Unfortunately, this is what passes for a political discussion these days. Demonize your opponent is all they know. You can't talk about anything substantive because you are just constantly fighting off accusations.
He calls himself a Libertarian in the paper. He also has a pretty chart showing biases of Liberals and Conservatives and says it's important to have ideological diversity in a company to play on the strengths of both. He takes pains to point out that the vast majority of people have overlapping traits and thus applying stereotypes to individuals is useless. The main thrust of the paper regards the "echo chamber" at Google. I think his firing actually helps support his position, to be honest. I don't really agree with all of his conclusions, but I didn't see any grossly stupid things in there. He seems like a thoughtful person, but maybe he's a PITA and so they fired him.
Wow, thanks for this. The guy makes a reasoned, careful argument. He's very adamant that he does not endorse applying stereotypes to individuals, and he accepts that we all have biases.
I don't agree with all of his conclusions, but it seems to me there is a culture problem at Google if he was really fired for authoring such a mild document. I have to assume that this document didn't come out of a vacuum and that there is more to this story.
Competition and open and free markets are a way to cooperate. The most efficient way, in fact.
Where I depart from many libertarians is that efficiency is not the only criteria. Take food, for instance. Efficiency is very important - too little and a good chunk of the population starves. But typical free market swings and instability are not really something that is desired in your food supply - I really don't mind some government tinkering to moderate the market, even if food costs somewhat more as a result. Other examples include anything that doesn't abide by notions of private property - photons will happily traverse your property whether you like it or not. We live on a sphere - your real estate cannot include infinitely down or up. Vaccines (and epidemiology in general) only work when almost everyone cooperates. These are not great candidates for a totally open and free market - but you still want to use as many free market principles as possible to maximize efficiency. I start to find myself agreeing with Tea Partiers and other right wing nuts when they get into an argument with a left wing nut because people on the extreme left seem to forget about competition and free markets and how they trounce central planning every single time. They'll even push a market driven approach like carbon credits without a hint of irony (and conservatives will sneer at carbon credits despite inventing pollution credits). Weird world, weird times.
That's great, and you can work on that if you like. It doesn't diminish the value in having something that can perform the work of a human, but can be scaled up and down without traumatizing a workforce. Something that can run 24/7. Something that can be tinkered with internally without a visit from the police.
Sure, there are niche uses for compasses... The find Mecca app probably uses the compass in your phone. I bet the starfinder apps use it to get a rough position. Same with the planefinder apps. Hell, I used to have fun testing my dead reckoning skills on a paper chart vs the GPS (and before that LORAN) on the sailboat. But the primary purpose of a compass is as an aid to navigation - and in that role it has been completely replaced. If you are a sea captain, hiker, survivalist, or something you still need to learn how to navigate with it for backup purposes - but the rest of us can safely ignore it.
For SpaceX it's even more disingenuous - they counted governmental launch contracts as "subsidies".
Agreed. Author is doing the typical semantics game where they attempt to redefine common vocabulary to make you see just how bad it all is because they aren't contracts for goods and services, but really just SUBSIDIES - big ugly SUBSIDIES. Both left and right play this ridiculous game because they get no traction when they use regular language to describe things that people are pretty OK with. They want to stoke outrage.
Anyway, these launch "subsidies" are saving the government quite a bit of money over the old ways, so I'm okay with these "subsidies".
What purpose does a compass serve? Just to know what direction you are facing? No, that would be pretty useless. It's for navigation. And GPS definitely replaces it completely for navigation. Sure, it can't give you an instantaneous direction, but take a few steps and it tells you gives you a more accurate heading than a compass.
Also, you seem to think middle-aged people are millennials.
Yeah most people will die for other reasons (like not having food) and maps are sort of low on the priority list - especially since you'd likely be on foot and not get very far. In any event, it's not like they are hard to learn. You can even teach someone nautical navigation in a few weeks and have them be pretty proficient.
Meh, "North" is only important if you are using the technology that the GPS displaced - the compass. I'm not too worried about people losing their ability to read maps, because any permanent loss of GPS is likely to be accompanied by massive societal upheaval and starvation. Reading road-maps will be the least of our problems.
Sometimes Amazon deliberately hides results. Not sure why - but you can often find things on Amazon with a Google search that are impossible to find through the on site search, even if you type words directly from the title or description. I assume these are products that they don't really want to sell, but they carry them so that Amazon comes up in any internet search for that item.
We bought so much Dr. Thunder when we were building our race car that we approached Wal-Mart to see if they wanted to throw us some sponsorship money. They didn't, but we put the sticker on anyway for our own amusement.
I was at the mall and there was this store called GAP. Inside was nothing but "GAP" branded merchandise. Later I found out that this same company also sells "Old Navy" and "Banana Republic" branded stuff. None of those stores reveal their affiliation with one another. EVIL! How are third-party re-sellers supposed to survive at GAP?
In fact, most of the 3rd party sellers on Amazon do exactly this, and I am never sorry to see them go. 9 times out of 10 you can take the 3rd party item on Amazon, do an image search and find the exact item on Alibaba or similar. All they do is import it and sell it on Amazon. Some are even more brazen and simply go to Harbor Freight, buy some crappy "Chicago" tools and resell them without revealing the source.
If you are a lawyer, you are pretty terrible. Of course the type matters.
conflating typefaces with the pirated computer code which was used to create them in this case,
I'm not "conflating" anything. In the US, fonts are not subject to copyright. Only the fact that they are computer fonts with some aspects of computer code lets them have any protection at all. It is completely legal to make a clone of any font you want. This is nothing like a DVD movie, and so that comment deserves ridicule.
If I was Universal and I was feeling vindictive, I'd pay someone to clone every single one of the fonts on that site and then release them Creative Commons.
but I expect that the license options are similar.
Fonts are not, in of themselves, copyrightable. Only computer fonts can by protected with copyright, and that's only because technically they sort-of behave like code.
So it's not really like images, but computer code. While it is very common for computer code to have separate commercial and private licenses, I would think that this would not be common for fonts. Fonts can be freely cloned, so you would expect the market to toss out the nasty licenses. I mean, if I want a completely free license to a font I can't imagine it would cost more than a few hundred dollars on a freelance site to get a decent clone. That's why I was surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this is what passes for a political discussion these days. Demonize your opponent is all they know. You can't talk about anything substantive because you are just constantly fighting off accusations.
He calls himself a Libertarian in the paper. He also has a pretty chart showing biases of Liberals and Conservatives and says it's important to have ideological diversity in a company to play on the strengths of both. He takes pains to point out that the vast majority of people have overlapping traits and thus applying stereotypes to individuals is useless. The main thrust of the paper regards the "echo chamber" at Google. I think his firing actually helps support his position, to be honest. I don't really agree with all of his conclusions, but I didn't see any grossly stupid things in there. He seems like a thoughtful person, but maybe he's a PITA and so they fired him.
Wow, thanks for this. The guy makes a reasoned, careful argument. He's very adamant that he does not endorse applying stereotypes to individuals, and he accepts that we all have biases.
I don't agree with all of his conclusions, but it seems to me there is a culture problem at Google if he was really fired for authoring such a mild document. I have to assume that this document didn't come out of a vacuum and that there is more to this story.
Competition and open and free markets are a way to cooperate. The most efficient way, in fact.
Where I depart from many libertarians is that efficiency is not the only criteria. Take food, for instance. Efficiency is very important - too little and a good chunk of the population starves. But typical free market swings and instability are not really something that is desired in your food supply - I really don't mind some government tinkering to moderate the market, even if food costs somewhat more as a result. Other examples include anything that doesn't abide by notions of private property - photons will happily traverse your property whether you like it or not. We live on a sphere - your real estate cannot include infinitely down or up. Vaccines (and epidemiology in general) only work when almost everyone cooperates. These are not great candidates for a totally open and free market - but you still want to use as many free market principles as possible to maximize efficiency. I start to find myself agreeing with Tea Partiers and other right wing nuts when they get into an argument with a left wing nut because people on the extreme left seem to forget about competition and free markets and how they trounce central planning every single time. They'll even push a market driven approach like carbon credits without a hint of irony (and conservatives will sneer at carbon credits despite inventing pollution credits). Weird world, weird times.
How about doing things humans cannot do?
That's great, and you can work on that if you like. It doesn't diminish the value in having something that can perform the work of a human, but can be scaled up and down without traumatizing a workforce. Something that can run 24/7. Something that can be tinkered with internally without a visit from the police.
That's more of the Libertarian position. Tea Party still loves to use government to push their agenda.
Sure, there are niche uses for compasses... The find Mecca app probably uses the compass in your phone. I bet the starfinder apps use it to get a rough position. Same with the planefinder apps. Hell, I used to have fun testing my dead reckoning skills on a paper chart vs the GPS (and before that LORAN) on the sailboat. But the primary purpose of a compass is as an aid to navigation - and in that role it has been completely replaced. If you are a sea captain, hiker, survivalist, or something you still need to learn how to navigate with it for backup purposes - but the rest of us can safely ignore it.
Life ain't a zombie movie - most of us would be the dead people in the cars, not the people running from zombies.
Wow, way to miss the point. Rock on, Rockoon.
For SpaceX it's even more disingenuous - they counted governmental launch contracts as "subsidies".
Agreed. Author is doing the typical semantics game where they attempt to redefine common vocabulary to make you see just how bad it all is because they aren't contracts for goods and services, but really just SUBSIDIES - big ugly SUBSIDIES. Both left and right play this ridiculous game because they get no traction when they use regular language to describe things that people are pretty OK with. They want to stoke outrage.
Anyway, these launch "subsidies" are saving the government quite a bit of money over the old ways, so I'm okay with these "subsidies".
What purpose does a compass serve? Just to know what direction you are facing? No, that would be pretty useless. It's for navigation. And GPS definitely replaces it completely for navigation. Sure, it can't give you an instantaneous direction, but take a few steps and it tells you gives you a more accurate heading than a compass.
Also, you seem to think middle-aged people are millennials.
Yeah most people will die for other reasons (like not having food) and maps are sort of low on the priority list - especially since you'd likely be on foot and not get very far. In any event, it's not like they are hard to learn. You can even teach someone nautical navigation in a few weeks and have them be pretty proficient.
Meh, "North" is only important if you are using the technology that the GPS displaced - the compass. I'm not too worried about people losing their ability to read maps, because any permanent loss of GPS is likely to be accompanied by massive societal upheaval and starvation. Reading road-maps will be the least of our problems.
Sometimes Amazon deliberately hides results. Not sure why - but you can often find things on Amazon with a Google search that are impossible to find through the on site search, even if you type words directly from the title or description. I assume these are products that they don't really want to sell, but they carry them so that Amazon comes up in any internet search for that item.
We bought so much Dr. Thunder when we were building our race car that we approached Wal-Mart to see if they wanted to throw us some sponsorship money. They didn't, but we put the sticker on anyway for our own amusement.
I was at the mall and there was this store called GAP. Inside was nothing but "GAP" branded merchandise. Later I found out that this same company also sells "Old Navy" and "Banana Republic" branded stuff. None of those stores reveal their affiliation with one another. EVIL! How are third-party re-sellers supposed to survive at GAP?
You buy in bulk and get your name on the product.
In fact, most of the 3rd party sellers on Amazon do exactly this, and I am never sorry to see them go. 9 times out of 10 you can take the 3rd party item on Amazon, do an image search and find the exact item on Alibaba or similar. All they do is import it and sell it on Amazon. Some are even more brazen and simply go to Harbor Freight, buy some crappy "Chicago" tools and resell them without revealing the source.
Same comment, only "Shit, if I wanted Windows, I'd just go fucking buy one..."
Clearly the superior choice is the middle.
if Musk does not like it, he can just close his company
What a coincidence, that's exactly what happened to this factory under GM/Toyota ownership.
and what specific kind it was doesn't matter.
If you are a lawyer, you are pretty terrible. Of course the type matters.
conflating typefaces with the pirated computer code which was used to create them in this case,
I'm not "conflating" anything. In the US, fonts are not subject to copyright. Only the fact that they are computer fonts with some aspects of computer code lets them have any protection at all. It is completely legal to make a clone of any font you want. This is nothing like a DVD movie, and so that comment deserves ridicule.
My apologies. :)
Ha, yeah, I made sure I checked to see what country the case was filed in first :)
If I was Universal and I was feeling vindictive, I'd pay someone to clone every single one of the fonts on that site and then release them Creative Commons.
but I expect that the license options are similar.
Fonts are not, in of themselves, copyrightable. Only computer fonts can by protected with copyright, and that's only because technically they sort-of behave like code.
So it's not really like images, but computer code. While it is very common for computer code to have separate commercial and private licenses, I would think that this would not be common for fonts. Fonts can be freely cloned, so you would expect the market to toss out the nasty licenses. I mean, if I want a completely free license to a font I can't imagine it would cost more than a few hundred dollars on a freelance site to get a decent clone. That's why I was surprised.
I shouldn't need to tell you that we are talking about fonts and not movies.