Why can't she say she was drunk, going to his apartment seemed like a good idea and they became intimate until she had second thoughts?
The story has too many holes in its timeline for this not to be a plausible explanation. You can create worse scenarios from the same facts, but it seems questionable that Richmond carried her passed out to through the streets of Florence to his hotel. She most likely agreed to it and was self-ambulatory even if she was intoxicated.
The sexual contact was probably ill desired, but it sounds like it stopped when she wanted to stop and again, we have no good explanation what put her on the bed in that situation to believe in unless you're subscribed to the idea he brought her home in a passed out state and put her on her bed.
The worst you could say that Richmond was opportunistic and a cad.
My belief is you can't call buyer's remorse sexual assault and you don't get a pass for getting intoxicated and making bad decisions that result in unwanted circumstances. It doesn't justify forcible assault, but it doesn't condemn sexual advances when you've willingly gotten into bed with them or agreeing to have sex for that matter.
Too many women are making bad decisions and having cognitive dissonance about it afterward and then seeking absolution through blame because they can't live with their mistakes.
Were they ever really relevant, or has it most always been a lifestyle magazine for fetishizing technology? Vanity Fair for Macintosh users who fancied themselves high tech? The kind of thing the CIO keeps in his office to show he's "up to speed"?
The only people I've known to read it wouldn't know TCP from UDP and have stronger opinions about icon design than cryptographic hash functions.
To be sort-of fair, I have flipped through it a few times and found a few articles that were interesting, but it's really kind of a design-centric version of Popular Science with more emphasis on computers and networking.
CenturyLink just put in fiber optic internet in my neighborhood and offers up to 1 Gbps speeds, but doesn't support static IPs. I've been using Comcast business and mostly don't mind what I pay for business class to get a/29.
I've been toying with the idea of switching to CenturyLink and running a pfsense instance on a cloud provider somewhere. Most generic Internet traffic (TV streaming, web, etc) would go out the CenturyLink dynamic IP and server traffic would get routed via IPSec to the pfsense instance to the cloud-based public IP addresses. This worked technically when I tested it with a virtual lab.
The Amazon cost estimator makes it seem mostly reasonable for compute and transit -- my actual server traffic is trivial, and even with generous CPU usage estimates it looked kind of reasonable.
The downside is that Amazon is very Linux oriented. There's a marketplace AMI for pfsense, but they want $500/year and creating your own is non-trivial. There are some FreeBSD AMIs but turning one into a working pfsense would be non-trivial as well.
I'd be tempted to try this just to kick the tires and see if the idea executed well in real life (like, no absurd latency or CPU utilization with the IPSec tunnels, etc) but I hate Netgate's AMI pricing so much I'm not even willing to shell out the $20 it would cost to run it for a week.
I'm sure there's a better place offering this or letting you install it yourself, but I can't easily find it.
Like, they record how the ATM communicates the authentication portion of the transaction, and replay that same communication with the ATM until its stored cash has all been dispensed and it's now empty?
Had this fantasy in the 1980s when I noticed the student union ATM had what looked like an exposed Cat-3 phone cable sticking out of it. I naively thought "what if it's a modem, and you tapped the line, reverse engineered a withdrawal transaction, and then replayed the withdrawal ACK endlessly until you sucked all the money out."
As it happened, 20-odd years later, I ended up at dinner with the guy that ran that ATM network at the time. One, he said that was most likely a leased line, not a dialup, making the interception of the more complicated than an analog modem. Two, he said there was anti-replay and encryption built into the system even then.
It does leave you permanently vulnerable to any flaws in the particular version of the library you linked against, or such is my understanding.
The assumption being that anyone (for most definitions of anyone) knows what DLLs their application loads and what the status of their patch levels are.
I still static link though because whenever I upload something (using a video filtering plugin) at least one person won't have the right runtime installed at all.
Which IMHO is the main mitigating factor -- what's the actual security risk versus the functional risk of the wrong library breaking the program?
I don't know if its technically possible, but it would be interesting to use a computer where everything was statically linked to see how much worse resource usage really was.
Endurance testing have revealed modern SSDs to be remarkably reliable -- this guy wrote 7 PB to an 850 Pro. http://packet.company/blog/
But let's say the failure rate is N% higher than HDDs for a given application. But the drive itself is much faster and uses less power than a HDD. What number N is acceptable as an increased failure rate in exchange for the vastly improved performance?
In an array, the performance increase may allow the use of single parity over double parity due to the increase in rebuild times and reduced stress on the other members, resulting in better overall storage efficiency through reduced redundancy. Then there's power savings, too, if you're spinning and cooling a large number of HDDs.
My wild guess is that drives like the 850 Pro already have a dollar cost and failure rate low enough that the performance improvement is so great over HDDs that for most applications it's already superior to HDDs. The only places it may not be are weird corner cases requiring extreme storage densities at very low costs.
If you're relying on the traditional credit card payment network then the cost overhead is high along with all the attendant accept credit card payment overhead.
But if you had a centralized micropayment service, the overhead gets down to a much lower level.
In an ideal world, such a service would be run as a non-profit (whatever skim would just go to running the service). Users would add funds to their micropayment account via normal methods to consolidate the usual banking transaction costs. The micropayment system could have some built-in checks, ie, users could set a maximum micropayment per site, or per time period, etc.
All of this sounds suspiciously like a clone of paypal with some added features for a micropayment system.
I think the bigger issue is establishing pricing and its attendant value. What's an article or web site visit *worth*? How much are you willing to spend per month and what kinds of quality expectations do you have over free, and how much quality can a site expect to deliver for some kind of micropayment? Is it just ad-free content, or is there some expectation of more quality by consumers to make it even worth 10 cents per site visit?
There seems to be some outer limit to this, at least at more legitimate sites because I see a lot of fake articles labeled as "sponsored content". Maybe I'm dreaming this, but didn't the commerce department make some noise about needing to label sponsored content as sponsored content? Or is this something that more legitimate news sites are doing to not totally alienate their readers?
Did it just get co-opted by Google making it relatively easy to collect micropayments for your site with mostly non-intrusive advertising?
Lack of a centralized micropayment infrastructure and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed? Lack of any agreeable billing model -- ie, unlimited use subscription vs. per visit/content, inability to calculate pricing model due to volatile perception of value?
Perhaps a general user objection on sites dominated by user-created content (eg, forums) where, in theory, adding content adds value to the site?
It seems like a reasonable idea, especially if it can be combine a lack of advertising with financial support.
I worked at an ad agency at the dawn of the commercial Internet. The people on the advertising side of the business had all kinds of problems adapting.
The print people wanted it to be another print medium and were frustrated by their lack of layout control and font selection. Their tool was giant images with click regions because they could basically export an Illustrator file as a graphic, so you'd end up with sites that were just a giant collection of images with click regions that led you to more images with more click regions.
The TV people treated it like another TV set, at first with just inserted videos, next with semi-interactive Flash animations that still had all the intelligence of a one-way TV commercial.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future the people who didn't grow up on standard, commercial television or tweaking print layouts down to the pixel AND who came of age frustrated by overlays, popups, interstitials and understand ad blocking will become ascendant and stop imposing old thinking on the web.
The most important reason PRC tolerates DPRK is stability. The idea of millions of Koreans flooding China is disturbing to the Chinese. They've served as a policy foil for the Chinese, but the previous fearless leader was more cooperative and malleable.
Maybe "connectedness" contributes to the partisanship.
The most stable societies often seem to be the ones with the least diversity. It seems like the fewer the internal differences among the population, the fewer reasons to be partisan -- the other guy looks like you, speaks like you, prays the same, eats the same, lives the same.
Connectedness makes people aware of differences -- the other guy looks different, talks different, prays different, eats different, lives different.
Something about humans makes the other a competitor or an enemy.
In true Slashdot fashion, I didn't read TFA just the TFS. Assuming that the source is capable (ie, did everything practical to disable telemetry, including any weakly published registry settings, etc) and is accurately counting firewall hits (how many of these are one telemetry source retrying relentlessly?) and not attempting to be an anti-MS shill, this really sucks that disabling it per MS instructions doesn't actually disable it.
That being said, does it affect functionality? Does stuff not work (for all definitions of not work -- from not all to pokey slow because it's trying and faiiling to hit a telemetry server)?
While I would expect corporations with an eye on security to object, I would also expect places like that to have a fairly stern outbound firewall policy and filtering system that would block a lot of telemetry by default, mitigating some of this but still not eliminating the annoyance of a machine that does what it wants.
I'm also curious how much analysis of telemetry has been done. Do we know what processes on the machine are responsible for telemetry, and are there any ways to disable them? Have the telemetry messages been analyzed to develop firewall rule groups to block them by IP, URL or DNS?
I think a time window for actual usage of a patent in a marketed product would be a useful check. If your patent isn't in a marketed product within, say, five years of issuance it would become public domain, and if it stops being used in a marketed product after 5 years it would also become public domain.
I think part of the problem also could not just be patent trolls as we know them, but companies like IBM that attack a technology sector with R&D and obtain dozens of patents they have no intention of actually developing into products but manage to patent enough things in an area that it's no longer practical to enter that field because most of the key techniques are already patented. It's kind of a land rush mentality where they're not actually interested in using the plots of land they claim, they just want to make sure nobody else can.
It's even worse when this is done defensively to guard a product they already make so that new innovations that may obsolete a cash cow product can be kept from the market. To extend the land rush analogy, they buy up all the plots of land so that the only remaining option is to rent an apartment in the crummy building they already have.
Tivo used to distribute some data at night on a TV channel. I caught it one night in a fit of insomnia, it looked like a video stream comprised of QR codes. I'm guessing the Tivo box recorded it and then decoded the full frames and then stored whatever the data stream was.
Like QR codes, the "data" would seem fairly impervious to scaling and resampling provided that the "bits" or white/black blocks were large enough to survive downsampling. You wouldn't really care if they converted them to compressed image data because the image was the data but represented at a low enough practical resolution that downsampling or format conversion wouldn't change the image enough to inhibit decoding.
You could even do something like the color-enhanced HCC2D code "extension" of QR codes for greater image data density.
Each image file could then be a rough equivalent of a disk block or sector, allowing the client side to manage a file system of sorts.
I always thought that the term "politically correct" was intended to be hurled as an insult at people who voice objections to racism, misogyny and intolerance. It is a lazy argument made by people who have resorted to calling sincerity into question.
The problem is that the people voicing objections to racism and misogyny often do so not to literal racism ("niggers are dumb") or misogyny ("she's a whore") but to elaborate, closely interpreted constructs that they believe are examples of these slights.
So saying that a woman is pretty becomes misogyny because it represents the male establishment's enforcement of an unrealistic physical standard of beauty. Saying that Jesse Jackson is an adulterer is called racist because Jackson is a civil rights leader and it's believed that labeling him that way is just an attempt to discredit him because of his race and his civil rights activism.
It's the use of racism or misogyny or other similar accusations through deconstructive analysis to turn obvious truths into accusations of bias that becomes political correctness. People believe that merely stating literal truths will get turned against them.
Amen... My wife in her 40s still owes more than $50K in student loan debt. If it weren't financed at such a cheap interested rate, I'd have long since paid it off, since we have the money, but at the 2 something percent it is financed at, why bother?
Every time we've looked at refinancing our house my wife worries that "we're starting over at 30 years" again, despite the fact that we save 10s of thousands of dollars over the life of the loan (and generally pay little to nothing in closing costs).
I keep having to explain to her that if I could refinance the house for 10,000 years and end up with a monthly payment of $10 I would do it, even if I would never "pay it off".
I don't disagree with you. I think Obamacare is the worst possible result, the casting in stone of a flawed system that now has no need to reform itself because it has just been enshrined as a permanent monopoly.
For all of its flaws, the pre-Obamacare system was at least vulnerable to its own worst impulses. Without ACA I think it would have been forced to adapt its cost structure, but now it doesn't have to. We just make people buy insurance they increasingly can't afford and which doesn't really provide them with an guarantees of protection from catastrophic health costs.
And I absolutely agree with the idea that removing the profit skim and administrative overhead required for "insurance" would provide worthwhile cost reduction in a single payer model.
I think, though, that we need to dig even deeper than that and address some of the labor side costs as well. Part of the reasons doctors expect or want to earn high incomes is that it cost them so much to become doctors. I would think we could make medical school free but tack on a requirement that the first five years after your internship you have to work as a salaried provider. Remove the argument that you have $150k in loans and costs therefore you need to make bank in order to pay them off.
I also wonder if the labor division between "doctors" and "nurses" is all that relevant anymore, it seems to be a relic of a more aristocratic division of labor. We need more, better trained nurse practitioner types who can practice more independently and reserve the investment in doctors for areas where more specialization is needed. I can't think of a single thing I've seen a general practitioner for that even an RN couldn't handle. Bottom line, the same money might buy is more people able to provide the basic services needed while still supplying levels of specialty where that's needed.
You might even argue we don't know what a "real fascist" is at all. Mussolini may lay some claim to being one, but mostly by dint of being the first national leader to associate himself with fascism.
As a political theory, fascism wasn't terribly well developed by the 1930s and often comes off as varying mishmashes of socialist economics, a critique of democracy, militarism and hazy references to heroic views of ancient empires. It was made worse by the cauldron of post-WW I European politics and the competition between more established political economies of capitalism, Marxism, and varying royalist impulses.
Any attempt to judge it by the implemented governments of Germany and Italy is of course warped by the war and specific policies those governments. It's literally like judging American Democratic Republicanism by the behavior of the Federal government during wartime -- sure, we had elections, but we also had wage and price controls, rationing and internment -- so democracy, socialism and authoritarianism?
In 1987 I asked my PoliSci 3104 "Political Ideologies" professor what contemporary governments could actually be defined as contemporary fascist governments and he thought for a while said that the only ones that would come close might be South Africa or South Korea, both of which had fairly authoritarian governments and of course South Africa had apartheid, and both states had fairly cozy, state-backed corporatism. You might almost categorize modern day China as starting to fall in line with this thinking, especially with regard to state-backed corporate capitalism, authoritarianism and a tendency to promote the ethnic interests of the Han.
I just don't think fascism was ever sufficiently developed as a coherent political theory to say what it is with any certainty, and contemporary evaluations of it always tend to discredit it for its associations with Nazism and fringe figures like Oswald Mosley. The intellectual effort of political theorists has tended towards advancing more democratic flavors of socialism, criticism of capitalism, or the obverse, critiques of socialist economies and varying defenses of establishment republicanism. Nobody seems to have looked at fascism as a starting point for a "third way" of governance, which is what I think it originally was inspired to be.
You laugh. but I seem to remember back 10+ years ago, there were more stories more often. The reason you hit on the reload button was the same reason the lab rat presses the lever for the food dispenser with cocaine in it, you hit the button and got instant gratification.
It was also a terrible risk to productivity -- you just *knew* if you hit reload, there would likely be some new story, and they were a total rabbit hole of reading comments, writing comments, looking at web sites mentioned in the comments, then their links....and then you went back to the main page and hit reload again.
In addition to less frequent updates, there's a loss of focus in story subject matter, way too much drift into social media hot button topics, political rants, and so on. Some can be interesting, but what's the *technology* angle?
I suppose the more general hazard is the for-profit nature, which aims for large user bases and therefore lowers submissions to the more common denominator. It would be nice to see more technical topics of a more sophistication. I wanna learn something I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't she say she was drunk, going to his apartment seemed like a good idea and they became intimate until she had second thoughts?
The story has too many holes in its timeline for this not to be a plausible explanation. You can create worse scenarios from the same facts, but it seems questionable that Richmond carried her passed out to through the streets of Florence to his hotel. She most likely agreed to it and was self-ambulatory even if she was intoxicated.
The sexual contact was probably ill desired, but it sounds like it stopped when she wanted to stop and again, we have no good explanation what put her on the bed in that situation to believe in unless you're subscribed to the idea he brought her home in a passed out state and put her on her bed.
The worst you could say that Richmond was opportunistic and a cad.
My belief is you can't call buyer's remorse sexual assault and you don't get a pass for getting intoxicated and making bad decisions that result in unwanted circumstances. It doesn't justify forcible assault, but it doesn't condemn sexual advances when you've willingly gotten into bed with them or agreeing to have sex for that matter.
Too many women are making bad decisions and having cognitive dissonance about it afterward and then seeking absolution through blame because they can't live with their mistakes.
Were they ever really relevant, or has it most always been a lifestyle magazine for fetishizing technology? Vanity Fair for Macintosh users who fancied themselves high tech? The kind of thing the CIO keeps in his office to show he's "up to speed"?
The only people I've known to read it wouldn't know TCP from UDP and have stronger opinions about icon design than cryptographic hash functions.
To be sort-of fair, I have flipped through it a few times and found a few articles that were interesting, but it's really kind of a design-centric version of Popular Science with more emphasis on computers and networking.
CenturyLink just put in fiber optic internet in my neighborhood and offers up to 1 Gbps speeds, but doesn't support static IPs. I've been using Comcast business and mostly don't mind what I pay for business class to get a /29.
I've been toying with the idea of switching to CenturyLink and running a pfsense instance on a cloud provider somewhere. Most generic Internet traffic (TV streaming, web, etc) would go out the CenturyLink dynamic IP and server traffic would get routed via IPSec to the pfsense instance to the cloud-based public IP addresses. This worked technically when I tested it with a virtual lab.
The Amazon cost estimator makes it seem mostly reasonable for compute and transit -- my actual server traffic is trivial, and even with generous CPU usage estimates it looked kind of reasonable.
The downside is that Amazon is very Linux oriented. There's a marketplace AMI for pfsense, but they want $500/year and creating your own is non-trivial. There are some FreeBSD AMIs but turning one into a working pfsense would be non-trivial as well.
I'd be tempted to try this just to kick the tires and see if the idea executed well in real life (like, no absurd latency or CPU utilization with the IPSec tunnels, etc) but I hate Netgate's AMI pricing so much I'm not even willing to shell out the $20 it would cost to run it for a week.
I'm sure there's a better place offering this or letting you install it yourself, but I can't easily find it.
Like, they record how the ATM communicates the authentication portion of the transaction, and replay that same communication with the ATM until its stored cash has all been dispensed and it's now empty?
Had this fantasy in the 1980s when I noticed the student union ATM had what looked like an exposed Cat-3 phone cable sticking out of it. I naively thought "what if it's a modem, and you tapped the line, reverse engineered a withdrawal transaction, and then replayed the withdrawal ACK endlessly until you sucked all the money out."
As it happened, 20-odd years later, I ended up at dinner with the guy that ran that ATM network at the time. One, he said that was most likely a leased line, not a dialup, making the interception of the more complicated than an analog modem. Two, he said there was anti-replay and encryption built into the system even then.
His advice was to just steal the entire ATM.
It does leave you permanently vulnerable to any flaws in the particular version of the library you linked against, or such is my understanding.
The assumption being that anyone (for most definitions of anyone) knows what DLLs their application loads and what the status of their patch levels are.
I still static link though because whenever I upload something (using a video filtering plugin) at least one person won't have the right runtime installed at all.
Which IMHO is the main mitigating factor -- what's the actual security risk versus the functional risk of the wrong library breaking the program?
I don't know if its technically possible, but it would be interesting to use a computer where everything was statically linked to see how much worse resource usage really was.
Then there's the value economics, too.
Endurance testing have revealed modern SSDs to be remarkably reliable -- this guy wrote 7 PB to an 850 Pro. http://packet.company/blog/
But let's say the failure rate is N% higher than HDDs for a given application. But the drive itself is much faster and uses less power than a HDD. What number N is acceptable as an increased failure rate in exchange for the vastly improved performance?
In an array, the performance increase may allow the use of single parity over double parity due to the increase in rebuild times and reduced stress on the other members, resulting in better overall storage efficiency through reduced redundancy. Then there's power savings, too, if you're spinning and cooling a large number of HDDs.
My wild guess is that drives like the 850 Pro already have a dollar cost and failure rate low enough that the performance improvement is so great over HDDs that for most applications it's already superior to HDDs. The only places it may not be are weird corner cases requiring extreme storage densities at very low costs.
I, for one, welcome our new Lone Idiot Overlords.
Computationally, the overhead is kind of trivial.
If you're relying on the traditional credit card payment network then the cost overhead is high along with all the attendant accept credit card payment overhead.
But if you had a centralized micropayment service, the overhead gets down to a much lower level.
In an ideal world, such a service would be run as a non-profit (whatever skim would just go to running the service). Users would add funds to their micropayment account via normal methods to consolidate the usual banking transaction costs. The micropayment system could have some built-in checks, ie, users could set a maximum micropayment per site, or per time period, etc.
All of this sounds suspiciously like a clone of paypal with some added features for a micropayment system.
I think the bigger issue is establishing pricing and its attendant value. What's an article or web site visit *worth*? How much are you willing to spend per month and what kinds of quality expectations do you have over free, and how much quality can a site expect to deliver for some kind of micropayment? Is it just ad-free content, or is there some expectation of more quality by consumers to make it even worth 10 cents per site visit?
There seems to be some outer limit to this, at least at more legitimate sites because I see a lot of fake articles labeled as "sponsored content". Maybe I'm dreaming this, but didn't the commerce department make some noise about needing to label sponsored content as sponsored content? Or is this something that more legitimate news sites are doing to not totally alienate their readers?
That's an optimistic reading.
How do you know that banning this wasn't the result of corruption -- payments by local providers willing to keep Facebook out?
Why didn't this concept take off?
Did it just get co-opted by Google making it relatively easy to collect micropayments for your site with mostly non-intrusive advertising?
Lack of a centralized micropayment infrastructure and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed? Lack of any agreeable billing model -- ie, unlimited use subscription vs. per visit/content, inability to calculate pricing model due to volatile perception of value?
Perhaps a general user objection on sites dominated by user-created content (eg, forums) where, in theory, adding content adds value to the site?
It seems like a reasonable idea, especially if it can be combine a lack of advertising with financial support.
Maybe a generation change will fix this.
I worked at an ad agency at the dawn of the commercial Internet. The people on the advertising side of the business had all kinds of problems adapting.
The print people wanted it to be another print medium and were frustrated by their lack of layout control and font selection. Their tool was giant images with click regions because they could basically export an Illustrator file as a graphic, so you'd end up with sites that were just a giant collection of images with click regions that led you to more images with more click regions.
The TV people treated it like another TV set, at first with just inserted videos, next with semi-interactive Flash animations that still had all the intelligence of a one-way TV commercial.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future the people who didn't grow up on standard, commercial television or tweaking print layouts down to the pixel AND who came of age frustrated by overlays, popups, interstitials and understand ad blocking will become ascendant and stop imposing old thinking on the web.
The most important reason PRC tolerates DPRK is stability. The idea of millions of Koreans flooding China is disturbing to the Chinese. They've served as a policy foil for the Chinese, but the previous fearless leader was more cooperative and malleable.
Maybe "connectedness" contributes to the partisanship.
The most stable societies often seem to be the ones with the least diversity. It seems like the fewer the internal differences among the population, the fewer reasons to be partisan -- the other guy looks like you, speaks like you, prays the same, eats the same, lives the same.
Connectedness makes people aware of differences -- the other guy looks different, talks different, prays different, eats different, lives different.
Something about humans makes the other a competitor or an enemy.
I never understood how six could account for small, remote populations with little interaction with the outside world.
From me to some guy living in a village in the Congo seems like more than six degrees of separation.
In true Slashdot fashion, I didn't read TFA just the TFS. Assuming that the source is capable (ie, did everything practical to disable telemetry, including any weakly published registry settings, etc) and is accurately counting firewall hits (how many of these are one telemetry source retrying relentlessly?) and not attempting to be an anti-MS shill, this really sucks that disabling it per MS instructions doesn't actually disable it.
That being said, does it affect functionality? Does stuff not work (for all definitions of not work -- from not all to pokey slow because it's trying and faiiling to hit a telemetry server)?
While I would expect corporations with an eye on security to object, I would also expect places like that to have a fairly stern outbound firewall policy and filtering system that would block a lot of telemetry by default, mitigating some of this but still not eliminating the annoyance of a machine that does what it wants.
I'm also curious how much analysis of telemetry has been done. Do we know what processes on the machine are responsible for telemetry, and are there any ways to disable them? Have the telemetry messages been analyzed to develop firewall rule groups to block them by IP, URL or DNS?
My uncle was on B-52s as well before that.
One of the B-52s he flew is now on display outside the Orlando airport.
When he and my did did a tour of the boneyard at Davis-Mothan air base, one of the B-52s on the tour was another B-52 he flew on.
I think a time window for actual usage of a patent in a marketed product would be a useful check. If your patent isn't in a marketed product within, say, five years of issuance it would become public domain, and if it stops being used in a marketed product after 5 years it would also become public domain.
I think part of the problem also could not just be patent trolls as we know them, but companies like IBM that attack a technology sector with R&D and obtain dozens of patents they have no intention of actually developing into products but manage to patent enough things in an area that it's no longer practical to enter that field because most of the key techniques are already patented. It's kind of a land rush mentality where they're not actually interested in using the plots of land they claim, they just want to make sure nobody else can.
It's even worse when this is done defensively to guard a product they already make so that new innovations that may obsolete a cash cow product can be kept from the market. To extend the land rush analogy, they buy up all the plots of land so that the only remaining option is to rent an apartment in the crummy building they already have.
Tivo used to distribute some data at night on a TV channel. I caught it one night in a fit of insomnia, it looked like a video stream comprised of QR codes. I'm guessing the Tivo box recorded it and then decoded the full frames and then stored whatever the data stream was.
Like QR codes, the "data" would seem fairly impervious to scaling and resampling provided that the "bits" or white/black blocks were large enough to survive downsampling. You wouldn't really care if they converted them to compressed image data because the image was the data but represented at a low enough practical resolution that downsampling or format conversion wouldn't change the image enough to inhibit decoding.
You could even do something like the color-enhanced HCC2D code "extension" of QR codes for greater image data density.
Each image file could then be a rough equivalent of a disk block or sector, allowing the client side to manage a file system of sorts.
I always thought that the term "politically correct" was intended to be hurled as an insult at people who voice objections to racism, misogyny and intolerance. It is a lazy argument made by people who have resorted to calling sincerity into question.
The problem is that the people voicing objections to racism and misogyny often do so not to literal racism ("niggers are dumb") or misogyny ("she's a whore") but to elaborate, closely interpreted constructs that they believe are examples of these slights.
So saying that a woman is pretty becomes misogyny because it represents the male establishment's enforcement of an unrealistic physical standard of beauty. Saying that Jesse Jackson is an adulterer is called racist because Jackson is a civil rights leader and it's believed that labeling him that way is just an attempt to discredit him because of his race and his civil rights activism.
It's the use of racism or misogyny or other similar accusations through deconstructive analysis to turn obvious truths into accusations of bias that becomes political correctness. People believe that merely stating literal truths will get turned against them.
My uncle is 6'2 and flew reconnaissance F4 Phantoms in Viet Nam. Just what is the height constraint?
Amen... My wife in her 40s still owes more than $50K in student loan debt. If it weren't financed at such a cheap interested rate, I'd have long since paid it off, since we have the money, but at the 2 something percent it is financed at, why bother?
Every time we've looked at refinancing our house my wife worries that "we're starting over at 30 years" again, despite the fact that we save 10s of thousands of dollars over the life of the loan (and generally pay little to nothing in closing costs).
I keep having to explain to her that if I could refinance the house for 10,000 years and end up with a monthly payment of $10 I would do it, even if I would never "pay it off".
I don't disagree with you. I think Obamacare is the worst possible result, the casting in stone of a flawed system that now has no need to reform itself because it has just been enshrined as a permanent monopoly.
For all of its flaws, the pre-Obamacare system was at least vulnerable to its own worst impulses. Without ACA I think it would have been forced to adapt its cost structure, but now it doesn't have to. We just make people buy insurance they increasingly can't afford and which doesn't really provide them with an guarantees of protection from catastrophic health costs.
And I absolutely agree with the idea that removing the profit skim and administrative overhead required for "insurance" would provide worthwhile cost reduction in a single payer model.
I think, though, that we need to dig even deeper than that and address some of the labor side costs as well. Part of the reasons doctors expect or want to earn high incomes is that it cost them so much to become doctors. I would think we could make medical school free but tack on a requirement that the first five years after your internship you have to work as a salaried provider. Remove the argument that you have $150k in loans and costs therefore you need to make bank in order to pay them off.
I also wonder if the labor division between "doctors" and "nurses" is all that relevant anymore, it seems to be a relic of a more aristocratic division of labor. We need more, better trained nurse practitioner types who can practice more independently and reserve the investment in doctors for areas where more specialization is needed. I can't think of a single thing I've seen a general practitioner for that even an RN couldn't handle. Bottom line, the same money might buy is more people able to provide the basic services needed while still supplying levels of specialty where that's needed.
You might even argue we don't know what a "real fascist" is at all. Mussolini may lay some claim to being one, but mostly by dint of being the first national leader to associate himself with fascism.
As a political theory, fascism wasn't terribly well developed by the 1930s and often comes off as varying mishmashes of socialist economics, a critique of democracy, militarism and hazy references to heroic views of ancient empires. It was made worse by the cauldron of post-WW I European politics and the competition between more established political economies of capitalism, Marxism, and varying royalist impulses.
Any attempt to judge it by the implemented governments of Germany and Italy is of course warped by the war and specific policies those governments. It's literally like judging American Democratic Republicanism by the behavior of the Federal government during wartime -- sure, we had elections, but we also had wage and price controls, rationing and internment -- so democracy, socialism and authoritarianism?
In 1987 I asked my PoliSci 3104 "Political Ideologies" professor what contemporary governments could actually be defined as contemporary fascist governments and he thought for a while said that the only ones that would come close might be South Africa or South Korea, both of which had fairly authoritarian governments and of course South Africa had apartheid, and both states had fairly cozy, state-backed corporatism. You might almost categorize modern day China as starting to fall in line with this thinking, especially with regard to state-backed corporate capitalism, authoritarianism and a tendency to promote the ethnic interests of the Han.
I just don't think fascism was ever sufficiently developed as a coherent political theory to say what it is with any certainty, and contemporary evaluations of it always tend to discredit it for its associations with Nazism and fringe figures like Oswald Mosley. The intellectual effort of political theorists has tended towards advancing more democratic flavors of socialism, criticism of capitalism, or the obverse, critiques of socialist economies and varying defenses of establishment republicanism. Nobody seems to have looked at fascism as a starting point for a "third way" of governance, which is what I think it originally was inspired to be.
You laugh. but I seem to remember back 10+ years ago, there were more stories more often. The reason you hit on the reload button was the same reason the lab rat presses the lever for the food dispenser with cocaine in it, you hit the button and got instant gratification.
It was also a terrible risk to productivity -- you just *knew* if you hit reload, there would likely be some new story, and they were a total rabbit hole of reading comments, writing comments, looking at web sites mentioned in the comments, then their links....and then you went back to the main page and hit reload again.
In addition to less frequent updates, there's a loss of focus in story subject matter, way too much drift into social media hot button topics, political rants, and so on. Some can be interesting, but what's the *technology* angle?
I suppose the more general hazard is the for-profit nature, which aims for large user bases and therefore lowers submissions to the more common denominator. It would be nice to see more technical topics of a more sophistication. I wanna learn something I don't know.