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I spent a few months living in Arizona some years back. I lived in an apartment complex where most of the space between the buildings was the carpark. The most coveted spaces were the ones that had a sort of awning or overhang, so that the car was out of direct sunlight. It made a huge difference in how hot the car got.

As an engineer, seeing this vast swath of paved-over space (more than an acre all told), some of which was itself covered with structures specifically intended to block the sun, I thought to myself: why in the hell don't they just cover the entire carpark, and cover it with solar panels, to boot? The complex could advertise itself as having all-shaded parking (and commensurate higher rent) and reduce its net electricity consumption. In sunny Arizona, such a project could have paid for itself in less than a decade; today, the economics are even more favorable.

My question is: why isn't this (grid-tied, solar panel-shaded parking lots) done by every piece of commercial real estate in sunny climes? You make greater use of a resource (land area), the tenants' cars end up cooler (you can charge higher rent for that), it has a more or less guaranteed return in a reasonable time span, and reduces operating expenses (lowered electric bills). See, for instance, the western parking lot at the Googleplex headquarters. Why isn't this done everywhere?

Solar panels over a carport is fine, but I'd like to see them over more farms. Besides providing clean energy, the solar panels would protect the crops from the hot sun (a big problem in the US midwest in 2012), and from hailstorms. (Well-built solar panels can withstand hailstorms.)

During a regular rain (not a hailstorm), the panels could be tilted vertically, so that the rain was distributed evenly among the crops.

I guess the biggest problem a farmer would have with this, would be driving his tractor over ground that had lots of poles sticking out of the ground, supporting the panels.

First up, it's not like solar carports are a new idea. Note that in many of the pictures the cars were clearly under solar panels in commercial lots, so that handles the commute

Still, this is a lot better idea than putting solar panels on the car itself, at least a carport will have a predictable amount of sun, and as you mentioned, it can be angled properly.

I'd note that this 'solar charging station' is actually only so in name, instead being a standard grid-tie system. The benefit is that covered car ports are really, really nice to have in sunny areas(saves on air conditioning, wear&tear on vehicle, etc...), so making the roof solar panels is a marginal cost over having to have a roof there in the first place, even if it would only be corrugated tin or something otherwise.

30' south facing is only if you're at 30' latitude. I'll note that the BMW concept IS tilted somewhat. The actual angle you'd end up settling on would depend on where you are, the weather, and the balance you want between using the panels as shelter and gathering power from them.

I've proposed these before. If you do the research, you'll find that Solar panels are really, really tough. One possible way to reduce expense in new-build, as we see here, would be to actually use the panels as the 'roof', eliminating the expensive conventional roof underneath.

There should be an easy and open mechanism for objections. The process as it stands is broken and very obscure.

Translation: It should take no knowlege, cost nothing, and preferably involve some charitable group that carries out my wants, unbidden, before I've even appreciated that I have them. Just like in everything else in life.

Rebuttal:

Citation of prior art and written statements

"Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing... prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent... [and] If the person citing prior art or written statements... explains in writing the pertinence and manner of applying the prior art or written statements to at least 1 claim of the patent, the citation of the prior art or written statements and the explanation thereof shall become a part of the official file of the patent."

That seems easy, open, to cost nothing (but time and a stamp), and not particularly obscure. But then, if you can't be bothered to Google how to submit prior art and then read one of the top 5 links, everything is obscure.

(not demand start, but that's very UNIX anyway: in UNIX(tm), things start when they're configured to during boot

For workstations, especially portable ones, shorter boot time is a marketing bullet point that differentiates one system producer from another. So as little should "start [...] during boot" as needed.

or when a USER f***ing starts them.)

But then you have to provide some way for the system to decide which USER is allowed to "f***ing start" each service. Or do you really want to have to wait for a member of the wheel group to show up to enter the command and password to "f***ing start" your machine's network driver? How is that better than letting the network driver demand-start when a program that uses the network is started? Linus Torvalds wrote in this post: "And today Daniela calls me from school, because she can't add the school printer without the admin password. Whoever moron thought that it's "good security" to require the root password for everyday things like this is mentally diseased."

While I hate the term, the SF Weekly assuredly did use "tech bro" intentionally. You can see that it's not the first time they've used it, nor are they the only ones using it. The term usually refers to the SOMA, app-of-the-week startup crowd that's more interested in pitching VCs than building something useful.

I am surprised they haven't used dogs. It worked well for airports in Florida: http://news.google.com/newspap...

Of course even less people can get C-band than can put up a big stick antenna, thanks to zoning and homeowners associations and living in apartments. People in urban and suburban areas don't like being around satellite dishes that are big enough to take a bath in.

... due to the law of diminishing returns... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

H1Bs directly reduce wages of technical employees, plus they also displace local contractors who otherwise get much higher hourly rates than employees generally due to the short term nature of the projects and higher skill levels and so on. Even if there is not a lump of labor, there is such a thing as a fixed budget at any point in time.

The US created just about zero net new jobs in the last decade while the population and the GDP grew. So, output is increasing in a 21st century economy while labor stays fixed or declines as a percent of the population.

On top of that, it doesn't matter how much labor is needed if it can be done more cheaply by robots and AIs. And before such replace human workers entirely, they will let a few workers do the work of many, thus increasing unemployment,

There are many possible "solutions" to this situation being tried, which I catalog here:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...

The real future of work is to make it play and pleasant. See Bob Black and EF Schumacher:

Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."

Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

The 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon depicts a society powered by mobile computing that has realized both these objectives (especially the first).
http://books.google.com/books?...
https://archive.org/details/pr...

For some comic relief see also the 1950s story "The Midas Plague" where only the very wealthy were allowed to have full-time jobs and work overtime and live in small homes, while everyone else was limited to part-time jobs as best or unemployment and forced consumption of mansions and massive amounts of food and consumer goods at worst..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Here.

OH! Here's a heap of examples!

Then there's the whole Rush Limbaugh tough on drug abusers except when blowhard radio personalities take so much non-prescribed oxycontin their ears quit working. Why hasn't he had himself locked up? (just Google, there's far too many references to link)

Then there's these.. Here too. Even some (former) Republicans agree.

Sarah was probably abused as a child - that is all the knows. As an adult, she gravitated to a partner the was like her abuser.

Human beings are not this completely rational animal. As a matter fact, most of our decisions are based on gut feelings (Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow).

And when you mix in physical trauma, people break and do stupid things like run back to their abuser or don't leave. A lot of that is also fear - fear that the abuser will punish them.

Or to put is this way, to expect rational action from someone in this predicament is completely unreasonable.

Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders.

This isn't true for Google, and in fact it's not true for many corporations.

What corporations are legally obligated to do is to fulfill the promises made in their articles of incorporation and in their statements to prospective shareholders during offerings (public and otherwise). Generally, these documents specify profit as the primary motive, but they often include caveats which allow the company to seek other goals alongside or perhaps even to the detriment of profits.

Google's documents, in particular, include a lot of such weaseling. The primary document to consider is the founders' letter to prospective shareholders during the IPO, in which they set the expectation for the shares people buy. That letter specifically announced the intention of the founders to maintain control of the company so that it does not have to be motivated entirely by profit motive, and particularly not by short-term profit motive.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and hold a small number of Google shares -- most received as part of my hiring bonus -- but I don't speak for Google. This erroneous notion that corporations are legally obligated to generate maximum profits is one that bothered me long before joining Google and indeed I made posts very similar to this one long before going to work for Google.)

Just leave that kind of behavior undefined.

Oh, that's just what we need. In the event of an unavoidable collision, demons will fly out of the driver's nose.

Moodle has been around since 2002. its open source and pretty easy to install and maintain. Google classroom, like most other google apps, ablates the responsibility of servers, networking, and an IT staff and in turn allows educational institutions to experience the full wealth of googles Software As A Service. Just imagine, your proctoring a major exam when suddenly your application just disappears in a fashion not unlike the massive gmail outage on 1/24/14. Google has no technical support, no publically available points of contact and zero fucks to give about your students or your lesson plan because you arent the consumer, you're the product.

https://support.google.com/a/t... : "Phone support is available for administrators of Google Apps for Business, Education, Government, and Nonprofit accounts." Not sure how that compares to their Google Apps for Business stuff, but that has gone from mediocre to pretty good. I didn't loose anything in the great outage of 2014, despite having 3 gmail accts and using google docs with it. In fact, I've never lost a google doc in 6-7 years. And when you hear rants like this, there never seems the possibility that something can disappear in other ways besides a "google outage", or some "cloud cluster fuck". Users never delete things accidentally, or rename them, dogs no longer eat homework, and non-cloud servers never seem to crash, or if they do, there is super-IT man at the ready, and the backups are alway good and easy to pull that one file out that no one can find all of a sudden, and no one ever overwrites a file with an older version, and of course no one would care to backup stuff thats in the google, or other, cloud even though the tech for that exists.

*sigh*

Well then, it must be my imagination , huh?

Ukraine and 21st Century Neo-Fascism: Left-Wing Support for Imperialism and White Supremacy

I read about it YEARS ago in the Economist - which I'm trying to find a cite - but here is my search : Find Fascism in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine pops up.

Funny? Isn't it?

And I'm called "stupid" all the time ....one of the reasons why I gave up my registered account and post only as AC.

That's not Waldo. THAT'S Waldo.

Where is WALDO?

Umm... Right here?

This area was tested for nuclear waste disposal, Yucca Mountain won out.

Are you referring to the Oak Ridge complex? ISTR that that was only being considered as a nuclear waste storage/ disposal site because it already had a lot of material on site. And it's in Tennessee, several hundred miles away from the area under discussion.

This area is a basalt range, and no problem for future earthquakes (claimed), yes we have Mt.s St. Helen but that's the edge of two plates.

I don't know much about the geology of America, not being an American and having no intention of going to America to work as a geologist (I have worked as a geologist on 3 other continents though, as well as in Canada). But my first glance at the landscape around ORNL, Tennessee linked to above makes me think "not a flood basalt region". This link to the Oklahoma geological survey is a bit slow ... try this one ... but tells me that Oklahoma isn't a flood basalt province either (that's not ruled out by Oklahoma being popular for hydraulic fracturing enhanced oil and gas production (popularly "fracking", but being in the trade I'll give it it's proper name). So, I'm guessing that you're getting confused with the Hanford site in (IIRC) Washington State. Which is half a fucking continent away, but is on a flood basalt province. And close to a number of volcanoes. Which doesn't really sound good for long term storage.

but if Oklahoma is having earthquake warnings, not sure what to say actually

I'm not sure what you're trying to say either. Was Oklahoma ever on a long (or short) list for nuclear waste disposal? Not being an American, I don't know. However, since it's a fairly large place, then an increased probability of moderate earthquakes in the near future doesn't necessarily preclude there being parts of Oklahoma which may remain suitable for (nuclear) waste storage/ disposal. Then again, as a geologist and scientist, living in one of the two most radioactive cities in my country, I have a rather more robust (and frankly, realistic) attitude to radiation than the hysteria which the popular press treat the topic with.

You know, I really ought to get my Geiger counter working again. But it's not something that I consider particularly important.

Note: I wrote the below comment when I wrote the previous one, but wanted to separate the two discussions. So here is my response to your oil subsidies claim.

As for the oil subsidies, you provided nothing that disputes my argument. The government does not give money from tax receipts to the oil industry. The government does give tax deductions for various business expenses and practices, just like with every other industry. Each of those articles you point to show they are talking about tax breaks of various kinds, not direct payments. It's fine with me if you oppose some of those tax breaks, because you have every right to oppose them.

On a side note, when did a 'tax deduction' become a 'subsidy'? A subsidy is money given to encourage an activity or assist a group*. A tax deduction may be enacted to also encourage or assist, but it is not the same as actually giving someone money from your own pocket.

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

Yup and there was a case of this in m8y state which was hilarious: http://www.masslive.com/news/i...

but a quick google search shows: https://www.google.com/search?...

Just on the first page of google we see similar incidents in Florida, New Jersey, DC.... ROTFL.

Bullshit.

Lenin? Yeah. He said shit like that. Stalin, wanting to seem like Lenin? Him too. The fucking KGB, though?? Have you read anything ever written by any kgb directors in defense of their actions?

Take a look at how KGB decision making actually occured and acknowledge how wrong you are.

Well, this isn't something Obama invented...

Perhaps not, but he has latched onto it as his personal catch phrase.

Just like how Bush Sr didn't come up with the phrase, "no new taxes," but when I hear that phrase he immediately springs to mind... or rather, Dana Carvey's dead-on impression of him.

using an F-150 on racing day...

Seems to work for Farm Truck.

Next Google investment you'll hear about is mice.

https://plus.google.com/+Larry...
.

Sorry, but I'm right. Coherent was pretty cheap, ~ $100.00. Minix wasn't that pricey either. SCO competitors often undercut them on price and could often run the wide range of commercial software available for it.

For comparison: " Windows NT operating system. Initial version is 3.1. Price is US$495, or US$295 as an upgrade from a previous Windows operating system. - Chronology of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems"

Unix list princes from 1993:

Consensys System V:
Base 2 user license - $249
Unlimited users complete package - $1,295

Dell Unix System V R4
Base 2 user license - $495
Unlimited users complete package - $1,295

Interactive Unix
Base 2 user license - $495
Unlimited users complete package - $3,195

SCO Open Desktop
Base 2 user license - $1,295
Unlimited users complete package - $4,290

Univel UnixWare
Base 2 user license - $249
Unlimited users complete package - $2,495

A/UX was a flat cost ( ~ $700 on cdrom) and could support 16 users and came with a fully loaded system including utilities, fortran and C compilers. Licenses to copy were $439. On top of that it could run Macintosh software.

Many of the free and open tools, such as the GNU collection, could run on lots of the commercial releases as well. And that's before considering the UCB code. By '93 the BSDs were entering the scene as well.

And lets not forget the fact that as wonderful as Linux & *BSD were in the early 90s there was little commercial software that ran on them, and even if it did it might not have been cost effective to run things on a PC compared to what a workstation or bigger machine could do.
   

In 1996 Linux Torvalds joined Transmeta, a California-based startup that was designing an energy-saving CPU. He continued to oversee kernel development for Linux, and in 2003 left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel as a Fellow at The Linux Foundation (known at the time as Open Source Development Labs) and today remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

https://drive.google.com/file/...

The man has been renamed after his own Frankenstein.

$2k. That's not a typo, they received two hundred dollars.

DOES NOT COMPUTE

You must be one of those high-level language compilers to have caught that error.

I am using multiling keyboard which allows swype input and doesn't even need network permission nor anything else than the user dictionary.

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

I'll second this suggestion. When I found out the keyboard that came with my tablet (FlexT9) was no longer in development because Nuance bought Swype, I went looking for alternatives since I was stuck on a software dead-end otherwise, and MultiLing was the one I ended up liking the most.

Decent defaults but extremely configurable. In addition to swipe, it has a split keyboard mode for thumb typing, options can differ in portrait and landscape, and it can be resized on-the-fly to use more or less screen space while in use. Plus multiple dictionaries (including a "linux dictionary" with completion for shell commands and more), many keyboard layouts (4- and 5-row qwerty, number only, dvorak, colemak, etc.), easy access to extra keys (function, sysrq, ins/break/del, arrows, esc, tab, math symbols, etc.), and some other things I can't think of or don't use. You can change the colours, key sizes, spacing between keys, even the roundedness of the key corners.

All this and it's a <1mb download (+700kb with the English dictionary). Plus the dev updates it often with bug fixes and features, so it's constantly improving.

it's not perfect, but easily one of the best keyboards I've used while still being fast and lean.

I am using multiling keyboard which allows swype input and doesn't even need network permission nor anything else than the user dictionary. https://play.google.com/store/...

If you make the .png transparent then you can just view it on google maps throgh docs. I have done this for northern Europe.

$2k. That's not a typo, they received two hundred dollars.

DOES NOT COMPUTE

Obviously shoddy work, not enough "eyes" looking at it from a QA perspective.

I don't really have bandwidth to fact-check this. There are a lot of trends and correlation is not necessarily causation. Mass shootings are defintiely on the rise in this country as are metal detectors in high schools. Also a lot of professional criminals are moving from physical to virtual crimes which may involve less gun violence.

Everyone of those mass shooters were involved with supervised psychotropic drugs.

Another Mass Shooting, Another Psychiatric Drug? Federal Investigation Long Overdue
One Thing in Common... and It's Not Guns
Or
Mass+Shooter+Psychotrpic+Drugs

$2k. That's not a typo, they received two hundred dollars.

DOES NOT COMPUTE

You don't know what you're talking about. Do you have any idea how much money was invested in OpenSSL last year? $2k. That's not a typo, they received two hundred dollars. If the volunteers responsible for openSSL, a world-class product, were held accountable for bugs they would have no choice but to ditch the project. You want accountability, you pay for it. No, $2k won't cut it.

Get down your high horse, they're not your slaves. People work for free and you think you can tell them how they're supposed to do it. Either do better or shut up and let others work in peace. The OpenBSD guys have the right attitude. They saw OpenSSL sucked and got their hands dirty to fix it. What have you done to address the problem?

I'm not challenging the 30 day number, to be sure.

It's not entirely true that write amplification won't appear to speed up the rate at which an SSD erases sectors. SSDs generally have multiple independent flash banks, and each can process an erasure independent of the others. To maximize your erasure rate, you need a pattern of writes that triggers erasures across all banks as often as possible. Each bank will split its time spent receiving data to write, committing write data to flash cells, and erasing flash cells. (My assumption is that a given bank can only be doing one of these operations at a time, which was certainly true for the flash devices I programmed.)

Consider a host sending a stream of writes as fast as it can send it. The writes will land on the drive as fast as the SSD controller can process them and direct them to flash cells. If there are any bottlenecks in that path, such as generating ECC codes and allocating physical blocks in the FTL, it will slow down the part of the duty cycle devoted receiving and committing write data.

A "friendly" write stream would minimize the number of GC cycles the SSD performs, and thus the amount of write amplification that occurs. Thus, the total number of writes to the SSD media is at most slightly larger than what the PC sends, and the "receive-write" portion of the "receive-write-erase" cycle gets lengthened by whatever bottlenecks might be in the PC-controller-flash path. A "hostile" write stream triggers a larger number of GC cycles to migrate sectors. It seems reasonable to me that an on-board chip-to-chip block migration might be quite a bit faster than receiving data from the PC. For one thing, you don't necessarily need to recompute ECC. The block transfer itself could be handled by a dedicated DMA-like controller transferring between independent banks in parallel with other activity. So, generating more write data locally to the SSD could reduce the time spent in the receive-write portion of the receive-write-erase cycle, so you can spend a greater percentage of your time erasing as opposed to receiving or writing.

It seems a little counter-intuitive, but it's in some ways similar to getting a super-linear speedup on an SMP system, which is indeed possible with the right workload. How? By keeping more of the traffic local.

The main effect of write amplification, though, is on the SSD wear specs themselves, as I said. They're stated in terms of days/months/years of writes at a particular average write rate. So really, when you multiply that out, they're specified in terms of total writes from the PC. There's at least one flash endurance experiment out there showing that drives often massively exceed their rated maximum total writes by very large factors. One reason for that, I suspect, is that they aren't sending challenging enough write patterns to the drive to trigger worst case (in terms of bytes written, not wall-clock time) failure rates.

For better privacy there is a search engine app, Search GUI. http://www.searchgui.com/ The mobile app links are: iPhone/iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap... Android: https://play.google.com/store/... Amazon Fire: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... Search engines like Search GUI can get a fair chance to compete with Google. Search GUI does not track any user information at all. The mobile apps don't even have ads. Has an interface built specifically for touch and mobiles/tablets.

There are altenate search engines built specifically for mobile. One example is: Search GUI: http://www.searchgui.com/ The mobile apps for Search GUI: https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap... https://play.google.com/store/... http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... Search GUI also have better privacy in that they don't track any user information unlike Google/Microsoft.

What the mods failed to see with the GP is that the American jury is going to have some prejudices against the foreign company - especially an Asian one.

All in all, Apple has this great reputation in the US, it's considered to be the poster boy for innovation and how USA is still #1!

Most Americans have the view that Asian companies do nothing but copy American companies' products, cheapen it, and sell it for less; while costing the jobs of red blooded Americans.

Rule based on law? Ah, the subconscious is an amazing thing. Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman and other Behavioral economists have quite a bit of data on how we humans are anything but rational and our decisions are mostly made unconsciously.

Samsung had no chance.

What the mods failed to see with the GP is that the American jury is going to have some prejudices against the foreign company - especially an Asian one.

All in all, Apple has this great reputation in the US, it's considered to be the poster boy for innovation and how USA is still #1!

Most Americans have the view that Asian companies do nothing but copy American companies' products, cheapen it, and sell it for less; while costing the jobs of red blooded Americans.

Rule based on law? Ah, the subconscious is an amazing thing. Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman and other Behavioral economists have quite a bit of data on how we humans are anything but rational and our decisions are mostly made unconsciously.

Samsung had no chance.

Type "cbc.ca" in the address bar? Screw that, they type CBC in their Google home page, wait for the search, then click on the cbc.ca link that comes up. Bass ackwards way of using the 'net in my book, but it works for them.

I remember when Google used to return a link to cbc.ca. Now it returns a link that goes to a Google redirector first, and only then goes to cbc.ca. Look at this shit:

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.cbc.ca/&sa=U&ei=IX1kU-_XK46KyAT64oDwAw&ved=0CBwQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEC5zGQIPXJ2rHgSuIAvHVNv5Ghgw

Well, it certainly does work for Google.

Now we know why UX people hate status bars, and now that they've gotten rid of those, they're going after the URL bar.

Anything that gives the user information is a threat. Besides, there's no "hover" gesture with a touchpad. You don't know where a link goes until you've clicked it and given the analytics people their data, and that's just the way the UX people who write the web browsers like it.

A few points:

* Rand Paul is looking for a way to accept alternative currencies like Bitcoin as campaign contributions. That makes him technologically progressive, not backward as some people here are somehow trying to spin it! Read the whole article for more context.

* I don't see why some people interpret this as an attempt to regulate Bitcoin. He obviously supports a free market in currencies - some backed by governments (which is the reality that we presently live in), some backed by a secure distributed ledger (like Bitcoin), some backed by commodities (like e-gold or e-penguins), some by investment assets (like stocks), etc.

* He did not claim to have invented the concept of a mutual fund - he engaged in a thought experiment for a new digital currency, backed by stock(s) / mutual fund(s). This is not an attack on Bitcoin, just a different (and perhaps complementary) idea. If there's a way to do this already, I haven't heard of it. There's no reason why you can't set up a decentralized network for swapping stock / fund shares. Of course all major businesses are currently tied exclusively to national currencies, but hopefully this will soon change...

--libman (old account)

(1) Read Hayek's Choice in Currency .

(2) Charles Koch (not "daddy" Fred C Koch) informed Hayek in a 1973 letter that, since he paid into the US Social Security program for over 10 years, he is technically entitled to benefits. Charles Koch is guilty of stating a fact, possibly as a joke. Hayek is guilty of receiving a letter. It takes very little to give the socialist spin blogosphere an orgasm... With all blogs linking to The Nation article, that has since been removed from their Web-site... Guess they sobered up...

(3) "Moving to US to take advantage"?! Hayek worked and paid taxes all his life. Specific to the US, Hayek taught at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1962, and later also taught at UCLA in late 60s / early 70s (before that aforementioned letter that you're trying to spin), and he intermittently worked on other things while residing in US and paying US taxes. He was by no means a moocher. He won the Nobel Prize a year later.

(4) There is absolutely zero logic to claims that libertarians are "hypocrites" if they don't reject anything and everything touched by the coercive monopolies of state. Hayek paid taxes / social security all his life - why can't he take back some of what was stolen from him?! Were slaves "hypocrites" for eating their masters' food?! (According to one theory (which presently I don't practice), libertarians should morally commit as much welfare fraud as possible! Was General Washington a "hypocrite" for using captured British cannons against them?!)

(5) "Until?" Neither of the two men you're slandering has significantly changed their positions (not that there's anything wrong with that if you're getting closer to truth).

(6) These "self-serving double-talking soulless punks" have saved millions of lives by intellectually confronting fascism and communism (among other forms of socialism). The Koch Family has saved millions more lives by being among of the world's greatest philanthropists (ex. cancer research).

--libman (old account)

It certainly makes sense for them to be the same field,

Huh? Search is the box in the middle of the page I get when I go to http://www.google.com/. The location field is what I type or paste an explicit URL into. If my location field starts second-guessing what I'm typing like the Google search field does, I'm getting a new browser.

Hacking Google and directing them to alternate sites based on autocomplete is at least a nuisance and possibly a security risk if people don't pay attention.

Most libertarians [...] believe in minimalist government, not no government.

This is true, but it's somewhat complicated. Whether { we can do away with all government tomorrow } and whether { coercive national governments with minimal powers are the perpetual ideal } are two separate questions.

Some libertarians (ex. "Anarcho-Capitalists" (not to be confused with any other kind of anarchist (a chickpea is not a chicken))) believe in no government - which of course is a long-term vision. This means universal recognition of NAP, and all higher-level governance being voluntary.

Most libertarians are gradualists - we recognize that coercive government is a consequence of human folly which is not going to disappear overnight. Pure free market is a more complex system of social organization, which requires a more literate populace with better access to technologies that will make the centralized state obsolete. Some pro-capitalist libertarian gradualists even go as far as advocating direct wealth redistribution, because it would be much more efficient than the welfare state - a step in the right direction.

The transition to a freer society is not inevitable (no "historical determinism" here), and the "powers that be" (and their moochers) will of course resist. But many trends are working in our favor. Globalization and cultural integration will make nationalist collectivism less potent. The Internet is making censorship very difficult. Secession movements are becoming more and more popular, leading to more intergovernmental competition. Intergovernmental competition rewards the freest economies with the inflow of brains and capital. You get the idea.

We'll end up with thousands of nations (including seasteads and some day space stations), and people will be free to vote with their feet. Some will have freer markets than others, but the more choice people have the closer we come to the ideal of doing away with involuntary government.

--libman (old account)

Granted, this release does break things a bit further than most, as mentioned by post about time_t incompatibility. For example, the password database may need to be updated (by running a new version of pwd_mkdb , as mentioned by a forum post: updating past 5.4 current flag day). So, that database is a binary update that is required.

It is also true that this is a case of the operating system requiring that binary executable files to be re-compiled. However, breaking compatibility with older executable files is actually something that is pretty much always happening between OpenBSD releases. So that's not at all unusual.

Let me explain a bit about OpenBSD compatibility between versions: The operating system and pre-built ports are generally filled with dependencies of libraries, and seemingly little to no tolerance for different versions. This means that most binary executables will be designed for a specific version of the OS. Using binary executables for any other version of the OS will break things terribly.

The end of OpenBSD FAQ 5: section on OpenBSD Flavors states, “It is important to understand that OpenBSD is an Operating System, intended to be taken as a whole, not a kernel with a bunch of utilities stuck on.” The kernel and other software is meant to match. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#NoFun (gotta just love the name of that hyperlink anchor) is about "using a system and ports tree which are not in sync." In other words, if the "system" (e.g., the kernel) and the "ports tree" (i.e., "other software") are different versions, then you're likely doomed. Upgrading software to the "-stable" branch is generally an exception, meaning that it is okay as long as you're still within the same version number. Upgrading to a new -release involves upgrading to a new version number, and that's when hopelessness starts to seep in. Upgrading to the "snapshots" release, involving "-current" source code, is also likely to cause some incompatibilities. (Possibly not. But the likelihood increases over time, especially as soon as something common like libc ends up getting an updated version number.) The only intended and recommended way to deal with these problems is to just avoid them altogether, by upgrading absolutely everything (operating system and all the software) at once, which keeps things in sync.

This does get discussed further at ][CyberPillar][: updating OpenBSD via binaries in the subsection titled "Code sync requirement (and ramifications of this requirement)", which describes this issue more and provides additional hyperlinks.

This is why every single "port"/"package" (third party software) needs to be updated (for the easiest experience) with every applied OpenBSD version upgrade (in order to have the easiest experience). There is no "let's upgrade one piece of software today, and then upgrade another piece of software next week". It's an all-or-nothin' deal.

Did you read about the latest feature added by some piece of software? Sure, you can download a pre-built binary executable file from the "snapshots" release to try out that new software. If the software runs, great. If there's a problem with needing another library, then there's another solution using pre-built binary executables. Simply make sure to upgrade your entire friggin' operating system to the "-current" (a.k.a. unstable/testing branch), and all other software, all at the same time. That should avoid version compatibility issues.

Sound too challenging? Then break out your compiler and compile from source, and handle any dependency/version confl

RTFM.

Libertarians have much better ideas for making people pay for externalities than statists, and these ideas are becoming ever-more practical as pollution-tracking technologies improve.

Pollution is a violation of Property Rights. It can be tracked from its source via ever-improving new technologies: imaging satellites, censor drones, floating / underwater / underground censor bots, etc. If dozens of Web-sites can have hundreds of millions of users, why can't all people verifiably affected by a pollution source, acting in their interests, sign on to class action lawsuits against pollutants? This naturally leads to an economic system where polluters pay their neighbors, creating incentives for filters, carbon sinks, etc.

--libman (old account)

https://groups.google.com/d/ms...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."

Apple, on the other hand, forbids emulators that allow users to add their own software.

This claim is outdated

This brings me to another ideological point about the iPad with which I disagree. Google and Microsoft publish the guidelines of their respective app stores. Apple, on the other hand, treats its App Store Review Guidelines as a trade secret and locks them behind a $99 per year paywall. Is there a public log of important changes to the Guidelines that I should be reading?

and meanwhile wrong/ no longer true.

Several years ago, Apple pulled a Commodore 64 game from the App Store just because the user could reset the emulated C64 into BASIC and key in programs. I'm aware that Apple has loosened up since then to the point where Codea and Python exist. But I thought emulators on the iPad were shipped with a handful of ROM or disk images and locked down to run only those images because of restrictions in the Guidelines against downloading executable code. When did this change? Which emulators that run on the iPad let the user add his own images?

I have an iPad Air and Zagg keyboard case for it. Toys. Both of them, toys.

I agree. Tablets are almost entirely without practical use. With one exception: reading PDFs.

I bought mine for reading role playing game PDFs as I am running out of shelf space. It is *great* for that. What I find rather stunning is how useless it is for anything else. I had thought tablets were toys, but after the success of the iPad I figured I was probably wrong. Apparently not.

(Mine is an Xperia Tablet Z. With its 16:10 screen and 224 ppi it's perhaps not as good as an iPad for PDFs, but it's not as locked down, it's light, and on sale with its SD card slot it was 33% cheaper. At least until !@#$ing Google neutered the SD card with Android 4.4, but that's another story.)