'Interesting' only in the sense that flat-earthers are interesting.
Despite how compelling the attempts of Rush Limbaugh and the Becko-philes to insist two quasi-governmental organizations that came into the failed market late and 30 year old laws (that enforce protocols resembling sub-prime mortgage derivatives in the manner a carefully inspected and up to code hotel resembles a third world ramshackle firehazard with most of the bricks that once formed load bearing walls sold out from under it.) must certainly have caused the crash are, I feel obligated consider the possibility that leaving derivatives completely unregulated despite multiple financial crises brought on by deregulation might just feasibly be responsible.
But sure - blame Barney Frank and the round-earth war against Christmas conspiracy.
Keynes made the amazingly obvious observation that the economy is driven by demand for goods and services, not supply.
Sure, you're free to spend $100 hiring someone to do yardwork . . .
What you are exceedingly unlikely to do, even if you have the capacity to do so, is spend $1,000,000 hiring 10,000 people to do yardwork all over your city. *That* money stays in bank account gathering interest (I can only assume that the people that complain about U.S. Government Debt never buy those nice, safe Government Bonds during recessions. Of course not!) until . . . the economy improves and a company with 10,000 workers doing yardwork around the city has a bond issue at a better interest rate to upgrade their equipment.
But that doesn't happen until there are people that can hire those people. That demand doesn't happen when everyones out of work.
It's actually worse than that of course - while everyone's out of work you're not even even hiring that one guy for $100 a week - you're bosses boss is breathing down his neck about headcount, and you *know* there's no chance of a Christmas bonus or a raise this year . . .
The government raising taxes on the wealthy (since they would *never* buy Government Bonds while complaining about the debt. We've established that.) to spend keeping those 10,000 guys on unemployment really is worth it. Since if they don't buy your MP3 Players, Games, whatever you manufacture you'll get to join them soon enough.
I suspect you're right - as much as I hate to 'root' for either of these two, Righthaven may have a valid infringement case here; The Drudge Report is hardly creating anything additional in a story. Of course, going from infringement and the thought that a DMCA complaint can be actually valid (Valid DMCA complaints! Who Knew?) to grabbing a domain name rather than the simple damages seems a bit odd.
Or, alternatively, toggle off cookies by default, install noscript and https-everywhere. Look at what Google lets you opt out of and, y'know, opt out. If you're feeling *really* paranoid, set up an alternate profile for any online persona that you don't want tracked backwards to you.
If you have a genuine concern about some evercookie tracking you unethically after you've done that, I'll grant that it's legit. Tracking via IP addresses should of course be limited to things that genuinely require a warrant, and I don't trust our security establishment to abide by that.
But for the love of Pete ninety percent of the time it's like listening to nudists complain about tourist cameras . . . downtown.
"OH my God they got a picture of my jiggly bits!!!!"
Bowing to Chinese Pressure to silence dissent against the government and their corrupt Bureaucrats: Bad Bowing to United States Pressure to silence dissent against our government and their corrupt corporate overlords: Good
"Twenty-five years and two days later, it’s not just hard to remember an era in which Windows wasn’t everywhere"
Bullshit - As a C64 and Atari ST veteran, twenty-five years later it's painful to remember the extraordinary effort it took to lose to windows. I had better graphics playing Neuromancer on the C64 than windows managed for a decade, and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Jack Tramiel should be strung up for crimes against computing.
I mean seriously - when I was a kid I had time to finish video games. It was competing with reading a book, playing outside, or watching TV - I was a kid.
As an adult, I got stuff to do and my playtime is at a premium - I finished two out of three Morrowind game endings, I finished No One Lives Forever and NOLF II, and when it cools down and I have time I'm finishing Baldur's Gate II all the way through. Come to think on it I finished Neverwinter Nights too, and I got a guy at work I'm going to mug and steal his copy of Planescape. Oh, and I ascended once in Nethack.
That what has kept my attention in the last decade or so. I might play Dwarf Fortress but I haven't got the time for the PhD required to figure it out, I play various 4X games, and the rest is casual games, mostly Wii.
Umm. A 'market', of any type, depends on a high degree of transparency and the ability to exchange one provider of a good or service for another; It may not be *fair* that a sufficient level of success creates the very domination of a market that distorts these, but I am only aware of Rand acolytes willing to staunchly deny this as a matter of course - even most libertarians I know will grant that.
When a single entity dominates the market, that transparency and capacity to contract as equals disappears - of *course* success is a valid reason to regulate. In this case, yes, Google's domination of the market allows them to deliver ad rates well above that of any competitor and still gain a profit, and that in turn means that Google's definition of family friendly can have a chilling effect regardless of whether that definition is reflective of society.
Is such regulation needed here? I don't know - but although TV Tropes is hardly a paragon of virtue, looking at it comparatively to the Internet at large, even dismissing the explicitly erotic, they are hardly anyone's definition of obscene, and yet a complaint to Google could result in a unilateral suspension of services on which they had come to depend, without warning or an attempt to correct the issue from both sides.
And let us be clear here - this was an exchange of goods and services - Google provided the ads, TV Tropes provided the space - and yet the suspension *was* initiated unilaterally and without warning or even complaint to the offending partner. This does not describe a 'typical' relationship of equals under contact law.
I know historically there has been at least one recession under every GOP president except (IIRC) Ford; over a hundred months of recessions since 1945 started under Republicans, several more than a year each;
Democrat Presidents? *If* you include the first Reagan recession (A fair argument - Carter and Volker were deliberately getting Inflation under control) - 17 months.
I counted them up for an economics class once. One might almost think deregulating and tax cuts for the wealthy don't actually help.
But I'm *sure* they'll work this time. I mean, GOP economics produced 2,000,000 jobs in the 8 years of GWB. Just because we need 250,000 job's a month to tread water on unemployment is no reason to be concerned about reviving an economic plan that managed 250,000 jobs a year.
We should punish Democrats for high unemployment though. Going back to the GOP makes perfect sense.
Gee, they don't allow comments on their video rehashing out of context phrases harvested from various places.
Almost as if there might be a legitimate counter-argument to teachers talking about how they knock off grade points because Microsoft Word isn't capable of rendering a standardized, well documented XML formats properly, and they wouldn't want to see that posted.
Or that people might mention that Microsoft Office *Itself* doesn't render MS-Office Documents consistently across versions.
Or follow-up on the long ignored complaint that Outlook 2007/2010 relies on the Microsoft Word HTML renderer, which ignores vast swathes of standard CSS dropping people back to 1995 HTML practice, let's not even pretend it's not a piece of crap.
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
'We're used to it' is in fact a legitimate argument for MS-Office. But lets not pretend it's an argument of deeper depth than the apocryphal retired sanitation engineer that kept buckets of sewage in his home because he's gotten used to the smell.
Except that by definition, if you think "making a public good like firefighting or police service an opt-in fee is stupid and results in dumb, avoidable tragic circumstances" you're not *actually* "all for the free market".
This is Ayn Rand in Practice. It is also the reason why these Balanced Budget, Socially and economically Conservative states (By and Large, an with caveats for the current recession) get more in taxes than they send to Washington and are being being subsidized by those stupid Liberal States.
Because that stupid liberal keynesian economics actually works. Although I swear to god, as near as I can tell the main insight Keynes made is that "Dollar for Dollar Poor and Middle Class People contribute to the Economy far more than the wealthy do"
Never having used OSX I can't speak to how it works in practice, but conceptually the concept of an XML config file that has it's GUI embedded, yet is also viable to access by things like sed/awk/gedit (No, I don't use emacs/vi. Ubuntu: Linux for wimps. **** off - {G}) seems like an awfully cool method to combine the CLI and GUI concepts as two aspects of a common interface.
I'm not a sports fan myself, but in the interests of fairness my main objection is the ego's of sportsfans.
I'll forgive them when they get to see "Because of the extended Sci Fi Marathon going into triple overtime, we are now joining Super Bowl 56, already in progress . . . 'And it's 4th and ten!!!'"
Frankly, as someone that has tried several times to figure out codecs past the 'something ffmpeg takes as input in format a and spits out as format b", so far this is the best intro I've ever had. It makes assumptions that I know computers at a basic level . . . and that's it.
As someone that has tried to figure out even the basics of codecs from various websites, if he can make it simple enough to bring some clarity to it more power to him.
Ever reference I have seen on the web made me feel like a kindergartner trying to understand the mathematics of quantum physics.
Among the few specifics it gets into is formalizing net neutrality and the end-to-end nature of the Internet - if it only accomplished that it would be worthwhile methinks.
Obviously I hope for more, but that it does formalize that as an international standard tends to indicate that's something they agree on.
Noting the distinction between a clear and obvious legal relationship establishing the responsibility of corporate oversight and a simple financial dealing with the lowest bidder?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes; it's put in the bank and loaned.
Except . . . during recessions . . . when
when what the banks do is invest in the safest securities available.
You know . . Government Bonds.
I highly recommend FRED for details.
The wheels on the bus go round and round . . .
'Interesting' only in the sense that flat-earthers are interesting.
Despite how compelling the attempts of Rush Limbaugh and the Becko-philes to insist two quasi-governmental organizations that came into the failed market late and 30 year old laws (that enforce protocols resembling sub-prime mortgage derivatives in the manner a carefully inspected and up to code hotel resembles a third world ramshackle firehazard with most of the bricks that once formed load bearing walls sold out from under it.) must certainly have caused the crash are, I feel obligated consider the possibility that leaving derivatives completely unregulated despite multiple financial crises brought on by deregulation might just feasibly be responsible.
But sure - blame Barney Frank and the round-earth war against Christmas conspiracy.
Pug
Keynes made the amazingly obvious observation that the economy is driven by demand for goods and services, not supply.
Sure, you're free to spend $100 hiring someone to do yardwork . . .
What you are exceedingly unlikely to do, even if you have the capacity to do so, is spend $1,000,000 hiring 10,000 people to do yardwork all over your city. *That* money stays in bank account gathering interest (I can only assume that the people that complain about U.S. Government Debt never buy those nice, safe Government Bonds during recessions. Of course not!) until . . . the economy improves and a company with 10,000 workers doing yardwork around the city has a bond issue at a better interest rate to upgrade their equipment.
But that doesn't happen until there are people that can hire those people. That demand doesn't happen when everyones out of work.
It's actually worse than that of course - while everyone's out of work you're not even even hiring that one guy for $100 a week - you're bosses boss is breathing down his neck about headcount, and you *know* there's no chance of a Christmas bonus or a raise this year . . .
The government raising taxes on the wealthy (since they would *never* buy Government Bonds while complaining about the debt. We've established that.) to spend keeping those 10,000 guys on unemployment really is worth it. Since if they don't buy your MP3 Players, Games, whatever you manufacture you'll get to join them soon enough.
So . . . yeah
Pug
I suspect you're right - as much as I hate to 'root' for either of these two, Righthaven may have a valid infringement case here; The Drudge Report is hardly creating anything additional in a story. Of course, going from infringement and the thought that a DMCA complaint can be actually valid (Valid DMCA complaints! Who Knew?) to grabbing a domain name rather than the simple damages seems a bit odd.
Pug
OHMIGODOHMIGODOHMIGODOHMIGOD
You mean people can figure out things about me based on . . . stuff I *DO*!?!?!?!?!
YOU'RE FROM THE NSA AREN'T YOU!!!!!!!!!
AUGH!!!
Oh - wait - if they have that much wrong, I'm probably okay . . . unless . . . it's a double bluff?!?!!?!
AAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!
{G} - Pug
Whine Whine Whine Bitch Bitch Bitch.
Or, alternatively, toggle off cookies by default, install noscript and https-everywhere. Look at what Google lets you opt out of and, y'know, opt out. If you're feeling *really* paranoid, set up an alternate profile for any online persona that you don't want tracked backwards to you.
If you have a genuine concern about some evercookie tracking you unethically after you've done that, I'll grant that it's legit. Tracking via IP addresses should of course be limited to things that genuinely require a warrant, and I don't trust our security establishment to abide by that.
But for the love of Pete ninety percent of the time it's like listening to nudists complain about tourist cameras . . . downtown.
"OH my God they got a picture of my jiggly bits!!!!"
Pug
Bowing to Chinese Pressure to silence dissent against the government and their corrupt Bureaucrats: Bad
Bowing to United States Pressure to silence dissent against our government and their corrupt corporate overlords: Good
Just so we're all on the same page here.
Pug
"Twenty-five years and two days later, it’s not just hard to remember an era in which Windows wasn’t everywhere"
Bullshit - As a C64 and Atari ST veteran, twenty-five years later it's painful to remember the extraordinary effort it took to lose to windows. I had better graphics playing Neuromancer on the C64 than windows managed for a decade, and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Jack Tramiel should be strung up for crimes against computing.
{sigh} - Pug
So call it the WIIII!
I mean seriously - when I was a kid I had time to finish video games. It was competing with reading a book, playing outside, or watching TV - I was a kid.
As an adult, I got stuff to do and my playtime is at a premium - I finished two out of three Morrowind game endings, I finished No One Lives Forever and NOLF II, and when it cools down and I have time I'm finishing Baldur's Gate II all the way through. Come to think on it I finished Neverwinter Nights too, and I got a guy at work I'm going to mug and steal his copy of Planescape. Oh, and I ascended once in Nethack.
That what has kept my attention in the last decade or so. I might play Dwarf Fortress but I haven't got the time for the PhD required to figure it out, I play various 4X games, and the rest is casual games, mostly Wii.
Pug
It's best to ignore the echo chamber, they never learn.
I keep hearing people say that . . .
Sorry, cheap joke, and I'm better than that . . . no I'm not . . .
{G} - Pug
I find this concept of a situation in which listening to Halliburton would have protected the environment and made life better highly uncomfortable.
Are we absolutely sure the ink is dry on these recommendations they supposedly made?
Pug
Umm. A 'market', of any type, depends on a high degree of transparency and the ability to exchange one provider of a good or service for another; It may not be *fair* that a sufficient level of success creates the very domination of a market that distorts these, but I am only aware of Rand acolytes willing to staunchly deny this as a matter of course - even most libertarians I know will grant that.
When a single entity dominates the market, that transparency and capacity to contract as equals disappears - of *course* success is a valid reason to regulate. In this case, yes, Google's domination of the market allows them to deliver ad rates well above that of any competitor and still gain a profit, and that in turn means that Google's definition of family friendly can have a chilling effect regardless of whether that definition is reflective of society.
Is such regulation needed here? I don't know - but although TV Tropes is hardly a paragon of virtue, looking at it comparatively to the Internet at large, even dismissing the explicitly erotic, they are hardly anyone's definition of obscene, and yet a complaint to Google could result in a unilateral suspension of services on which they had come to depend, without warning or an attempt to correct the issue from both sides.
And let us be clear here - this was an exchange of goods and services - Google provided the ads, TV Tropes provided the space - and yet the suspension *was* initiated unilaterally and without warning or even complaint to the offending partner. This does not describe a 'typical' relationship of equals under contact law.
Pug
I know historically there has been at least one recession under every GOP president except (IIRC) Ford; over a hundred months of recessions since 1945 started under Republicans, several more than a year each;
Democrat Presidents? *If* you include the first Reagan recession (A fair argument - Carter and Volker were deliberately getting Inflation under control) - 17 months.
I counted them up for an economics class once. One might almost think deregulating and tax cuts for the wealthy don't actually help.
But I'm *sure* they'll work this time. I mean, GOP economics produced 2,000,000 jobs in the 8 years of GWB. Just because we need 250,000 job's a month to tread water on unemployment is no reason to be concerned about reviving an economic plan that managed 250,000 jobs a year.
We should punish Democrats for high unemployment though. Going back to the GOP makes perfect sense.
{Sigh} - Pug
Gee, they don't allow comments on their video rehashing out of context phrases harvested from various places.
Almost as if there might be a legitimate counter-argument to teachers talking about how they knock off grade points because Microsoft Word isn't capable of rendering a standardized, well documented XML formats properly, and they wouldn't want to see that posted.
Or that people might mention that Microsoft Office *Itself* doesn't render MS-Office Documents consistently across versions.
Or follow-up on the long ignored complaint that Outlook 2007/2010 relies on the Microsoft Word HTML renderer, which ignores vast swathes of standard CSS dropping people back to 1995 HTML practice, let's not even pretend it's not a piece of crap.
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
'We're used to it' is in fact a legitimate argument for MS-Office. But lets not pretend it's an argument of deeper depth than the apocryphal retired sanitation engineer that kept buckets of sewage in his home because he's gotten used to the smell.
Pug
I keep thinking I'd like something that combined text adventures with SVG, For something like the "Knight Orc" or "Amber" experience.
Heck I'd still like to finish a few games from my Atari ST - {G};
Pug
Except that by definition, if you think "making a public good like firefighting or police service an opt-in fee is stupid and results in dumb, avoidable tragic circumstances" you're not *actually* "all for the free market".
This is Ayn Rand in Practice. It is also the reason why these Balanced Budget, Socially and economically Conservative states (By and Large, an with caveats for the current recession) get more in taxes than they send to Washington and are being being subsidized by those stupid Liberal States.
Because that stupid liberal keynesian economics actually works. Although I swear to god, as near as I can tell the main insight Keynes made is that "Dollar for Dollar Poor and Middle Class People contribute to the Economy far more than the wealthy do"
Pug
Nah - you'd be able to smell *their* vile stench when you came on board!
Pug
Never having used OSX I can't speak to how it works in practice, but conceptually the concept of an XML config file that has it's GUI embedded, yet is also viable to access by things like sed/awk/gedit (No, I don't use emacs/vi. Ubuntu: Linux for wimps. **** off - {G}) seems like an awfully cool method to combine the CLI and GUI concepts as two aspects of a common interface.
Pug
I'm not a sports fan myself, but in the interests of fairness my main objection is the ego's of sportsfans.
I'll forgive them when they get to see "Because of the extended Sci Fi Marathon going into triple overtime, we are now joining Super Bowl 56, already in progress . . . 'And it's 4th and ten!!!'"
{G} - Pug
Frankly, as someone that has tried several times to figure out codecs past the 'something ffmpeg takes as input in format a and spits out as format b", so far this is the best intro I've ever had. It makes assumptions that I know computers at a basic level . . . and that's it.
I'm definitely watching this all the way through.
Pug
As someone that has tried to figure out even the basics of codecs from various websites, if he can make it simple enough to bring some clarity to it more power to him.
Ever reference I have seen on the web made me feel like a kindergartner trying to understand the mathematics of quantum physics.
Pug
Gee, I don't have the foggiest why I distrust the NRA's self-evaluation of their gun competency.
Pug
Among the few specifics it gets into is formalizing net neutrality and the end-to-end nature of the Internet - if it only accomplished that it would be worthwhile methinks.
Obviously I hope for more, but that it does formalize that as an international standard tends to indicate that's something they agree on.
Pug
Noting the distinction between a clear and obvious legal relationship establishing the responsibility of corporate oversight and a simple financial dealing with the lowest bidder?
Troll? Really?
Pug