I actually do see a connection to unions here - if you're not genuinely willing to walk away from a bad deal, you're not actually negotiating. Businesses know this and it sometimes results in temporary outages, such as a TV channel or the Amazon dispute with publishers. In America we hardly have unions any more, and our media reports on strikes (e.g. a railroad strike in France) with derision and as a sign of a failed system. But I see it as a sign of tough negotiations between parties who both have something to lose. Ideally, each industry would have about as many unions as it has employers, and there would be more than one of each.
I actually don't like the idea of being a faceless member of a collective, or causing a great divide between management and workers. But right now we have a situation where one side is organized and using its leverage to drive a tough bargain (with companies growing ever-larger, and more profitable), and the other is just lying down.
The whole question of "which direction is the causality" is misleading in the first place; pure, uni-directional causality in situations of interest to people is almost non-existent. What we should usually look for is stable configurations ("stable" not implying "good," as in poverty), and self-reinforcing cycles (whether virtuous or vicious). Even if manipulating A causes B to change, it may also be that manipulating B would cause A to change.
It does bother me that the biggest money on the 'web is being made by middlemen - google, helping you find content, but they don't produce any; facebook, helping you talk to your friends. It is like banking - necessary, but annoying that the bankers always wind up richer than the buyers and sellers they are "helping."
That's a cool format comparison, but what's wrong with the Lena image as a point of comparison either? It looks SO much better in the new format! The most annoying thing about jpg is the bias towards blocking - drawing everything as rectangles when there aren't enough bits to say otherwise. The new format loses detail - how could you not? - but doesn't have random hues and sharp right angles strewn about.
I wonder how this would translate to a video codec, because people might not care about jpg file sizes, but television signals suffer noticeably from insufficient bandwidth all the time. (Granted, switching away from h264 now would be like switching over to the metric system).
SomethingAwful still seems to be doing well with its pay model.
Fair enough, though I am not familiar with it. Let's include craigslist and wikipedia as examples of awesome signal-to-noise ratio that is possible when full monetization through advertising is foregone, for whatever unusual reason that is specific to each.
I would say, don't hate the player, hate the game. I think the ad-driven web is thoroughly corrupted, right down to clickbait headlines, and steal-and-reprint news aggregators (ahem).
But at this point there is no market for paid content on the web, or anywhere else (note the crash-and-burn of investigative journalism as a result) - nobody even remembers or can imagine what a spam-free web would look like. (Including you adblock users, since there is nothing to consume but ad-sponsored content). So it's hard to blame any single advertiser or website for playing along.
Doesn't matter? tell that to all the millions of websites that get a 25% cut in advertising revenue because those with bot nets need to get their cut.
You assume this is to divert ad revenues to phony sites? The article disputes that:
"We found a lot of bots suddenly inflating the audience of websites we recognize that are clearly not being run by international organized crime," said Michael Tiffany, the CEO and co-founder of White Ops.
Unfortunately, the article didn't get around to explaining why spammers would inflate ad impressions on legitimate sites. Are we so sure these legitimate sites aren't clients of marketing agencies that are paid to increase the clicks, never mind how they do it?
I don't think it's just the licensing. I am using mplayer -dumpstream dvb://xx and the.ts files it generates don't seem compatible with most players except mplayer itself, and don't seem to work on XBMC. What would be a better option for grabbing DVB from the command-line? One requirement is for the player to be able to start replay and skip around inside the file while before it is done recording.
I have a pi and found the XBMC UI to be awfully sluggish on it. The bigger problem is it can't play the mpeg-ts dumps of broadcast TV I make from mplayer, although there must be some way to make TV broadcasts playable?
The pi is also too slow to be a thin client for X if you use a WiFi usb dongle, or if you tunnel over ssh. But if you use the ethernet, open the X server on the pi to un-encrypted remote connections (DISPLAY=pi:0 firefox on the client), it is passable for web use, other than flash and videos. I use it to look at howto's in my garage.
But the ad-driven Internet has effectively relegated personal documents to business records. When google is already reading and adding commercials to every email, it's much harder to argue these are intended to be private, person-to-person communications. Google's multi-billion dollar business actually is snooping, and its users consent to that.
We would need to see comparisons against paper and wood. You can make a paper airplane for 2 cents or a balsawood plane with a rubber-band propeller for $2 at the dime store, as far as structural materials goes, they are proven.
The ability of governments to act as gatekeeper that controls and taxes voluntary commerce between willing parties is ending. Deal with it.
That is what we used to call libertarian cyber-utopianism. The basic assumption there is that technology empowers individuals (and private collectives, in the capitalist version) but not the public collective. (The "utopian" part of the assumption is that this would be good.)
Why do you think that? It seems to me that, just as much as technology empowers individuals to operate as unlicensed taxis, it empowers collectives (insurance companies and governments) to identify them (e.g. license plate recognition and cellphone tracking).
We are 20 years into the Internet age and I don't see a big net shift in individual empowerment. If anything, Big Data empowers Big Business and Big Government.
The summary fails to mention the 5 year warranty, which is obviously quite fantastic. It was only a few years ago many hard drive manufacturers were cutting back from 3 years to 1. A quick survey of amazon indicates many HDDs are currently offering a 2 year warranty. I'd be peeved if a drive died at 2 1/2 years. 5 1/2, not so much.
Pfft, the sexual revolution might be THE most familiar topic of the entire 20th century, so it's a perfect example of simple extrapolation.
If we're really supposed to want to read thing we can't relate to, don't look to sci-fi, because people (including authors) aren't actually capable of not being themselves. Look to the past, plenty of obscure foreign stuff from centuries past. Go read a few thousand pages of pages of Islamic philosophy from the 5th century. You'll be bored silly. But then, that's what's wrong with this premise in the first place. The idea that people like to dwell on ideas they don't sympathize with is simply incorrect. What people really want from sci-fi (and everything) is to be told that their values and vision of human nature and the future are correct. The most popular way is through dystopian future, which is a form of "I told you so!"
It's not hard to understand why companies might be slow to hire ex-cons in a market with a long-term labor surplus. What is harder is fixing the problems created by such policies - you release somebody from prison into society. You deny them voting rights, and employment, and even welfare and food stamps. They literally have no way to get food. And then sit back and wait for the self-fulfilling prophecy of recidivism. You could hardly design a system more likely to fail if you tried.
You assume he chose some country and reached out to them? Most likely the FBI that invented the (phony) plot. They probe people, and particularly people with names like Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, for a willingness to compromise their loyalty to the US.
In the past, the "terrorists" behind some of these plots turned out to be almost pitiable, evidently just simple-minded muslims that probably never would have taken any initiative had they not been recruited by the FBI:
Following a series of similar widely ridiculed so-called "sting" operations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last week that it had foiled yet another "terror plot" that, like virtually every supposed "terrorist" case in recent years, was created and managed from start to finish by the FBI itself. This time, the dupe was a 28-year-old California man, Matthew Aaron Llaneza, with a documented history of mental illness, who apparently believed his government handlers were helping him wage "jihad." Critics, however, say the whole scheme smacks of entrapment and a waste of taxpayer money.
Guess it depends which you think is the bigger threat to Intel - technological inferiority to a peer competitor (first priority: protect IP), or technically inferior but "good enough" low-cost competition (first priority: ramp up low-cost production).
Both seem like serious threats. If you lose on volume long enough, you then also lose your technical edge. Just like Intel did to DEC, Sun, etc.
They're not building coal (power) plants any more in the U.S.
Even if true, that's just my point... take a coal plant built 10 years ago. That's a long time ago, right? There was no Tesla. Solar was practically still a unicorn. But that "old" coal plant sitting there still has about 3/4 of a billion dollars tied up in it, and the only way to get it out is to keep shoveling in the coal for 30 more years. Either that, or there's going to be a lot of jockeying around on who eats it.
alternative power producers (who want to be paid per kWh when it's convenient for them to generate, but expect someone else to fund the 'smart grid' or demand shifting necessary to make their product viable).
Keep in mind the benefits of one household using solar are shared equally by everybody - cleaner air, reduced global warming, and reduced depletion of fossil fuel reserves. That is the rationale for placing the additional cost of renewables and variable supply on power consumers in general.
And it is not at all clear that local storage is the most efficient way to do it.
Jobs are fairly fluid as you say, but infrastructure less so. It costs about a billion dollars to build a coal plant, on the anticipation it will operate for 40 years. I would imagine the financing and legal arrangements (such as price guarantees) that entice people to make such investments could easily leave not only investors but taxpayers in the lurch.
The idea of encryption as a silver bullet is a myth. PGP accomplishes nothing on a compromised host (at either end), which is what this bill is about. (This on top of the fact that PGP accomplishes nothing on hosts on which it is not installed, which is to say, effectively all of them).
Slashdot Mirror
I actually don't like the idea of being a faceless member of a collective, or causing a great divide between management and workers. But right now we have a situation where one side is organized and using its leverage to drive a tough bargain (with companies growing ever-larger, and more profitable), and the other is just lying down.
The whole question of "which direction is the causality" is misleading in the first place; pure, uni-directional causality in situations of interest to people is almost non-existent. What we should usually look for is stable configurations ("stable" not implying "good," as in poverty), and self-reinforcing cycles (whether virtuous or vicious). Even if manipulating A causes B to change, it may also be that manipulating B would cause A to change.
It does bother me that the biggest money on the 'web is being made by middlemen - google, helping you find content, but they don't produce any; facebook, helping you talk to your friends. It is like banking - necessary, but annoying that the bankers always wind up richer than the buyers and sellers they are "helping."
What are your feelings on birth control? Similar?
I suppose the point is to deter other would-be harassers by sending a message that MIT will not associate with them.
I wonder how this would translate to a video codec, because people might not care about jpg file sizes, but television signals suffer noticeably from insufficient bandwidth all the time. (Granted, switching away from h264 now would be like switching over to the metric system).
Fair enough, though I am not familiar with it. Let's include craigslist and wikipedia as examples of awesome signal-to-noise ratio that is possible when full monetization through advertising is foregone, for whatever unusual reason that is specific to each.
But at this point there is no market for paid content on the web, or anywhere else (note the crash-and-burn of investigative journalism as a result) - nobody even remembers or can imagine what a spam-free web would look like. (Including you adblock users, since there is nothing to consume but ad-sponsored content). So it's hard to blame any single advertiser or website for playing along.
You assume this is to divert ad revenues to phony sites? The article disputes that:
Unfortunately, the article didn't get around to explaining why spammers would inflate ad impressions on legitimate sites. Are we so sure these legitimate sites aren't clients of marketing agencies that are paid to increase the clicks, never mind how they do it?
I don't think it's just the licensing. I am using mplayer -dumpstream dvb://xx and the .ts files it generates don't seem compatible with most players except mplayer itself, and don't seem to work on XBMC. What would be a better option for grabbing DVB from the command-line? One requirement is for the player to be able to start replay and skip around inside the file while before it is done recording.
You could get one of those $8 USB sound cards for it, although $8 is kind of a big upgrade for a $35 computer.
The pi is also too slow to be a thin client for X if you use a WiFi usb dongle, or if you tunnel over ssh. But if you use the ethernet, open the X server on the pi to un-encrypted remote connections (DISPLAY=pi:0 firefox on the client), it is passable for web use, other than flash and videos. I use it to look at howto's in my garage.
But the ad-driven Internet has effectively relegated personal documents to business records. When google is already reading and adding commercials to every email, it's much harder to argue these are intended to be private, person-to-person communications. Google's multi-billion dollar business actually is snooping, and its users consent to that.
We would need to see comparisons against paper and wood. You can make a paper airplane for 2 cents or a balsawood plane with a rubber-band propeller for $2 at the dime store, as far as structural materials goes, they are proven.
That is what we used to call libertarian cyber-utopianism. The basic assumption there is that technology empowers individuals (and private collectives, in the capitalist version) but not the public collective. (The "utopian" part of the assumption is that this would be good.)
Why do you think that? It seems to me that, just as much as technology empowers individuals to operate as unlicensed taxis, it empowers collectives (insurance companies and governments) to identify them (e.g. license plate recognition and cellphone tracking).
We are 20 years into the Internet age and I don't see a big net shift in individual empowerment. If anything, Big Data empowers Big Business and Big Government.
The summary fails to mention the 5 year warranty, which is obviously quite fantastic. It was only a few years ago many hard drive manufacturers were cutting back from 3 years to 1. A quick survey of amazon indicates many HDDs are currently offering a 2 year warranty. I'd be peeved if a drive died at 2 1/2 years. 5 1/2, not so much.
If we're really supposed to want to read thing we can't relate to, don't look to sci-fi, because people (including authors) aren't actually capable of not being themselves. Look to the past, plenty of obscure foreign stuff from centuries past. Go read a few thousand pages of pages of Islamic philosophy from the 5th century. You'll be bored silly. But then, that's what's wrong with this premise in the first place. The idea that people like to dwell on ideas they don't sympathize with is simply incorrect. What people really want from sci-fi (and everything) is to be told that their values and vision of human nature and the future are correct. The most popular way is through dystopian future, which is a form of "I told you so!"
It's not hard to understand why companies might be slow to hire ex-cons in a market with a long-term labor surplus. What is harder is fixing the problems created by such policies - you release somebody from prison into society. You deny them voting rights, and employment, and even welfare and food stamps. They literally have no way to get food. And then sit back and wait for the self-fulfilling prophecy of recidivism. You could hardly design a system more likely to fail if you tried.
In the past, the "terrorists" behind some of these plots turned out to be almost pitiable, evidently just simple-minded muslims that probably never would have taken any initiative had they not been recruited by the FBI:
Both seem like serious threats. If you lose on volume long enough, you then also lose your technical edge. Just like Intel did to DEC, Sun, etc.
Hard to say what X is, but 0 is not a reasonable guess.
Even if true, that's just my point... take a coal plant built 10 years ago. That's a long time ago, right? There was no Tesla. Solar was practically still a unicorn. But that "old" coal plant sitting there still has about 3/4 of a billion dollars tied up in it, and the only way to get it out is to keep shoveling in the coal for 30 more years. Either that, or there's going to be a lot of jockeying around on who eats it.
Keep in mind the benefits of one household using solar are shared equally by everybody - cleaner air, reduced global warming, and reduced depletion of fossil fuel reserves. That is the rationale for placing the additional cost of renewables and variable supply on power consumers in general.
And it is not at all clear that local storage is the most efficient way to do it.
Jobs are fairly fluid as you say, but infrastructure less so. It costs about a billion dollars to build a coal plant, on the anticipation it will operate for 40 years. I would imagine the financing and legal arrangements (such as price guarantees) that entice people to make such investments could easily leave not only investors but taxpayers in the lurch.
The idea of encryption as a silver bullet is a myth. PGP accomplishes nothing on a compromised host (at either end), which is what this bill is about. (This on top of the fact that PGP accomplishes nothing on hosts on which it is not installed, which is to say, effectively all of them).