That particular claim depends on how Google-service users are distributed. It's true that any one service shutdown affects a minority of overall Google users, since they tend to shut down the less popular ones. But what proportion of Google users do 20 service shutdowns affect? It depends on the distribution of users. It could be a small minority, basically the same early adopters who keep signing up for every doomed service. But it could affect a considerably larger number of users in aggregate, if the correlation between the users of those 20 services isn't high.
In this case because they don't have much choice: the entire point of PayPal when it comes to credit-card payments is as an intermediary that companies who aren't directly registered with a CC merchant account can use to receive CC payments.
They don't have to. People are just pointing out that Google has a pattern of introducing services as trial balloons, and then discontinuing them a few years later if it doesn't fit into their overalls strategy. If you understand that and are okay with it, no problem. If you'd rather not have to scramble to find a replacement in a few years in the (not that unlikely) circumstance where the service is shut down, however, you might want to look elsewhere.
In particular, nobody claims that lossy codecs use a perfectly accurate model of human hearing; they don't need to. The goal is to have a psychoacoustic model that captures enough of the general mechanics of hearing, to enable a bunch of constants to be tuned empirically. If the model doesn't come anywhere near to capturing anything important, that would be a problem, because you'd never be able to tune the constants. But once it captures the general outlines, much of the real work on lossy encoders over the past 10-15 years is on tuning a billion constants with listening tests. The goal is empirical transparency (people cannot distinguish the compressed version), not a scientifically valid model of human hearing. Pointing out that there are all sorts of slightly wrong things about the internal model isn't really important if you can't show that they produce audible differences in the end result.
Anyway, the target here probably isn't bitcoins, it's probably the other alternative currency mentioned in the article: corporations with virtual currency. Amazon coins. There's obviously someone to regulate there.
I agree bitcoins aren't the real target. In addition to the corporation-tied virtual currencies you mention, online game currencies are of interest to law enforcement recently because they've been used to launder money. It's quite straightforward: you buy a bunch of virtual gold with USD, then you transfer it through the game world in a way that is invisible unless you're looking at server logs, and someone else ends up with this pile of virtual gold. That someone else sells it and gets USD. The net effect is that USD has moved from one person to another, who is possibly in another part of the world, without either: 1) moving it through the regular, traceable banking system; or 2) physically having to carry around suitcases of cash. Instead the money moved via, say, Blizzard's servers. What the government wants is for Blizzard to do some tracing and reporting of these movements once they reach a certain size.
If that were illegal, most street photography would be illegal! In the U.S. at least, publicity rights are fairly limited. Someone needs your permission to put your face into a TV ad for a product, but they don't need your permission to take a street photo and put it up on Flickr or Twitter.
Wait, I post random shit about people on twitter all the time. I thought that's what twitter was for. Is there now some code of conduct on twitter? Is there going to be one on Slashdot, too?
I wouldn't blame her specifically for the reaction. Anyone can tweet things, but here someone actually took actions based on random tweets (someone was fired because a third party they had never met posted some tweets). I would blame those people at least as much. And then the people who fired her for similar reasons. There are a bunch of parties in this case firing people for pretty stupid reasons, and it's not the people Tweeting who are responsible for it.
Why not blame the people actually doing the firing? Some random person posting on twitter does not have the authority to fire anybody. The people who make the decisions (in both companies, in this case) should take responsibility for their actions.
The bureaucracy didn't come up with this idea of their own accord, unless by "the bureaucracy" you mean the U.S. Congress rather than NASA. The chairman of the Congressional committee that oversees NASA's funding explicitly and very specifically demanded that they take down this archive. And they gave in, and did so.
If they could get what they wanted from documents that have been publicly available for decades, they wouldn't have a spy trying to carry it back into their country, either. The archive has been online for a long time, and China hardly needs to spend spies into the U.S. to copy it. They probably already made a local archive, anyway. All taking it down does is harm researchers.
I don't see how taking down an archive of publicly available documents, many of which have been publicly available for decades, is reasonably related to someone stealing documents that aren't publicly available.
The (Party-State) thing is pretty common for both parties, especially when talking about someone less known. If I were writing about Dick Cheney or Barack Obama or something, I wouldn't put it there, but if we're talking about regular Congresscritters, it seems like useful information to know their party affiliation and where they come from.
If you're seeing a pattern, perhaps rather than a conspiracy, it's simply that one party is attacking science more than the other one is, at least lately?
I'm guessing the authors signed some kind of publication contract that authorized WHSmith to make and distribute ebook versions in the first place. Does adding DRM to the ebooks comply with the terms of the contract? Without seeing the contract they signed, I have no real way of knowing what they gave WHSmith permission to do.
It might even get you more contracts at the same place, despite their intent to replace you. There are pretty good odds that at some point in the future, the person you trained is going to run into some problem where they'd love to get your input on it. Unless the system is quite simple and exceptionally well documented, that's almost inevitable. So there's a good chance the company will want to pay you a nice consulting rate for some hours in the future, regardless of what they think their plan is. And if the person you train was happy with your mentorship, they'll be a good internal advocate for steering those contracts your way.
I guess it depends on what you value. If you value eating out a lot, then sure, I can believe you can live better in Malaysia than the U.S. on the same amount of money. But overall I think, for most Americans, a cheap American city will have an overall higher quality of life for the same amount of money, in part because, well, you don't have to live in Malaysia.
Car insurance: I've never paid $2400/yr for car insurance! Even when I was early-20s and had higher rates, I paid more like $1000/yr. Now I pay less.
Taxes: I don't see how you could possibly pay an effective 25% if you make $16k/yr. Something closer to 5-10% is a lot more likely. The biggest is payroll taxes of 7.6% off the top. But then after that, you take a standard deduction ($6100 for single) and the personal exemption ($3900), so your first $10,000 of income is tax free. The remaining $6000 is taxed at the lowest federal rate, 10%. So that's another $600. Overall you pay 7.6% x $16,000 + $600 = $1800, i.e. an effective 11.25%. Maybe add something for state, depending on your state (I lived in Texas, so add $0).
Food: Dear god, $350/month? What are you buying? I spend about $200-$250/month now, and I have a middle-class salary, making no effort to be frugal. I spent more like $100/mo when I was a grad student. Are you eating steak daily or something?
Rent: Really depends on where you live. In Texas there is no need to pay $700 rents. Nor in Pittsburgh.
If your goal is just to live cheaply, and you don't have kids, there are plenty of places in the U.S. where you can live ok on $16k/yr. I did it as a grad student. Not in the SF Bay Area, though.
I think the intent was to not take a job, i.e. the suggestion is that if you're a freelancer making low-but-nonzero money, you can just move somewhere with a low cost of living. Of course, you could also move there and get $100k+ job, but that would defeat the goal of not having a boss.
Yeah, if they could cross-reference the GPS-reported location with a rough bounding box from the ISP, that could greatly restrict the data spoofing. But I'm not sure how easy that is to do. Do ISPs even have a mechanism where they could report approximate locations of phones in real-time? Is it legal to do so? I know they can go through logs in response to law-enforcement requests, but not sure how real-time that ability is, or whether telecom laws restrict their ability to share the data.
Slashdot Mirror
That particular claim depends on how Google-service users are distributed. It's true that any one service shutdown affects a minority of overall Google users, since they tend to shut down the less popular ones. But what proportion of Google users do 20 service shutdowns affect? It depends on the distribution of users. It could be a small minority, basically the same early adopters who keep signing up for every doomed service. But it could affect a considerably larger number of users in aggregate, if the correlation between the users of those 20 services isn't high.
In this case because they don't have much choice: the entire point of PayPal when it comes to credit-card payments is as an intermediary that companies who aren't directly registered with a CC merchant account can use to receive CC payments.
They don't have to. People are just pointing out that Google has a pattern of introducing services as trial balloons, and then discontinuing them a few years later if it doesn't fit into their overalls strategy. If you understand that and are okay with it, no problem. If you'd rather not have to scramble to find a replacement in a few years in the (not that unlikely) circumstance where the service is shut down, however, you might want to look elsewhere.
In particular, nobody claims that lossy codecs use a perfectly accurate model of human hearing; they don't need to. The goal is to have a psychoacoustic model that captures enough of the general mechanics of hearing, to enable a bunch of constants to be tuned empirically. If the model doesn't come anywhere near to capturing anything important, that would be a problem, because you'd never be able to tune the constants. But once it captures the general outlines, much of the real work on lossy encoders over the past 10-15 years is on tuning a billion constants with listening tests. The goal is empirical transparency (people cannot distinguish the compressed version), not a scientifically valid model of human hearing. Pointing out that there are all sorts of slightly wrong things about the internal model isn't really important if you can't show that they produce audible differences in the end result.
Anyway, the target here probably isn't bitcoins, it's probably the other alternative currency mentioned in the article: corporations with virtual currency. Amazon coins. There's obviously someone to regulate there.
I agree bitcoins aren't the real target. In addition to the corporation-tied virtual currencies you mention, online game currencies are of interest to law enforcement recently because they've been used to launder money. It's quite straightforward: you buy a bunch of virtual gold with USD, then you transfer it through the game world in a way that is invisible unless you're looking at server logs, and someone else ends up with this pile of virtual gold. That someone else sells it and gets USD. The net effect is that USD has moved from one person to another, who is possibly in another part of the world, without either: 1) moving it through the regular, traceable banking system; or 2) physically having to carry around suitcases of cash. Instead the money moved via, say, Blizzard's servers. What the government wants is for Blizzard to do some tracing and reporting of these movements once they reach a certain size.
If I had to label The New York Times, I'd say it's a newspaper for whatever type of people it is who like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman.
If that were illegal, most street photography would be illegal! In the U.S. at least, publicity rights are fairly limited. Someone needs your permission to put your face into a TV ad for a product, but they don't need your permission to take a street photo and put it up on Flickr or Twitter.
Waiting for some bright minds in Congress to start holding hearings into whether Communist OSs like Linux are responsible for cyberterrorism.
Wait, I post random shit about people on twitter all the time. I thought that's what twitter was for. Is there now some code of conduct on twitter? Is there going to be one on Slashdot, too?
I wouldn't blame her specifically for the reaction. Anyone can tweet things, but here someone actually took actions based on random tweets (someone was fired because a third party they had never met posted some tweets). I would blame those people at least as much. And then the people who fired her for similar reasons. There are a bunch of parties in this case firing people for pretty stupid reasons, and it's not the people Tweeting who are responsible for it.
America has very few free-speech protections for employees, unfortunately.
Why not blame the people actually doing the firing? Some random person posting on twitter does not have the authority to fire anybody. The people who make the decisions (in both companies, in this case) should take responsibility for their actions.
The bureaucracy didn't come up with this idea of their own accord, unless by "the bureaucracy" you mean the U.S. Congress rather than NASA. The chairman of the Congressional committee that oversees NASA's funding explicitly and very specifically demanded that they take down this archive. And they gave in, and did so.
If they could get what they wanted from documents that have been publicly available for decades, they wouldn't have a spy trying to carry it back into their country, either. The archive has been online for a long time, and China hardly needs to spend spies into the U.S. to copy it. They probably already made a local archive, anyway. All taking it down does is harm researchers.
I don't see how taking down an archive of publicly available documents, many of which have been publicly available for decades, is reasonably related to someone stealing documents that aren't publicly available.
The (Party-State) thing is pretty common for both parties, especially when talking about someone less known. If I were writing about Dick Cheney or Barack Obama or something, I wouldn't put it there, but if we're talking about regular Congresscritters, it seems like useful information to know their party affiliation and where they come from.
If you're seeing a pattern, perhaps rather than a conspiracy, it's simply that one party is attacking science more than the other one is, at least lately?
I'm guessing the authors signed some kind of publication contract that authorized WHSmith to make and distribute ebook versions in the first place. Does adding DRM to the ebooks comply with the terms of the contract? Without seeing the contract they signed, I have no real way of knowing what they gave WHSmith permission to do.
It might even get you more contracts at the same place, despite their intent to replace you. There are pretty good odds that at some point in the future, the person you trained is going to run into some problem where they'd love to get your input on it. Unless the system is quite simple and exceptionally well documented, that's almost inevitable. So there's a good chance the company will want to pay you a nice consulting rate for some hours in the future, regardless of what they think their plan is. And if the person you train was happy with your mentorship, they'll be a good internal advocate for steering those contracts your way.
That's almost as big as West Virginia!
This is clearly heresy. As is recorded in the bible quite clearly, overpasses do not exist, and have never existed.
I guess it depends on what you value. If you value eating out a lot, then sure, I can believe you can live better in Malaysia than the U.S. on the same amount of money. But overall I think, for most Americans, a cheap American city will have an overall higher quality of life for the same amount of money, in part because, well, you don't have to live in Malaysia.
Some of those definitely seem high to me.
Car insurance: I've never paid $2400/yr for car insurance! Even when I was early-20s and had higher rates, I paid more like $1000/yr. Now I pay less.
Taxes: I don't see how you could possibly pay an effective 25% if you make $16k/yr. Something closer to 5-10% is a lot more likely. The biggest is payroll taxes of 7.6% off the top. But then after that, you take a standard deduction ($6100 for single) and the personal exemption ($3900), so your first $10,000 of income is tax free. The remaining $6000 is taxed at the lowest federal rate, 10%. So that's another $600. Overall you pay 7.6% x $16,000 + $600 = $1800, i.e. an effective 11.25%. Maybe add something for state, depending on your state (I lived in Texas, so add $0).
Food: Dear god, $350/month? What are you buying? I spend about $200-$250/month now, and I have a middle-class salary, making no effort to be frugal. I spent more like $100/mo when I was a grad student. Are you eating steak daily or something?
Rent: Really depends on where you live. In Texas there is no need to pay $700 rents. Nor in Pittsburgh.
If your goal is just to live cheaply, and you don't have kids, there are plenty of places in the U.S. where you can live ok on $16k/yr. I did it as a grad student. Not in the SF Bay Area, though.
I think the intent was to not take a job, i.e. the suggestion is that if you're a freelancer making low-but-nonzero money, you can just move somewhere with a low cost of living. Of course, you could also move there and get $100k+ job, but that would defeat the goal of not having a boss.
Yeah, if they could cross-reference the GPS-reported location with a rough bounding box from the ISP, that could greatly restrict the data spoofing. But I'm not sure how easy that is to do. Do ISPs even have a mechanism where they could report approximate locations of phones in real-time? Is it legal to do so? I know they can go through logs in response to law-enforcement requests, but not sure how real-time that ability is, or whether telecom laws restrict their ability to share the data.