Common browser UIs seem to imply that the URL is metadata that is separate from content, but you can make unencrypted HTTP requests using a telnet terminal emulation session to the IP address of the server using port 80. If you do it becomes abundantly clear that the request URL, headers, and body are sent over the same unencrypted network socket. The browser has to parse the URL to the point of extracting the host name (e.g. http:///foobar.com/requestPath), but the IP address is all that it needs to create the socket; the URI is then transmitted in its entirety on that socket.
When you use HTTPS the browser notices the difference in protocol and makes an encrypted connection to port 443. All the business of certificate are taken care of under the covers, and what you end up is just another socket. Everything else remains the same, including the fact that the only thing that gets transmitted in the packet header is the destination IP address and port number. Everything else is transmitted inside the socket (including the actual hostname you requested).
and open source software like Gnu Radio. No need to spend $150 bucks and then void your warranty.
The thing GNU Radio is just just a bunch of software routines. People have cobbled things together that will allow you to listen to AM, FM, and SSB, but the UI is crude and it's not something an average person would find usable. On top of that the digital voice decoding is a separate piece of software which (except on Windows) you have to compile from source and figure out how to bolt that on.
It'd be nice if more people were putting their hacking energies into SDR, because then maybe someone would come up with a nice, slick plug-and-play solution anyone could download from a distro repository. It's happened in other somewhat technical areas, like GIS (e.g., Quantum GIS) or computer algebra.
Well, this is a good point, but the real issue with Google's business model isn't collecting data your data per se -- it's that you don't get to find out what they do with it. If it were transparent it would be a simple and reasonable economic transaction: I get services from you and you get to use my information, and if I don't like how you use it I can go elsewhere for those services.
All the arguments for the optimality and acceptability of a market economy are based on the assumption that parties to transactions have perfect -- or at least good enough -- information about conditions related to that transaction. But an entirely self-interested party (as corporations are) will if given the opportunity hide information related to a transaction when it is favorable to them. This is one of the reasons we pay more for healthcare than other countries, because our system is rigged so that you can't figure out how much a medical service costs. This starts with the largely bogus Hospital price lists (called a chargemaster), which pretty much guarantees that self-insurance is not a viable option. But if you have insurance, nobody is ever quite sure how much of what is covered by that insurance. In theory you pay your copay and that's it, but insurance companies routinely dispute bills (which is why providers make you agree to pay out of pocket), I am convinced sometimes speculating that you will pay some of the amount they ask for.
People use "free market" to mean "unregulated", but in fact a free market that operates the way people assume a free market should requires regulation, particularly of information. I'd like the law to say Google has to give me an accounting of all the ways they've made money off my information, so I can decide whether the const in consequences to me is worth the value of their services.
I don't mind the sponsored posts; I like the fact that they're in a different color rather than camouflaged as regular content. They're generally of no interest to me, but in return for consideration I make a point to at least skim the summaries to see if they might be of interest to me. I also appreciate that they don't use popups or intrusive DOM techniques that obscure content
Sites like this, especially long-running ones, are kind of like a clubhouse; any changes to the clubhouse are bound to be controversial with the members. But in this case the members don't pay the fee; someone else pays for the upkeep. As long as a site is reasonable about how they present advertising I have no particular qualms with it.
I used to ride my bike about ten miles to work each day at a small Unix software developer in Brookline MA. I wheeled my bike through the front door and noticed the secretary was sitting at her desk with a stunned expression.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It blew up," she said. You know how in books people who are overwhelmed with shock say things "in a hollow voice"? That was how she said it; I'd never actually heard anyone talk in that voice before.
"What blew up?"
"The Shuttle. It blew up."
So we all gathered around the radio -- this was before the Internet and before televisions were common in offices -- and listened to the news people speak in that special hushed tone they use for unimaginable catastrophes. Anyone who listened to the radio on 9/11 knows what I'm talking about, it's low and soft and... hollow, like they're reluctantly whispering terrible things in your ear.
Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
This has nothing to do with the economic situation in Finland. You're just using it as an excuse to bring up a pet issue.
Well, as someone who has friends who are inventors and hold patents, I think they deserve compensation for the effort they put into their inventions. But the thing is, they're real inventions, not bogus ones. The bogus ones are the problem.
I was CTO of a small software developer back in the early 00s, and every couple of weeks someone would come into my office with a printout of something they'd read on the Internet, and as soon as the word "patent" came out of their mouth, I'd stop them right there.
"This is going to be one of those things where they took something people had been doing with LORAN for years and substituted 'GPS' or 'LORAN', isn't it?"
"Well, LORAN was mentioned in the prior art..."
"Stop!" I'd say, putting my fingers in my ears. "I am not going to read that thing, I'm not even going to listen to you, because (a) it's a bogus patent and (b) if I knowingly do the obvious thing in that patent we'll be facing treble damages."
The real problem is bogus patents that dress up the obvious way an experienced practitioner would solve a problem in obscure language. If patents were uniformly genuine inventions then I wouldn't have a problem with non-practicing entities buying them and enforcing them. That wouldn't be a pitfall to just doing your job as an engineer.
This is a bitchslap party between a Russian and a Turkish guy.... these two countries have hated each other since the 1700s when they started battling each other for influence in the Balkans. And after the recent jet crash disaster, they'll hate each other for a couple of more years again.
Some people I guess are just a waste of perfectly good protoplasm. Extorting money I can understand, although I don't agree with it. But life is way too short; there's something pathetic about people who can't think of better things to do with theirs than rehash some conflict from centuries before they were born.
This is totally weird, but as I was reading that article and seeing the BASIC listing, I actually remembered the smell and feel of my TRS-80.
The olfactory bulb is intimately interconnected with the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and associative memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotions. So it's quite commonplace for smells to trigger emotional memories, and it wouldn't be surprising for the trigger to run the other way -- from an emotional response to an olfactory memory.
So I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that you probably loved that computer. Or possibly hated it.
The thing that you have to know about 1979 is that the vast majority of people (including most law enforcement) back then had never seen a computer in person. If you asked most people to draw a computer, they'd produce a rough sketch of the iconic IBM 729 7 track tape drive.
Technology moved so fast after that the computers of 1979 would seem inconceivably archaic even to people who were born in that year. I was still learning to program back then, on machines that had banks of lights on the front panel to show you the contents of the CPU registers. The very first microcomputers an average person (well, and average person with rudimentary soldering skills and the equivalent of $3200 burning a hole in his pocket) could own had just recently become available, and they had the same feature.
The point of my old-fart ramblings is this: unless you are old enough to remember this time, you probably have no idea of how alien and spooky this computer stuff would have been back then. It's not just people are more used to computers now, we're more used to being confronted with unfamiliar new technology in general. You have to understand the biggest change in technology experience most people had had at that time was the switch from rotary dial to keypad on telephones and not everyone had that yet. There was still a display in the Boston Museum of Science explaining the benefits of Touch Tone dialing. TV remote controls were still in the future, you still had to get off the couch to change the channel or the volume. So this kind computer stuff was barely one step removed from sorcery as far as most people were concerned.
The Internet also has familiarized most people today with oddball geek behavior, and experience has taught us not to expect people doing bizarre things to make sense. So not only were computers weird and disturbing to most people, weird and disturbing behavior was more weird and disturbing to most people. People in general, and law enforcement specifically, had no experience whatsoever to draw upon to formulate a reasonable response to something like this. Later law enforcement doesn't have that excuse, but at the time this is really all you could expect from the FBI.
I was watching a video of the Bundy crowd tearing down a SCADA camera at an electrical substation (which I suspect was a utility co camera they mistook for an FBI surveillance camera), railing against a federal government "that serves the rich and elite of this Earth."
Now this guy reached into his bag of insults for something to smear the ad blocker developers with and came up with "rich and self-righteous."
No wonder Bernie Sanders is doing so well; he was so far behind marching to his personal different drummer that now he's out in front of everyone else on the track. If it's a three way general election between Trump, Bloomberg and Sanders, Sanders will cream them. All he has to do is stand up on the debate podium, wave his hand in the direction of the other two and say, "I rest my case."
Well... I think there's a better way to deal with the program than eradicating it: calling the bluff of the people who say it's necessary.
The critical claim is that there aren't enough trained tech workers in the US. So make the H1B dependent on intending to establish permanent residency. Then you get and keep your trained workers.
The reasons companies don't want this is that the purpose of the program isn't to supplement the US workforce, it's to make it easier to ship their jobs overseas when the guest worker with all his newly accumulated experience is kicked out of the country. If there were a shortage of US expertise then we wouldn't be kicking successful workers out and bringing in less experienced ones.
There is no shortage of techies in the US per se, but there's never enough good people. The best H1Bs I've met really do add a lot by being here -- as the best of any group of workers would. So let's keep the best people, who actually end up creating more jobs.
Of course everything you do in our current economy emits carbon -- including things you do to reduce the rate of carbon emissions. And what's more anything you build to reduce carbon emissions will increase increase during the time it takes you to build it. Whether you save any carbon depends on amortizing those emissions over the lifetime of the thing you build. A new grid will be in use for decades, so you don't have to save much to get some net savings. The question is whether you save enough to justify a new grid.
In fact the question really should be whether carbon reductions are possible at all, because there's simply no way to cut fossil fuel cosumption without building a massive new electricity distribution infrastructure... Well, there is actually one other way, which is to drastically reduce our energy consumption. But if you want to reduce carbon emissions without dramatic changes in lifestyle or reduction in living standards you've got to make it possible for other energy sources to compete with fossil fuels.
So it's true that you wouldn't save any carbon if you built a new grid and nothing else changed; but the whole point of building a new grid is that things would naturally change, purely through market forces. You wouldn't need more government interventions like regulations, subsidies for rooftop solar/wind, or carbon taxes. People would use more renewable energy sources because that's what's coming out of their sockets. It'll be more of what's coming out of their sockets because renewable sources will more often be marginally cheaper for the company they buy electricity from.
So in a reduced carbon emission future, the electricity market could look to the consumer exactly like it does today except that electricity prices will be cheaper and more stable. Just as a global and continent wide food market means that in developed countries food is always cheap, and famine is unheard of, a continent wide market in which multiple energy sources compete will lower prices and insulate consumers from fluctuations in any one source like crude oil.
b. a browser and a connection is all that would be required.
- For web development that's always a requirement.
Yeah, but the poster isn't saying that a cloud IDE would be great because it requires a browser and Internet connection; he's saying it would be great because that's all it would require.
I agree that a SaaS IDE doesn't seem very compelling for a traditional development team using modern tools, which largely have solved the problems he's referring to. But I suppose there are some scenarios where it would be useful, e.g. a virtual, part-time team where people who work in different places contribute on an occasional basis.
I'm not advocating realism. German Expressionism made a virtue of limited set budgets by making films look like this. If you believe in compulsory realism such a fantastical mise-en-scène would be bad, but this weirdness is precisely what makes those movies cool.
What I'm saying is that as audiences get more used to digital effects, filmmakers have to become more subtle and thoughtful in using them. "Bad" isn't a property of the effect itself, but how it fits into the story. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has precisely the incongruity I found jarring in the Greedo-shot-first cut of Ep IV, but uses it intentionally to tell the story. There's the analog film of Dr. Parnassus's stage, then cardboard cutout trees on the far side of the looking glass, beyond which lies the impossibly sharp digital world of Dr. Parnassus's imagination. The cutout trees are there to signal a transition from a real/analog world to a fantasy/digital one. Lucas just clumsily mixes the two media in distracting ways.
Aesthetics isn't simple as some technique being appealing or unappealing. The appeal of a technique depends on context. Chiaroscuro was the bee's knees in Baroque painting but it wouldn't work in a Cubist painting. Both kinds of painting have aesthetic appeal, but techniques that work in one don't necessarily work in the other.
Part of the aesthetic context is the audience and it's familiarity with the techniques being used. When perspective drawing came in painters vied to do the most elaborate depictions of converging lines; later perspective in itself wasn't as exciting to people. Perspective itself didn't necessarily go out of style, just ostentatiously poking the audience in the eyes with it.
I recently watched the Greedo-shot-first cut of Star Wars Ep IV, complete with Lucas's new effects grafted into the old movie. I concluded hate for this version isn't just about rewriting childhood memories. The new effects, while sophisticated in execution, were clumsily fit into the overall movie. Their look didn't go with the rest of it. The original movie was 100% film; the new cut switches jarringly between hyper-HD digital shots and grainy analog film shots. Thirty years ago the technology of the digital scenes would have enchanted us, but now we're used to the technology. The constant switching back and forth between digital and analog is almost like someone had grafted new color scenes onto an old black and white movie. When you watch an old B&W movie you forget there's no color because you're drawn into the story. Adding new color scenes would repeatedly draw your attention away from the story to the specific technology used for each scene.
The problem is the new technology per se, it's the artistically clumsy way it's been bolted onto this particularly movie.
I think we're at the point where we're no longer impressed by a scene just because of the computational resources it must have taken to render, and this makes many elaborate digital effects seem cheesy. I'm not entirely sure why; it may be an uncanny valley type effect, that the digital shots are so close to perfection that their subtle difference from real shots is more noticeable. Or it may be that the purely digital process for these effects encourages artistic sloppiness in a way that the older, more labor intensive techniques don't.
Not that your concerns aren't legitimate, but they aren't congruent with what the summary claims, which is that nobody will be compelled to go looking for dirt on anyone else.
So this is similar to the "mandated reporter" laws in other situations where someone's safety (particularly minors) is at risk. For example in many states if you are a doctor or teacher and discover signs of physical abuse or neglect you are legally bound to report that information. In roughly half of US states clinical psychologists are mandated to report patients who are planning to harm others.
So assuming those mandatory reporter laws are reasonable, then whether this law is reasonable depends on the degree it responds to what legally would be considered harm to someone -- in this case the minors who are featured in the material. To the degree which it compels reporting of porn made without actual minors (e.g. with young-looking actors or through completely virtual methods), it would be unreasonable.
Well, what you do in order to feed those billions makes a difference, doesn't it? Even if you feed them wild fish, how you harvest those fish makes a difference. Unlike, say, manufacturing widgets, unregulated extraction doesn't maximize output over the long term. Fishing isn't production, it's extraction, and since it's a renewable resource you want to extract in a manner which doesn't shift the system equilibrium -- you don't want to live on your environmental capital.
I once saw a presentation by a marine ecologist who modeled the impact of marine sanctuaries, and his model showed that long term fish catches were maximized by creating large marine sanctuaries and intensively fishing around the sactuaries' perimeters. Now this is just an idea, mind you, and a compelling argument isn't the same as proof; but this is the kind of idea we need to consider. You could say, "Screw it, we've got seven billion mouths to feed," and catch as much fish as you can in the short term, but that only makes your problem worse in the long term as you extract each fishery down to the point of collapse.
I thought the sanctuary idea was interesting because it would be way simpler to enforce than giving each fishing boat a quota. All you have to do is ensure fishing boats don't go into any no-go areas. Rather than trying to divvy up a total catch fairly, you simply maximize the system output and let market forces determine who stays in business; meanwhile you maintain completely pristine and maximally productive areas, extracting only the sustainable surplus they produce rather than eating your metaphorical seed corn.
Yeah, it's a big problem, but you only make it bigger by throwing up your hands in despair.
The problem is you're expecting the Nazis to make sense and to present themselves honestly. My point is that they don't, and that they had a motive for claiming they were socialists.
Slashdot Mirror
This is correct.
Common browser UIs seem to imply that the URL is metadata that is separate from content, but you can make unencrypted HTTP requests using a telnet terminal emulation session to the IP address of the server using port 80. If you do it becomes abundantly clear that the request URL, headers, and body are sent over the same unencrypted network socket. The browser has to parse the URL to the point of extracting the host name (e.g. http:/// foobar.com/requestPath), but the IP address is all that it needs to create the socket; the URI is then transmitted in its entirety on that socket.
When you use HTTPS the browser notices the difference in protocol and makes an encrypted connection to port 443. All the business of certificate are taken care of under the covers, and what you end up is just another socket. Everything else remains the same, including the fact that the only thing that gets transmitted in the packet header is the destination IP address and port number. Everything else is transmitted inside the socket (including the actual hostname you requested).
and open source software like Gnu Radio. No need to spend $150 bucks and then void your warranty.
The thing GNU Radio is just just a bunch of software routines. People have cobbled things together that will allow you to listen to AM, FM, and SSB, but the UI is crude and it's not something an average person would find usable. On top of that the digital voice decoding is a separate piece of software which (except on Windows) you have to compile from source and figure out how to bolt that on.
It'd be nice if more people were putting their hacking energies into SDR, because then maybe someone would come up with a nice, slick plug-and-play solution anyone could download from a distro repository. It's happened in other somewhat technical areas, like GIS (e.g., Quantum GIS) or computer algebra.
Well, this is a good point, but the real issue with Google's business model isn't collecting data your data per se -- it's that you don't get to find out what they do with it. If it were transparent it would be a simple and reasonable economic transaction: I get services from you and you get to use my information, and if I don't like how you use it I can go elsewhere for those services.
All the arguments for the optimality and acceptability of a market economy are based on the assumption that parties to transactions have perfect -- or at least good enough -- information about conditions related to that transaction. But an entirely self-interested party (as corporations are) will if given the opportunity hide information related to a transaction when it is favorable to them. This is one of the reasons we pay more for healthcare than other countries, because our system is rigged so that you can't figure out how much a medical service costs. This starts with the largely bogus Hospital price lists (called a chargemaster), which pretty much guarantees that self-insurance is not a viable option. But if you have insurance, nobody is ever quite sure how much of what is covered by that insurance. In theory you pay your copay and that's it, but insurance companies routinely dispute bills (which is why providers make you agree to pay out of pocket), I am convinced sometimes speculating that you will pay some of the amount they ask for.
People use "free market" to mean "unregulated", but in fact a free market that operates the way people assume a free market should requires regulation, particularly of information. I'd like the law to say Google has to give me an accounting of all the ways they've made money off my information, so I can decide whether the const in consequences to me is worth the value of their services.
I don't mind the sponsored posts; I like the fact that they're in a different color rather than camouflaged as regular content. They're generally of no interest to me, but in return for consideration I make a point to at least skim the summaries to see if they might be of interest to me. I also appreciate that they don't use popups or intrusive DOM techniques that obscure content
Sites like this, especially long-running ones, are kind of like a clubhouse; any changes to the clubhouse are bound to be controversial with the members. But in this case the members don't pay the fee; someone else pays for the upkeep. As long as a site is reasonable about how they present advertising I have no particular qualms with it.
I used to ride my bike about ten miles to work each day at a small Unix software developer in Brookline MA. I wheeled my bike through the front door and noticed the secretary was sitting at her desk with a stunned expression.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It blew up," she said. You know how in books people who are overwhelmed with shock say things "in a hollow voice"? That was how she said it; I'd never actually heard anyone talk in that voice before.
"What blew up?"
"The Shuttle. It blew up."
So we all gathered around the radio -- this was before the Internet and before televisions were common in offices -- and listened to the news people speak in that special hushed tone they use for unimaginable catastrophes. Anyone who listened to the radio on 9/11 knows what I'm talking about, it's low and soft and ... hollow, like they're reluctantly whispering terrible things in your ear.
Cuz consumer technology changed rapidly and they got their timing and direction wrong.
Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
This has nothing to do with the economic situation in Finland. You're just using it as an excuse to bring up a pet issue.
Well, as someone who has friends who are inventors and hold patents, I think they deserve compensation for the effort they put into their inventions. But the thing is, they're real inventions, not bogus ones. The bogus ones are the problem.
I was CTO of a small software developer back in the early 00s, and every couple of weeks someone would come into my office with a printout of something they'd read on the Internet, and as soon as the word "patent" came out of their mouth, I'd stop them right there.
"This is going to be one of those things where they took something people had been doing with LORAN for years and substituted 'GPS' or 'LORAN', isn't it?"
"Well, LORAN was mentioned in the prior art..."
"Stop!" I'd say, putting my fingers in my ears. "I am not going to read that thing, I'm not even going to listen to you, because (a) it's a bogus patent and (b) if I knowingly do the obvious thing in that patent we'll be facing treble damages."
The real problem is bogus patents that dress up the obvious way an experienced practitioner would solve a problem in obscure language. If patents were uniformly genuine inventions then I wouldn't have a problem with non-practicing entities buying them and enforcing them. That wouldn't be a pitfall to just doing your job as an engineer.
I don't have any friends.
This is a bitchslap party between a Russian and a Turkish guy.... these two countries have hated each other since the 1700s when they started battling each other for influence in the Balkans. And after the recent jet crash disaster, they'll hate each other for a couple of more years again.
Some people I guess are just a waste of perfectly good protoplasm. Extorting money I can understand, although I don't agree with it. But life is way too short; there's something pathetic about people who can't think of better things to do with theirs than rehash some conflict from centuries before they were born.
This is totally weird, but as I was reading that article and seeing the BASIC listing, I actually remembered the smell and feel of my TRS-80.
The olfactory bulb is intimately interconnected with the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and associative memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotions. So it's quite commonplace for smells to trigger emotional memories, and it wouldn't be surprising for the trigger to run the other way -- from an emotional response to an olfactory memory.
So I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that you probably loved that computer. Or possibly hated it.
The thing that you have to know about 1979 is that the vast majority of people (including most law enforcement) back then had never seen a computer in person. If you asked most people to draw a computer, they'd produce a rough sketch of the iconic IBM 729 7 track tape drive.
Technology moved so fast after that the computers of 1979 would seem inconceivably archaic even to people who were born in that year. I was still learning to program back then, on machines that had banks of lights on the front panel to show you the contents of the CPU registers. The very first microcomputers an average person (well, and average person with rudimentary soldering skills and the equivalent of $3200 burning a hole in his pocket) could own had just recently become available, and they had the same feature.
The point of my old-fart ramblings is this: unless you are old enough to remember this time, you probably have no idea of how alien and spooky this computer stuff would have been back then. It's not just people are more used to computers now, we're more used to being confronted with unfamiliar new technology in general. You have to understand the biggest change in technology experience most people had had at that time was the switch from rotary dial to keypad on telephones and not everyone had that yet. There was still a display in the Boston Museum of Science explaining the benefits of Touch Tone dialing. TV remote controls were still in the future, you still had to get off the couch to change the channel or the volume. So this kind computer stuff was barely one step removed from sorcery as far as most people were concerned.
The Internet also has familiarized most people today with oddball geek behavior, and experience has taught us not to expect people doing bizarre things to make sense. So not only were computers weird and disturbing to most people, weird and disturbing behavior was more weird and disturbing to most people. People in general, and law enforcement specifically, had no experience whatsoever to draw upon to formulate a reasonable response to something like this. Later law enforcement doesn't have that excuse, but at the time this is really all you could expect from the FBI.
You expect to get some kind of UI feedback that you've successfully long-pressed? Luxury!
The long press is, hands down, the absolute worst invention of my lifetime.
Especially if you're buying fabric. For reference, at the moment £ 1 / m^2 equals $1.20 / yd^2 at current exchange rates.
I was watching a video of the Bundy crowd tearing down a SCADA camera at an electrical substation (which I suspect was a utility co camera they mistook for an FBI surveillance camera), railing against a federal government "that serves the rich and elite of this Earth."
Now this guy reached into his bag of insults for something to smear the ad blocker developers with and came up with "rich and self-righteous."
No wonder Bernie Sanders is doing so well; he was so far behind marching to his personal different drummer that now he's out in front of everyone else on the track. If it's a three way general election between Trump, Bloomberg and Sanders, Sanders will cream them. All he has to do is stand up on the debate podium, wave his hand in the direction of the other two and say, "I rest my case."
Well... I think there's a better way to deal with the program than eradicating it: calling the bluff of the people who say it's necessary.
The critical claim is that there aren't enough trained tech workers in the US. So make the H1B dependent on intending to establish permanent residency. Then you get and keep your trained workers.
The reasons companies don't want this is that the purpose of the program isn't to supplement the US workforce, it's to make it easier to ship their jobs overseas when the guest worker with all his newly accumulated experience is kicked out of the country. If there were a shortage of US expertise then we wouldn't be kicking successful workers out and bringing in less experienced ones.
There is no shortage of techies in the US per se, but there's never enough good people. The best H1Bs I've met really do add a lot by being here -- as the best of any group of workers would. So let's keep the best people, who actually end up creating more jobs.
Actually, it's closer to "Why 6 Republicans want to make it easier for companies to get government subsidies."
Of course everything you do in our current economy emits carbon -- including things you do to reduce the rate of carbon emissions. And what's more anything you build to reduce carbon emissions will increase increase during the time it takes you to build it. Whether you save any carbon depends on amortizing those emissions over the lifetime of the thing you build. A new grid will be in use for decades, so you don't have to save much to get some net savings. The question is whether you save enough to justify a new grid.
In fact the question really should be whether carbon reductions are possible at all, because there's simply no way to cut fossil fuel cosumption without building a massive new electricity distribution infrastructure... Well, there is actually one other way, which is to drastically reduce our energy consumption. But if you want to reduce carbon emissions without dramatic changes in lifestyle or reduction in living standards you've got to make it possible for other energy sources to compete with fossil fuels.
So it's true that you wouldn't save any carbon if you built a new grid and nothing else changed; but the whole point of building a new grid is that things would naturally change, purely through market forces. You wouldn't need more government interventions like regulations, subsidies for rooftop solar/wind, or carbon taxes. People would use more renewable energy sources because that's what's coming out of their sockets. It'll be more of what's coming out of their sockets because renewable sources will more often be marginally cheaper for the company they buy electricity from.
So in a reduced carbon emission future, the electricity market could look to the consumer exactly like it does today except that electricity prices will be cheaper and more stable. Just as a global and continent wide food market means that in developed countries food is always cheap, and famine is unheard of, a continent wide market in which multiple energy sources compete will lower prices and insulate consumers from fluctuations in any one source like crude oil.
Yeah, but the poster isn't saying that a cloud IDE would be great because it requires a browser and Internet connection; he's saying it would be great because that's all it would require.
I agree that a SaaS IDE doesn't seem very compelling for a traditional development team using modern tools, which largely have solved the problems he's referring to. But I suppose there are some scenarios where it would be useful, e.g. a virtual, part-time team where people who work in different places contribute on an occasional basis.
I'm not advocating realism. German Expressionism made a virtue of limited set budgets by making films look like this. If you believe in compulsory realism such a fantastical mise-en-scène would be bad, but this weirdness is precisely what makes those movies cool.
What I'm saying is that as audiences get more used to digital effects, filmmakers have to become more subtle and thoughtful in using them. "Bad" isn't a property of the effect itself, but how it fits into the story. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has precisely the incongruity I found jarring in the Greedo-shot-first cut of Ep IV, but uses it intentionally to tell the story. There's the analog film of Dr. Parnassus's stage, then cardboard cutout trees on the far side of the looking glass, beyond which lies the impossibly sharp digital world of Dr. Parnassus's imagination. The cutout trees are there to signal a transition from a real/analog world to a fantasy/digital one. Lucas just clumsily mixes the two media in distracting ways.
Aesthetics isn't simple as some technique being appealing or unappealing. The appeal of a technique depends on context. Chiaroscuro was the bee's knees in Baroque painting but it wouldn't work in a Cubist painting. Both kinds of painting have aesthetic appeal, but techniques that work in one don't necessarily work in the other.
Part of the aesthetic context is the audience and it's familiarity with the techniques being used. When perspective drawing came in painters vied to do the most elaborate depictions of converging lines; later perspective in itself wasn't as exciting to people. Perspective itself didn't necessarily go out of style, just ostentatiously poking the audience in the eyes with it.
I recently watched the Greedo-shot-first cut of Star Wars Ep IV, complete with Lucas's new effects grafted into the old movie. I concluded hate for this version isn't just about rewriting childhood memories. The new effects, while sophisticated in execution, were clumsily fit into the overall movie. Their look didn't go with the rest of it. The original movie was 100% film; the new cut switches jarringly between hyper-HD digital shots and grainy analog film shots. Thirty years ago the technology of the digital scenes would have enchanted us, but now we're used to the technology. The constant switching back and forth between digital and analog is almost like someone had grafted new color scenes onto an old black and white movie. When you watch an old B&W movie you forget there's no color because you're drawn into the story. Adding new color scenes would repeatedly draw your attention away from the story to the specific technology used for each scene.
The problem is the new technology per se, it's the artistically clumsy way it's been bolted onto this particularly movie.
I think we're at the point where we're no longer impressed by a scene just because of the computational resources it must have taken to render, and this makes many elaborate digital effects seem cheesy. I'm not entirely sure why; it may be an uncanny valley type effect, that the digital shots are so close to perfection that their subtle difference from real shots is more noticeable. Or it may be that the purely digital process for these effects encourages artistic sloppiness in a way that the older, more labor intensive techniques don't.
Not that your concerns aren't legitimate, but they aren't congruent with what the summary claims, which is that nobody will be compelled to go looking for dirt on anyone else.
So this is similar to the "mandated reporter" laws in other situations where someone's safety (particularly minors) is at risk. For example in many states if you are a doctor or teacher and discover signs of physical abuse or neglect you are legally bound to report that information. In roughly half of US states clinical psychologists are mandated to report patients who are planning to harm others.
So assuming those mandatory reporter laws are reasonable, then whether this law is reasonable depends on the degree it responds to what legally would be considered harm to someone -- in this case the minors who are featured in the material. To the degree which it compels reporting of porn made without actual minors (e.g. with young-looking actors or through completely virtual methods), it would be unreasonable.
Well, what you do in order to feed those billions makes a difference, doesn't it? Even if you feed them wild fish, how you harvest those fish makes a difference. Unlike, say, manufacturing widgets, unregulated extraction doesn't maximize output over the long term. Fishing isn't production, it's extraction, and since it's a renewable resource you want to extract in a manner which doesn't shift the system equilibrium -- you don't want to live on your environmental capital.
I once saw a presentation by a marine ecologist who modeled the impact of marine sanctuaries, and his model showed that long term fish catches were maximized by creating large marine sanctuaries and intensively fishing around the sactuaries' perimeters. Now this is just an idea, mind you, and a compelling argument isn't the same as proof; but this is the kind of idea we need to consider. You could say, "Screw it, we've got seven billion mouths to feed," and catch as much fish as you can in the short term, but that only makes your problem worse in the long term as you extract each fishery down to the point of collapse.
I thought the sanctuary idea was interesting because it would be way simpler to enforce than giving each fishing boat a quota. All you have to do is ensure fishing boats don't go into any no-go areas. Rather than trying to divvy up a total catch fairly, you simply maximize the system output and let market forces determine who stays in business; meanwhile you maintain completely pristine and maximally productive areas, extracting only the sustainable surplus they produce rather than eating your metaphorical seed corn.
Yeah, it's a big problem, but you only make it bigger by throwing up your hands in despair.
The problem is you're expecting the Nazis to make sense and to present themselves honestly. My point is that they don't, and that they had a motive for claiming they were socialists.
You're obviously too busy being pedantic.