They are not telling you that you cannot talk about a subject, just that you cannot talk about a subject HERE. That is an important distinction.
When Google caves to government pressure to remove something from search results, that's effectively government censorship. Yes, there are other search engines, but very few use them. When Facebook caves to government pressure to remove something, that's effectively government censorship. Yes, there are other social sites, but very few use them.
One company off in the corner banning something? No problem. And Reddit might fall that way (they're still assholes though). But when one or a few places to talk dominate the choices most people are aware of, then if they all ban something that really does limit your freedom. Freedom in the abstract with no way to practice it is meaningless.
For every horror in all of history, every genocide, those who spoke against the horror were labeled as "toxic nincompoops who spew vitriol". Merely because the label is often correct is no excuse for banning it. Keeping it off the front page so people do see it by accident? Sure - do that thing.
But Reddit has clearly changed from a place that built a community on the promise of free speech, to a place that's monetizing it's community. Wouldn't want anything offensive on the rails of the money train.
Meh, I never saw the appeal of Reddit in the first place, but plenty of people did and I hope they find a better forum somewhere. Maybe people will return to the place we don't talk about? That would be lively.
But if Reddit (or any other site) bans a topic of conversation, they are not infringing on your free speech rights. You're still free to say it. Just not there.
If a site used to allow X, and now they don't allow X, then I am now obvious, in practice, less free to express X than before. If it's a knitting site, and X has nothing to do with knitting, that's one thing. But if users has areasonable expection based on the history of the site that "here's a place we can talk about X", and the site then changes to ban X, then they're being assholes.
If you create an online community, then destroy it, you're an asshole. Simple as that.
This can't be stated enough. Freedom of speech is a protection from government censorship, not websites, stores, or other private operations. It amazes me how many people just don't get that.
Blatantly false. Freedom of speech is a basic human right, a founding principle of the USA, and an all-around good thing to have. The First Amendment only protects you from censorship by the federal government, and by other amendments, state and local governments (not that that stop state-funded universities from becoming the least-free places in America for speech).
The owner of a website has every legal right to be an asshole to his users. Doesn't change the fact he's still being an asshole, and should be called out and criticized for it. (Only in the mind of progressives are "what I think is right" and "what people should be legally compelled to do" the same.)
If it is, those backups better be encrypted. Depending on that, they may be useless for "non-authorized" recovery.
Tape drives have supported hardware-level encryption for many years now. Typically the admin who controls the backups manages the passwords (typically auto-generated strong passwords, stored somewhere in a DB with some additional level of encryption). Encrypted tape is designed to be very strong against the tapes being stolen (or lost), not against an insider threat. And that's generally the right answer. If they had backups, they wouldn't be useless.
But the laws of physics do. To maintain signal strength over a long run, you either need thicker wire or a booster (as well as wire pairs properly matched for impedance for the signal, as with any transmission line longer than 1 bit). Reliable, long (over 30 feet) HDMI cables do one or the other, as you can use very thin wires for a short run, so everyone does. Sure, it's not like ethernet, where collisions need to be detected within a certain latency, placing a hard limit on cable length, but you're still moving electrons in a wire.
I need CPU to rip video, at home. Xeon is ridiculously overpriced. My current Sandy Bridge is 4-cores, OCed to 4GHz, which is fine for DVD but "run overnight" slow for BluRay. Haswell offerer 8-cores, and is 20% faster clock-for-clock, but I didn't want to replace my system so soon when it was new. Skylake looks to be faster still clock-for-clock, and can be OCed to 4.8 GHz, so a likely 80% improvement per core. That's a big deal to me. I'll likely wait a bit for the 8-core, as I want a 3x improvement when I build my next PC.
For rendering video professionally, you just can't beat EC2 Spot for price, forget buying your own anything. Not the easiest environment to code for (you have actually be fault tolerant, not just give lip service, and it really helps if you can run on a variety of hardware choices), but it's worth it if you need millions of core-hours cheap (or even thousands, if it's a hobby and you don't want to wait weeks for your home PC to crank it out).
So widespread adoption of crazy hippie ideas might reduce overall energy consumption by 10%? Not worth a reduced standard of living, unless as a feelgood measure that individuals are happier with.
What I find most annoying about all this is less the could of smug, and more the fact that household electricity use is such a small slice of the pie of overall US energy use. From wind power to this DC nonsense, it's obsessing on feelgood measures of little importance to the big picture.
This biggest slice of the pie is industrial energy use where electricity isn't part of the picture: "Primary energy use" by heavy industry for blast furnaces and the like. Industrial electricity use is the next biggest slice, followed by IIRC industrial transportation.
If you're thinking "but wait, that means there wouldn't be enough bitcoins in existence to allow everyone to withdraw their deposits", then congratulations, you understand how banking works.
With BTC denominated accounts if everyone tries to withdraw their BTC at once the bank has a big problem. They can try to buy BTC to cover the withdrawals but there is no guarantee they will actually be able to.
Now you understand how banking works. That's now a flaw in the system, that is the system. A savings account is a sort share in the bank, it's not at all a bundle of money in the vault.
Sure, all that's true, but most modern recessions aren't caused by lack of money supply, but instead lack of demand. If businesses don't see any worthwhile investment opportunities at any interest rate, additional supply won't help. You can't push on a rope. Stability (and its counterpart, uncertainty) is the chief concern for most recessions: when businesses and consumers reach the point where they believe they understand the "new normal", can cope with it, and have survived, only then do they start spending again.
Oh, sure, if you don't value your time at all, that's the best strategy. Just keep trying cheap cables until one seems to work, and return the rest. Personally (and professionally), I have better things to do with my time than screw about with sketchy cables, but to each his own.
Traditional currencies have inflation because they are printing money faster than old bills get destroyed.
The amount of "printed currency" in circulation has almost nothing to do with the size of the money supply. It's amazing how many gold/bitcoin fans don't understand this. Heck, the US recently concluded "QE", in which a couple of trillion dollars were created by the Fed without any of it being physically printed.*
When you deposit $US with a US bank, in a savings account or CD, it can loan out 100% of your deposit. If banks offered BTC-denominated savings accounts, they'd work the same way. If you're thinking "but wait, that means there wouldn't be enough bitcoins in existence to allow everyone to withdraw their deposits", then congratulations, you understand how banking works.
There's only ~$1.3 T in physical US currency, but there is ~$10 T in total bank deposits (of various kinds). That wouldn't change if we adopted gold or bitcoins as the national currency.
*To further complicate things, the money supply actually didn't grow during that time, as bank deposits with the Fed grew at about the same rate. When the banks start finding investments better than the rate the Fed pays, we'll start seeing the inflationary effects - it's a very new idea by the Fed, and time will tell how crazy it was.
Given the mass incompetence of how Gox was run, that's the least surprising thing. They had paper wallets scattered around the city that that only Mark knew the password to.
So, you're telling me that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange stored its assets by printing them on paper cards? I never saw that coming. I hope they were at least kept in protective sleeves!
The actual spec is behind a paywall, as with most tech specs, but Wikipedia says.
cable of about 5 meters (16 feet) can be manufactured to Category 1 specifications easily and inexpensively by using 28 AWG (0.081 mmÂ) conductors.[107] With better quality construction and materials, including 24 AWG (0.205 mmÂ) conductors, an HDMI cable can reach lengths of up to 15 meters (49 feet).[107]
You may be right, and this is just the physical consequence of the spec, but 28 AWG is quite thin wire. (One poster said his long cable has a booster, so maybe that's another way, but that's not "cheapest" either).
You mean Samsung would know when to tell the phone "not" to open as per their planned obsolescence policy.
Hey, now, this isn't Sony we're talking about. ("Sony timer" was a common phrase in Japan for a few years, with a strong urban legend that actual timers were built in to pop the day the warrantee expired. My favorite urban legend was that Sony employees carried a remote that could expire all your Sony timers early if you annoyed them.)
If offered a $45 HDMI cable over a $2 one, save your money and go cheap, heck by 3 of the cheap ones incase it breaks while installing it, you will be money ahead and you won't hear the difference EVER.
I hope you don't work with technology in any way. Sure, buy the cheapest cable that meets spec, but remember the first rule of engineering: the vendor is a lying bastard. There's a reason the cheapest cable is the cheapest cable. Paying $45 for a 6-foot HDMI cable is silly. Paying $45 for a 50-foot HDMI cable isn't.
Also, for HDMI specifically, the different numbered specs matter depending on use case. If your doing "4K" video, you'll want the HDMI 1.4 (or above) cable. If you want high color depth for a specific application, you'll want at least 1.3.
Sure, cheap is good, but as always in life, avoid the cheapest crap in the store.
I've had cheap longer mini-jack cables fail - just break inside the insulation. I've had cheap RCA cables break, short, and most annoyingly have the center-pins break off and get stuck in my equipment.
Yeah, avoid the $40 job with the weird connectors, but a $4 patch cable can save a lot of headache over a $1 cable.
This comes up whenever audiophile cables are discussed, but it's worth repeating: don't buy the cheapest cable.
There may be no useful difference between a $10 cable and a $1000 cable, but very often there's a real difference between a $10 cable and a $1 cable. Even for digital data, really cheap cables often don't meet spec, and can cause frustrating intermittent problems. You don't need anything exotic to avoid that, just avoid the bottom tier.
An example from my living room: I use a 45 foot HDMI cable to plug my TV directly into my HTPC (for reasons of convenience that aren't that interesting). The spec calls for thicker-gauge wiring for HDMI cables over 30 feet (IIRC), and you'll quickly see the price jump between cables that meet that spec and cables that don't. Don't buy the cheapest junk possible, that's all it takes.
It used to be that Dayton Audio was the only "solidly built, not too expensive" brand I knew about for cables, but Amazon changed that - now there are a bunch of options, including some sort of Amazon store brand that seems to be fine.
It's worth paying a bit more for solidly-built cables that meet spec (and especially for Ethernet cables, for some guard on the cable that keeps the clip from snagging or breaking off it you need to pull it through a tangle). Anything beyond that is a bit silly.
Let Paris implement its own Grand mur de la France, behind which it can spend what it takes on a search engine with a Forget Me feature.
France did try building a Grand mur de la France once, of course, but then the Germans just went around it. Google search results are already filtered in France as needed to comply with French law, but France seems to be upset here that the Germans (or French with a VPN) are getting around it. Somehow, I don't think they'll learn this time, either.
I'm pretty sure this was arrogance, but not malice, on MS's part: they really want to shift the IE userbase to Edge and drop IE support in some future release. Can you blame them? But in their arrogance they didn't remember (or didn't care) that quite a large portion of Windows users don't run IE in the first place.
I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of an electric car with an external-combustion range extender under the hood. High-efficiency turbines (of the sort they use in industrial power generation, not the sort in aircraft and the M1 Abrams) are very durable, but also quite heavy. However, if we're talking about a 40 HP generator in a 400 HP car, it can afford to be 3x as heavy per HP as a normal car engine. Doubling the efficiency is worth something.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not telling you that you cannot talk about a subject, just that you cannot talk about a subject HERE. That is an important distinction.
When Google caves to government pressure to remove something from search results, that's effectively government censorship. Yes, there are other search engines, but very few use them. When Facebook caves to government pressure to remove something, that's effectively government censorship. Yes, there are other social sites, but very few use them.
One company off in the corner banning something? No problem. And Reddit might fall that way (they're still assholes though). But when one or a few places to talk dominate the choices most people are aware of, then if they all ban something that really does limit your freedom. Freedom in the abstract with no way to practice it is meaningless.
For every horror in all of history, every genocide, those who spoke against the horror were labeled as "toxic nincompoops who spew vitriol". Merely because the label is often correct is no excuse for banning it. Keeping it off the front page so people do see it by accident? Sure - do that thing.
But Reddit has clearly changed from a place that built a community on the promise of free speech, to a place that's monetizing it's community. Wouldn't want anything offensive on the rails of the money train.
Meh, I never saw the appeal of Reddit in the first place, but plenty of people did and I hope they find a better forum somewhere. Maybe people will return to the place we don't talk about? That would be lively.
But if Reddit (or any other site) bans a topic of conversation, they are not infringing on your free speech rights. You're still free to say it. Just not there.
If a site used to allow X, and now they don't allow X, then I am now obvious, in practice, less free to express X than before. If it's a knitting site, and X has nothing to do with knitting, that's one thing. But if users has areasonable expection based on the history of the site that "here's a place we can talk about X", and the site then changes to ban X, then they're being assholes.
If you create an online community, then destroy it, you're an asshole. Simple as that.
This can't be stated enough. Freedom of speech is a protection from government censorship, not websites, stores, or other private operations. It amazes me how many people just don't get that.
Blatantly false. Freedom of speech is a basic human right, a founding principle of the USA, and an all-around good thing to have. The First Amendment only protects you from censorship by the federal government, and by other amendments, state and local governments (not that that stop state-funded universities from becoming the least-free places in America for speech).
The owner of a website has every legal right to be an asshole to his users. Doesn't change the fact he's still being an asshole, and should be called out and criticized for it. (Only in the mind of progressives are "what I think is right" and "what people should be legally compelled to do" the same.)
If it is, those backups better be encrypted. Depending on that, they may be useless for "non-authorized" recovery.
Tape drives have supported hardware-level encryption for many years now. Typically the admin who controls the backups manages the passwords (typically auto-generated strong passwords, stored somewhere in a DB with some additional level of encryption). Encrypted tape is designed to be very strong against the tapes being stolen (or lost), not against an insider threat. And that's generally the right answer. If they had backups, they wouldn't be useless.
But the laws of physics do. To maintain signal strength over a long run, you either need thicker wire or a booster (as well as wire pairs properly matched for impedance for the signal, as with any transmission line longer than 1 bit). Reliable, long (over 30 feet) HDMI cables do one or the other, as you can use very thin wires for a short run, so everyone does. Sure, it's not like ethernet, where collisions need to be detected within a certain latency, placing a hard limit on cable length, but you're still moving electrons in a wire.
I need CPU to rip video, at home. Xeon is ridiculously overpriced. My current Sandy Bridge is 4-cores, OCed to 4GHz, which is fine for DVD but "run overnight" slow for BluRay. Haswell offerer 8-cores, and is 20% faster clock-for-clock, but I didn't want to replace my system so soon when it was new. Skylake looks to be faster still clock-for-clock, and can be OCed to 4.8 GHz, so a likely 80% improvement per core. That's a big deal to me. I'll likely wait a bit for the 8-core, as I want a 3x improvement when I build my next PC.
For rendering video professionally, you just can't beat EC2 Spot for price, forget buying your own anything. Not the easiest environment to code for (you have actually be fault tolerant, not just give lip service, and it really helps if you can run on a variety of hardware choices), but it's worth it if you need millions of core-hours cheap (or even thousands, if it's a hobby and you don't want to wait weeks for your home PC to crank it out).
So widespread adoption of crazy hippie ideas might reduce overall energy consumption by 10%? Not worth a reduced standard of living, unless as a feelgood measure that individuals are happier with.
What I find most annoying about all this is less the could of smug, and more the fact that household electricity use is such a small slice of the pie of overall US energy use. From wind power to this DC nonsense, it's obsessing on feelgood measures of little importance to the big picture.
This biggest slice of the pie is industrial energy use where electricity isn't part of the picture: "Primary energy use" by heavy industry for blast furnaces and the like. Industrial electricity use is the next biggest slice, followed by IIRC industrial transportation.
Sounds like you are, in fact, buying mid-tier cables on sale, not buying junk cables.
If you're thinking "but wait, that means there wouldn't be enough bitcoins in existence to allow everyone to withdraw their deposits", then congratulations, you understand how banking works.
With BTC denominated accounts if everyone tries to withdraw their BTC at once the bank has a big problem. They can try to buy BTC to cover the withdrawals but there is no guarantee they will actually be able to.
Now you understand how banking works. That's now a flaw in the system, that is the system. A savings account is a sort share in the bank, it's not at all a bundle of money in the vault.
Sure, all that's true, but most modern recessions aren't caused by lack of money supply, but instead lack of demand. If businesses don't see any worthwhile investment opportunities at any interest rate, additional supply won't help. You can't push on a rope. Stability (and its counterpart, uncertainty) is the chief concern for most recessions: when businesses and consumers reach the point where they believe they understand the "new normal", can cope with it, and have survived, only then do they start spending again.
Oh, sure, if you don't value your time at all, that's the best strategy. Just keep trying cheap cables until one seems to work, and return the rest. Personally (and professionally), I have better things to do with my time than screw about with sketchy cables, but to each his own.
Traditional currencies have inflation because they are printing money faster than old bills get destroyed.
The amount of "printed currency" in circulation has almost nothing to do with the size of the money supply. It's amazing how many gold/bitcoin fans don't understand this. Heck, the US recently concluded "QE", in which a couple of trillion dollars were created by the Fed without any of it being physically printed.*
When you deposit $US with a US bank, in a savings account or CD, it can loan out 100% of your deposit. If banks offered BTC-denominated savings accounts, they'd work the same way. If you're thinking "but wait, that means there wouldn't be enough bitcoins in existence to allow everyone to withdraw their deposits", then congratulations, you understand how banking works.
There's only ~$1.3 T in physical US currency, but there is ~$10 T in total bank deposits (of various kinds). That wouldn't change if we adopted gold or bitcoins as the national currency.
*To further complicate things, the money supply actually didn't grow during that time, as bank deposits with the Fed grew at about the same rate. When the banks start finding investments better than the rate the Fed pays, we'll start seeing the inflationary effects - it's a very new idea by the Fed, and time will tell how crazy it was.
Given the mass incompetence of how Gox was run, that's the least surprising thing. They had paper wallets scattered around the city that that only Mark knew the password to.
So, you're telling me that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange stored its assets by printing them on paper cards? I never saw that coming. I hope they were at least kept in protective sleeves!
The actual spec is behind a paywall, as with most tech specs, but Wikipedia says.
cable of about 5 meters (16 feet) can be manufactured to Category 1 specifications easily and inexpensively by using 28 AWG (0.081 mmÂ) conductors.[107] With better quality construction and materials, including 24 AWG (0.205 mmÂ) conductors, an HDMI cable can reach lengths of up to 15 meters (49 feet).[107]
You may be right, and this is just the physical consequence of the spec, but 28 AWG is quite thin wire. (One poster said his long cable has a booster, so maybe that's another way, but that's not "cheapest" either).
You mean Samsung would know when to tell the phone "not" to open as per their planned obsolescence policy.
Hey, now, this isn't Sony we're talking about. ("Sony timer" was a common phrase in Japan for a few years, with a strong urban legend that actual timers were built in to pop the day the warrantee expired. My favorite urban legend was that Sony employees carried a remote that could expire all your Sony timers early if you annoyed them.)
Wouldn't bother me any, but then I shattered the glass on my phone about 3 years ago, and it has many seams. Still works fine for me.
If offered a $45 HDMI cable over a $2 one, save your money and go cheap, heck by 3 of the cheap ones incase it breaks while installing it, you will be money ahead and you won't hear the difference EVER.
I hope you don't work with technology in any way. Sure, buy the cheapest cable that meets spec, but remember the first rule of engineering: the vendor is a lying bastard. There's a reason the cheapest cable is the cheapest cable. Paying $45 for a 6-foot HDMI cable is silly. Paying $45 for a 50-foot HDMI cable isn't.
Also, for HDMI specifically, the different numbered specs matter depending on use case. If your doing "4K" video, you'll want the HDMI 1.4 (or above) cable. If you want high color depth for a specific application, you'll want at least 1.3.
Sure, cheap is good, but as always in life, avoid the cheapest crap in the store.
I've had cheap longer mini-jack cables fail - just break inside the insulation. I've had cheap RCA cables break, short, and most annoyingly have the center-pins break off and get stuck in my equipment.
Yeah, avoid the $40 job with the weird connectors, but a $4 patch cable can save a lot of headache over a $1 cable.
This comes up whenever audiophile cables are discussed, but it's worth repeating: don't buy the cheapest cable.
There may be no useful difference between a $10 cable and a $1000 cable, but very often there's a real difference between a $10 cable and a $1 cable. Even for digital data, really cheap cables often don't meet spec, and can cause frustrating intermittent problems. You don't need anything exotic to avoid that, just avoid the bottom tier.
An example from my living room: I use a 45 foot HDMI cable to plug my TV directly into my HTPC (for reasons of convenience that aren't that interesting). The spec calls for thicker-gauge wiring for HDMI cables over 30 feet (IIRC), and you'll quickly see the price jump between cables that meet that spec and cables that don't. Don't buy the cheapest junk possible, that's all it takes.
It used to be that Dayton Audio was the only "solidly built, not too expensive" brand I knew about for cables, but Amazon changed that - now there are a bunch of options, including some sort of Amazon store brand that seems to be fine.
It's worth paying a bit more for solidly-built cables that meet spec (and especially for Ethernet cables, for some guard on the cable that keeps the clip from snagging or breaking off it you need to pull it through a tangle). Anything beyond that is a bit silly.
Let Paris implement its own Grand mur de la France, behind which it can spend what it takes on a search engine with a Forget Me feature.
France did try building a Grand mur de la France once, of course, but then the Germans just went around it. Google search results are already filtered in France as needed to comply with French law, but France seems to be upset here that the Germans (or French with a VPN) are getting around it. Somehow, I don't think they'll learn this time, either.
I'm pretty sure this was arrogance, but not malice, on MS's part: they really want to shift the IE userbase to Edge and drop IE support in some future release. Can you blame them? But in their arrogance they didn't remember (or didn't care) that quite a large portion of Windows users don't run IE in the first place.
The Chrome UI has annoted me from the start, and I trust Google about as far as I can throw their corporate HQ, but Chrome still has some neat tech.
Anyone know? Is there a chromium fork with a different UI, as Pale Moon is to FF?
I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of an electric car with an external-combustion range extender under the hood. High-efficiency turbines (of the sort they use in industrial power generation, not the sort in aircraft and the M1 Abrams) are very durable, but also quite heavy. However, if we're talking about a 40 HP generator in a 400 HP car, it can afford to be 3x as heavy per HP as a normal car engine. Doubling the efficiency is worth something.