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Gay marraige- Paul opposes forcing states to recognize any type of marriage. He does not support banning gay marriage. Gay marriage is permitted in every state right now. A government not providing benefits and recognition for a type of relationship, whether's it's a opposite sex, same-sex, incestuous or polygamous one, is not the same thing as a government prohibiting that relationship.
Earmarks- Paul has never been sneaky about earmarks. He says that under the Constitution, it is Congress' job to allocate spending, not the Executive branch's, so he inserts his earmarks in spending bills, then votes against them. The earmarks don't change amount of money that the spending bill appropriates. It only determines how that money is spent. If there is no earmark, then the Executive decides how it will be spent. |
Think of the compound microscope that you use in college science courses. You have the increasing magnification rates of 40x, 100x, 400x, and 1000x. The greater the magnification, the more "sensitive" the observation object is to movement because you have very few, if not fractions of, micrometers of leniency. |
A little background:
I've had this mac for... hmm I'm not sure, actually. At least two years. It's OS version 10.6.8. I wouldn't normally get one, but my mom really wanted one because "macs don't get viruses" (I know now that that isn't true). Since I didn't have any substantial arguments against buying one, I went along with it. If only I had known.
The problems started off small. I hadn't quite realized how much I had actually used .exe files until I was left without them. Even with right-click turned on, it was nearly impossible for it to work. But these are things everyone experiences with their macs. The first actual problem I had was when the desktop background stopped working.
It came as a surprise. I had my desktop background set to change randomly, but now all it would do is flash a random one for half a second and change to the same one every time. Since this wasn't much of a problem, I just chose a background like a normal person (do normal people do that?) and moved on with my life. Then more and more problems kept happening, and the thing is that they were all so tiny and seemingly unrelated it was difficult to even consider calling tech support. Programs running in the background would close randomly (like MagicPrefs, which I used to fix the aforementioned right-click problem), and webpages would randomly get a 404 or a security warning (including google, but before refreshing the page would fix it, and that didn't work this time).
Finally it got bad enough that we took it into the apple store. They said the problem was in the settings library, which I interpreted (correct me if I'm wrong) to mean that the specific combination of settings I had chosen were stored in such a way that they completely fucked with the computer. They fixed that by backing up the computer and performing a factory reset, and then putting everything back on the computer except for the settings. But for whatever reason (maybe because I STILL WANTED MY COMPUTER TO BE SET THE WAY I WANTED MY COMPUTER TO BE SET, which they must have overlooked) the computer stopped working again after only two days. At this point, I decided "welp, I guess we just have a broken computer," but eventually (after like another several months of this thing) my mom decided she was going to take the thing back to the mac store. I didn't want to go so she went alone, calling me when necessary. We got similar results. Except that this time the "fix" seemed to break it even more, which is interesting because according to my mom when the guy looked at the notes from the last visit (the one thing I wish other companies did with their customer service, because it's pretty great) he said that the other guy clearly had no idea what he was doing/talking about. Which was also interesting because at one point my mom called me up to say he had accidentally deleted an important .txt file with router information on it, which it later turned out he didn't. Anyway, after that visit more things broke, including time machine (apple's backup program).
Finally, about three months ago we took it in again and I just said "I don't care if we're here all day, we will reprogram the freaking OS if we have to just fix the damn computer." (not an actual quote) Of course, as always, the "genius bar" had first given us one of their n00bs, who seemed overwhelmed when I said that and told him the history above so he went to get one of the better people. They said again (for the third time) that the problem was in the settings, and I asked for details and in the end I sat in the mac store for two hours going/sorting through all of the folders in all of our libraries and deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and finally we got the computer working again. We discovered that the problem with the desktop was in the color settings (we didn't figure out why , but I knew now not to mess with those settings), we figured out that the problem with the webpages was with the firefox settings (which we decided might have been a problem with firefox, so he suggested I start using safari and I was like fuck that noise and you can see from the screenshot I'm now using chrome), and so on.
Two weeks later, the computer was still working, running smoothly and fast. I took that as a good sign. The behavior continued until two weeks ago, when the desktop background broke again. Except this time it was a different problem. Whenever I locked the session (I'm not sure what that's called on PCs, I think it's "switch user" or something like that) and logged back in, the background would be the default aurora thing. Then today, this. If I restart my computer, it fixes itself for the equivalent of one visit to Google, then it does this. And finally, finally , I have a direct finger to point at apple for the problem.
This is more a story than a request for help, I will probably be visiting the mac store again (sigh) but if anyone would like to help it would be appreciated and while I'm not yet versed in the workings of the computer I learn quickly and have the internet at my disposal, so any additional information you may need to help fix it I can provide.
No |
I agree with you that there are a lot of "pro-piracy" postings on r/technology, but I do try to seek out balanced discussions and read the anti-piracy/pro-copyright side as well.
My problem becomes that, in verifying their numbers and methods, most of the anti side's rhetoric relies on pathos ("we've lost all these jobs! Feel sorry for us!") and bad accounting (for reference, recall Limewire being sued for almost as much money as the National Debt).
As a digital native, I can also see the benefit of "piracy" in spreading word of mouth advertising. Anecdotally, a friend sent me a YouTube link of First Aid Kit, which prompted me to but their album on Google Play. I don't think the entertainment industry is comfortable with that model, because their ability to prescribe entertainment has been upset; instead of spending tons of money to sell you an artist, now they actually have to find talented people once again. |
He wasn't saying that the workers should make as much as the managers, he was saying that the pay should be proportional. Basically the same complaint that worker makes X dollars, and the CEO makes 350*X dollars + stock options + golden parachute. It's ridiculous. |
I'm still a little pessimistic, only because I'm skeptical of humans.
I think the hangup on these cars will be the same as the hangups on some modern technology...people trying to make a quick buck.
We saw today the massive amounts of energy and money it takes to overturn a patent troll on an electric shopping cart.
I see a cottage industry of people faking injury and/or causing accidents to sue sue sue. They might not win many of them, but it will drive prices higher on these vehicles as well as make insuring these cars cost prohibitive. |
Double-think.
"Capitalism" means free markets and competition. But "capitalism" (in current practice) means closed markets, legal monopolies, businesses writing law, purchased congressmen. Then there's "crapitalism", with the above negatives, but socialism for the rich and successful - see: bank bailouts, 15% cap gains tax rate, 0% or negative tax liability for the largest corporations, oil subsidies, dwindling real median income. |
The laffer curve is also difficult to dissect because rates of taxation have different effects on companies of different sizes, companies of different structures, companies that produce different goods etc. etc. Their marginal profit curves can be heavily influenced by rates of taxation or they can be slightly effected. Since marginal profit is the primary consideration in whether or not a business would expand, and the expansion of business writ large is what drives capitalist economies and causes increased revenue per percent taxed, it makes sense.
That being said there are other concerns that influence marginal profit, particularly price per unit of goods or services sold and potential shifts in things like overhead, price per unit of goods (which can be heavily influenced by employment consideration since the unemployed and underemployed are less likely to buy and therefore that can cause a price shift which in turn causes a shift in the marginal profit curve which in turn causes the business to retract and downsize employment etc.), purchasing power of the currency... etc. etc. |
I wasn't saying that competition is bad, or even that the government is the driving force behind the competition.
I was saying, that in most countries the owners of telecom infrastructure are forced to rent these services wholesale to their competitors. This ensures that healthy competition can take place. In contrast, in the U.S. there is a huge barrier of entry for competitors. So high, that it's taken until now for a massive company to take the leap.
My conclusion was, that in a market that had no government interference (the U.S.), the service to customers has been much worse than in countries where the government regulated the market, to ensure competition can take place.
Given this, I was confused that you seemed to say that government should not regulate the market, because competition is good.
(side-note: without government enforcing shared use of infrastructure, if there were multiple companies competing, you would end up with a multiplication of infrastructure, a blatant inefficiency that customers would notice in the price). |
All they have to do to monetize it is to sell it at sex shops
Something similar happens in the Japanese scifi novel Rocket Girls . The lead character complains about having some creep want to buy her used skintight spacesuit. The same lead character later does precisely that in order to fund a shopping trip during an unexpected visit home. Rocket Girls also makes mention of how the girls found it horribly embarrassing to wear the suits, especially for their press conferences. |
Yes, but your dinner jacket isn't made of materials that are designed to allow you to sweat in a vacuum without turning into human jerky, as well as allow you to lose excess body heat in almost absolute zero without turning you into a meat popsicle. |
As mentioned by someone else here in the comments, existing suits aren't tailormade for each astronaut, coming in specific sizes. You save money due to economics of scale, and replacement parts are cheaper to stock and transport to space. Also, in emergencies, you don't have to get the exact suit that is fitted to you and you alone. That can mean the difference between life and death up there, which is God knows how costly.
If you consider the suit alone, custom-fitting them is outrageous, which is why I staryed out by pointing out that these suits might result in savings elsewhere that mighr offset said outrageous cost. |
Yes. In almost every way you could define fake, THIS IS FAKE, and doing a disservice to ACTUAL AI research out there.
Let me elaborate:
All the responses are of course preprogrammed. They are supposed to hide that this machine is fully deterministic in its communication. It can do three things: 1. Match image 2. Learn new image 3. Turn around and drive to mirror. There is no "AI" element either in its interaction, nor in its movement. The "quirky" language is supposed to anthropomorphise him, and hide the fact that just three commands are used throughout.
This OF COURSE extends to the concept "me"- there is no recognition, or evaluation, to the robot it is just another object to label, one that is labelled "me". There is no self-awareness.
So what are we left with? A machine that does a bit of image recognition, one of the most ubiquitous tasks of machine learning/ AI, and one that is indeed quite advanced (cameras can now recognise specific peoples' faces by extrapolating the "true" face from various noisy/ translated representations). All the rest is smoke and mirrors, which MAY have been done to aid immersion, but really just fools people into thinking that this is more than a rolling camera with an image recognition routine.
....and that to me is baaad, m'kay, because while AI so far has been good at solving delineated, single problems (motion over terrain/ pathfinding; image recognition; pattern extraction in a variety of datasets; natural language processing) there is NO convincing "unifying" machine out there yet that makes use of all these faculties, and combines them to get an integrated perception of the world, much like our brain provides for us. This is a big problem still, and it pisses me off if people make it seem like it's solved just to sell their piecemeal algorithm.
Source: 4 years' research work in machine learning |
Here is a simple guide to avoiding 6 strikes:
VPN or Proxy
A VPN or Proxy will re-route your traffic so it looks like you are connecting from a different IP.
There are some considerations you should take when choosing a VPN:
Make sure they [do not keep any logs](
Be sure you can pay with [bitcoin](
Make sure they pool multiple users into 1 IP
Make sure [they are in the US]( -- only if they do not log!
Seedbox
Another option is a seedbox. You can download files directly to the seedbox/torrent box. Then you can download the files to your computer from the seedbox.
Absolutely pay with bitcoin. There is no deniability here like a VPN.
Do not ever connect to the seedbox without a VPN.
Private Trackers
Private trackers are thrown around as a viable option. This is entirely untrue. If you can get on a private tracker, don't you think anyone else can?
Peerblock
Peerblock is absolutely worthless and should not even remotely be considered a viable option.
Last Thoughts
Don't setup your own VPN. Your IP will be tied to you and you will be the only one using it. You will have no plausible deniability.
Your ISP may not be involved in six strikes, but will probably be soon. |
This is insane. Any lawyers out there have an idea how this can be stopped or at least bring more attention? I keep reading about more rulings that and IP address DOES NOT mean specific person. If the same extremely faulty "evidence" is used to accuse people of a crime they may or may not have committed, how is this in any way not a overstep and a complete work around of the courts? And what is going to be the side effects to our already overpriced and extremely poor internet service speed in this country?
We are going backwards on technology, what the hell is happening to this country? |
There's also less opportunity and money in live performing than there has been in the past. Before recorded music was widespread and easily available, live musicians were your best/only options, so venues, especially restaurants and clubs, were much more likely to hire (and importantly, pay) bands to provide music. Now, it's easier and cheaper just to pipe in music from a service like Spotify or Pandora, or bring in a DJ, than deal with live musicians. On top of that, many musicians are willing to just play for "exposure," rather than a check. The more people are willing to pay for free, the less monetary value venues place on their work. You then have to consider what good that "exposure" is the people you're being exposed to are mostly not going to be paying for your music, even if they do remember to check out your recordings. My guitar teacher says he lucky to be was able to easily support himself in college playing restaurants, bars, and clubs before he got his first college position, as he doesn't see that as an option in this generation. |
Glad filabot isn't the vaporware we all expected it to be a few years ago but pegging this as some glorious answer to endless plastic filament is unrealistic in reality.
first off the bat, filament must be consistent in quality. This goes for both diameter and density. I print in mostly 3mm PLA, my PTFE tube can fit 3.25mm before it jams and my melt chamber requires at least ~2mm before it overflows. Density differences are a result of bubbles in the filament. Bubbles cause spluttering on extrusion and with too many can ruin an entire print.
Quality of filament can change between sellers, batches, colours and even what part of your coil you're at. You really have to go on experience and word of mouth to get a trusted producer at a fair price.
Plastic must be clean, oils will cause issues much like bubbles in your filament.
Plastic must be of the same type. This is the biggest problem i've come across when sourcing refuse plastic. Once you have determined your plastic is a thermoplastic for a start, you then have to determine the type of plastic you have. There are crude burn tests you can carry out to get a ballpark temperature of when the plastic melts and try and pin it to a single type. If you mix thermoplastics, you can find issues in several ways ranging from : lower melt point plastics (causing overflow in melt chamber), unmelted on higher melt point plastics (causing blockages on filament nozzle) or even burning plastics with a low melt point.
finally this brings me onto sourcing enough plastics. Recycling milk bottles isn't going to get you more than a little cube in print unless you drink milk like water. Supermarkets delivery plastic waste would be the best source, it all tends to be thermoplastic and is sent back for recycling. |
Damn it Reddit!
Stop bitching for 2 seconds and realize this isn't some over-funded, over marketed, incremental corporate profit initiative. These guys are leveraging crowd funding to try and innovate an interface that really does need innovating.
That smartphone you are using is the result of advances in interfaces as much as anything related to processing hardware. Multi touchscreen, gyro, voice dictation, and gesture navigations all improve and enable the modern smartphone.
With these crowd funding initiatives, YOU push things along and make them a reality by nothing more than a small donation that gets you something in return. You yourself might have an incredible idea for something great and find yourself in the exact same position one day. Stop being so critical. |
I used SRWare Iron for a few weeks, then I read this: |
I was under the impression that yes indeed Google provides anormous amounts of information, but the NSA doesnt exactly need Google to access your data. The NSA has the capability to access the servers of your internet providers and gather the intel they need to gather your behavioural patterns. |
Thanks for taking the time to gather and post the links. I am being sincere, BTW. I read most of them (ok, I skimmed some, read some. your effort was not in vain).
My point is not that Android had 100% coverage for apps with a tablet layout. It's that most of the apps I use do have a tablet layout whichI then generalized into the state of the Android market regarding tablet layout for apps.
From the Verge article, "Hugo Barra, Google's vice president of Android product management, believes the disparity is shrinking. "The absolute position that we're in is one where well over 60 percent of the apps that you'd expect in a given category are already available with a decent tablet UI," Barra tells The Verge. While 60 percent is better than nothing, it's far from 100 percent."
Now, I am not going to make an argument that 60% is more than 50% and thus makes a meaningful majority. That would be pretty weak. Similarly, when someone (like the parent) says "it [Android] has a lot of problems with poorly scaled apps and lack of tablet apps to contend with" they are making an equally weak statement that is clearly out of date the current state of things.
Barra also said "that the situation has vastly improved compared to a year ago" and there is no reason why that situation won't continue to improve.
There has been marked improvement in the past year likely due to Google's push to developers to educate developers on good Android development. IIRC, at last years IO conference, Google launched a major restructuring of developer.android.com highlighting best practices, education material designed to show how to support multiple form factors, screens sizes, layouts, and versions. And Google introduced API capabilities that streamlined that stuff. |
Kodak competes (and has been competing) with companies such as Xerox and HP. They aren't competing with an RRD, rather they supply and service high resolution commercial printing machines to RRD. Kodak initially spun off their commercial printing business when they sold it to Sun Chemical, who then spun the division off as its own company, Kodak Polychrome Graphics. KPG was a success as its own company and eventually acquired again by Eastman Kodak. I am pretty positive they used to sell flexo, but I can't be sure if they sell it anymore. I could ask and get back to you. Their product line has changed pretty dramatically over the past decade. |
Change its business model?
No thanks, I like my free subscription to google services. There really aren't any other ways for websites to make money besides subscription fees and ads. If it's not one, it's usually the other.
Ads, like 'em or hate 'em, are necessary. They serve many purposes, first and foremost being to send you information. They tell you about some sort of product or service, whether it's being sold, offered, or protested. Without this (actually important) function, there'd be no such thing as an ad. There would be no way for anybody to sell you anything, aside from going up to you in person and trying to sell you their product, and with as many people as we have on this Earth, there really isn't any room to use a door-to-door method, at least globally.
The second important function of an ad is to generate revenue. An advertiser pays some domain owner to host their content. This is a mutually beneficial agreement - the advertiser gets to send their information out to the world, and the host gets to rake in a bit of money. Assuming the ad works as intended, the advertiser than makes money through an increased amount of business. Money flows, the economy flourishes, who's to complain?
The last important function of an ad is to fill up space. Even without ads, it can be hard to fill up space without making your page seem cramped. Too few items and too much white space makes your page look empty, and boring. Too many items and too little white space makes your page seem cramped and unorganized. Achieving a good balance can be done with ads - get all your information on the page, first and foremost, and then balance out whatever remaining white space you have with ads. You get everything you want out to the world, your advertiser pays you a bit of money to have his ads on your page, and voila! Everyone is satisfied.
Really, though, you have to go into the WHY of advertising. Yeah, it's obviously all to make money. What specifically are they targeting, though? Why do large auto manufactures like Ford and Chevrolet spend so much each year to send you ads? Why do Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and the Coca-Cola company all advertise anyway, despite not even needing to advertise?
There are a few reasons, besides the obvious. Preventing buyer's remorse is a huge one, though. Say you DO go out and buy that nice F-150 you've been seeing everywhere. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but you use it for about a month and everything seems to say "drsingerx, you should have purchased that Avalanche instead." In this way, they aren't advertising to let you know of anything - their advertising so that you keep their product.
Another reason large companies advertise is to maintain customer loyalty - without constant advertising, it's easy to lose a Joe and a Sally here and there. Big companies will throw constant adverts at you just to make sure you keep coming back - take, for example, the Kroger company and Wal-Mart. Kroger is regional, but Wal-Mart is national. Kroger knows that it's difficult enough to maintain low prices against Wal-Mart, especially when Wal-Mart can draw a net loss (they'll put prices low enough that the store will actually lose money) in a store just to throw someone else out of business. Kroger needs to make sure that you keep coming back to them. Thus, advertising. Companies throw ads at you to make sure that they have the same customers each year.
One of the last reasons (I'm sure there are several, these are just the ones that came to my mind while reading this) big businesses advertise is to stay relevant. It might not seem like it, but keeping up with the current generation's every-changing tastes can be difficult. Look at Facebook and YouTube - try to change too much, and you'll start to piss people off. Try to name a few companies that don't advertise. Having a tough time? That's probably because every name-brand product advertises. The only companies I could come up with were crafts and hobbyists manufacturers. To get back to the point, companies advertise to stay in your head. Advertise too little, and you'll start to lose people. In this sense, there really isn't "over-advertising," at least not until people start to get upset with seeing your logo everywhere. Companies are constantly changing their image, and constantly refocusing, just to make sure that you can still remember their name and recognize their logo when you see it.
All this isn't too bad, right? We know what ads do and why people do it, and we of course know who, where, and when we're advertised to. It's not too bad, all things considered.
The biggest problem with advertising now is that there's too much of it, at least for most people. Hell, I just want to watch my YouTube video, but I can't do it without seeing some movie trailer first. Every single company wants to be in your head, but with everyone out there (remember, fortune 500 companies are the 500 BIGGEST companies) trying to be in your head, there's no room left for the original content. You can't go anywhere without seeing some company up in your face about some new product they've come up with. That's great and all, but I'm STILL waiting to see my video.
The other problem with advertising is that it's becoming too intrusive. I don't want adverts directed specifically at me, google; that's fucking creepy. I also don't want my name and face plastered around the internet, trying to show me the latest and greatest the world has to offer. I would take a boring, generic ad designed to affect the greatest population possible over an ad targeted specifically at me any day. Pop up advertisements that require me to play a game of "Find the close-button?" Yeah, that's a no-no. Just leave me with my banner ads, dammit.
The last problem (and possibly the biggest, at that) is that ads aren't always... honest . If someone says that they're trying to sell me something, but really misdirect me through surveys, downloads, and other general malware, than screw them: that's the lowest form of advertising. Show me exactly what you're trying to sell me, and don't give me that bullshit "you're the 1 millionth customer" nonsense, either. I really shouldn't have to defend myself on this one - you either try to sell me something, or you get off my webpage. It's as simple as that.
That's about all I got for that, really. Now, back to the article.
What AdBlock is trying to do is the right thing - force advertisers to be responsible with their advertising, or stop advertising completely. It's high time we had someone around showing the big guys how to do what they want to do, and AdBlock does that job perfectly.
However , the way AdBlock goes about doing this job is horrific. You can't make someone pay you to show you their content -that's criminal. There really shouldn't be any special whitelist saying who is and who isn't advertising properly - rather, the advertisers should work with the customers and AdBlock directly to determine what is and what isn't acceptable. Anybody who doesn't follow the proper model has their ads blocked - it's as simple as that.
The need for better advertising is always present, but the methods for getting there are few.
I'm not gonna put in any |
Not sure why you're being down voted this is the best |
It does a check against Maps number DB when receiving a call, the permission is necessary to display the name in the call screen and store it in call history
Maps doesnt run in the background for me, and it's just loaded up any time a caller is not on your contact list via an activity intent (which is not the same as the full maps app) |
OK, so what's broken now? I removed location rights from the Facebook app, now can't get in to see the permissions. Did Google give fb back location access? What if I change my mind now, do I have to uninstall and reinstall fb, will that even work? |
What's broken is why you see the permissions in the first place, and this is the largest source of confusion. Google/Android provides public APIs to do common functions. ELI5: They provide basic programming functionality, so that developers don't have to re-invent the wheel every time they need a function. Sometimes developers need a function, and can only find it in a certain part of the API, for instance in the part that is used to work with Contacts, or Camera. They may not actually be accessing the contacts, or using the camera, but they use this function, and this will cause the permissions to pop up. They could have re-invented the wheel and re-done this functionality themselves, or they could take the hit to permissions. Once an app matures and becomes stable, its not uncommon for developers to go clean up the use of these functions to clean up the permissions list, once they have the bandwidth. |
As a developer, I'm glad they removed it. Not because my apps do anything nefarious, but because turning off individual permissions WILL cause all sorts of bugs and crashes.
Apps were never supposed to handle this situation. The app requests certain permissions in its manifest, and if the user installs it, the app will assume that the requested permissions have been granted. They're not designed as optional features that users can turn on or off individually, and I would bet that 99% of apps out there will crash in this situation.
In its present state, this is not a security feature. It's just an excellent way to break the vast majority of apps out there.
I'm not opposed to the idea, and frankly, I have no idea why a wallpaper would need location data, but the point is, you can't just introduce something like this over night with no advance warning.
If Google were to actually make this a part of Android, developers would need to be warned in advance, because it would be quite a bit of work to provide workarounds for individual permission denials, and a LOT of testing would need to be done. I'd happily add this functionality, if required, but this is not something you can just add to the OS from one day to the next.
Pulling individual permissions adds a whole new layer of complexity, and nobody should expect current applications to work in these circumstances, because that wasn't the design paradigm when these apps were written. |
On your last visit, you bought Chicken-Burrito(s)... maybe you'd like to try our new Mango Fish Tacos!!!"
Sounds like they are offering you something new to try.
>Anytime I see ANY kind of predictive-marketing trying to pigeon-hole me.. I purposely go out of my way to be as unpredictable as possible.
Sounds an awful lot like every hipster I have ever met.
>FUCK MARKETING. FUCK IT RIGHT IN THE ASSHOLE. WITH A RUSTY PIPE.
OK I think we can agree that marketing can get a little crazy but come on. I don't know about you but I don't (and I would bet most others don't) have enough time on my hands to go discover every single product that is produced by every single company by myself. The purpose of marketing is to let people know about new products or recommend products that they think the person might like. By actively making your purchases random you do make it harder for them to suggest things to you so you wind up getting suggestions for all sorts of random crap instead of things you might want to buy.
I don't want to sound like I am OK with the removal of privacy that comes with lots of these apps but I don't think that gathering market data is something that we need to be so up in arms about. Companies have been doing it since the beginning of business. That is how companies know what things people want to buy. In the past it was done by looking at receipts collected from stores. Now they do it almost instantly. All this means is that companies can respond more quickly to market trends. |
I was responding to the fact that you stated it's not vital more than once.
Huh? You really didn't, you just mentioned that iPhones do it. I tried to answer the question you wrote about why an Android application as written will crash if you pull a permission out from under it while an iOS app was built with that security model in place already.
"Security" is a large topic, and sure, security is a vital consideration for mobile devices. This specific feature, however, is not.
iOS and Android both have a permissions model that only allow an app access to what you agree to. The only difference is that Apple asks on a per-permission basis and Android asks for all permissions at install time.
There's no difference in security between those two models - just a difference in convenience for the user. In iPhone, the user can still use an app and restrict access to some components. In Android, the user decides whether to install an app or not based on what it lists in the manifest for permissions. If an Android application doesn't request access to the camera in the manifest, it can never use the camera. |
I can tentatively agree with not giving them a complete pass, but I would have to ask: in what way are they any more culpable than anyone else in the corporation?
Lawyers do not make the decision to (in this context) mine data and sell it to interested parties. That's a strictly business/managerial decision. If lawyers had any input on that whatsoever, it's strictly to state that, "yes, this is legal" and "I'll go ahead and draw up the documents we need" such as privacy agreements, etc.
To refuse to do so is to simply refuse to do their job.
The comment you responded to upheld engineers as some force for good whereas lawyers/accountants as the ones that turned Google to evil. How does this make sense? If anything, aren't the engineers even more culpable/complicit in privacy issues and data mining as they're the ones actually writing the code to perform these actions? Wasn't it an engineer (if anyone) that knew that Google could even grab this data from their customers and sell it?
Like you said earlier, I see this as an executive and board decision for the company.
I don't know much about the accountants' ethical standards, but the lawyers' one in business is not to try and change a company's business model. Lawyers are absolutely held to varying ethical standards and face sanctions or disbarment for the violation of these duties. Telling a business to not make money in a completely legal manner (with explicit permission from its customers) isn't one of those duties. I disagree that the higher ethical standards in law would make the lawyers any more evil here than anyone else in that corporation. Their ethical duties simply do not extend to (and thus address) the actual management of the business short of advising when things may or may not be legal. It's not their job (in this context) to be the moral compass or guide any more than it is the engineer's.
Could you imagine Eric Schmidt back in the day walking up to his legal division and telling them to draw up these privacy documents and someone saying, "well I think data mining is generally a scummy business practice and we shouldn't do that?" That's clearly not in the job description not just for lawyers or accountants, but pretty much everyone outside of the board/executives. I think this specific example is a little more difficult to consider as Google's business practices are neither illegal nor necessarily considered evil. With explicit permission from customers, there's not much to consider "evil" here. It could be considered a devil's bargain. Customers agree to give up their data to Google (to sell) in exchange for its services. I don't think it's the lawyers' (or accountants') job to interfere in an agreement by two consenting and competent parties. In fact, trying to interfere would probably break some ethical duty to their employer. |
After some research I think you must be referring to the financial times piece on Database Marketing. Those numbers primarily refer to an old practice of list generation that utilized sweepstakes and promotions to come up with lists of contacts and gain "implied" consent thurugh the filling out of a form.
This could be a "Win a New Car" contest at the mall or the like where the level of customer data obtained would be limited to geographic and contact information. Other prevalent examples would be comment cards at businesses, restaurants, informational booths at home shows, community events, etc.
What we are looking at here is something completely new and different. Here we are able to peek behind the curtain and gain access to data that was previously unheard of. What we are able to get now or is on the immediate horizon is purchase histories, browsing histories, inter-relational data-basing (friends, families, occupational correlations, social status, # of friends (many, few, age, age differentials as indicators of maturity, and buying power) AND their buying patterns and histories AND in turn all connected to them. We are now able to web and interrelate this data to remove the noise from the signal and come up with buying patterns not just for you personally but to use personal data to drive additional purchasing decisions outside of your realm into gift purchases, predictive marketing based on regional, occupational and societal factors, as well as even safety considerations.
Database Marketing techniques are only getting better and there is excellent growth potential there especially as linked systems are able to isolate duplicated data and intelligently filter the garbage. This is on the horizon. Last year was the beginning of a new trend and a very significant year for DDME (Data Driven Market Economics) and it is estimated that over 156 Billion dollars was spent in the U.S. alone on this growing sector. It is expected that this economy is set to explode due to the increased focus on driving data through mobile, and smart devices. Current projections show this industry growing exponentially in the coming 10 years with some projections predicting over this will be a 1 trillion sector by 2020!
This type of data coupled with the baby boomers moving into retirement age and a more connected Gen X and Y consumer being easier to reach through newer cheaper media sources makes for a nice cocktail that marketing companies are predicting will be the new Holy Grail of the marketing world.
A brilliant example of this is the Flashlight app. The economics of that app and the broad based marketing data it was able to provide are astounding. First off you have a sample of 100 million! Second you are looking at a device that is mobile and therefore more likely to be a personal device instead of a shared device (home computer, TV watching patterns, etc.) This only improves the valuation of the data. This app was then able to isolate search, buying patterns, and social data to be one of the first almost free of cost in depth customer profiling system with no forward cost other than analyzing and infrastructure to sell said data. This app was found to be in violation of Google TOS thankfully but there are many apps that are doing similar things but are within the TOS due to their disclosure.
Now FINALLY to answer your question. If you are talking about that type of data that is now possible, and you had 100m of those customer profiles, the valuation of these would be worth an almost unlimited amount of money. You would essentially have the key to market dominance in any sector you chose to operate (as long as your user base had a proven purchasing history for that product). The data is that valuable and that is why we get into scary territory here. It is quite possible the Unified Field Theorem for Marketing Mad Scientists everywhere.
The best part is that data is relevant and evolving as long as that consumer has your "free" app installed. This gets into new territories of predictive marketing techniques which get very creepy. New marketing engines are being built around this and if those are ever coupled with a database of this type you are looking at personal marketing solutions where a brand is never a brand but a reflection of the consumer that is purchasing it. This is the weirdest most permissive oddness that removes objective truth and creates a market place of mirrors that reflect back to the consumer what they want rather than what is.
This is pretty openly discussed in the industry and there are positive aspects to it but there are unscrupulous people abusing this as there are always abuses in emerging markets.
Sorry for the long winded response. This is obviously a fascinating subject and how and why we buy what we buy says a lot about us. It may say more about us than anything else that is measurable, and in my opinion I think it does. I am humbled on a daily basis by the trust people display on a daily basis while they proclaim their inability to be influenced and declare themselves skeptics.
This is not a bad thing. This actually says great things about people and how we interrelate. It shows that we do trust and want to cooperate, and be communicative to achieve more. It is a shame that savvy marketers and unscrupulous business are abusing that trust to increase market share and enrich themselves.
I see the power in this and do not hate business. Furthest thing from it. I do see this as consorting with a very dishonest lot and my position working in this area for fortune 50 company dictates my commitment to ethical dealings and ensuring that this is a respected industry that empowers consumers with actionable information and isolates segments that needs and utilizes products. Marketing when wielded responsible can be a diplomat bringing things together and establishing new levels of trust, and shared success. When wielded unscrupulously it is more akin to an enabler or drug dealer. There are many new enterprises that are interested only in making money and do not care about the "Externalities" that their business impacts upon. This is dangerous to all of us. |
Its actually very easy to do from the programming side.
You have it listen for preset incoming commands and keywords like:
Are you a bot
r u a bot
Are you real?
Are you a real person?
etc.
And you have a list of pretyped set responses:
LOL No. thats stupid.
Umm yea, im totally a bot LOLOL u busted me!!!
Whats a bot?
uh, last time I checked, I was real. Why wouldnt I be...?
etc.
source: used to be a spammer and program these type of AI chat bots. Its depressing how stupid people are and how easily they can be tricked into giving over their CC number or persuading them to join a site you get commission from. |
It isnt just the bots you need to be weary of. My friend got matched with a girl, they chatted briefly and she asked to meet up in a public place. It was about a 20 min drive away, he was hesitant but since he "had nothing better to do" he got her cell number and went to meet her there.
He shows up and texts her, she starts acting sketchy and keeps stalling, saying things like "I'm around but wait a few mins i'm looking for my friend". Eventually she shows up with a female friend to greet my boy. To his surprise, both are cute, he asks what now?
She tells him to get in his car and follow their car, he constantly keeps asking questions to try and figure out what exactly is going on but she keep being dismissive. To make a long story short he eventually ends up on the lawn of some random house why they try to coax him inside, he refuses, some guy in a suit comes outside and tells him to come inside to talk about a "business opportunity". At this point my friend decides that he's had enough and leaves. |
I was thinking bot the other day and I thought she was about to try and divert me to a website or 800#. Turns out she was just a good looking woman 19 miles away that wanted to get laid and kept getting ignored because everyone thought she was a bot. I kept waiting for the punchline like "So how much cash you have?" or something like that. Everything went smoothly. We're meeting up again for the third time next week. Also I'm average looking and not fat, not athletic either. Fuck me right? |
Thats why you have your bot pause in sending chat to them for X amount of time and then continue the convo back up to try and convert them.
You drop 3-4 lines and in your last line, have something like "BRB, gotta go take my dog on a walk babe". then you set a timer to wait X amount of minutes until you send a reply, in which you would do something like "okay, back! :) I swear that dog gets stronger each day haha".
It helps to have thousands of past convos logged into a database to help you determine what is the best response to send based on what the users input. If the bot thinks the person is trying to test the legitimacy of it, it can send some defensive/sneaky chat lines to throw them off and continue the conversation.
If I detected a user was just fucking around with my bot or testing me, I would either have that bot sign offline or have it block the user. Then I would wait X amount of days and then unblock the user//sign back on and start the convo again. |
Modship on Reddit has absolutely nothing to do with democracy. It is closest to Authoritarianism if one actually cares to label it, but at its core, it is nepotic.
Sometimes mods will call a "public vote" for new leadership (this is extremely rare, but can happen), but that still falls under leadership deigning in order to save face - it does not happen in large subs. |
Money wise its easy, environementally much more difficult.
For starters they're made from rare earth metals and have a limited life span. The majority of the planets rare earth metals come from China, where they're a byproduct of lead manufacturing. But since they more valuable they end up producing lead just for the byproducts. A couple years ago when I was researching this it was estimated that half of China (especially kids) had lead poisoning. After the initial studies found this they shut down any studies/information about this from leaving the country. While China's approach obviously isn't ideal, there is not way to get around a refining process that consumes tremendous amounts of energy and clean water, and leaves behind various types of nasty waste. Oh and also its strip mining, but frankly that's a minor inconvenience compared to the water/energy/toxic waste.
Then there's disposal. Right now the most popular disposal route for used electronics is to send them to third world countries where they're dissolved in acid and the valuable metals removed. By hand. Often by children who end up permanently disfigured. But even in a best case/forward looking scenario, they're a huge pain to dispose of. |
Doesn't matter. Lenovo installs a superfish root certificate with no scope to which has been cracked.
> Password to it is komodia
And because of this certificate, your computer will automatically trust anything that has been signed by it. Think of window updates which you don't need confirmation windows. |
It wasn't to comply with the government's wishes. Superfish is adware and it was placed on Lenovo consumer PCs to net Lenovo a small portion of the advertising revenue generated by Superfish.
At the absolute best, this is an example of a company carelessly installing more crapware onto their products and compromising both the security of their product and the quality of the product as well. At the worst, this is a company who knew the risks and decided to take the risk anyway for a very small payout.
It's one of those situations that will almost certainly lead to many people being fired, Lenovo possibly being sued in a class-action lawsuit, and long-term erosion of their brand name. |
I'm not from the US, so I'm not well versed on the activities of the ACLU, but this is why I included the word "ostensibly" in my comment. I was hoping the intentional ambiguity would spare me from downvotes, perhaps people just don't know what the word "ostensibly" means? |
My position is that there's nothing wrong with trying to get others to agree with your viewpoint, whether you're a billionaire with a media empire or a homeless person on the street - yes, the billionaire will better be able to promote his ideas, but when it comes down to it people will decide whether to agree or disagree (that's what I meant with the sheeple thing, though it was unnecessarily rude - sorry). As long as nobodies viewpoint is being suppressed, then people will come to their own conclusions. |
Out of curiosity, how much of what happens at Apple can actually be attributed to Steve Jobs? Does he contribute to the engineering, design, ideas, what? If he's really involved, then Apple is somewhat reminiscent of Stark Industries, with a super-genius engineer at the company's head. |
Did we really need an -entire- feature article to say : "The Microwave". |
Waaaait a minute. Cable companies are investing boatloads of money in DOCSIS 3.0 to speed up their internet offerings. Which is great for users and for competition. And makes cable... the bad guys?
Mobile companies (4G) and local telco's (VDSL) are not making similar investments in the US, and are printing cash (US mobile phone companies have margins around 30%). And so they are... the poor innocents, getting steamrolled by big cable?
The article is also, I believe, wrong on a technical basis: the technologies should be able to compete on even footing for the immediate future. DOCSIS 3.0 is implemented as fiber to the node, then cable from the node to the premise. VDSL is also fiber to the node, then copper from the node to the premise. Fiber to the premise is rare except in MDU's, and can be done with either tech.
Anyway -- the amount of fiber is very similar in both deployments, and both will deliver 50 Mbps. Cable can theoretically hit 400 Mbps with 8 downstream channels - but this would require a massive investment, is commercially not viable at this point. |
While I do agree with you, the story also goes that Deep Blue was allowed to study a lot of Kasparov's earlier games, whereas he wasn't allowed to study all the test games that Deep Blue had played against other chess players. And if several humans were altering the algorithms between matches Kasparov wasn't just competing against Deep Blue, but the combined skills og the programmers+Deep Blue. Agreed upon yes, but fair - I'm not so sure :D |
ryeinn says he wants to know about these tools because he's never heard of them.
pyroxyze responds and recommends NetMeter.
You become hysterical demanding to be able to install WINDOWS software on your "D-LINK".
I come along and make you more angry, and you thought it wouldn't be possible. ^_^ |
I've had this one situation where my Windows 7 wasn't connecting to my internet. I could only use Google. Meaning: I couldn't get to Reddit/Facebook/Yahoo, anything. Just Google search. I couldn't even get to the links that Google search pulled up, just had the search results. On all my installed browsers which was Chrome, IE, Safari, and Firefox. So I called tech support for the cable company, who then after failed to solve the problem, referred me to Microsoft. Who also failed to solve the problem. After doing research on my Windows Vista (which I had explained to both tech support operators that everything else connected to the Wifi fine) I found out that the router the cable company installed needed to be changed from a WPA to a WEP. So I called the cable company again, and they said no, it works fine and to contact Microsoft because there's something wrong with my browser and the firewall is blocking it. And during one of the three calls, one of the tech support operators asked me "Are you sure you're connected to the right wireless connection?" I had to calmly explain to him that yes, that is how I'm connecting the 4+ other Wifi capable devices in my house. |
I will leave this here:
dan@li58-42>curl reddit.cm
<meta content="0;url=
<title>reddit.cm reddit</title>
<meta name="description" content="reddit.cm">
<meta name="keywords" content="reddit.cm">
<p>&nbsp;</p>
dan@li58-42>curl -I "
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Cache-Control: private
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Expires: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:31:51 GMT
Location:
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:41:51 GMT
Also feel free to go to and search for "reddit.cm". |
Same for Britain too, where I'm from.
We allocate seats in Parliament by constituencies and the fact that some geographic regions are safe seats for specific parties shows that FPTP isn't very fair in terms of allocating overall votes.
i.e. ~23% of people voted Liberal Democrat in the 2010 UK elections.... yet they only got less than 10% of actual seats. The party I voted for had no bearing on the overall result because my constituency is a safe seat for another party.
I'd vote yes for proportional representation. Unfortunately, Alternative Vote was pushed through as a referendum by the ConDem government and it received an overwhelming "NO" vote (I was one of the many that voted "NO" because it was confusing, didn't change much overall and frankly was not a significantly fairer system and was thus simply not what the country needed.)
And now that is going to make future governments shy the fuck away from Proportional Representation.
On the plus side, at least parties like UKIP and the BNP have no seats in Parliament. |
The article is terrible because it makes it seem like the US just up and decided to shutdown a gambling website because Jesus .
While the medeval gambling laws that exist in the states have far more complex reasons for existing than just neo-puritans, in actuality Bodog knowingly violated American law by accepting American punters instead of doing the legally acceptable IP blocking (much like YouTube and others do) preventative measures. Several European gambling sites do this such as Betfair.
In the US it is against the law for an establishment to take online sports bets (yes, just sports) as part of the Wire Act at the Federal Level, and any online bets are prohibited by some states. I believe the Wire Act portion was just declared invalid so that's probably why Maryland is pursuing this case.
My take on it though was that your DoJ pressured a bank and the bank used their influence to move the focus to Bodog. It is still against Federal law for a bank to process online gambling transactions. |
While that's true, it's not that simple. It's not like congress is doing this completely on their own accord. Apple spent ~$2.25 million on lobbying last year (ref: The same site says total lobbying expenditures last year were about $3.3 billion. Some of the lobbying goes to things mostly specific to that interest. Some goes to efforts beneficial to many entities (but rarely the little guy). |
Exploiting loopholes in the intent of a law does make one an asshole, yes.
There is no such thing as a loophole. There is tax code, and there are people who know the code, and those who don't.
Again, if you have a problem with it, contact your congressional reps.
>There's a big difference between "I'm adding my college supplies as deductions" (which is simply following the intent of the law, and remembering to do it), and "I'm going to route funds through international banks to avoid paying this portion on a technicality".
Right. The difference being... the first example is of the little guy following the tax code to save them self as much as they can on their taxes. And the second is of the big guy following the tax code to save them self as much as they can on their taxes.
Huge difference ....
>To put it in a simpler context, think of it as a kid being told "Don't leave that chair!" and then hopping around the house in the chair... the intent of the rule/law is pretty simple, avoiding it on technicalities is kind of a dick move.
So it's a dick move to try to maximize your profits in every possible corner? No. That's not a dick move. That's business.
In fact... that's good business. If you think that's bad business, I'd love to see you running a company. Come back to me when your investors jump ship, your board of directors fire you... or worse, all of the above sue you. If you think this wouldn't happen, it shows your naivety of how business works.
>And so another loop hole pops up, it's fought over to fix it, and if (big if) they finally get it patched, another is found.
Again, there is no loopholes. There is tax code. It's either right or wrong. If you think it's wrong, then do something about it.
>So yeah, that makes them assholes.
Because you don't understand business. I got it.
>I'm not saying assholes should be put in jail for it, I'm not saying we should burn down their stores... but I'd certainly like it to be looked at as the asshole move that it is, and have it reflect in the public opinion of them (instead of having it cheered on as it has been here).
And that's very naive of you.
Again, there is no difference between the little guy and the big guy, working the tax code as best they can to save as much as they can on their taxes. No difference at all.
>Just did. That money was intended to be taxed, and since the money isn't going to the government, it's less services and more cuts.
There is no "money that was intended to be taxed". There is money that is taxed, and money that isn't. If they're playing all of their due taxes, then they are not assholes.
Guess it's a good thing they pay every cent they owe according to tax code. And just like me, they don't pay a cent more. (We both hope)
>And they're assholes.
Still waiting on a real reason as to why.
>It's possible to turn a profit and pay taxes.
Correct.
>It's just when you are determined to cheat every penny that you become an asshole.
True, if you're cheating the system, you're an asshole.
Guess it's a good thing they aren't cheating the system. And they pay every penny they owe, and hopefully not a cent more. Again, just like me when I pay my taxes.
>I don't care about legally, that's not what I'm saying.
Yes it's quite clear you don't care about that.
>Hell even if it was blatantly illegal I doubt it would matter now days (which is sad to say, but whatever).
Eh? Tax evasion is taken pretty seriously even currently. I don't recall anyone getting away with tax evasion once it's been brought up to the public. Corporations get away with plenty of other corruption these days, tax evasion isn't usually one of them.
> I'm saying "They are morally assholes, and wrong in their actions."... I'm not saying they broke a law.
Right. They're morally assholes and wrong in their actions... by following the law and ensuring they don't pay any cent more than they owe.
Just like when I pay my taxes. I'm such an asshole for making sure I don't pay more than owe.
>The law is not where morality and 'right and wrong' come from. The law should be a mirror of it, not the other way around.
I'm still waiting for what is exactly immoral about following the law and not paying more than you owe.
>We have a fundamental difference of opinion as to the role of a company in a society.... or it would seem that they do have a role in society rather than being above it.
Yes. And your opinion shows a great deal of naivety to the real world. A corporation is no different than any citizen*. We all want to make more and pay less, and there is nothing about that makes us a bad part of society. At all. Not a thing.
*Note: I do not agree with the Citizen's United ruling. |
I think you're forgetting that consumer anger can force companies and governments to change practices to avoid bad PR/boycotts (though usually only in token ways). If consumer anger were harnessed to punish these practices it would no longer be in the interest of shareholders to follow them. The "this is how the system works" argument relies on the complacency of the masses. If people start turning those hands clapping for iphones into clenched fists against the company, it would be within the fiduciary duty of the corps to toe the line.
Not that I realistically expect that to happen, as most people are convinced everything is the personal fault of Barack Obama. |
Foreign tax credits are provided to prevent such double taxation; the foreign tax credit limitation is not double taxation, and is in fact the first time such earnings were taxed. |
Apple doesn't even make sense as a company anymore. They own over 80 billion dollars in cash reserves. What are they selling products for? Their company CAN'T invest that much money any more, and they are continuing to rack up money day by day. It is sociopathic to continue to try to continue to use tax loopholes and tax breaks when you own that much cash.
You don't seem to understand how business works. The goal of business to make money for it's investors . As of a month or so ago, Apple had almost 100 billion dollars in reserves, [and they made the announcement what they were going to do with it.](
The buyback of shares was merely to strengthen everyones stock, but the dividends . That's the key. Apple is giving almost HALF of it's reserves (around 45 billion actually) to it's investors. They're doing their job.
>What I'm trying to say is, if you are a billionaire, you've won the fucking game.
Apple isn't a person. It's a corporation made up from the money from investors.
>You don't need to look for tax breaks any more.
First of all, they aren't tax breaks. Second, yes... no matter how much money a corporation has, the ultimate goal is to make money for the investors . The money belongs to the investors... like me. I make less than 50k a year, but part of those billions is mine because I have Apple stock. As an investor... YES, Apple needs to do everything to make maximum profits, always .
>Pay to each country you do business in what the individual human beings are paying.
Individual humans and corporations aren't the same thing. Hence why they have different tax codes.
>Its not like Apple, or Exxon, or Koch industries, or Walmart have to worry about their kids or their future.
Again, you're forgetting these are not private companies. They are publicly traded companies. It is their job to make more money for their investors. That is it. That's their goal.
As an investor, why the hell would I be OK with Apple being fucking lazy on their taxes?! Do you ignore all of the deductions you're allowed to make on your taxes each year? Are you even old enough to pay your own taxes yet?
>Instead, Apple, Exxon, Koch industries, and Walmart make a living off of screwing over laborers and ripping people off.
Don't lump Apple in with the rest of those assholes. Apple doesn't screw over any of their laborers. Whether it be the factory workers in the Foxconn plants of China that make more money than any other blue collar worker in the country (and have a lower suicide rate than any other worker in China or every single US state ). Or be it the Apple retail employees that are paid higher wages than almost every other retail position in the country.
>The sociopathic entities that are corporations need to have legally set moral and ethical codes, because increasing profitability and the companies bottom line promotes disgusting and reprehensible behavior.
What is immoral about making money for your investors? Explain that.
>The least these companies can do is pay their fair share so the government can take care of the people they screw over.
Again, Apple does pay their fair share to the government. And again, Apple doesn't screw people over. |
you are slightly off. Basically in the Android world, they utilize the Java programming language, but they also borrow the Java API Structure, Sequence, and Organization. That is to say, all of the code in Android was written from scratch (minus the 9 infringing lines), but in order to appeal to Java programmers, they utilized the naming and method signatures of the 37 Java APIs in question. Things like java.lang.String, java.util.List, etc, when the reality they COULD HAVE used different package names like com.android.lang.String, or even, com.android.lang.CharacterSequence. This would obviously had made it more difficult for Java developers to develop for Android, which is sort of the crux of the argument. |
INAL but, isn't this document far to vague to be of any real use even if it were endorsed in some way? The sorts of protections you get from amendments to a constitution tend to have much more specific language.
My worry is that candidates could just endorse this and score points while the document remains too vague to have any real positive impact. Things like "Don't censor the internet" just sound like nice ideas with no real, explicit definition. |
Krivvan's post was on to something: previous rovers couldn't do complex anaylsis like Curiosity, which has routinely been compared to a science lab on wheels. Apparently, the science equipment is about 10x more/bigger in terms of sheer mass, which I can only assume allows for both more, and more precise, measurements to determine the things that thesatsui commented on earlier.
Also, this is the first rover on Mars since Obama claimed to want to put humans on Mars in the 2030s, so everyone at NASA undoubtedly feels that, unlike previous rovers acting as a half-ass defunded proxy for the Apollo 2.0, this sucker can be seen as a herald of greater things to come. |
In the beginning, there was hydrogen. Lots of it. All over the place. Then it started forming clouds. The clouds got dense enough that they collapsed into themselves. This in turn pulled more hydrogen in. As we all know, gravity is a bitch. Eventually the pressure and temperature inside the cloud got so high that hydrogen fused with more hydrogen to make helium. That fusion also created lots of light and energy. Thus the stars were born.
Some of those stars were so massive that the fusion didn't stop at helium, it kept going, forming heavier and heavier elements, and generating more and more energy to the point where the energy being released violently exceeded the gravitational pull keeping the star together. The stars went supernova spilling their guts across the universe.
The supernovae are what seed the universe with all the elements.
Fast forward a long long time later, those elements formed compounds and those compounds formed more compounds, and they all ended up on this rocky planet going around a sun... where they went on to form the primordial soup, the beginnings of life.
Fast forward a split second later, the life evolved into a species that thinks digital watches were a neat idea. The same species that contemplates itself and the universe. The same species that observes the Universe and figures out how we got here. |
This was a private project(s). It says a lot that you think anyone wanting to persue anything practical must be doing it for school. Im 27. I set homework not do it.
And what I hate are bullshitters and timewasters. Anyone can have an idea. There are more ideas than time in the universe to complete them. Reddit attracts talkers not doers because it provides opportunity to talk when you should be doing. Sadly this means there are very few people with experience of doing. More like "Let me show you an article Ive read when I should have been working".
Id say Im allowed to hate people who want to talk about fields Im interested in that have no understanding of that field or experience in it. You don't see lay people running medical conferences for that reason. Hating Posers should be encouraged. Only way people are motivated to actually learn or do anything. If it was solely about appearance anyone could look like an expert in anything with wikipedia. And the sad thing is these posers make it hard for actually knowledgeable people to gather together.
If you look at a few technical subreddits like GameDev or Science you'll notice they've spawned things like TrueGameDev or TrueScience because posers flood the boards. That says some things about the type of people Reddit attracts Im not sure Im supposed to like. These subreddits also get less vistors and less page views. The attempt to create a heavan for experts ironically means less people gather together to share knowledge. This also means the majority of subscribers to subreddits are posers.
People here seem to think an interest in a subject is enough to make up for no experience in that field beyond reading articles and blog posts. This is very annoying. I have nothing against amateurs, we were all there once, the difference is trying not to be an amateur and knowing to learn and not speak until that point.
Everyone knows an armchair psychologist or alternative therapy nut. Beyond the dangers of encouraging people like that in any discipline or subject its quite annoying when these noisy people drown out the true experts. |
If it was really an issue I would just wipe the drive now. I had very little on demonoid so personally I am not afraid at all. There is way too much wrong with the case that they could ever get you for anything unless you were a major uploader anyway. |
No ... there's really just one big log for the server.
For what.cd ... they use nginx with a php based torrent/forum. nGinx serves up the assets and caches much of the content and pages (so for many pages a request is served solely through nginx and never hits the, much slower, php backend).
Point is though ... there's no mechanism in php or nginx throwing different user-actions into different logs. The only thing that is logging is nginx. There's an error log for php, and for the sql backend ... but there's nothing beyond that .. unless someone went to great lengths to add that functionality (which they didn't). |
Well yes the rail system in the U.S. is older, but its not bad, it's just not designed for passenger rail service. The rail system in the U.S. has 220,000 km of track so upgrading even a small percentage between major cities is expensive, also 40% of freight in the U.S. is moved by train so those tracks would have to operate with both high speed rail and freight, realistically a separate line would need to be built for high speed rail to be effective, but its not going to happen because of cost. So the U.S. is upgrading its old rail lines to allow some 120 kmph trains but only in certain corridors. |
Bitcoins are an invented currency without a government to mandate its use.
Everything in this world has value based on a consensus (markets). Even your precious dollar. Even your previous gold. Bitcoin is the same way. Its not more real or fake than the balance your bank gives you.
No government needs to mandate the use of gold or silver, yet I can get rich off those items and store my wealth with them easily. |
I'm not sure what side you fall on based on your comment but i'll say my piece here.
There is no legal guarantee of anonymity on reddit. If content on reddit ends up being limited due to the Mods fear of being outed then so be it.
The argument that it is our right as redditors to do shit that we want kept secret from the world with guaranteed anonymity is naive and stupid.
If you want to do shit on Reddit that you are afraid of getting outed for then don't do shit that will get you outed. Don't go to meet ups. Don't tell people that you mod a subreddit you don't want to be linked to. Fuck, you could have a separate account for your shady shit. |
Deleted my comment. It felt pointless in the end to state the obvious and say that doxxed redditors should have been FAR more careful with keeping their identities secret, or maybe that VA - knowing that he had a family to provide for and if outed could have lost it all - and others maybe shouldn't have manned controversial if not borderline-illegal subreddits in the first place. Plus to describe that point shouldn't have taken eight paragraphs.
I'm not defending Gawker but from how I see it, I don't think they did anything illegal to dox VA, and I don't think the doxxed info linked by Jezebel was obtained through illegal means either. Their article was also arguably in the public interest too because a lot of people hate creepshots, jailbait, and some of the other controversial crap VA posted.
Back to your point, banning SRS would have done NOTHING WHATSOEVER to prevent this and further movements from continuing. We all know that SRS has its origins from SomethingAwful users pissed off at Reddit for various reasons. If we banned SRS, they'll just congregate on SomethingAwful or another site and continue their campaign to shit all over Reddit. Project PANDA, Redditbomb etc do not need Reddit as a medium to survive. You seem to forget this.
I hate SRS for different reasons (EXTREMELY rude mods, defamation and banning of users that disagree with their opinions etc). I would like to see them banned from Reddit too but if we did that, it will not be a magic band-aid fix. |
This is completely true, as someone who does a lot of laser welding, reflectivity and the absorption coefficient of a given frequency of light and material are important. Things like polished aluminum have a tendency to damage optics as they reflect so much light. Likewise organic materials (wood, rubber) are usually cut on a Co2 laser and metals are usually cut on a Nd:YAG laser due to incompatible absorption by the different frequencies.
You probably could coat the mortar in an ablative layer or highly reflective layer (for that frequency laser). Currently I have not heard of any mortar or drone being coated in such and it would change their performance in other ways. some old soviet mortar is not going to have anything but a steel casing.
other thing to think about is that these systems are highly dependent on atmospheric conditions, effective range is probably 10% in rain or fog or clouds. |
That's an interesting question... the cop-out answer is that it's different for everyone and it's a matter of 'whatever blows your hair back.' But I'll just tell what you blows my hair back.
The fundamentals are definitely algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.
Algebra teaches you 'process.' Just think of order of operations basically. Calculus is hard because algebra is hard. In any calculus problem there is a much larger amount of algebra steps than calculus steps. Algebra is about being meticulous, thorough and consistent.
Geometry teaches you about space, literally the ether we exist in. Shapes and patterns that humans recognize in our (approximate) 3 dimensions. It's perhaps the most fundamental and in a way hardest to describe the benefits of. It's the type of thing that most people (that I know) find asinine and kinda 'duh' but if you stick your face in it for long enough, you start to see what it's all about, and it's fucking beautiful. Recommended read: Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow.
Trigonometry is also a highly fundamental math. However I must admit, I did not do all that well in my trig classes, but those were just grades. After the fact what I can tell you about trig is that is your first introduction to 'time' in math. If Geometry is space, Trigonometry is time (and space, and yet they are related, klja;klsjdf;lkjasdf).
That's my essay on math fundamentals but beyond those subjects in school here's the subjects I studied that really blew my mind
I originally got interested in programming because of video games, in particular video game graphics. Linear Algebra is fundamental to that.
I was also fascinated by Physics when I had to take it because it explains how the universe works, Calculus is the physicists best tool (apparently until you get into quantumwtfidontknoweverstuff).
The math I studied that feels the most cognitively similar to programming is Combinatorics. The best part of learning Combinatorics is that when you watch Good Will Hunting you see the 'theorem' Will proves is actually like a fucking homework problem taken right out of chapter 1 of a Junior level course in Combinatorics. The shit they do when Will and the Prof. start working together and they cancel shit out together then high-five? Graph coloring, which is equivalent to register allocation in writing compilers. Same concept, different manifestation.
Oh yea, I'm not sure where to categorize this subject. Also, I fucking hate studying it. However, if you want to be right about everything most of the time, learn statistics. Combinatorics is almost like Statistics except in Combinatorics you don't divide the answer by the total number of possibilities at the end. |
I don't know why they try so hard to adhere to the AR dimensions. You could build such a stronger gun if you modeled it more like a Halo gun, or even a bullpup configuration.
This design puts so much stress on the buffer ring. Even in professionally manufactured polymer lowers such as the plum crazy, you can see the buffer ring flexing like crazy.
Here's a video of Nic Taylor firing the Plum Crazy Polymer Lower Receiver with a high speed camera. I forget the frame rates, but they're crazy high.
I just think its so fucking stupid to make the 3d printed guns look so much like the AR platform when you could design it to be so much stronger. I'd want my gun to last 10 years and ~5,000 rounds. I know I could just print a new one if it broke. But I don't want it to break, |
A civil revolt would be impossible for the US armed forces to stop in any manner that would allow the nation to move on as a whole. Sure, they could carpet bomb city centers and fire cruse missiles into meeting areas, but that's not going to win hearts and minds, and will only fuel the insurrection.
The standing armed forces of this nation are single digit millions. Of that number, a large portion are useless because the navy won't do much good in the actual fights, because remember heavy weapons won't help reign in negative opinions of the oppressing force. Of the remaining numbers, many boots on the ground won't fire upon their neighbors, friends, family, countrymen. These people who refuse to fire upon Americans will probably take up arms in the resistance, adding expertise and manpower to the growing uprising. Also the armed forces rely on private contractors for logistical support, and that is something that will go away quickly, again a plus for the uprising.
The only way to control a populace is with boots on the ground, this is why no matter how impressively America bombs a much smaller nation, we still send in ground forces. The soldiers that accept orders to fire upon Americans will be the target, and many of these people will die. This is where my small arms collection comes into play. As Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and literally most conflicts in world history have shown us, Guerrilla warfare works. It is possible for the technologically or physically inferior force to deny victory to the superior force, crushing their will to fight. Remember, these soldiers are people too, and many won't fight on given such extreme circumstances.
Now lets talk who is fighting this insurrection on the side of freedom. I would be naive to assume that this movement would have the full support, or even 51+% support in the populace, but even 10% would be capable of denying victory to the opposing force. 30 million armed and motivated individuals could wage one hell of an irregular warfare campaign. Look what dorner did to southern California, and he was one guy and mostly crazy. Now multiply that by millions. Remember, the afghans kicked the British empires' ass, the Soviets ass and are are working us over pretty good now. And these are some of the poorest people in the world, with the fewest resources and worst communication and transportation networks in the world. This hypothetical force fighting the regular army in mainland USA would have so many more resources, so much simpler communication and transportation, and of course a much higher ceiling on the number of potential combatants.
Remember, the goal of irregular warfare is not to go toe to toe with the superior forces, rather to deny them supply, deny them the ability to pick the conditions of a battle, and deny them the ability to relax. |
There's a lot of ATF decisions that I don't agree with, but this honestly makes sense. What would you have them do? Regulate every piece? Most pieces? Where do you draw the line? You can't fire without a hammer spring, but would you regulate a piece of bent wire? Do you regulate the fully assembled rifle? Would it still be regulated if, say, the grip was missing? Where do you draw the line?
The most sensible thing is to regulate one single, constant part. The receiver is perfect for this, because there is rarely a need to change it out, and it is easy to engrave a serial number on. |
Just to clarify for everyone.
This is only 1 piece of a gun. The 'lower' piece of the receiver. The receiver is what the ATF defines as 'The gun' and if the receiver is broken into upper and lower sections it is the 'lower' section that is defined as 'the gun' It's the piece that holds the all important serial number.
Here is an example of a 'lower' for an AR 15 |
How do I summon the |
What's funny is that in the Developer Preview version of Windows 8 there was a registry key that allowed you to completely turn off the Metro Interface. When Microsoft found out that 90% of the dev's testing it had turned off metro, they got rid of the registry key. |
I stopped by a new Microsoft store last week, curious as an android user, formerly blackberry and iPhone. I grilled the guy to get up to speed on the new Windows options.
The store was pretty crowded, but my wife pointed out that the people were mostly employees. Meanwhile at the Apple store you have to wait in line or make an appointment of you want talk to someone.
Anyways, there are 3 different types of windows applications now: standard programs, like Photoshop; apps, which work sorry if like widgets when you're in the grid layout; and phone apps, which are different from the windows 8 apps. From the grid mode, a button brooms you back to the old windows which is probably unchanged. |
I've been a Verizon customer for about 9yrs.
When I left sprint for Verizon, Verizon was great.
9yrs later, here I am shelling out almost $200/month for myself and my wife to have smartphones w/ a decent data/txt plan...
Might just have to go rouge, unlock my phone like a fucking anarchist and call it a day. |
Good for them. As an architect, this is the first I've heard of a company (or large organization, govt or other) seriously questioning the validity of building intensive infrastructure in an area where people really should reevaluate where they are living. It is unstable land that is prone to flooding and hurricanes (of various degrees). Other than the luxury of being near the water, why are we really building here?? We need to start thinking about that question. If companies start refusing to provide infrastructural services to these disaster probe locations maybe that will help residents to rethink their living situation. If it's too expensive for the capitalist-driven corporation to develop, maybe it should be too expensive for development. |
My local print shop was raided by the feds; they were investigating counterfeiting done by "a laser printer that is listed as being sold to you". The printer had been stolen from the shop 6 months prior during a break-in. Luckily the shop owners had filed a police report with the laser printer & model listed on it. I came in shortly after the the investigators left - the shop owners were pretty shaken up. |
Want me to address the music industry specifically?
First off, here:
Secondly:
Third, once again refer to how the music industry [dealth with cassette tapes]( and [digital media such as cd's and mp3 players](
What can they do now? Nothing. They're fucked. They've stuck in their ways of trying to keep a walled garden of music and music rights (which they more than often fail to properly pay the artists their fair dues) and that time has come and passed -thankfully - due to the internet. Streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify and even YouTube help artists reach greater audiences than RIAA and classic record labels have ever been able to, add to that Facebook / Twitter / Reddit / and even MySpace Music and adtists don't need record labels to make it any more. Example: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
However even with all of these different platforms, there are still many many musicians who's music cannot be found on such things such as Spotify / Pandora / YouTube directly because of the record labels - which drives people to piracy.
Pirates now (much like the first link I showed you, and there are numerous studies that also back this up) more than ever spend more money on music than any other demographic.
On to your second point on to why they shouldn't protect their copyright. Here's an answer that may shock you, I think they should. However going after people for sharing songs and demanding $25,000 a song is horse shit. So is taking videos down from YouTube becaus a song is playing in the background on the radio. So are taling down LetsPlay videos because of a 30 second clip featured in an intro - which should be covered by fair use. So is blocking entirely differnt parts of the world from accessing a music video on Vimeo, because the regional sales platforms are different than those availble in the US.
>One last thing. Your entire post reeks of entitlement. You act like you are entitled to music/movies/games which must be delivered the way you want at a price point you deem acceptable, and if those demands aren't met, you are just going to steal it. It's a very shitty attitude.
Pure speculation and conjecture on your part. They have to reach their target audience. Attacking that audience - rather than listening to the deamnds of that audience is not going to make them have a successful busniess model.
Once again, I point you to other people who I have sourced with successful busness models, who they could follow. Those other people such as Gabe Newell of Valve said it perfectly for me: "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." The only problem I have is the continuation of their stonewalling on new technology much like they've done repeatedly with other forms of media (and one reason we still pay such a high rates fee on recordible media such as CD's and DVD's) and they continue to do so with Streaming - saying that it's everyone else's responsibility to make sure they make money. IE blaming Google because of their search results and Mozilla because a browser access a webpage. |
I doubt it. In order to change the delta V (direction and velocity) of a body in space, we must apply enough energy to it to overcome it's inertia (Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion.) You can do this one of two ways. Short term application of large amounts of energy (chemical rocket), or long term application of small amounts of energy (ion drive). The astronauts foot would not give enough force over a long enough period of time to effect the waste enough to fly into the sun. This is of course, greatly simplified. There's orbital mechanics to take into account, and a myriad of other things I'm sure. |
Absolute mass is irrelevant, what matters is mass per energy, since your money is poportional to energy and rocket cost is porportional to mass. Since nuclear fuel makes a whole lot of energy it's not that bad. Though we can do some math.
The cheapest way to launch the spent fuel away from earth is just launch it to escape velocity and let it go wherever, I can't find actual costs, but using current costs for GTO you can get about $25k/kg is more, but I'll also assume you're using spacex or something which can get it done cheaper anyways, so I'll call it a wash and $25k/kg is fine.
Nuclear fuel makes about 50MWh per kg . If you reprocess it and only launch the unusable stuff it's much more cost effective.
It's expensive, but if the cost of electricty went up 5x and/or the cost to launch a rocket went down 5x, it would be cost effective, more likely they could meet in the middle, with electricty at $0.40/kWh and rockets at $10k/kg to escape velocity it would work just fine. |
There's a difference in the nature of the two things under discussion. In the case of global warming, you're talking about consideration of whether a particular phenomenon is occurring or not and what its cause is. This is a question of science.
In the case of thorium reactors you're talking about advocacy for adoption of a particular technology. The questions of science here are not under debate. As with global warming, the science itself is pretty-well agreed upon. The engineering, though, is another matter - unlike the scientific question, the answers are much more issues of shades of grey. When someone argues as if the situation is black/white then either they're biased, over simplifying or naive. |
This is a good comparison of nuclear power vs coal power. Nuclear power is like airplane travel, coal power is like automobile travel. Coal power has numerous issues and generally is extremely high as far as pollution is concerned, as for natural gas, fracking would explain why that is hazardous. There are plenty of accidents that cause deaths with coal power, it's just less catastrophic. Now compare this to how cars get in accidents all the time but they usually affect a small amount of people at once. Then compare this to Nuclear power, which is safe, clean, and powerful, you could use one Nuclear plant to take the place of 15 coal plants, perhaps even more. The only biproduct is nuclear waste which we are getting extremely close to being able to dispose of (fuel in Nuclear Fusion reactors when we finish the designs of one, or the nuclear plant Bill Gates is discussing). Now compare this to airplanes. Airplanes rarely crash, but when they do, it's catastrophic, large damages, most likely many deaths, and lots of money worth of damage. But when you total up how much damage is caused by all the car accidents vs all the damage caused by airplane crashes, it doesn't even compare. |
I'm super happy with my hybrid drive.
I did add a msata ssd to my laptop as well, but the hybrid drive by itself was amazing.
I hope Microsoft gets us a sane partitioning scheme in windows 9. As it is, it is stupidly difficult to get your windows installation, user data, log files and dbs, swap and hibernate files, and boot files all on their own partitions/volumes where they belong.
With the current boneheaded state of windows, it is really hard to manage the size of the /windows directory and the tons of miscellaneous crap that they spam in there
Log files, some temp data, user installed programs... It is really insane to have all that mixed in there. It makes it harder to keep frequently accessed, bottlenecking and executable files on your ssd, while writing logs, user programs, and other nbi/o to a platter, and keep things isolated so its easier to keep log files from spamming out of control, and manage security contexts at a volume level.
Anyway, I keep my uefi partition on the ssd, a Linux rescue environment and windows emergency .wim on the platter. The platter also gets my user home folder, media, and a copy of my 30gb OS partition I occasionally sync over. The ssd gets windows, a swap "partition" (as best as win can manage) and hibernate.
User data partitions are encrypted. But not the OS partitions. But... Who knows what data is getting leaked into my unencrypted partitions because of how MS does things.
The real sad part is trying to share iscsi disks on windows for vm's. It is insane to me to have a duplicated 8gb or so of windows files for each VM where only user programs and data changes. Its trivial on linux, just share a root but mount var, etc, usr and home separately. Or put home on a clustered disk using something like drbd and you get the best of all worlds.
The msdn forums have a comical narrative of "how can I install SQL server, visual studio, etc to my d: drive?" Ms's response is basically that they can't imagine why anyone would want to do that. Circular dependencies are one of the big reasons why they lost a competitive edge and vista was so delayed and bloated. As soon as they tried to isolate and improve/remove one component, half the system broke in unexpected ways. |
I don't really see the issue. In the desktop world, there are 2, maybe 3 OSs everyone knows (including Linux, which makes up single digit representation and is for all intents and purposes not a consumer OS), 2 CPU vendors in Intel and AMD , 2 GPU vendors in Nvidia and AMD/ATI (3 if you count Intel, which I don't, because no one "buys" Intel, it is an integrated chip and is then ignored when someone actually buys a GPU), and what, maybe 3-4 HDD makers using 1-2 ODM parts, plus 3 SSD manufacturers? Plus, let's not ignore other areas of life: 2 mobile OSs, 2 search engines on any given market (Google and Bing in the West, Google and Baidu in the East), 3 browsers, etc. These things evolved this way via consumer a tions and preferences, plus dev support. This is democracy at work in technology, and it's kind of amazing to behold. The things that work well get picked up, which in turn makes them work better, naturally thinning the selection of other ompeting standards that don't work as well.
As long as the companies don't price fix, and stay competitive, having only a few suppliers doesn't hurt an economy. In the CPU space, Intel's done some shady stuff in the past to handicap AMD, but AMD has put out some incredibly compelling, affordable products as a result. In the GPU space, having only Nvidia and AMD has solved sooo many driver and software related issues in games and professional suites that used to occur due to having to support many disparate competing chipsets and software standards. In the OS space, well, people have clear favorites, and then there are the Linux people who get to geek out. |
when people who have never invested in anything in their life suddenly don't get the returns they gambled on
People are upset because they had hope for a company, and now they do not. No one was waiting to cash in on the returns of an "investment" because it was never an investment.
You (not just you, a lot of threads) are making it seem like these are spoiled kids throwing a fit over something they never deserved in the first place. Is it so hard to understand why a people are upset with the company? They were crowd funded, and gave the donors what they asked for. End of transaction. People are upset because they sold themselves as an independent group aimed at a specific demographic with a product that served a specific function. Instead, they were bought buy a company that people already dislike, with intent to change what the headset is used for. |
This is beyond stupid. Kickstarter is not an investment website.
It's a website where you "donate to" (read: purchase from) a company that you think has the potential to meet their goals. You then receive which ever shiny little perk they promised you for the size of the donation.
Who the hell thinks this is a scam? You have to be dumb to think that.
Example:
Guy asks someone for a small amount of money to start a hotdog stand. He promises to give this person 5 free hotdogs once he opens.
Guy gives this person the 5 free hotdogs that he told the person he would give them.
The person then starts bitching about the fact that the hotdog stand isn't paying him an equal portion of what his business is now worth. |
That is hardly the only logical conclusion. Statistical analysis indicates that there is exactly one planet with life on it. Any other number is built upon a tower of assumptions.
[A completely opposite theory to yours is that once a species develops technology they turn inward instead of outward.]( Perhaps civilizations retreat to live in a black hole or some other computing substrate since no one has been able to develop F |
Another shitty article on medium, written by one of my favorite radfems. I really like this conjecture:
>This is because all computers are reliably this bad: the ones in
hospitals and governments and banks, the ones in your phone, the ones that control light switches and smart meters and air traffic control systems. Industrial computers that maintain infrastructure and manufacturing are even worse. I don’t know all the details, but those who do are the most alcoholic and nihilistic people in computer security.
(emphasis mine)
And this one
>It was my exasperated acknowledgement that looking for good software to count on has been a losing battle. Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.
Some people write software, sweetheart. You know that linux box you keep bringing up, like it some how makes you more competent than a Windows user, that's written by people, mostly for free. If the quality is not up to your standard, I suggest you go fork it and do better, or quit complaining. |
It's quite funny to see everybody reading this as if it was new and full of knowledge. It's always been that way, it will always be. It's capitalism kicking our butts to make more software, faster and this dumb girl should keep on tweeting l33t h4x0rZ stuff instead of writing endless wall of clueless retarded shit. |
I think the critical point is that "Net Neutrality" has existed the entire time, but that is now at stake. NN has been the de facto rule of the internet since it has been widely adopted, but we are to the point now where the internet has gone from being an add-on to modern life to a necessity for participating in society, while at the same time the ISP landscape has never been less competitive or more rife with conflicts of interest. The ISP's are now testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with. We're at a watershed moment in the history of the internet, so now we need to codify what makes the internet great before a few huge companies are able to change the landscape to fit their profit-maximization goals at the expense of society. |
Generally the best way to go about it is be nice, don't send them a heap of shit or a letter implying that the congressperson and their staff is out of their fucking minds. Be concise, be curt, and be voice your concerns. These three things will ensure that the poor intern/staff member who skims through the shit sent every day actually reads it and passes it on.
I got this from not only my rep's interns but also my rep. Both said it was good to get a nice letter from time to time. |
Your definition of "just fine" must be measured in a cosmological scale. The average person thinks like you do because we mortals are confined to space and time like feeble noobs compared to the likes of billybuckets.
You see whenever someone thinks about nuclear fallout wiping out large swathes of terrestrial species and multicellular life, they are being clowns. Yeah, so what if it's a mass extinction and more than 75% or the unique lifeforms on the planet are demolished. People like you know biodiversity will rebound in a few hundred million years from then. Obviously these idiot plebeian fools didn't think about it.
Yeah there is the evidence of the many species driven into extinction inadvertently by humans completely as an accidental byproduct of not giving a shit at all... and that leads these unscientific simpletons to think "if we acted on purpose, surely we could accelerate this by destroying the habitat where most of life is living" but they neglect to think about the tardigrade.
Sarcasm over. Seriously, difference between "life on earth will be over" and "life as we know it will be over" is a minute one to make. Yes, scientifically those statements are vastly different. Yes technically you are being correct, and that's the best kind of correct, if you're being a dip shit.
Distinction matters in many things. In this, it doesn't, furthermore I would say that outside a scientific setting your viewpoint does more damage than good. You need not supply any more ammunition to the "we don't need to do anything" crowd. The same people who are so simple they cannot make the distinction between the scenarios are the same that will think "well shit, if the tardigrade can make it, surely my surplus of guns and beef jerky will get me and my family through, fuck solar panels. I can buy another gun for that money. ".
Any insults are in jest or imagined, sorry just trying to make it readable. |
They haven't, but the MPAA are trying to twist the facts so that it's Googles fault that these things exist on the internet because Google found them for you.
Just like dumbshit Jim Hood pointing out that there's child pornography online and trying to say that he's trying to get Google to remove it - yet Google has been paramount in identifying child abuse victims with their image search technology and have done a lot to combat the problem. |
So basically, this is good news for VPN services. UK people will now just buy a vpn service in a country without data retention laws, and boom you can torrent again. On the other hand, not everyone wants to learn what a VPN is, so I guess the law is somewhat effective. I'm glad they aren't taking the Aussie attempt that's currently underway and banning vpns altogether. |
About five years ago, I bought a Braun Activator electric shaver, based on the fact that I hated cleaning my old electric. The cleaning system is great - it's built into the charging cradle, has three modes (eco, standard, intensive), and you can choose when to run the cycle. Downsides.. it automatically decides what cycle to run as some function of time since last cleaning, and can gradually work its way up to "intensive" whether or not you shave every day. Buying replacement cartridges of cleaning fluid can get obnoxious ($10 every two months or so), and the cleaning is a bit on the loud side. I tend to run it just before I leave for work in the morning. I buy new cutter/foil heads every couple of years ($30 to $40) to keep things sharp, while the manufacturer recommends every 18 months. |
It's pretty simple to hijack customers' DNS queries. Fuck, I could do it myself, I don't even need to be the router, I could probably just ARP poison the fucking network or whatever.
All the ISPs need to do is either (a) return NXDOMAIN for .xxx DNS queries, or (b) return the IP of a different website that is controlled by the ISP, by the government, or whoever. It will either say, correspondingly, "upgrade your account to access porn lol" or "no porn in this country lol its against jesus lol".
Any large ISP could do this tomorrow if they liked. China already does far more intensive stuff with it's Great Firewall, they actively block connections containing certain keywords for fuck's sake. Blocking DNS is a piece of piss until someone writes some software that allows Win/Mac users to access an encrypted DNS service, which would probably happen within days, but they'd start blocking URLs that disseminate or talk about the software pretty quickly (in Australia it's illegal to have a website that instructs people on how to commit a crime, & bypassing the Internet filter will almost certainly be a crime, so voila, able to block any web page that mentions how to get past it), so |
4 needs some polish, absolutely. I've been beta testing it for 2-3 months (Since b1 was released, when the hell was that anyway?) on multiple machines (XP, Vista, 7, all different hardware) and the thing crashes like crazy. It has a lot of nice features, but the stability is not there yet.
It hates flash. If you're watching Netflix or youtube and have a bunch of other (reddit or porn, duh) tabs open, it will inevitably crash. I haven't quite pinpointed this issue, but it may be the way FF is handling the different tab threads and memory cleanup. |
When you have everyone that you're following coming through one timeline it's just a jumbled mess of nonsense. Go to the "People I'm Following" page and use the button with the little Bullet Points on it to create a list for each type of person you're following. A "News" list for The Guardian and CNN. A "Shopping" list for Woot and Amazon. A "Funny People" list for Jeffrey Ross, Sarah Silverman and whoever else. Now when you read through the posts you're only looking at what you're interested in seeing at that moment.
I follow about 300 people separated into 8 different lists. I have each list set as a different column in TweetDeck (using the Chrome app so it just sits in a tab on my browser all day) so all the different lists cascade down in a gloriously organized stream of information, articles and one liners. Before I figured out that little trick I had the exact same mindset as you. |
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