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... that believes ad blockers are unethical.

"For the record, I don't run any ad blockers. Basically, I consider them unethical"

And when someone call Lauren out on his absolute stupidity they get censored.

http://www.gizmag.com/stronger...
http://www.gizmag.com/flash-ba...

There is a patent application from 2008:

https://patents.google.com/pat...

But then there is a .mil evaluation:

http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc...

This is an interesting article that discusses the history behind the two degree increase.

From what I can see, it's just a convenient way for politicians to talk about it, because let's be honest, 99% of politicians don't really understand radiative forcing anyway. link to get around paywall.

FWIW, according to the book Portraits in Silicon, Amdahl and Cray never actually met in person.

Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed

My Verizon FIOS service begs to differ. So do the lucky folks with Google Fiber. In fact, when I used to have DSL my 10+ meg connection was on par with the local cable provider's speeds -- without the terrible latency at peak times that my cable-subscribed neighbors experienced.

Your statements might be colored by a poor experience with DSL. Some installations are better than others -- it seems to be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood issue. It's obvious you've never had fiber of any type, and you don't even mention satellite or metropolitan WIFI. Cable is not the end-all, be-all internet provider.

Launch complex 13 (now Landing Pad 1) is located closer to Coco Beach so perhaps I will try there first.

He said "Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works." [1].

There are issues with it though. See my https://groups.google.com/foru...|sort:date/mozilla.support.firefox/N3wPDW8YEJk/GcCVilBOBQAJ (or http://preview.tinyurl.com/4kc... ) newsgroup thread that I recently discovered with http://ocregister.com/ and http://rottentomatoes.com/ 's e-mail address login. :(

That's right! T-34 is faster and more manoeuvrable than German tanks, only "inferior" in size, but small size is also the advantage of T-34.
About fire power, an interesting blog discussed about this:
http://tankarchives.blogspot.c...

You don't have the slightest idea what life is like there, and you hardly even have the experience required to imagine it.

Oh that's rich. You have no clue what life is like in Iceland but you see fit to lecture me on it. And most of your whole bloody nation sees fit as well when most of them couldn't even point to Iceland on a map.

And you're bitching because people in Reykjavik can't buy whale meat at the supermarket.

Where'd you get that idea? You absolutely can. It's just not that commonly eaten, due to price and health reasons.

Icelanders shouldn't have hunted whales to near-extinction

Icelanders have never hunted any whale species to near extinction. That was Americans who did that. *coughs and stares in your general direction* Learn your whaling history. At one point 735 of the world's 900 whaling ships were American.

Icelanders primarily hunt minke whales, which are an incredibly abundant species (rated LC/"Least Concern")

The whale population in Northern Alaska is substantially bigger than the human population

As is the Icelandic minke population.

But hey, come on, lecture me some more about not talking about places I know nothing about!

Not igloos, but the buildings do look a little silly what with the stilts

Really, you're going to lecture someone who lives in Iceland about silly-looking buildings?

The money from the government doesn't make up for the insane costs of food and fuel

Oh PLEASE, you're going to lecture someone in Iceland about expensive prices? You know that half of all children's clothing here was bought overseas because it's cheaper when parents are expecting to take an overseas trip and come back with a suitcase full of clothe then to buy them here? I recently bought a printer that retails in the US for $200. I had to buy it from Europe for $250, pay $40 to have it shipped overseas, then $70 in customs fees. But that still saved me $100 over buying it locally. A month ago I bought a small item on ebay. The purchase price was $1. Shipping made it $5. Customs charged me $11 on top of that. $17 for a $1 item. Don't lecture me about "high prices". :P

And the key point is you get money from the government *and* you don't pay state taxes. You only pay US federal faxes. Do you know what the tax rate on a person working as a contractor is here? It's about 60%. As a salaried employee I pay over 40% of my salary in income tax. Now factor in those purchase prices / customs fees on top of that. Oh yeah, those poor impoverished natives and us rolling-in-the-cash volcano dwellers...

And it is subsistence hunting -- the meat obtained cannot be sold.

That's not what "subsistence hunting" means. Look up the definition of subsistence in the dictionary. Subsistence hunting means "hunting for survival". Nobody in Barrow is going to starve if they don't get whale.

And FYI, Americans in general don't give a rat's arse whether whale is sold or shared, they just care whether it's "indians" doing it or not, because only indians have "cultures" and "history", everyone else is just white devils or evil japs or the like out to destroy the world. If they actually gave a rat's arse about sharing then they wouldn't be raising such a fury over the Faroese whale hunt (they share it too).

Gold almost worthless??? -- Lets make the wires of our houses out of gold! - oops only a swimming pool of the stuff exists.. there is this thing - scarcity vs demand. And when fiat currencies fail - what do people turn to?

You could buy dollars - bits of paper that have value based on what the political elites tell you - of course those same people tell lies about most everything. So how is gold going to become worthless - in the long run vs fiat currency? Gold looks like a pretty good buy right now. Gold is worth something because it has utility (because of it's scarcity, it holds value in small amounts thus useful for trade - longterm storage of wealth - not really an investment - more of a safe haven when currencies fail)

Better yet - how about bitcoin? http://www.google.com/finance?...

Now why is bitcoin worth something? ( holds value because of it's scarcity - even more useful for trade than gold - yet to see the long term).

Interesting time we live in - the Feds must keep the price of stocks inflated or people will realize the pension funds are broke - but doing that will eventually destroy the dollar - some precipitating event - unexpected of course.. next week - or 20 years???

Man! That looks ugly. Uglier than even Steve Job's aluminum yacht with iMacs in the bridge. Waste of money too. There ain't nothing our enemies got that is even worth putting 4.4 billion in jeopardy.

"What wifi problems is anyone having now that this is all over? You claimed it required an expert, but that was the only time that was ever true."

That doesn't actually make any sense. I didn't "claim" anything. I stated facts. You can easily verify them with a new software tool that I predict everyone will be using some day.

DEA has been cracking down on doctors prescribing drugs for the past 5 years, making it harder to get any kind of pain relief drug from your doctor, in both quantity and quality so that you end up suffering so your doctor doesn't go to jail.

I know this from personal experience but here is a simple google search that took 5 seconds.

https://www.google.com/#q=dea+...

... when a boring phone company tries to tap into something that was once a fad.

> ... until recently it was impossible to order a pizza from Minecraft. In fact, you couldnâ(TM)t make a phone call, send a text message or browse the web from the game even if you built a phone.

Around here we call that security and/or separations of concerns. The _last_ thing you want is some bug to be exploited by hackers that can have a negative impact on your finances.

/sarcasm Because the "first" thing I want from Verizon is being able to order a pizza from when I'm playing Minecraft on a phone. Gee, how about less price gouging, better cell coverage, better call quality, ending the shenanigans of deploying fiber, a straightforward billing statement without hidden feeds, better customer service, of the million other things you could actually do to treat and respect your customers better. Nah, who would want that when "Dude, we can order a pizza from within Minecraft!"

Fucking morons.

That's quite a story, Enrique. I like stories. I like stories about pinatas. In fact, I like everything you have to say.

In fact, Android has AIDE, an app for apping other apps.

It also has Tasker, which along with its app factory addon also lets you make apps for Android. I used it to make a tool to toggle Adreno graphics driver options once, it was actually reasonably easy.

Android app:
https://play.google.com/store/...

The penitent information that the story blerb doesn't mention is that 17.3 'Rosa' isn't available via the update manger yet. (An upgrade option should be in the "edit" menu.) But, according to Kirk M.:

"Once the new version of the Mint Update Manager is released (next week sometime, there will be an LM blog announcement as well) the option to upgrade to 17.3 will be included usually in the "Edit" menu. By default, the Update Manager will only continue to update your current install (17.2 in your case) unless you specifically choose to upgrade to 17.3. Just click on the option to upgrade listed in the "Edit" menu, sit back and relax until it's done. Reboot.

It shouldn't be any more complicated than installing normal updates since the base remains the same. Your current kernel should stay the same as well (not upgraded to the newer kernel thatâ(TM)s automatically installed during a "clean" install) which is a decent safety factor for those that upgrade."

However, upgrading via the command line can be done right now. According to this website, just issue the following commands:

sudo sed -i 's/rafaela/rosa/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Reboot; you're good to go.

No, you don't need two sockets, you need to pay for two sockets even if you only use one.
This is specifically addressed in their FAQ (Q7): https://docs.google.com/viewer...

This will get you where you are going. https://sites.google.com/site/...

The lyrics to Guns 'n Roses' song, Civil War, come to mind. This is long but relevant:

"What we've got here is failure to communicate.
Some men you just can't reach...
So, you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it!
Well, he gets it!
N' I don't like it any more than you men."

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars

Read the Rest

It's actually worth reading the rest of the lyrics, they're not bad. I actually still enjoy the song today. I know, I know... It's GnR, you're not supposed to like them but I do.

I've just upgraded my daily driver system from 17.2 to 17.3. It took only a couple of minutes and so far I haven't had any issues (only a few hours in).

I followed the instructions here (the terminal version):

https://sites.google.com/site/...

Best,

From the way this pig is squealing, Center for Medical Progress must be causing him lots of pain.

I wonder if this swine has the balls to Google "racist roots of Planned Parenthood" Nothing like a rich, sheltered, white woman calling black children "undesirables" and working really hard to make sure they're never born...

Or maybe you're completely wrong.

The only reason it's popular today is because of the self-perpetuating nature of popularity. People like it because it's what they've known, and it's what's been available.

They like it because it did read-only replication and key-sharding long before Postgres. While Postgres implemented far more of 80s database ideas and did so at higher quality, they dragged their feet about late 90s ideas like clustering, trying to get it just perfect supposedly, and the web moved on with MySQL. That is why you see it everywhere: it was the only option for a site with too many queries per second to be served by a single machine. Meanwhile Postgres's stubborn-greybeard choice of BSD license meant Greenplum made progress on clustering but could release their Postgres-based work as proprietary software, so the progress withered to irrelevance on a fork and didn't benefit the community. It is the same story with Linux vs BSD on embedded systems: the more restrictive license is actually better for companies in the long run, because when companies act in their interest they are structurally capable of considering only the short term.

Meanwhile even the open source effort may not have considered the long term enough. Today I heard Facebook serves live traffic out of Hadoop, not just batch queries, so I'm not sure these older styles of clustering are relevant any more. I haven't heard much about Postgres clusters. Maybe they're good. :/ but already you can get Hadoop-like interface backed by Bigtable, and new distributed transactional databases like Spanner sound very different from and more powerful than the replication style of MySQL and Postgres.

That is where it belongs. Helium-3 is the dumbest, most impractical solution to our energy problems imaginable. Unicorn farts would be a more realistic power source. We don't actual have any helium-3, and even if we did, it is far harder to fuse, with far less energy out, than deuterium, and deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.

Well said. Though you'll find yourself arguing with people who thought you said it's a dumb idea. It's a great idea --- good enough for practical old NASA to drop it into their distant-futurist visions of lunar colonies --- but a dumb solution for Earth right now, even directed research. There's an energy crisis happening down here.

Lunar H3 mining along with the idea of solar energy collected in orbit are 'fails' in my book because both would place Earth society in the grip of the consortium that manages the infrastructure, and that infrastructure (though awesome) would become an absurdly simple single point of failure. These ideas lead directly to One World Government and it's probably not the one you want. Even if it works out it's lights out for mankind when the first Bad Thing, Who'da Thunk It happens.

In order to ensure that nations can maintain their sovereignty, even to ensure there are nations at all, the fossil free energy solution we pursue should comprise power generated directly from elements that can be mined locally with a reasonable footprint, technology that can be manufactured and maintained locally. Mining is a 'given'. If you think wind and PV solar are mining-free solutions, you haven't looked into the process or run the numbers necessary to scale them. Wind and solar and the chemistry necessary for grid storage are environmental disasters waiting to happen.

Grid electricity should become the universal medium of exchange and should be used for almost all ground transportation, and must be available in such abundance that we can use it to manufacture synthetic fuels for air and sea travel. Continental grids should consist of power plants pushing HVDC into regional 'loops' from which tuned HVAC is extracted from several points to power the legacy grids, which can then be separated into smaller islands than are currently used. Efficiently doing DC/AC conversion and the means to better switch and properly utilize HVDC should be a top research priority --- what ever the energy source.

We are also approaching a time when the purification of ocean/waste water and its transport will become a top priority on a scale that exceeds any present oil and gas pipelines. Within fifty to a hundred years' time, additional terawatts of energy will be needed to bring fresh water into regions that are presently depleting water tables faster than they replenish. I'm not just talking tap water. Our food supply relies on massive irrigation. If you think wind and solar could purify and move this much water, let alone power an industrial society, please think again.

It's time to finish taming fire. Nuclear fission and specifically the two fluid molten salt reactor with active processing with it's "safe in 300 years" waste decay profile is the single best and most practical solution yet devised to produce energy on the scale necessary to survive and prosper.

I'm not fond of these so-called "small scale micro-fission reactors" either, where conventional nuclear power manufacturers re trying to trump the safety issue (while aggravating the waste generation problem) by proposing a great many smaller light and heavy water reactors. Yes of course they want to sell one to every town, including yours. It's an absurd notion borne out of the an

What about all those charitable orgs that spend most of their money on ads for a political candidate? What about the supposed claim of merkin xtians that they give more money than anyone else to charity? Why didn't you guys check the "charity" for real charity status.

And isn't this investigation EXACTLY what you rightwinnutjobs were SCREAMING holy persecution for by the IRS? Them trying to find out of your "charities" were actually doing charity stuff, not politics???

Is this how you fuckwits are going to ensure you get your cake AND eat it? You pack the investgation arm with republicans whose ONLY mantra is "NO" and refuse any and all investigations into economic fraud, throw a shitton of investigation witchhunts against the IRS so that they daren't say "Boo" to a moth, then get private companies to investigate "the left" (IOW someone you don't agree with their policies) for what you were doing, "because both sides are as bad as each other"?

From the way this pig is squealing, Center for Medical Progress must be causing him lots of pain.

I wonder if this swine has the balls to Google "racist roots of Planned Parenthood" Nothing like a rich, sheltered, white woman calling black children "undesirables" and working really hard to make sure they're never born...

Wouldn't that be more like Bowl of Heaven than Ringworld? The ringworld never really used the sun as a motor except to hold it in place.

pictures: https://www.google.com/search?...

Book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bowl-Hea...

Here is the complaint: https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/ilnd/318734/1-0.html.

Here is the patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/US5371734.

Basically the patent describes a time division wireless networking scheme in which certain nodes orchestrate transmission and receiving time slots assigned to adjacent nodes. The claimed benefits of this scheme amount to these: bandwidth can be allocated to nodes dynamically, and nodes can extend battery life by turning off their receivers when it's not their turn to receive data. I have no strong opinions as to whether the networking scheme as so vaguely described in the patent is original enough to be patented, but the complaint is a different matter. It appears that Atlas IP LLC appears claiming that any system in which devices are polled and in which the devices may not be transmitting or receiving at any time infringes on this patent. If that is what the patent means, then clearly it's too obvious to be "original".

Not this shit again.

Why isn't ALOHAnet prior art?

Here is the complaint: https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/ilnd/318734/1-0.html.

Here is the patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/US5371734.

Basically the patent describes a time division wireless networking scheme in which certain nodes orchestrate transmission and receiving time slots assigned to adjacent nodes. The claimed benefits of this scheme amount to these: bandwidth can be allocated to nodes dynamically, and nodes can extend battery life by turning off their receivers when it's not their turn to receive data. I have no strong opinions as to whether the networking scheme as so vaguely described in the patent is original enough to be patented, but the complaint is a different matter. It appears that Atlas IP LLC appears claiming that any system in which devices are polled and in which the devices may not be transmitting or receiving at any time infringes on this patent. If that is what the patent means, then clearly it's too obvious to be "original".

So the NTLM bug was fixed, but somehow made it into the release. It is fixed in the chromium releases. I'm using 49 at the moment perfectly.
Users could not authenticate to the squid proxies, and couldnt get out, and our entire shipping department couldnt reach fedex.

Bug @ https://code.google.com/p/chro...

We had to push out a group policy for google chrome to turn off updates, but a few users already got smacked with it. We use google gmail/office enterprise, so this hit us pretty hard. Having employees use IE11 for now. Bug says a update might be pushed out tomorrow.

I wondered whether such a thing already exists (the Internet seemingly has everything) so I did a quick search. I didn't find a portable Faraday cage, but I did find SharkSkin Covert Electromagnetic Trilaminate Dive Hood which claims to "reduces the Human Body's Electric Signal making you Less-Detectable to Underwater Marine Life." I wonder if it would work the other way also: Reduce electromagnetic frequencies entering a human brain.

Of course, WiFi Allergies are 100% bunk, but it might be an interesting "treatment" for the psychological symptoms. As a bonus, we'll know not to complain about the WiFi being down to people walking around with SharkSkin hoods.

I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently?

Hard to say. The company does make pretty substantial profits and they have quite a lot of cash. The problem the company doesn't really seem to have organic growth prospects and they don't dominate an important segment like Google does with search or Apple does with devices. Yahoo just doesn't seem to have a focus to the company and I'm not sure anyone would be able to easily fix that.

And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.

That is among the dumbest business decisions of all time. The board should have pimp slapped him when he didn't want to sell the company for such a staggeringly large amount of money. I can't stand Microsoft either but if they want to buy my company for way more than it is really worth I'd take the money and run.

From Google's Apps for Education Common Questions page:

https://support.google.com/a/a...

Will there be advertisements with Google Apps?
For all EDU domains, ads are turned off in Google Apps for Education services and K–12 Google Apps for Education users don't see ads when they use Google Search and are signed in to their Apps for Education accounts.

The chromium open source tar ball will continue to be updated and support 32-bit x86 and ARM for at least the next 5 years.

The proprietary Chrome binaries which include features listed below will not longer be updated after March 2016:

- AAC, H.264, and MP3 Support
- Adobe Flash (PPAPI)
- Google Update

https://groups.google.com/a/ch...

IBM has you covered, a Patent on how to be a patent troll

http://www.google.com/patents/...

And for good measure Halliburton has a patent on how to patent someone else's invention and gain control of it

http://www.google.com/patents/...

IBM has you covered, a Patent on how to be a patent troll

http://www.google.com/patents/...

And for good measure Halliburton has a patent on how to patent someone else's invention and gain control of it

http://www.google.com/patents/...

Aww, thank you APK, it makes me feel all warm inside when you call me a troll. It is so nice when one of the biggest trolls in the community welcomes me with open arms to his elite community. It makes me feel awesome that you have finally allowed me to join the hallowed halls of trolldom where you rule as king of all the trolls.

So, when do I get my Moo pin, or my Apping App App? Or maybe you hand out APK pins, with this as the picture:

https://www.google.com/search?...

I'll just leave this here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

AlmostALLAdsBlocked is crippled by default & adblock doesn't do a FRACTION of what hosts do for FAR LESS no less -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org] from a higher cpu serviced level of operations MINUS addons detectability (& blockability easily by ClarityRAY) in kernelmode vs. less cpu serviced usermode (slower).

Yes, Hosts files is dramatically slower, thank you for agreeing.

DNS has security issues hosts overcome & do better locally resolving for more speed than remote DNS provides (with less complexity by far as well as power & resources consumption) -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]

Oh? An up to date DNS installation has security issues? Just like your hosts file? Interesting how that works. DNS is far less complex, and you admit you run it in that very post you link to. Are you saying you run DNS when you "know" it has security issues?

We will see where ad networks go in the future, for now you are speculating, and I am speculating, so complaining that I am in "phantasyland" while you are in reality is quite funny.

Here is an example of Ads hosted on the web site, that apparently don't pay:

https://www.google.com/#q=Wind...

Care to explain how no one does it, when Google clearly does do it?

> What has socialism done to give it such a horrible name?

Robbing from Paul to pay Peter.

The problem in America is that there is a _perception_ of socialism == communism which is anathema to (free market) capitalism.

Ironically the US _is_ communist; it is just never _labeled_ as such, but the facts, sadly, speak for themselves:

1. Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of Industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. etc.

For more details see:
* http://laissez-fairerepublic.c...
* https://www.google.com/search?...

Well, right now "this world is more peaceful" it depends where you live: Go to south america like Venezuela, Brasil, Colombia, Salvador, Mexico see the world there or go to Middle East, specially Siria and around there and see there. Go to africa and visit some countries there and see too. It isn't a "World Peaceful" there too.

This is true when compared to the first world, but untrue compared to the way things were even a couple hundred years ago. Dozens of people killed in rioting is not the same thing as one tribe systematically conquering another tribe, killing all the men, adult women, and boys, and taking the girls as sex slaves -- the sort of practice you can read all about (and apparently God approves of, according to ancient Israelite priests) in the Bible (Torah).

Hell, why do you need to look in the Bible/Torah and go back 4,000 years to find examples?

Just read the Quran and look at ISIL or Boko Haram TODAY.

Yep, no need to go back to the Crusades or Old Testament. It's happening RIGHT NOW!!!.

Allah sure seems to approve.

Had a friend who is quite bright, but inexperienced with root cause elimination. 6 months ago, he went down the path of "building" his own home theatre/PC gaming rig. After several rounds of buying what the online rags suggested as the best bang for the buck, he had three collections of incompatible parts and not one working PC.

I'd done him a couple of favors in the past and he was emotionally defeated with the whole project. He ended up giving me the whole lot. The one thing all his platforms had in common was Gigabyte motherboards with a high density buzz words on the spec sheet and rave online reviews. I've not yet diagnosed all the problems, but I now have a heck of a HPC system after swagging the Gigabyte board for a ASRock that actually retails for 40% less. Turns out that dual bios feature of Gigabyte boards, is REALLY flaky.

https://www.google.com/search?...

At the end of the day, unless you are ready to learn troubleshooting skills related to the tasks, you probably ought to buy something you can box up and ship back if it doesn't work.

I wondered why the summary has links to articles on Softpedia and Bleeping Computer instead of linking directly to Emsisoft, whose employee wrote the decryption utility. But it seems Emsisoft has dropped the ball, as they have nothing on their home page or their blog or their changelog that mentions this tool. In fact I can't find any reference to this on their site at all, which makes me suspicious about downloading it.

Both of the articles in the summary point to a link on emsi.at instead of emsisoft.com. Domain registration and name servers point to emsi.at being a legitimate host under the control of Emsisoft, but who knows? What a weird way to release a security tool, with zero announcements on your company website and the download hosted at a URL shortener.

But I still don't understand what a joulukouku is.

Literally: Christmashook

But "Joulukuu" is literally Christmas "moon". In finnish month names end with -kuu ie. moon, meaning month. Both having same ethymological origin, see explanation here.

Joulu is finnish possibly from Swedish "Jul" meaning same thing ie. Christmas, but there are multiple explanations where Jul originally came from, see this.

Google Bookmarks kind of ruins the joke, eh? ;)

Here's my anecdote: Many interesting ideas I had back in the day came to me under the influence of pot. Some of those ideas brought me a great deal of money.

I never said this doesn't happen, but your reasoning is post hoc ergo propter hoc: your ideas came to you while you were stoned, therefore they must have come from the pot. In order to conclude that you'd have to have done all of your thinking about the problems while you were stoned.

As I said, I think it quite plausible that drugs can, at the right time, help you escape the limitations of self-censorship in your thinking. But in my experience people who are stoned all the time certainly have novel ideas, but those ideas aren't particularly useful. That's because creativity actually involves a kind of interplay of critical and imaginative thinking. Enough people have anecdotes like yours to think there's something to it, but the very nature of creativity -- at least as I'm defining it -- makes me doubt you can get it entirely out of a bottle.

For the record, I consider creativity the finding of novel approaches to a thing that are better in some way than pre-existing approaches. This almost certainly presupposes an intimate familiarity with pre-existing approaches, unless we count pure dumb luck as creativity. Picasso, for example, didn't draw the way he did because he couldn't to realistic work. He had very good drawing skills, and his early works were representational. That level of draftsmanship doesn't come without struggle; and from that he derived his interest in geometric figures, most easily seen in the development of his landscapes. Note if "House in the Field" seems a bit crude, it was painted when he was twelve years old.

The Turbographx-16 is the worlds first true 16 bit CD system!

This is a PR campaign orchestrated by BSA (Business Software Aliance), see this article (in czech, google translated) https://translate.google.com/t... It's not right to pirate software but it's also not right to lie, shame on you, BSA.

As the person credited for the first law commercializing space launch services (credited by the law's sponsor, Ron Packard during his introduction of my Congressional testimony on space commercialization) there truly _is_ a problem with privatized space and it is a capital market failure.

This capital market failure systemically suppresses technology investment and it derives from something that should be obvious to anyone in venture finance:

Economic activity is taxed rather than liquidation value of net assets.

A venture financier, or angle, or anyone else who takes dollars out of a bank account and puts it into a high risk venture, is rendering their capital illiquid. If you cease taxing economic activity (income, capital gains, sales, value added, inheritance, gifts, etc.) and instead tax only the liquidation value of net assets, for all practical purposes high risk investments cease being taxed.

This is why, the year after I testified before Congress on the initial legislative direction for companies like SpaceX, I wrote a white paper titled "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy" wherein I proposed a shift away from centralized government provision of technology development and, at the same time, a shift away from politically biased government delivery of social goods (ie: the welfare state), by taxing net assets at the rate of interest on the national debt and distributing tax revenues as an unconditional citizen's dividend. Later I clarified the assessment mechanism to be liquidation value as well as some of the further aspects of government to be privatized.

Its obvious why so-called "liberals" don't want this since by-passing the welfare state without regard to any politically defined criteria other than citizenship, it would gut their political base.

Conservatives, in particular neo-libertarians of the Austrian School, on the other hand, have much to answer for here. A net asset tax, so assessed, is a big step toward the anarchocapitalism of the American school of libertarian thought exemplified by Lysander Spooner in his definition of "legitimate government" as "a mutual insurance company". Protecting property rights is according to the American school of libertarian philosophy (as contrasted with the Austrian school), the primary role of government and it is entirely legitimate to charge for that service just as it is legitimate for a property insurance company to charge a premium that is approximately proportional to the value of the property being underwritten. Moreover, it is entirely legitimate for any company to pay dividends and a mutual company would pay dividends to its members -- members who, quite reasonably, could be called on for service in times of emergency such as war and could, therefore, quite reasonably be assigned one share and exactly one share each.

Indeed, I view it as a moral responsibility for men like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg -- particularly as beneficiaries of network externalities aka network effects that could not exist in the absence of government protection of those monopolistic property rights -- to at the very least lend their vocal, if not material, support to such a capital reform.

It would be smart for risk investors like Elon Musk to do so.

Expiration dates are indeed predictable. One common trick used by subscription services is to merely bump it the appropriate number of years during their auto-renew phase rather than complaining to the user (and therefore offering a reminder that it exists, thus possibly getting the service canceled, and that's lost revenue!).

Giving a random range of -1 to +4 months from the standard shouldn't harm anything (except the aforementioned squirrelly services?) and would offer a lot more protection. Consider googling 4147 visa for example; you'll find a few expired credit cards. Now bump the expiration dates by 2 or 4 years. (Slashdot covered this two years ago.)