It's true that after Trump won the primary, the WFB ceased to find the project, and a DNC lawyer then started funding the project, but it certainly started off as a conservative project. It's also the case that Steele was never told who was funding it, merely asked to research.
It is a "paid for" report, but I'm not sure why you think that's a criticism. There aren't many unpaid for reports. If you mean it's "biased", that makes little sense, Trump's opponents on the right, and then left, were looking for things to use against Trump, they didn't commission the report with the aim of publishing it. It was extremely important to them that the report be factual - if it wasn't, there's no point in creating the report to begin with.
Are you referring to Brandon Eich and that infamous thing he did? Because, you know, Mozilla's done a lot of good stuff since then, just because they employed Eich and got him to invent Javascript is no reason to still be angry at them.
Your rant actually started out with the assertion that you'll believe scientists are right about global warming when an unrelated set of bodies, who traditionally have only blessed science when it suits their agenda, decides to act in a specific way you happen to agree with, when other alternatives exist.
Maybe it's not what you intended to mean. But it certainly seemed strange.
We could make it cheaper if we run all the equipment - diggers, pumps, trains, etc - on coal. It's a very cheap form of fuel and if we just burn coal to get all that energy, we'll have this global warming problem fixed in a jiffy!
What the fuck are you talking about? The 1960s-1980s Feminists were "Second Wave", they were infamous for burning their boyfriend's porn magazines and holding demonstrations outside Red Light districts. Viz's "Millie Tant" rabid-Feminist character was one of their earliest, dating back to the late 1980s.
I know that because I lived through it myself, in its epicenter of suburban California.
That was its epicenter, huh? Bull. Shit. There was no epi-center. Half the major names were in the UK. Greer was Australian. Dworkin was from New Jersey. Gloria Steinem lived in New York. Are you mixing up the Feminist movement with the Hippie Movement? Because those aren't remotely similar groups, and yeah, Hippies were about free love man, but they certainly weren't about female equality.
Today's retributive feminists are exhuming tales of that culture to settle current scores.
Cobblers.
My mother was involved with the movement in the 1980s in the UK, in a group that was so fucking anti-men that when they wanted to collate their magazine in my mother's house, questions were asked about my presence, because being a male I wasn't allowed to see that publication.
Meanwhile my dad used to go out to buy cigarettes during the evening, only to be literally harassed by gangs of roving feminists who demanded to know who he was and why he was outside, because there was, apparently, a rapist in the area, and they felt that if women couldn't walk around freely, neither should men be able to.
Those who laud second wave feminists as "pro-sex" or wanting equality with men have no idea what they were. I'm not saying all of them were like that, but they pretty much match the depiction of third wave by those pretending that third wavers are somehow extremists.
Meanwhile what is it exactly that's an example of "Today's retributive feminists"? Because from what I can figure out, it boils down to "Sarkeesian wants more positive female representation in vidja", which is somehow the worst thing ever.
Those of you who think Third Wave Feminists are somehow extreme have no idea whatsoever how bad the second wave was.
I suspect it's more complex than that, but as someone stuck in a county in Florida that's pretty much run by rich elderly jackasses, I find the whole "Old == poor" thing extremely dubious too.
And 25 year olds "can earn more money"? Really? I remember being 25, back in the 1990s you had to do two jobs to get anything resembling the lifestyle of a retiree. Single 25 year olds typically have to rent rooms in shared houses, eat Ramen a lot, and generally the luxuries are the occasional movie and Friday night at the bar.
Even if you compare incomes and find the 25 year old theoretically has more, the 25 year old has to spend a fair proportion of their income on work related expenses, something a retiree doesn't have to do. When 1/3 of your income is spent on transportation, and you have no discounts or anything else to make things easier, and another 1/3 on rent, you don't have a lot left.
I'm totally happy with laws against age discrimination if the laws have the effect of preventing access to employment or services. But Tinder's actions seem reasonable to me, and it strikes me the likely result of the court ruling is that people will now be prevented from accessing the Tinder platform thanks to their age, whereas before they weren't. Well done Judges, way to show you're in touch.
A hack that has no guarantee of working anyway will break if Google implements something obvious that probably should have been in every browser from Mosaic onwards? Heavens forfend!
Well, I'm guessing the aim is to create a cryptocurrency rather than cryptoinvestmentvehicle. Right now 99% of cryptocurrencies are useless at the whole "currency" part of their names, because they can't actually be used to conduct transactions. Why not? A combination of sky high transaction fees (in some cases) coupled with extreme volatility (all of them.)
Once you throw out the idiot libertarian ideology behind cryptocurrencies, you get to the nitty gritty that cryptocurrencies are supposed to be useful as money - that is, as a means of exchange. Currencies that aren't stable are useless. So throwing out the libertarian bullshit and pegging the virtual value of a coin to something real world makes perfect sense.
The main negative about room service is that it's expensive. It's cheaper to just wander downstairs and go to the hotel restaurant. Cheaper hotels don't even bother with a restaurant (or, by implication, room service.)
If you reduce the cost of room service, more people will use it, which means more people may eat at the hotel, which means the hotel may need to employ more catering staff (you know, cooks, etc.)
And while all of this is going on, people need to repair and maintain the bots.
Given your interpretation of those figures, between 1/3 and half of all people in that county, including the children, are on prescription painkillers.
That is completely unreasonable, and the story is absolutely right to suggest it's newsworthy.
Yes, opiods are over prescribed. But not to extent almost half the population is on them.
He believes that research into better ways of video encoding will stop if nobody can make money from merely doing the research and publishing it. Hence, he's trying to make MPEG, which uses the patent system to enable that kind of paid research, viable in an environment in which the need to pay royalties to use a technology is highly unpopular and undermined by free alternatives.
He's wrong, as Google, Hulu/Vudu/Roku/Consonant-U-Consonant-U/Amazon etc have plenty of incentives to fund such research and contribute it to the public domain. But traditionally this is how video and audio encoding standards have always been done (see also the H.26x series), so it's hard for him to break out of that thinking.
If I understand it correctly, he thinks the issue is licensing (well, duh), and is proposing that people contributing technologies to MPEG tick a box on their MPEG FRAND agreement along the lines of "If my patented technology is used in this standard way, then the technology can be used for free, but not if it's used in this other standard way."
He doesn't give examples, and his use of the term "profiles" suggests it could boil down to "Allowed to be used for low bit rate video for free, but not in high bitrate video" as traditionally MPEG profiles have been combinations of a bit rate, resolution/framerate, and, sometimes, use of certain technologies.
At the same time there's that odd sentence in the summary about not defining profiles in MPEG, so there's that.
TL;DR: I think the underlying point is that if his changes went ahead, then the next generation of MPEG standards, would have free versions and paid, licensed, versions.
Would it work? I guess the idea is that the profile of the format that competes with free codecs like Google's would be free, while places you'd never bother, with a free codec and wouldn't care, like Blu-ray, would be paid. The latter would benefit from mass adoption of the former because the hardware needed to encode it would be the same and so you'd see economies of scale.
Given we're almost always at war these days, perhaps you're making a good argument for not giving the government off switches or the ability to listen in to phone calls.
How about.... McDonalds(Google)' will refuse to serve you unless you drive in with a McDonalds car.
More, McDonalds refuses to serve you if you drive in with a Ford, but is fine with any other car manufacturer. Meanwhile, Ford refuses to allow anyone to build a MacDonalds within one mile of any Ford dealership for some reason.
(Google supports the Roku just fine. And the issue apparently started because Amazon refused to sell Chromecasts. And they refused to sell Chromecasts because... we're still unsure about that one, but they did blame Google at the time.)
I know Jobs had an RDF, and Cook presumably wants to copy that, but the RDF was supposed to affect the people around him, not himself. Does he really think Swift, which is another me-too language that looks like almost every other popular programming language except Python, is somehow not "geeky"? It's no more or less programmer hostile than Javascript FFS.
Trump was elected by the States, not the people. Nobody won votes from the majority of the people of the nation, and Trump didn't even have the most support, so it's a little silly making the claim you're making.
Frankly, I do think proprietary software such as MS Office, PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. often offers a better user experience than free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives
While this is often true, I'm surprised MS Office is on that list - OpenOffice/LibreOffice haven't always been ideal, but as the MS Office UI has deteriorated, the ribbon being the big killer, OO/LO has vastly improved.
When I use OO/LO, I don't generally have sixteen tabs open in my web browser along the lines of "remove section break office" / "remove gap between tab cell top and first paragraph" / etc.
The only reason I use Word more than LO's equivalent is that Word's document format is the industry standard, and LO just doesn't support accurately for anything other than very plain text. What gets spat out by LO tends to load into Word in a way that needs cleaning up afterwards. Otherwise I'd use it exclusively, it's a better UI, easier to navigate and more intuitive.
Yeah, I'm sure Google would be seriously hurt if it had to fork out $20M for something that would give it amazing publicity around the world. That's why they're cancelling it. Sure.
No, this shit started with the entire media (both wings, Fox, MSNBC, et al) working together to smear, minimize, and discredit all non-Trump candidates in the GOP primary.
I assume you're talking about Fox, because I saw no attempts to discredit Bush, Rubio, or even Cruz during the primaries, and Fox was the only one I avoided. In fact, most candidates were pumped up as that guy that will finally beat Trump only to... uh, not beat trump.
One or two got bad press, but, for example, in Carson's case, the bad press was a combination of him doing comical things like staying in the wings after he'd been called to a debate, and writing a book about his past knifing people.
Outside of the news, Bush I recall being portrayed as a punching bag by Trump on SNL, but the others were for the most part not treated any worse than, say, Clinton... although Clinton's coverage was pretty negative.
On that note, did you see the NYT's coverage of Clinton? They leapt on pretty much every ludicrous allegation made about Clinton, no matter how ridiculous.
Nobody's arguing for that. What they're arguing for is that a small group of rural voters shouldn't get to disenfranchise the vast majority of voters, who are non-rural.
The majority of Americans are no where near as right wing as Congress. We have a right wing congress solely because the system weighs the votes of those outside of cities as more important than those within them. That's not right, and needs to stop.
No, it's normal, not unconstitutional. When you buy land you generally have a strip you're allowed to maintain but are required by law to give allow utilities to have access to. Those are the laid out in the deed. It's how utilities work, they wouldn't be able to wire up your neighbors otherwise if you chose to be an asshole and prevent them from having access.
Slashdot Mirror
The Steele Dossier was actually commissioned by a right wing group, The Washington Free Beacon, and was created by Fusion GPS. There's some speculation that the WFB was acting under prompting from Ted Cruz, though the Cruz campaign has denied that.
It's true that after Trump won the primary, the WFB ceased to find the project, and a DNC lawyer then started funding the project, but it certainly started off as a conservative project. It's also the case that Steele was never told who was funding it, merely asked to research.
It is a "paid for" report, but I'm not sure why you think that's a criticism. There aren't many unpaid for reports. If you mean it's "biased", that makes little sense, Trump's opponents on the right, and then left, were looking for things to use against Trump, they didn't commission the report with the aim of publishing it. It was extremely important to them that the report be factual - if it wasn't, there's no point in creating the report to begin with.
Are you referring to Brandon Eich and that infamous thing he did? Because, you know, Mozilla's done a lot of good stuff since then, just because they employed Eich and got him to invent Javascript is no reason to still be angry at them.
Your rant actually started out with the assertion that you'll believe scientists are right about global warming when an unrelated set of bodies, who traditionally have only blessed science when it suits their agenda, decides to act in a specific way you happen to agree with, when other alternatives exist.
Maybe it's not what you intended to mean. But it certainly seemed strange.
We could make it cheaper if we run all the equipment - diggers, pumps, trains, etc - on coal. It's a very cheap form of fuel and if we just burn coal to get all that energy, we'll have this global warming problem fixed in a jiffy!
What the fuck are you talking about? The 1960s-1980s Feminists were "Second Wave", they were infamous for burning their boyfriend's porn magazines and holding demonstrations outside Red Light districts. Viz's "Millie Tant" rabid-Feminist character was one of their earliest, dating back to the late 1980s.
That was its epicenter, huh? Bull. Shit. There was no epi-center. Half the major names were in the UK. Greer was Australian. Dworkin was from New Jersey. Gloria Steinem lived in New York. Are you mixing up the Feminist movement with the Hippie Movement? Because those aren't remotely similar groups, and yeah, Hippies were about free love man, but they certainly weren't about female equality.
Cobblers.
My mother was involved with the movement in the 1980s in the UK, in a group that was so fucking anti-men that when they wanted to collate their magazine in my mother's house, questions were asked about my presence, because being a male I wasn't allowed to see that publication.
Meanwhile my dad used to go out to buy cigarettes during the evening, only to be literally harassed by gangs of roving feminists who demanded to know who he was and why he was outside, because there was, apparently, a rapist in the area, and they felt that if women couldn't walk around freely, neither should men be able to.
Those who laud second wave feminists as "pro-sex" or wanting equality with men have no idea what they were. I'm not saying all of them were like that, but they pretty much match the depiction of third wave by those pretending that third wavers are somehow extremists.
Meanwhile what is it exactly that's an example of "Today's retributive feminists"? Because from what I can figure out, it boils down to "Sarkeesian wants more positive female representation in vidja", which is somehow the worst thing ever.
Those of you who think Third Wave Feminists are somehow extreme have no idea whatsoever how bad the second wave was.
This is good news for Bitcoin!
I suspect it's more complex than that, but as someone stuck in a county in Florida that's pretty much run by rich elderly jackasses, I find the whole "Old == poor" thing extremely dubious too.
And 25 year olds "can earn more money"? Really? I remember being 25, back in the 1990s you had to do two jobs to get anything resembling the lifestyle of a retiree. Single 25 year olds typically have to rent rooms in shared houses, eat Ramen a lot, and generally the luxuries are the occasional movie and Friday night at the bar.
Even if you compare incomes and find the 25 year old theoretically has more, the 25 year old has to spend a fair proportion of their income on work related expenses, something a retiree doesn't have to do. When 1/3 of your income is spent on transportation, and you have no discounts or anything else to make things easier, and another 1/3 on rent, you don't have a lot left.
I'm totally happy with laws against age discrimination if the laws have the effect of preventing access to employment or services. But Tinder's actions seem reasonable to me, and it strikes me the likely result of the court ruling is that people will now be prevented from accessing the Tinder platform thanks to their age, whereas before they weren't. Well done Judges, way to show you're in touch.
A hack that has no guarantee of working anyway will break if Google implements something obvious that probably should have been in every browser from Mosaic onwards? Heavens forfend!
Well, I'm guessing the aim is to create a cryptocurrency rather than cryptoinvestmentvehicle. Right now 99% of cryptocurrencies are useless at the whole "currency" part of their names, because they can't actually be used to conduct transactions. Why not? A combination of sky high transaction fees (in some cases) coupled with extreme volatility (all of them.)
Once you throw out the idiot libertarian ideology behind cryptocurrencies, you get to the nitty gritty that cryptocurrencies are supposed to be useful as money - that is, as a means of exchange. Currencies that aren't stable are useless. So throwing out the libertarian bullshit and pegging the virtual value of a coin to something real world makes perfect sense.
Might actually create more jobs than it destroys.
The main negative about room service is that it's expensive. It's cheaper to just wander downstairs and go to the hotel restaurant. Cheaper hotels don't even bother with a restaurant (or, by implication, room service.)
If you reduce the cost of room service, more people will use it, which means more people may eat at the hotel, which means the hotel may need to employ more catering staff (you know, cooks, etc.)
And while all of this is going on, people need to repair and maintain the bots.
Given your interpretation of those figures, between 1/3 and half of all people in that county, including the children, are on prescription painkillers.
That is completely unreasonable, and the story is absolutely right to suggest it's newsworthy.
Yes, opiods are over prescribed. But not to extent almost half the population is on them.
He believes that research into better ways of video encoding will stop if nobody can make money from merely doing the research and publishing it. Hence, he's trying to make MPEG, which uses the patent system to enable that kind of paid research, viable in an environment in which the need to pay royalties to use a technology is highly unpopular and undermined by free alternatives.
He's wrong, as Google, Hulu/Vudu/Roku/Consonant-U-Consonant-U/Amazon etc have plenty of incentives to fund such research and contribute it to the public domain. But traditionally this is how video and audio encoding standards have always been done (see also the H.26x series), so it's hard for him to break out of that thinking.
If I understand it correctly, he thinks the issue is licensing (well, duh), and is proposing that people contributing technologies to MPEG tick a box on their MPEG FRAND agreement along the lines of "If my patented technology is used in this standard way, then the technology can be used for free, but not if it's used in this other standard way."
He doesn't give examples, and his use of the term "profiles" suggests it could boil down to "Allowed to be used for low bit rate video for free, but not in high bitrate video" as traditionally MPEG profiles have been combinations of a bit rate, resolution/framerate, and, sometimes, use of certain technologies.
At the same time there's that odd sentence in the summary about not defining profiles in MPEG, so there's that.
TL;DR: I think the underlying point is that if his changes went ahead, then the next generation of MPEG standards, would have free versions and paid, licensed, versions.
Would it work? I guess the idea is that the profile of the format that competes with free codecs like Google's would be free, while places you'd never bother, with a free codec and wouldn't care, like Blu-ray, would be paid. The latter would benefit from mass adoption of the former because the hardware needed to encode it would be the same and so you'd see economies of scale.
Hosted DHCP. Hosted. D. H. C. P.
What the...?
Given we're almost always at war these days, perhaps you're making a good argument for not giving the government off switches or the ability to listen in to phone calls.
I'm picturing autonomous police cars pulling over autonomous cars...
More, McDonalds refuses to serve you if you drive in with a Ford, but is fine with any other car manufacturer. Meanwhile, Ford refuses to allow anyone to build a MacDonalds within one mile of any Ford dealership for some reason.
(Google supports the Roku just fine. And the issue apparently started because Amazon refused to sell Chromecasts. And they refused to sell Chromecasts because... we're still unsure about that one, but they did blame Google at the time.)
I know Jobs had an RDF, and Cook presumably wants to copy that, but the RDF was supposed to affect the people around him, not himself. Does he really think Swift, which is another me-too language that looks like almost every other popular programming language except Python, is somehow not "geeky"? It's no more or less programmer hostile than Javascript FFS.
Is Cook trolling? That's got to be it, right?
Trump was elected by the States, not the people. Nobody won votes from the majority of the people of the nation, and Trump didn't even have the most support, so it's a little silly making the claim you're making.
Sometimes British English makes more sense. For example, you park in a car park, not a drive way, and you drive in motorway, not a park way.
BTW did anyone consider the possibility that the left behind cars might just be abandoned PT Cruisers?
While this is often true, I'm surprised MS Office is on that list - OpenOffice/LibreOffice haven't always been ideal, but as the MS Office UI has deteriorated, the ribbon being the big killer, OO/LO has vastly improved.
When I use OO/LO, I don't generally have sixteen tabs open in my web browser along the lines of "remove section break office" / "remove gap between tab cell top and first paragraph" / etc.
The only reason I use Word more than LO's equivalent is that Word's document format is the industry standard, and LO just doesn't support accurately for anything other than very plain text. What gets spat out by LO tends to load into Word in a way that needs cleaning up afterwards. Otherwise I'd use it exclusively, it's a better UI, easier to navigate and more intuitive.
Yeah, I'm sure Google would be seriously hurt if it had to fork out $20M for something that would give it amazing publicity around the world. That's why they're cancelling it. Sure.
I assume you're talking about Fox, because I saw no attempts to discredit Bush, Rubio, or even Cruz during the primaries, and Fox was the only one I avoided. In fact, most candidates were pumped up as that guy that will finally beat Trump only to... uh, not beat trump.
One or two got bad press, but, for example, in Carson's case, the bad press was a combination of him doing comical things like staying in the wings after he'd been called to a debate, and writing a book about his past knifing people.
Outside of the news, Bush I recall being portrayed as a punching bag by Trump on SNL, but the others were for the most part not treated any worse than, say, Clinton... although Clinton's coverage was pretty negative.
On that note, did you see the NYT's coverage of Clinton? They leapt on pretty much every ludicrous allegation made about Clinton, no matter how ridiculous.
Nobody's arguing for that. What they're arguing for is that a small group of rural voters shouldn't get to disenfranchise the vast majority of voters, who are non-rural.
The majority of Americans are no where near as right wing as Congress. We have a right wing congress solely because the system weighs the votes of those outside of cities as more important than those within them. That's not right, and needs to stop.
No, it's normal, not unconstitutional. When you buy land you generally have a strip you're allowed to maintain but are required by law to give allow utilities to have access to. Those are the laid out in the deed. It's how utilities work, they wouldn't be able to wire up your neighbors otherwise if you chose to be an asshole and prevent them from having access.