting in the same GPU puts you at about $85 more than the iBuyPower box. Since they don't identify which AMD CPU they're putting in there we probably can bet on it being even lower power than this example. In fact I'd bet on a lower quality PSU, memory and who knows how much storage they're throwing in there. |
I think by definition hardcore gamers are people who enjoy pulling the most depth out of their games and by extension playing games that are by their very nature "deep". I like Cheetos as much as the next guy, but they have nothing to do with my particular brand of "hardcore". To me, hardcore is breeding competition ready Pokémon on the bus to and from work, and battling competitively when I get home. It's knowing each ones tier, move pool and stat distribution, and honing my ability to forecast the meta and the average competitor's actions when dealing with my team and exploiting it. Battlefield and COD have an entirely different appeal, and "hardcore". There is so much less depth to those games, and while great skill goes into becoming great, they still are shells of what console gaming used to mean. The argument against the PS4bone1 in this case is that they're an awkward in between PC that offer much less in terms of console exclusiveness and "hardcore" appeal than previous iterations. Console gaming the way I remember it, that is, as a completely separate entity from PC gaming, is going by the way side. And it's criticisms towards Nintendo's actions and "hardcores" like yours that our contributing to the problem. |
No, you clearly understand very little.
All this shit takes resources that for the most part are better spent here on earth.
Getting into space is extremely costly and takes incredible human effort.
So if we are going to risk those resources in space we damn well better make sure we do our best to recoup the investment and that means risk mitigation.
The story is the same for pretty much all resource intensive projects.
This author completely misses this point by trying to compare space exploration to low cost risk aversion were failing is not nearly as costly. |
Wow... do you not understand how space exploration nor money works? Let me write some patronizing words and maybe you will learn better.
First we need a shit ton of humans building space stuff, that takes time and materials that have opportunity costs. If you lose a space shuttle that is a huge material and time loss.
Second, money may not be finite, but the value of money is finite. Its called inflation. Money is a proxy for resources, not just material resources but also intangibles like human capital, which means it represents a fixed amount of value. That value can grow or shrink which imposes different conditions on the monetary supply.
For example, suppose we gain $40 billion of value per day that means we can print $40 billion a day without effecting inflation.
However, you are flat wrong on your ass if you think the US prints $40 billion net new dollars a day. Their is a total of $1.2ish trillion USD in circulation, much of it outside of the US. If the US printed $40b a day that would equate to over 14 trillion dollars a year, which is 10x the current money in circulation and would probably equate to hyper inflation. And that would mean dollars are valueless, but I still seem to be able to buy stuff which means they are not valueless. |
I guess you just ignored the part where he ran it on his real page for his real youtube channel and got a ton of fake likes. |
I hate the rep Napoleon gets. Much of the negative stuff around him is because of the anti-Napoleon stuff put out by his enemies.
He helped unite France, and established a system of laws known as the napoleonic code that are the basis for many law systems today.
He promoted religious tolerance. He abolished feudalism. He helped create the metric system. He was one of the greatest commanders in human history (seriously, he's up there with Caesar). He helped France hold off pretty much every country in Europe invading it, and then spread the empire into those countries. Inside the conquered countries he spread the reforms of tolerance and getting rid of feudalism.
Look up the French revolutionary army. Other European nations had been attacking France over and over again to try and take back power for their noble relatives. Napoleon took over and took the fight to them. Yes a lot of people died in the napoleonic wars, but it wasn't like Napoleon was the root cause of this. He wasn't Hitler of the early 1800s.
Seriously, people need to read up on him
>Bonaparte instituted lasting reforms, including higher education, a tax code, road and sewer systems, and established the Banque de France (central bank). He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with the Catholic Church, which sought to reconcile the mostly Catholic population to his regime. It was presented alongside the Organic Articles, which regulated public worship in France. Later that year, Bonaparte became President of the French Academy of Sciences and appointed Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre its Permanent Secretary.
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>The development of the code was a fundamental change in the nature of the civil law legal system with its stress on clearly written and accessible law. Other codes ("Les cinq codes") were commissioned by Napoleon to codify criminal and commerce law; a Code of Criminal Instruction was published, which enacted rules of due process
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>The Napoleonic code was adopted throughout much of Europe, though only in the lands he conquered, and remained in force after Napoleon's defeat. Napoleon said: "My true glory is not to have won forty battles...Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. ... But...what will live forever, is my Civil Code."
Dude was a good leader.
He, for the most part, did very good things for the average person.
He conquered his enemies and helped get the common man out of serfdom which was basically its own form of slavery.
He helped establish what would become nation states as we know them.
His reforms helped shape civil law for Europe for centuries to come.
He's not the short easily angered tyrant he's portrayed as. (For the record he was actually above average height for the time period)
Problem is is that since he wasn't a noble, and he made enemies of other European nobles by threatening their hold on the power over the commoners, many of those nobles spread anti-Napoleon propaganda.
Sure he was unelected, and took power in a coup, but he helped bring order to the chaos.
What gives nobles a right to rule just because they were born into a good family?
Here is a man who worked his way up to being the Emperor of France, conquerer of most of Europe. He held an empire that stretched to Egypt. One only rivaled by something like rome or Alexander. Not only that, but he worked his way into power by gaining support from a bunch of the French twice
He threatened the kings hold on power, and he paid for it with how he was remembered.
I wish he had been successful in Russia. He couldn't have been any worse than the fucking inbred dipshit Tsars that caused the deaths of millions while they lived in luxury. The Russian revolution happened for a reason.
He couldn't have been any worse than the nobles that jerked each other off for the next hundred years. All pretty much related. Fighting wars and sending the common man to die for their squabble with their inbred fuckstick of a cousin. Killing tens of millions in their colonies. Dicking around until a long time later WWI broke out (many of the leaders in WWI were related. Both the allies and central powers had relations crossing over) and finally started to dissolve the royals hold of power over Europe.
I wish he had been successful.
Who took over after he was gone? Another fucking cuntstick king
We could use a leader like Napoleon again. A man that can unite his country. Reform it for the better. Defeat those that had previously attacked his country. Spread tolerance for others. Reform the conquered areas just like he reformed France
He gets a bad reputation because his enemies were the ones that wrote the history books. |
Yeah but the unelected kings and nobles that ruled the rest of Europe during that time period were A-okay
Napoleon was an emperor.
Sure he took power in a coup in the chaos, but he helped reform France and put an end to feudalism. He helped promote religious tolerance.
European nobles had been trying to invade France for years before Napoleon took over. He took the fight back to them and kicked their asses.
He brought those reforms to the conquered areas too.
He ruled an empire that stretched from France to Egypt. He was one of the greatest commanders to ever live.
He emancipated the Jews and Protestants and helped get the Jews out of the ghettos they were forced in.
Napoleon was soooooo much better than Hitler.
It's not a contest between a democratically elected govt and a dictatorship. It was between an unelected King and an unelected Emperor.
Under the king you continue being a serf under the nobles heel. Under the Emperor you get your whole country reformed by a man who came from basically no noble beginnings and he gained a ton of supporters and followers because of his views, and he helps make you not a serf anymore.
Who replaced him? A fucking King again.
If Napoleon had won he'd be considered one of the greatest leaders in the history of mankind.
I wish he had won. Honestly, do you really think that the common Russian person was better off under the Tsars? Do you think the common European was better off under the heel of the nobles?
Do you really think that the napoleonic code was a bad thing? Think that religious tolerance was a bad thing?
No. Napoleon was the anti-Hitler. Hitler invaded countries that didn't attack Germany and killed the Jews. Hitler was an idiot militarily and got in the way of his generals.
Napoleon conquered countries that had tried attacking his for years. He united his people after the chaos of the revolution (look up the reign of terror). He promoted tolerance for Jews Muslims and Protestants in countries that were formerly all under the catholic fist at the time. He was an amazing general.
The only problem was he lost.
If he had won he'd be seen in a much much much much much much better light.
History is written by the victors. What do you think the nobles in power are going to do to the legacy of a man that threatened their grip on power. Threatened their grip on the common man. A man that came from a small island in the Med defeated almost all of them and built a great empire. They aren't going to allow someone like that to be portrayed in a positive light. It could threaten their "right to rule by birth" mentality. It'd make them look bad to the common person.
They spread propaganda against him, and retook their grip on Europe. A grip that wouldn't be let go until WWI many decades and many many deaths later. |
On the Internet, every website loads at the same rate as any other website.
This is of course not true. Any number of factors may come into play. Is the server extremely busy? Is the local network it's on having a switching problem? Is the network it's on saturated? Is it's connection to the Internet (typically from a higher Tier ISP sometimes called a Network Service Provider) fast enough to handle it's peak traffic? (Typically you know it's time to upgrade soon if you start going above 75%.). Who does your NSP peer with and how fast are those connections? What are the paths to end user ISPs (your Comcasts and Verizons) and how fast are those connections? How and where is Quality of Service being used?
All things are already not equal and differ as technical and financial needs require. Buy the bandwidth you can afford, and stretch what you have with technical means if you can't. If you have a 1TB monthly volume limit on that virtual server you have that runs a website and you can't afford to increase it and need a way to spread out (maybe you hit 1TB 25 days into the month) you run your own traffic shaping on the server just to slow it down a little. Or if you're charged on the 95th percentile and want to keep your server from going over 20Mb/s.
And this doesn't just apply to websites, but since you mention it, it's perfectly ok for a provider (at any tier) to shape (and give priority to) traffic based on type of traffic. On a busy network, many outfits will give priority to UDP (improves DNS resolution so it looks like pages start to load faster and most online games use UDP) and RTP (for VoIP) for example, but slow down P2P.
And that's ok and normal and responsible network management.
What's not ok of course is artificially creating fast lanes or purposefully slowing traffic based on where it's coming from or going to. I say that having been in a position where I was responsible for off campus student housing networks and we gave priority to traffic to the university network so our customers [who were students] needed to be able to access resources, submit homework, stream class content, etc. Was this a "fast lane?" Probably, yes. But it was not something we charged anyone for - it was a technical solution to our efforts to make our service "not suck" for our customers.
Enabled natural monopolies like the cable providers have no incentive to Do the Right Thing of course, and Net Neutrality will keep them and other providers in their place if we can convince the FCC to Do the Right Thing too, but please don't take away my ability as a network provider (well, I'm not in that industry anymore) to manage my network as I see fit. You'll have to pull CBWFQ and WRED from my cold dead fingers before I'll let you do that. |
Also its a stupid fucking analogy because UPS can just deliver the packages at the door or have people pick it up. Were not going to get anywhere dissecting this analogy.
The point is- Verizon gives people internet access. Netflix provides a service on the internet. If that service is popular, and you cant provide it at a reasonable speed- People should leave your service.
The problem comes in when we basically have legalized price fixing, and monopolies. We need to break up Comcast and Verizon. Every area should have no less than 3-4 choices for broadband. AND we as a nation should start investing our tax dollars in fixing and improving our infrastructure.
Just imagine... if we took a fraction of our defense spending from two frivolous wars and put it into making a nation wide fiber and wireless network. Imagine the commercial opportunities and the economic growth we would experience. Hell- the jobs making that new UTILITY would put a serious dent in our unemployment. |
There are good competitors to windows namely linux. It's just hasn't gotten the mass appeal on the desktop. I think hating on microsoft is all good and dandy until you start to see the alternatives. Android which is a linux based operating system has a total google integration. Sure you can use it without a google account by the experience can sometimes be limited and the vast majority of users won't be able/care to not have their entire activity online and offline transmitted to google and other software vendors.
The cellphone market created dystopian garden environments and users not only don't resist they ask to replicate it on the desktop. The smartphone made privacy not matter, online services started being more and more "cloud based" and the internet is starting to be more centralized. Single endpoints started having all of this concentrated information about millions of users at a time. Government surveillance programs with far reaching consequences have been revealed left and right in recent years yet people are not aware just how much they are pushed into those directions by their OS decisions. Browser based OS's and other completely web integrated environments makes it so you can never be truly offline if you don't take deliberate effort to try and disconnect and even than you're not safe.
See this lecture . Where are we now? How many data mining companies have been created since the smartphone took over everything and facebook and social network in general has become much more than just a way for people to talk to each other. |
Also note that popular ad blockers like AdBlock+ have a specific whitelist of advertisements (they were paid for the privilege by ad companies themselves).
[And here's the handwaving text they use to allow this.]( |
I think Obama was a solid case of getting to Washington (yes I know he was already there) and wanting to change things, then learning very quickly that shit was going to be super hard for his administration if he didn't play the game, so he made the easy choice. |
Basically they are going to charge high bandwidth subscription based service providers like Netflix, XBOX LIVE, PS+, HULU, etc. more to transmit their data to end users and then classifying the rest of the Internet data transmitted as a class two service provider.
It will be viewed as a compromise but ISPs will come out on top & they will continue to screw & overcharge customers for the services they provide.
It's an early proposal, so it could certainly change, but don't count on it. |
It" meaning what, exactly? Neither this clickbait piece of crap "article" nor the only slightly more informative Guardian article it links to has, in whole or in part, any leaked document in it - just a sprinkling of people vaguely reacting to an alleged draft.
Where's the document, or at least some relevant portion of it, how was it obtained, how close is it perceived to be to a final draft, etc., etc. ? The Guardian pieces just contain deeper and deeper links to similarly uninformative articles, each one of course plastered with ads. |
I suggest starting a tilt to sue the FCC if they do not follow thru with what 3.7 million people want.
On what grounds? You can't just sue because they issue a decision you're not happy with. First of all [you have to have standing]( You have to prove that their actions have harmed you in a quantifiable way. If you don't have that, you don't even have the beginnings of a case.
Sure, perhaps a company like Netflix might have standing eventually, but I don't see how any of us do.
Also, even if you're harmed by it, I'm not sure the FCC even can be sued. Just like if Congress passes a law that (for example) destroys your business, you can't sue them even though you can prove that the law caused you economic harm.
I'd like an attorney to chime in here. |
A BILL
To prohibit Federal agencies from mandating the deployment of vulnerabilities in data security technologies.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Secure Data Act of 2014’’.
SEC. 2. PROHIBITION ON DATA SECURITY VULNERABILITY MANDATES.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in subsection (b), no agency may mandate that a manufacturer, developer, or seller of covered products design or alter the security functions in its product or service to allow the surveillance of any user of such product or service, or to allow the physical search of such product, by any agency.
(b) EXCEPTION.—Subsection (a) shall not apply to mandates authorized under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (47 U.S.C. 1001 et seq.).
(c) DEFINITIONS.—In this section—
(1) the term ‘‘agency’’ has the meaning given
the term in section 3502 of title 44, United States Code; and
(2) the term ‘‘covered product’’ means any computer hardware,
computer software, or electronic device that is made available to the general public.
Do we have any lawyers willing to |
Shit like this actually makes me enraged enough to go out and vote.
Good, you should be voting :) Ignore people who say "both sides are the same" because they aren't, and even if they were, we need representation from a younger voting bloc. As in, when no one young votes, they think "Why bother even trying to appeal to these younger people? They don't vote! Why even listen to their opinions?"
> Something about the Party System itself seems incredibly easy to manipulate and corrupt
All governments tend towards corruption; in terms of historical precedent, the U.S. has a very long run going... but it isn't going to last much longer unless we right the ship.
In part due to the corruptible nature of government, our more conservative-leaning thinkers have recently been pushing harder than ever for drastic reductions in the size and scope of government, primarily via defunding. However, I think this approach, at least in the current extreme, is fundamentally misguided. The problem with not funding the government with taxes is that the funding ends up coming from somewhere else; the private sector. But that pretty much means the private sector is their 'boss'; it's writing their paychecks. Regulators can't get anything done without the blessing of their regulatees, due to money woes. So Regulator and regulatee cut "deals" to get things done, some of them very cozy. But if the regulator had the proper "teeth", they wouldn't have to bow down to their regulatees. The relationship between Regulator and Regulatee should be as parent to child; the regulatee doesn't have much leverage and regulator knows best. Our government has become like Cartman's mom trying to control Cartman (the private sector).
Regulators need the resources to do their job, and their funding should come from public sources. Then, and only then, they answer to voters instead of their supposed regulatees.
But instead, we have more pressure to defund than ever. One cause is increased fear-of-government; granted, our concerns with the NSA are extremely valid, but they are irrelevant to how we regulate industry... but still, people want to "kill government". We have a huge amount of "the government cannot, and will never be able to do anything right" propaganda, much of which coming from the regulatees who want more than anything for this defunding to continue, so that they enslave their regulators with their paycheck; becoming their bosses and capturing government. And it's working. |
Basically I had read somewhere on reddit that calling the offices of your politicians (local and state) doesn't really do anything as it is usually a staffer who takes down the calls and will just inform the politician about who called about what and that's pretty much the end of it.
However, staffers/PR people, will take big notice to the 'Letter to the Editor' section and clip these out when compiling press hits about their politician and forward these to the politician who will usually read them as they are huge red flags in their eyes when this "letter to the editor" is now published in a local newspaper that can be quickly circulated if it's on a hot button issue like the Comcast/TWC merger to other newspapers around the country and posted online as well.
The more people who do this then the bigger the fire. The bigger the fire, the bigger the smoke plumes which can be seen from further and further away. |
Actually, they aren't just using existing batteries. It is their own special blend of electrolyte. They also remove the individual PTCs and pressure vent from each cell and instead use a small fuse wire, liquid cooling, and two different intumescent epoxies with different phase change temperatures inside of each battery module. This let's them remove a lot of the cost from the battery packs while still providing protection from thermal runaways and internal dendrite growth that can puncture the cell membrane inside the cell and cause shorts. |
Still, $3 million out of $50 billion is 0.006% of all money being spent acquiring pilots and TV shows.
In other words, if you took 1% of what cable companies spend acquiring TV shows, pilots, etc., wholly black-owned production companies are receiving less than 1% of that . That's pretty incredible, considering there's only about a thousand cable channels that could be picking up these kinds of shows to air. |
Might be a good idea. However, there are some risks to any person bringing such a lawsuit. Though there may be more risks, I can think of at least two. First, if the person sues Comcast for breach of the contract the person has with Comcast and loses, that person may become liable for the legal fees incurred by Comcast. This depends on whether the contact has a provision awarding legal fees to the prevailing party. Second, many jurisdictions award legal fees to parties who must defend against lawsuits that are frivolous, groundless, or vexatious. Thus, you must have an actual claim. Otherwise, you might end being responsible for the legal fees. With that said, have fun and happy ligating. |
Yay! now rootkits can really dig in there good and I'm sure the extra code won't carry its own risks.
It also very helpfully obsoletes the hundreds of thousands of dollars businesses spend on Clustering and High Availability.
Outside of consumer grade electronics this isn't that great. Even in the consumer space, do YOU really want your cell carrier to inject kernel modules to take over your phone completely silently and on the fly? See my first comment about YAY! rootkits! |
When Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web, he set things up so that you could click on a link and go to that page to read more about whatever you clicked on. The system expected that if the server existed, and you and it were both connected to the web, you could access that page. The web has been based on neutrality since day one.
Fast forward a number of years, and in 2002 Comcast lobbied the FCC to change broadband internet access to be an information service which is not regulated. The FCC agreed, and broadband was no longer considered a telecommunications service subject to rules like common carrier - "you don't own the data you're carrying on behalf of your customer, and thus can't destroy it or send it to Antarctic just because you don't like it."
In 2008 or so, Comcast was caught blocking access to bittorrent, and throttling voice over IP traffic from to and from its customers - so long as their customers were using a competitive VOIP service like Vonage. If they paid more and got Comcast's VOIP service instead, their data didn't get throttled. The FCC fined them for blocking bittorrent, but the court hearing the case rightly agreed that as an information service, the FCC couldn't apply common carrier rules. Despite being thrown out, the fine caused some changes in ISP behavior, and things kind of went back to normal for a while.
The FCC created the Open Internet Ruleset in 2010 which applied very basic regulations to prevent anti-competitive behavior by ISPs - who control access to the internet, and even more importantly, have a terminating access monopoly over you, the potential customer of any web-based business. This ruleset was based on the idea that the FCC could still regulate "information service" internet access through what was known as thier "ancillary powers" to spread broadband. Most people doubted this plan would stand up in court, and Verizon sued. Verizon won in 2010, and the Open Internet ruleset was struck down, the judge saying in the ruling that since the FCC classified ISPs as information services, they couldn't regulate them.
During that time, Telus, a Canadian ISP got into a fight with their worker's union, and blocked access to the union website for all of their customers. DoCoMo in India started selling website access in pre-defined packages, just like cable channel packages. This would make starting a new website much harder, as you'd have to contract with DoCoMo in order to get your new site included in one of their packages - and then do the same for every other ISP in the world. A huge barrier to entry for new business, and fundamentally breaking Berners-Lee's design for the Web.
At the same time, Comcast and Verizon and AT&T had all started video streaming services. These services were generally similar to, but more expensive than, Netflix's service. Suddenly, Netflix's performance began to get worse, eventually becoming unusable for many people. Netflix offered free caching servers to ISPs so that Netflix traffic wouldn't take up so much of their bandwidth, but most major ISPs refused. Instead, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon demanded that Netflix pay for access to their internet customers, on top of the internet access those customers and Netflix already paid. In other words, demanding they pay for that terminating access monopoly to the user. Finally Netflix caved and began paying the fee, and within weeks all the "congestion" slowing the traffic down disappeared. It was later discovered that the congestion and slowness was purposefully created in order to make it appear that Netflix was clogging up the internet, when in fact the ISPs were routing traffic through specific overloaded switches instead of doing their best to minimize the problem in order to make the case for the extra fees.
So within the 13 years that major ISPs had free reign to alter how the web worked, they blocked services and throttled competing services to gain competitive advantage. Internationally, major ISPs have blocked political traffic and tried to turn the internet into a cable network. This FCC action to reclassify ISPs as telecommunications services returns ISPs to common carrier status, where, as Tim Berners-Lee put it:
( |
You make an extremely good point. Here's the deal. As long as the free market owns the internet, anyone/everyone has a way to find their way onto the internet in whatever way they and the provider (who could be the next door neighbor) see fit to agree on. As soon as the government owns the internet, or healthcare, you become only able to have what government has deemed "fair", and of course fairness means eventually taking from those who have and giving to those who haven't joined the give and take of the free market. This here the reason "net neutrality". It's not "fair" if someone PAYS for stupid fast internet, if everyone cant HAVE stupid fast internet. So, government's solution is to rob choice from everyone and make it so everyone has the same regardless of wealth, ingenuity, hard work, OR lack thereof.
Same reason, by the way, its getting harder and harder to convince the SMARTEST people to become doctors, they wont be ALLOWED to make huge $ as a Dr., so, they'll dig for oil, or something the super smart are still allowed to make big $. |
and how many people don't watch the news at all but still answered that poll? "well I get a newspaper delivered to my door, so I guess that's where I get my news", or, "well I don't watch the news, but If I wanted to I'd probably turn on CNN, so I guess that's where I get my news". also a lot of people probably consider something like "the daily show" to be their news source, and even if they're watching it on Hulu they called it a TV or cable source.
also, there are probably a lot of people who watch the news or read the paper in the morning, then spend the rest of the day monitoring the news online, but don't consider it their "primary source" even though they are spending more time and consuming more content via the internet, they still like to think the newspaper or the morning news is more "official" and therefore their primary source |
it also explains the rates of violent crime and illiteracy, degenerative neurological disorders, bone disease...
It builds up in your bones for years, and is released slowly as bones have very low cell turnover. Lead causes the formation of free radicals, electrically charged molecules which latch onto the precision machinery and alter the delicate chemistry in your cells.
It interferes with most of the enzymes it encounters. Each atom of lead that enters your body damages each structure it bonds with. Since it's stored in your blood, bones, teeth, brain, spleen, kidneys, liver, and lungs, these structures tend to be fairly important for basic life function.
It interferes with learning, causes programmed cell death in neurons, causes aggression by impairing the development of the cortices that regulate emotion and mood in infants exposed to trace levels of lead...
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. ^^^^^^^^^^Here's ^^^^^^^^^^where ^^^^^^^^^^I ^^^^^^^^^^lose ^^^^^^^^^^most ^^^^^^^^^^of ^^^^^^^^^^you
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In researching this comment, I found papers and articles describing blood lead levels in children of various races in the 70s and 80s. Lead poisoning overwhelmingly affected nonwhite children back then. It was only in the poorest communities that white children had anywhere near the levels that any random black child had.
Marketing, media, news... It all feeds that same concept: you're incomparably different from anyone else, and you need to posses this material wealth to achieve it.
When you zone out in front of the television, your brain is on hard autopilot. When you drive your daily commute, when you don't need to dedicate your total awareness to something, and your mind wanders.
(digression about perception, biology, psychology)
Your brain processes every pixel your eyes detect. Every time the lights dim or the wind blows the trees outside, that's detected, analyzed, and organized by a system you're unable to communicate with directly.
Why?
Because you're stuck thinking in words. Your brain understands words, sure. It also recognizes every bird call, every bark of every dog, the make, model, color, year, and condition of every vehicle you see. You just can't correlate that directly to something you can blurt out. It's all there, it's just not organized.
The organization of those stimuli into tactics, predictions, heuristics, THAT is what your brain was evolved for. It's coordinating the organization of vast quantities of abstract concepts with equally vast quantities of concrete measurements.
That blurry, half-assed, kludged and hacked together thing you call consciousness arose naturally from DNA saying "I'm tired of all these fucking gankers" and taking a patient, higher order approach.
which we immediately fucked up. Now we're killing stuff before we even see it. We're killing dangerous animals in places we'll never go. Why? Coz it's what we evolved to do.
In the meantime, the rest of the DNA on the planet thinks we're total jerks.
And we are! We totally are!
(/digression about evolution, consciousness, human nature)
We sell food you shouldn't eat to people too addicted to stop eating it, and we say it's their right to buy it and the company's right to sell it to them.
We go to the store and see that we can't afford the good one we saw on television, so we buy the cheap one that does the same thing with cheaper methods. Cribs made of wood treated with lead and cadmium. Painted with lead and cadmium.
McDonalds' chinese suppliers cut corners by using heavy metals. Walmart's suppliers, too. Lead in garden hoses. Lead in christmas lights. Lead in collectible drinking glasses and children's toys.
When people go out and say things like "lead is bad for you" it doesn't carry with it the implication of why.
LEAD ISN'T BAD FOR YOU, IT'S BAD FOR SOCIETY |
So I live in the UK. We have weekly trash and recycling collections. So we have 3 bins. One for regular waste, one for general recycling and one for food recycling. It works well, and since they forcibly cut down the size of regular waste bins, people are recycling more and more. Easy answer: have a system like this, and also allow e-waste in the general recycling bags. It's already lots of different kinds so has to be sorted anyway. For larger items such as big TVs, you could just have a call out system as we do here.
A sofa is a ridiculous comparison considering it's huge and needs a fair sized vehicle just to carry ONE. Plus people despose of electronics more often than sofas. Yes it's less often than trash, but that's why you induct it in to general recycling so there isn't a lorry coming out just to pick up old phones and printers.
Ewaste may not be a health risk. You know what it is? An environmental risk and a massive resource drain. If the nation didn't have a vested interest in fixing this issue we wouldn't be having this discussion. The reasons themselves are different from trash but the principle is the same. What matters isn't your silly sensibilities about what people should do, but what they demonstrably will do and how best to deal with that.
But hey, go ahead and cut off the nose to spite the face. I'm sure it'll make you feel better that these lazy people are suffering exactly nothing personally, and we lose out in larger terms. Flawless social outlook there, pal. |
Austin resident here & passionate about recycling. The problem with this resource is that it also mentions Best Buy as a place to drop off electronics for recycling. AFAIK there's no oversight on how the electronics get recycled. BBY could be selling the waste [almost positive this is the case] to a third party company that then does a quick sort of the valuable stuff and then ships the remainder of the e-waste to a third world country where it's dumped off for additional resource recovery. Unfortunately, the third world is not full of first world facilities so this next phase of resource recovery amounts to little more than burn and sniff tests, which I was appalled to learn about in this Ted Talk about Recycling by Mike Biddle ["We can recycle plastic"]( My concern is that the places we are encouraged to drop off our e-waste at are not accountable. My dilemma is that if BBY or Ecology Action of Texas are just dumping off waste to a third party, then it could end up in the third world who uses the burn and sniff. And if they're burning e-waste, then that's going to have a more immediate impact on our planet/health than if it were simply buried in our own landfills. |
Have you actually used a Mac?
I will respond to that by asking another question: Have you actually used a hackintosh? It sounds to me like every hackintosh basher's arguments come from pre-2005 era scenarios where you had to work for 2 weeks to get a system up and running. This is (for the third time) a tangential argument at best.
This is 2009 and today very few components of a regular PC are not supported (Intel wifi adapters and some SATA/IDE controllers come to mind) by OS X. Most computers today use intel processors and northbridge/southbridge, broadcom or atheros wifi adapters, nvidia, intel or ATi graphic cards and so on. The components are all pretty standardized and the (get this) same components are used in apple-branded computers too. It is possible to build component-by-component exact replica of a mac using hardware available off-the-shelf and get 100% compatibility with OS X without messing with any drivers at all - for a fraction of the cost of a real mac.
The only real differences are that with a mac you are guaranteed Apple support, and the OS comes pre-installed. The build quality is somewhat better and there is a style statement attached.
Needless to say, if the cost of owning Apple hardware comes down and becomes comparable to regular PCs, everyone including me, will prefer to buy them. For now, it is not too much (or any) hassle at all to buy a regular laptop or assemble a desktop (take care to avoid some incompatible components), buy a copy of leopard, make a pre-boot CD for use during installation, and have your fully functional OS X system within 30 minutes, for half the price, and virtually indistinguishable from real macs. Overall the installation experience is either the same or in some cases easier than installing Linux. |
Go through his history. He constantly bitches about digg, even when there's absolutely no context for it. I've run into him a number of times already. He never adds anything worthwhile to conversation.
Listen, I spent years on digg and the shit that people accuse the digg crowd of was simply not a rampant problem there to start with. I would say that without question, the biggest assholes there were the people who came from reddit just to start shit. People like kuzb. I did a lot of lurking on reddit but kept my commenting on digg, mainly because I didn't have time for two sites that served the same purpose. The traffic here has definitely increased but it was already trending upward well before digg imploded. There were certainly a number of people that switched allegiances when that happened but I can definitely say there's been a trend of apparently younger and younger people joining up lately. Or at least less and less mature. I see no reason to believe that had anything to do with digg though. I think it's more likely a symptom of reddit becoming more widely known and attracting a broader swath of the idiotic public.
If you're so hung up on needing a small and elitist version of reddit, take the fucking open source code and start your own version. Lock it down so you can control the people who are allowed to join. That is very much not the model that reddit works on though. I certainly wish the site would run a little more smoothly but the very last thing I'd want to see is some sort of bullshit circlejerk of assholes controlling who's allowed to talk and who isn't. |
Keep dancing on that landmine Netflix. The government just passed a law that allows them to cripple your business. |
I'd argue that AOL is a company that played a very large part in shaping what the internet is today. They are also still technically an ISP. So yes, this is an article about a business deal, but AOL still does relevant things with the internet, which is an ever-present and ever-growing piece of communications technology. Is it about a new and innovative piece of technology? Not really, but it's a non-blogspam article from a legitimate source discussing changes in a company that shaped the modern internet. I'd say it at least loosely qualifies as /r/technology material as long as it's about the business of technology and stays away from the huffington post politics side of it. |
It was a search engine.
In the days before Google, Yahoo was my primary search. Typically, when I was looking for something, I would have to go through several pages of results to find what I was looking for. If that didn't work I would try Alta Vista - sometimes the subject I was looking for was on the first page, other times I'd find it a few pages in, sometimes not at all (hence why it wasn't my first point of reference).
We're all now used to finding what we need as first hit on Google or on the top page of results (well, usually, at least), so my above statement might seem crazy if you weren't using the internet before (say) 2000.
But that was the way it was - Yahoo was this dot-com giant, and it was really entrenched in its way of doing things (every page had a banner ad across the top) and was highly invested (mentally, as much as anything) in the way that had driven it to success during the mid- to late-90s.
There was a really great article on Yahoo posted within the last few months, written by a guy who was a programmer there at the time, in which he talked about the mentality there. It really wasn't in Yahoo's interest to change things or be groundbreaking any more, because they were making piles of cash just the way they were. I can't find the article right now, but an example might be that there was no problem with them having the link you wanted on page 6 of the results, because everyone was using Yahoo anyway an it allowed them to show you 5 extra banner ads (this is just a made-up for-example - the article was much better and deeper).
The way the search landscape has changed in the first 10 years I was using the internet (1996 - 2006 - it's interesting that Google's position has been stable since then) is one of the things that makes me doubt anyone's ability to predict the future internet trends. Any time I hear someone say "nothing can compete with Facebook - it's established and it's the de-facto way people communicate" I just think how they said that kind of stuff about Yahoo in the late 90s. |
This is as annoying as people who say |
Check out cucumbertube.com. It pulls search results from multiple "tube" sites. It supports a bunch of search operators, which is cool, and it has a fuck-ton of categories. The nice thing about the categories is that they're really just pre-made search terms, and if you click on, say, Blue Eyes, it'll show up in the search box as:
"Blue Eye"|"Blue Eyed"|"Blue Eyes"|Blueeyed|Blueeyes
to make sure it grabs all the videos it can. It's also nice that they make categories like that because you can combine them at will, like if I wanted to search for blue-eyed secretaries who are NOT milfs giving handjobs to big-cocked men, I'd copy and paste each of the search terms for those categories into a single search and use the - sign in front of milf.
Example:
"Blue Eye"|"Blue Eyed"|"Blue Eyes"|Blueeyed|Blueeyes "hand job"|Handjob Secretary "Big Cock"|"Big dick" -MILF
That was an extreme example, and it returns zero results; but if you take out the "secretary" part you get a few. You can't really get SUPER specific and expect to find much. |
Awe look everyone! A non-engineer! Everyone wave at the nice person whose integrals don't involve the sinc function! |
There is not a single sentence in this article that isn't exaggerated.
I'm so disappointed I'm just going to go through it:
>LulzSec Leader Betrays All of Anonymous
And would you care to define who "All of Anonymous" is?
>the de facto King of Anonymous
Not only are the two groups are barely related, but the idea that Anonymous has any sort of governing structure, let alone a king, is idiotic.
>the most notorious and influential hacker alive today
Oh yeah because LulzSec is so active these days.
>The name Sabu should be familiar
It's not.
>legendary attacks
Everybody's already forgotten about them.
>Fox News reports
Journalistic standards right here.
>I've talked to Sabu multiple times, and on each occasion he's seemed more and more distant, to the point where it was hard to get in touch with him at all.
"But the real star of this article, guys, is me. The journalist. I'm important."
>Sabu has remained a hugely influential character atop a vast cult of personality.
Maybe it's because I'm not really in the hacker subculture, but somehow I really doubt this statement is even half true.
>Gizmodo.com
This is the biggest piece of bullshit on the whole page. |
The problem is that it brings the wrong kind of attention. When people see something like "Hackers take down FBI.gov!" they aren't taking the time to reflect on what caused that action and why people are upset, they just get scared of the dangerous hackers. Most people don't realize that DDoSing a government site is about as effective as spray-painting graffiti on the IRS building. They see it as scary hackers who are only a few mouseclicks away from stealing the social security number, credit card number and teenage daughters. It does nothing but alienate the public while barely inconveniencing the government agency.
(the story is somewhat different for DDoSes of comercial sites since it costs them money, but I still consider it to do more harm than good with the bad PR it generates). |
Isn't the whole point of anonymous that they are everyone and they are no one? Then why would this even matter? I don't get it. Wouldn't this cause non-anonymous hackers to join anonymous? I don't understand...
If you do something wrong and break the law, whether you are an evil greedy corporation, or a banker, or a baker, or a hacker, or the police, you should be brought to justice. What crimes is anonymous accused of anyways? don't they stand for good? I am so confused. |
Fallacy of the excluded middle! They're not talking about teaching coding instead of maths, they're talking about teaching coding during an ICT lesson instead of Microsoft Office, which most can do anyway.
When you say basics, what do you mean? Just reading, writing and arithmetic? People would complain if children left school unable to locate their own country on a map, can we safely assume that Geography, History etc. come under basic skills? What about basic social skills? Team work? Coping with failure? They seem like pretty fundamental skills too. So basics clearly doesn't just mean the three Rs in most people's minds. When you compare the merits of coding with basic maths rather than other ICT skills, are you saying that computers shouldn't be taught in schools at all?! That seems very shortsighted, given that they form a huge part of almost every job and clearly are at the forefront of the new economy. The world is rapidly changing, the jobs that most people are doing now didn't even exist thirty years ago. One thing is clear though; computers are going to form a massive part of the future, and we should be skating towards where the puck is going to be. Are you really suggesting this stuff isn't going to be relevant?
If you accept the necessity of teaching computing to young people, you're then stuck with the choice of whether the nature of that teaching involves the same repetitive Office based tasks in a way that doesn't progress or teach anything new from the ages 11-16, or whether you also teach a basic foundation in coding which gives them a better understanding of how computers actually work, trains them to think logically, and involves independent problem solving, troubleshooting and yes, any number of maths skills. It also would be a springboard for many to start coding at home.
This is clearly the way to go. The answer to the education problem is definitely not:
There are some children that leave school without learning basic math therefore all kids should learn nothing but basic math until this is solved.
Really?
So you want to hold everyone back to the level of the least performing student and you think this would in any way fix the education system?!? That's utter lunacy. How is that meant to instil a love of learning? There will always be children who perform worse than most (see any bell curve). Our education system should tailor specific programmes of work towards underachieving pupils, just as they should stretch the best achieving ones. It should certainly not overreact and dumb down the entire curriculum just to suit the least able pupils, as evidenced by the anecdotes of the sort of person who assumes the teenager they met who couldn't spell or add up must be representative of each and every young person!
At the beginning of the 80s, all the 8 bit computers allowed you to program in BASIC and loaded by default into BASIC from ROM. This gave even very young kids a great start in computers and it got many into coding. Now it's something that's hidden. We're in danger of losing that pioneering DIY spirit. Computers are becoming mysterious and incomprehensible. The drive for this change is coming from the private sector and Universities, not articles. The world is changing dramatically. If we don't adapt what we teach our young people, then other countries will.
I'm not clear how teaching the same basic skills over and over again when 80% of kids can already do them by age 11 is supposed to instil more of a love of "knowledge" than the creativity and independent problem solving involved in programming! There's also far more to learning than just plain knowledge. Knowledge is the gift of the educator and the author to hand out to the pupils. To create something from scratch, to overcome problems by yourself, to make something that would never existed were it not for you; that's something else entirely; it transforms the role of the learner from trusting receptor of other people's creations to a creator yourself. These are exactly the kind of skills that we're going to need. |
When I was in high school we had a decent teacher this was when they taught C++ the teacher was getting to old to teach it though. He had 3 classes he had to teach of about 30 kids and when they all have problems that they can’t debug themselves (or more realistically won’t debug it themselves) he just couldn’t do it and his quality of teaching went down. When I met him he was a very happy everyone can do well teacher, seeing him now is like seeing a beaten dog because kids took advantage of his good nature and would goof off do nothing not show up etc. Now I do have to say he wasn’t the best teacher for programming but he did give us opportunities to do what we like some people made console apps I learned a graphics library in C++ and made a full game all one file and such because I didn’t know object oriented because he didn’t know. If they want to teach coding in school you need to have teachers who care but aren’t afraid to say if you are goofing off get out and or fail them and actually are up to date with coding practices. I start teaching coding at the local high school soon(They call themselves the premiere school of arts and technology with no computer science at all) I am interested to see how I handle the students who just play flash games or don’t really want to be there. I think that programming in general is something people go “ohh I like games so I will learn to make them” and then they realise it’s not as easy as say Game Maker so they stop paying attention and become detrimental to the learning experience. In College my programs dropout rate was like 75% because they had 40 spots and they let anyone in. After they realised coding wasn’t some simple thing (when you get into 3d games especially) they drop by the end from 40 of us there were 9. |
I feel like it shouldn't be that hard to find a math teacher that wants to improve their skill sets to teach more interesting material.
I had a friend who was taking an "I'm going to be a teacher" math course taught by the same professor who teaches Diff EQ. He thought it'd be "cool" to have them learn Python since he took a few courses over it, and gave them a programming assignment. Never could answer any of their questions so my friend asked me, and I sat down with her and explained and helped her write the code (output all prime numbers between 1-1000) comments included. She emailed it to him and asked for clarification on a part. (whether he wanted to include the limits) He took the program I helped her build and showed it to her class and tried to pretend he came up with it. |
You do make a good point and I learn ruby and perl entirely online. Some people, however, like learning from paper (reading on the go). But in short yes, the Ruby site has a wonderful and completely online tutorial, and I'm sure others exist for python, perl and whatever else you fancy. |
SireBelch should go rename his account to |
Salting passwords does provide additional security but it is really the hashing algorithms chosen that make these passwords easy to brute force.
All the salt does is ensure that you have to brute force every password in the DB, you're not going to get any duplicates. This removes rainbow table attacks from the table but doesn't address the real problem.
The problem is that MD5 and SHA-1 (even sha-256 to some extent) were built for speed of hashing. When you're trying to brute force a password speed in hashing is a really really bad thing.
This means you can try far more candidate passwords a second than with a scheme that has a work factor built into it.
Couple this with the GPU based hashing programs out there and for as little as 1000 dollars you can have a machine that can try about a billion password candidates a second.
You can rent sever time that can try 800 Billion - 1 Trillion hashes a second for not a whole lot of money either.
Long story short, the salt provides some additional protection to users that choose weak passwords to begin with but these are the types of passwords that will be broken really fast by either a dictionary attack or other bruteforce methods.
The question is then if you choose really strong passwords to begin with does the salt give you any additional protection? Not a whole lot.
What would provide more protection is slowing down the rate at which an attacker can try candidate passwords salt or no salt. Bcrypt does this by introducing a work factor into its algorithm. It is designed to be slow and by changing a parameter you can make it even slower. This increases security by many many orders of magnitude over using a salt, especially for those users that choose weak passwords in the first place. |
The main risk I'd say was if they managed to gather enough info about you to discover more online services you use with the same password (if applicable). They could then log into that and potentially do some damage from there. This may not be a major issue for the typical, potentially computer-savvy redditor, who has ten different passwords for all sorts of different sites, but think of the millions of people who don't think in this way, and have their email address and identical password listed, being able to log into the email address and find more web services used, with the same password, and potentially cause damage from there.
If you think that a security incident like this doesn't apply to you and therefore it doesn't apply to anyone, you're wrong. There are a lot of people who put far too much trust into the web. After all, sites like LinkedIn have 125 million users! They must have the best security around... right?... RIGHT?.... |
You can get in trouble with the government for not enforcing a legitimate DMCA takedown.
You can't get in trouble with the government for enforcing a false DMCA takedown.
There's a time limit on how long you can sit on a takedown request.
Therefore, taking down everything is the only way to enforce the law without getting in trouble. I suppose you could hire a crack team of copyright researchers who spend hours researching every request and responding ASAP. Problem is that not only does that cost money, but all it takes is one flood of requests to overwhelm even the largest army of researchers, and you can bet that the one takedown that gets lost in the shuffle is the one that matters. |
I actually don't post things because I don't want to make other people feel bad. This year I have gone to
Las Vegas
San Diego Comic Con
I am going to
Meet Nick Offerman at his woodshop for an afternoon
Great American Beer Festival
Most of my friends would post about 100 postings at each of those. Shit I have one friend that goes on trips and posts at each airport he hits on the way. Another friend told me about his trip to rome. His friends just wanted to take a picture at the coliseum but didn't give a crap about going inside. Lots of things like that. Its pretty sad. |
Even if you do realize it, it still takes a toll. Here's why. Facebook is big on the idea of extending the idea of your identity to have an online presence. Try making a Facebook account with an obviously fake name, for instance, and the site will reject the request. The motivation behind this is twofold:
By making your Facebook account appear to be a part of your identity, you are more likely to post personal information about yourself on the site. This makes you more likely to keep your account, continuously update it, and thus provide a steady stream of revenue for advertisers, who are interested because of the "personal information" bit.
It makes Facebook appear necessary. It's a part of your identity. You "need" it. If you want to interact with any of your friends online, you need your online identity, and Facebook is how you do that. I'm talking about your average joe here--of course more computer savvy people will have other ways of keeping in touch and realize it's just a website. People see things like a telephone number or an instant messenger account as ways to contact you, but Facebook as something more integral to you, by virtue of the site tying itself into your identity.
Even you, at some level, will see this way. Everything about the site, when you look at someone's account, is trying to lead you to believe that you're not just looking at an account, but someone's identity. So, even though you consciously realize that what you're seeing is a heavily edited version of reality, you're in conflict because so much of what you're seeing is trying to suggest to you otherwise. It's the same principle that magazine covers with photoshopped supermodels work on. You know it's false, but it's so "accepted" that in your times of weakness, it's hard to fight.
Here's something interesting to try: deactivate your Facebook account for one week, and go out and meet people. Just talk to a few people, and mention you don't have a Facebook account if they ask. Watch what happens. You get two reactions mainly:
1) Something is wrong with you
2) Something is wrong with me
In the first case, people assume that you're crazy or you have something to hide. In the second case, people will justify why they still use the site to you, even though you never asked or never judged them. They'll say things like "Oh, well, I only have it because..." or "I just use it for...", that kind of thing.
How do I know this? I've been Facebookless since last August. I realized, after the above, that it was absolutely hopeless to think that I could subject myself to this imagery and not be influenced by it on some level, because as humans we all have times of weakness. I know a thing or two about living without that wretched site. I don't plan on going back. |
Yes by using a control group. You take 1000 people and tell half of them at random to use facebook and half of them to not use facebook, then measure their happiness. So long as the groups were really random and you are willing to equate a survey about happiness with happiness, then you would proove or disprove this.
Doing this would have cost tons more, since the participants would need to be tracked down several times. Also because of the popularity of facebook you would expect a high level of non-compliance which would skew the results.
This study is a great example of where the best explanation is a correlation (unhappy people tend to use more facebook), but it is more fun to believe the effect is the result of causation (using Facebook more will make you unhappy). |
I think you're right on the money with how the brand has been designed. People are conditioned to believe it's necessary.
Personally, I still have an FB account. It's a chore. I'm meant to use it for professional marketing and promotion, but I never do, and its only function for me is keeping in touch with relatives (all under 23) who use it as their primary communication medium. I hate going on there, because I'm inevitably filled with a great wave of apathy. Firstly, I know my life sucks compared to what I see of other people's edited realities: I have health issues, therefore I'm broke, and I really don't have a social life to speak of. This is itself is a pain in the ass, but doesn't break my heart. What does make me feel bad about myself is the fact I look at the feed on FB, and I just don't. care. I do not give a fuck, and then I feel guilty for not giving a damn about other people's opinions and experiences... and then I wonder what kind of fucked-up head games that website is playing. |
No, it isn't flawed but maybe I did not explain it as as well as I should have(I've been finding and getting into entirely too many arguments and i'm running out of steam because everyone keeps resorting to just insults instead of any valid or useful comments/conversation, it sucks)
YouTube is the economy think of this as the world
views are the form of money that is used
viewers are the consumer
subscribers are good will/brand loyal customers
each individual channel is a producer, company, developer , and or creator of ideas
groups of channels(machinima type groups) are corporations
video types are each a different industry within the economy
YouTube's mods are a regulatory body and have rules for use
The standard of this system goes like this:
Viewers want to watch stuff and do so by the current offered developers of content. Viewers find some content more interesting than others and as such that content becomes more popular. This drives even more viewers to that content producer because it is seen to have value, some viewers even transition into subscribing to the channel they like the most so as to always see the new content from that channel. Those other channels that are not doing as well as the popular ones decide to do their content a bit different and adapt to the competition. If this new and different content being produced is good it will become more popular, if it does not get more popular the channel will eventually stop producing content or be forced to try to change again. The originally popular channel see's these new channels that are starting to do better and they either adapt as well, or they themselves lose popularity eventually stopping all together. It becomes a never ending cycle as all of the producers either adapt or they become obsolete and die out.
Now sometimes content producers decide to work together and create a channel group(think of machinima). The main goal of these groups are to make lots of content in order maximize the potential to getting popular somewhere and getting lots of viewers, which will tend to increase subscribers and views for other content in the group. Now these groups have a hard time trying to compete against the multitude of other outside channels because even though they are big, all the combined competition is much larger. In order to keep up with trends and what consumers want the groups decide to go around and buy out/bring in other channels effectively removing them from competition. This increases their own amount of potential content, which again increases their chances for popularity and views. Some groups decide to expand the types of their content and come out with a wide range of different content. This alienates some of their fans which are only interested in one type of content(lets say game coverage) and not the others being produced(like movie trailers). They start to become unpopular with some of their consumers and overall viewership starts to die down. The group can either adapt again by isolating the none popular material or they can risk becoming completely unpopular and die out. A different group did not diversify and was able to keep the consumers for the most part, but they have purchased too many channels and are created so much content that their consumers are not able to in high enough numbers watch it all. This is a big form of supply and demand.
If left fairly alone the entire system can and will run itself. It will automatically create balances within the overall economy. |
Timothy Lottes (creator of FXAA and TXAA) frequently opines on this kind of stuff and just offered his [views on the A7]( |
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