The biggest front-end problem is that users, before they can register, must “cross a busy digital junction in which data are swapped among separate computer systems built or run by contractors.”
Why is that? It is because the government needs to determine how much of a coupon it’ll write each person to go and buy private insurance. Beyond the philosophical components of means-testing (what the philosopher Jonathan Wolff calls “shameful revelations”), the actual process requires substantial coordination between multiple government agencies with very different infrastructures.
As the GAO notes, “the data hub is to verify an applicant’s Social Security number with the Social Security Administration (SSA), and to access the data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that are needed to assess the applicant’s income, citizenship, and immigration status. The data hub is also expected to access information from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Department of Defense (DOD), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Peace Corps to enable exchanges to determine if an applicant is eligible for insurance coverage from other federal programs that would make them ineligible for income-based financial subsidies.”
Rather than just being an example of bureaucratic infighting, each of these pieces of information is necessary to determine how aggressively the government should subsidize the private insurance individuals will buy, and the entire process will stall and fall apart if one of these checks isn’t completed quickly.
This by itself might not be a problem; however, the second issue is that the means-testing is necessary to link individuals up with individual private insurers. As the Washington Post notes, the back-end problems are in part the result of the site being “designed to draw from the offerings of private insurers, each with their own computer systems, rates and offerings.”
Instead of doing it in a cheaper, more straightforward, and more humane manner, representatives insisted that private insurers stay in the mix, and they got exactly the system they wanted. They got a needlessly complicated back-end: a Katamari-like glue ball of various databases, both private and public, all hosted by different entities, and all indispensable by law. So given that the government never had a chance to design or even see significant parts of that system, is it surprising that it is overwhelmed by the initial demand? Not to me. But instead of patiently waiting a few months (which worked for every other massively online game, no matter how fubar the game or the launch was), the plutocracy supporters will now point fingers at Democrats, blaming them for correctly implementing what used to be the Republican vision of healthcare just a few years ago.
What you are saying doesn't make any sense. What skyscraper? Who is to say I cannot run a server that uses its own logic to resolve URIs starting with bestnameresolverevar:// ? Will anyone be upset I took over this particular URI scheme? Will I collide with an existing standard? Will the rest of the Internet or the Web be affected in any way? Any way besides offering resolutions for URIs that were, up until now, unresolvable?
Imagine a fractured internet, where if you want your site accessible from the world, you have to buy domain names and have your site be vetted by every country that you want your site accessible from.
OK... Uh, I can't seem to do that, may be you can help? What way of fracturing the Internet cannot be fixed by client software? I mean, besides unplugging the cables? China is spending billions of dollars and millions of full-time workers on fracturing the internet, and what do they have to show for it? People have to use https proxies to get connected, oh horror! They are suffering the global Internet which is slightly slower, and takes an extra step to set up.
What do you even mean by "fracturing"? IP? DNS? IP is already fractured: we have 2 versions working side by side. I didn't notice any difference, did you? DNS? I pray to the Internet God they split already, so that we have a bloody marketplace instead of a one-man show. The space of ASCII character sequences is big enough to accommodate any number of providers. So your client will be connecting to several different DNS servers or an entirely different kind of name resolver, depending on the URL format or content. Where's the downside?
I'd argue that the judging by the summary, TFA is a crock of shit. European countries that are themselves not US colonies own the entirety of their Internet infrastructure, a.k.a. the tubes. They can (and do) run their own DNS if they so please. US has colonized the German Internet about as much as it colonized the German forests. US plays a huge role in the development of the world-wide network, but that influence is more akin to the influence of Hollywood on film. Like you say, "colony" is not the right word. A "captive audience" is not a right word even, since the audience loves it. More like, US have captured the world's imagination.
That's the beauty of the free software: very cheaply, we now have several versions of the program, each created with a different purpose in mind, and together they cater to every possible audience.
Thanks, but I got a user-friendly fork that was created with the intention to fix what Palant has broken. It does so by not exploiting the end user. It doesn't have an "acceptable ads" option, so I don't need to uncheck anything.
No one should use AdblockPlus over Adblock Edge or TrueBlockor Adblock Lite or any other fork that removed malicious features introduced in version 2.0. If you haven't heard, Palant sold out to advertizers (the ironing is delicious), and has now "allow acceptable ads" option enabled by default, where "acceptable" likely means that Palant got paid. Since that's his game now, I would only use AdblockPlus if I wanted to be get another update with a malicious payload.
The comment about being sex-crazy applies to nearly all Christian blends. Indeed, it is impossible to base anything on a 2000-old Jewish text without taking at least some of their views on the subject. But when I was talking about the savage hypocrisy, I was very careful not to hang it on Christians in general. I am well aware that some (especially smaller, independent) churches at least try to live up to Christian and/or Paulian ideal. This is not the case, though, with any of the major movements. All of them, starting with Orthodox and Catholic, and ending with huge Pentecostal churches such as AoG, are copying and improving on the old Jewish paradigm, which boils down to crowd control via a death grip on all manifestations of the reproductive function. Opium for the masses and all that great stuff.
And if you want to showcase your church, you could at least tell us your denomination, so that we know your theological leaning, as well as give us the idea about the money trail (do all donations stay in your church, or do some go to the umbrella organization somewhere in mid-south).
At least here in USA, it's because Puritan Christians rule, and Christians tend to believe it's OK to make preaching the gospel a commercial activity, but not sex (go figure). The MO for every "respectable" movement has been the same since about 200 AD, and is the same as that of the Jewish Temple of 40 AD, you know, the one where Jesus got processed. It's almost as if the leaders of major churches actually figure things out by looking at Jesus and doing exactly the opposite: they make churches into shops, and slam the door on women who are forced into selling sex by the shitty economy. Hehe, no, that would be too ironic. I am sure, they are just re-inventing the wheel first patented by the Jewish prophets...
On the other hand, for the "it's my work, so it's my choice" crowd, the -NC option ensures that nobody can copy their work and make a profit.
It also ensures that the copyright holders can walk up to any non-trivial entity with non-zero assets (like Debian) and shake it down for cash or creative control, regardless of whether the entity is distributing anything "commercially". A fear of lawsuit will be more than enough to censor legitimate uses by entities that are not equipped for a legal battle. Every piece of non-free software is a liability both for the user and for the distributor, so Debian is wise to stay away.
No-no, running spyware just to kill time is what the computer geniuses of tomorrow are all about, or at least should be, according to Google's marketing department. God forbid they should stop playing a game for a second and write a free version of a popular non-free program.
I have no idea what you are saying, except that you seem to be resorting to name-calling and attacking my personality. Which is ironic, at best, since you are a game developer, and just as guilty of seeking to make a living by doing something no one asked you to do. And while my point is, I buckle down, work my ass off teaching, and spend whatever leisure I can get on my personal pet projects, your point seems to be, you DESERVE to be paid for game development, and you MUST have the means to CENSOR other game developers, or you will take your marbles and go home. Well, bon voyage.
I'll tell you exactly where I am coming from. If you want to make money by making video games, you have a plethora of options. If you don't care about being independent, you could just get hired and get paid per hour. And besides that (and this goes for your potential employer, too), you could
* raise money before you start
* try to survive on donations
* try to get reasonably popular and then sell endorsements and merchandise
* go mmo route, whereas the client is free, but the server is a trade secret, and
you are the only one with a functional server, so you can sell service subscriptions
As you can see, the copyright-less market provides plenty of ways to make money by writing entertainment software. The public shouldn't put up with censorship just so that you can have yet another one.
But I can't see how authors retaining control over their works is a bad thing for creativity.
Copyright is not a "retention of control", which is a gross mischaracterization at best. Copyright is an exclusive right to distribute: that is, the power to censor everyone else. Can you imagine how CENSORSHIP may be a bad thing for creativity?
Like it or not, self-interest is a powerful motivator that shouldn't be dismissed.
In your particular field, entertainment, every motivator can be safely dismissed, since what you are not making has absolutely no utility, unless by accident. If you can't make money programming time sinks, may be you'll get hired by the fed to write a free educational game, and we will ALL be better off as a result. As a professional logician, I'd like to get paid for sitting on my ass all day and thinking about new formal languages, which is what I do best. Instead, I am teaching calculus and statistics, hoping that one day I will have enough leisure to dedicate more time to theoretical research.
Devil's advocate: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Try being less philosophical. In statistics, the difference between the two is blurred. I don't know how those particular copyright studies have been done, but if people keep sampling and coming up with zero for correlation coefficient, then the correlation coefficient is near zero with high degree of confidence, and so any claim that "increasing _____ is correlated with increasing _____" is extremely likely to be false.
Also, you don't need to put carriage returns to wrap your text, the site does that for you. It just makes it obnoxious for people who want to quote a section of your reply.
I could live with the long copyrights if we also had big social safety nets and Basic Income
But why should you??? There is no silver lining to copyright. Its intentions aside, there is absolutely no proof
that it spurs innovation or creativity, whichever industry you look in, whatever the term, and however you quantify
the goods. And economists looked into this
many times by now. So our best economics research tells us that the ONLY perceptible effect of copyright is censorship,
which is a BREAK on creativity and innovation, and an infringement on our rights as humans, as outlined in the UDHR.
The only good part of copyright is the right to attribution. Authors, and authors only should be able to compel people
who distribute their work to attribute it correctly, as long as it does not raise distribution costs too much. This right
shouldn't be perpetual, but could last as much the current copyright: lifetime + some more. In other words, the only
type of license enforceable by copyright should be a BSD-style license.
Copyleft enforcement would not hurt too much, but it wouldn't be needed either, given just one thing. There should be a law which
mandates free software use for all government, all education, all healthcare. Other public goods may be added
to this list as needed. As long as we have that (and I can argue UDHR implies we should), non-free software will live on the fringes
(hi-fi games), and things like GPL simply won't make any impact. Reckless fools will still pay for spyware masquerading as
appliances, toys, and games, but I am just not convinced we should ever legislate to save individuals from their own stupidity.
For whatever reason, USA was not able to make a deal to extradite him from UK. But this has nothing to do with charging him with a crime:
Emails leaked by WikiLeaks from Stratfor, a private intelligence firm, have discussions surrounding a secret grand jury with a secret indictment. Later, the media organisation received declassified diplomatic cables that confirm a secret indictment exists.
So he is, in fact, accused of something here in US of A, probably "aiding the enemy" or something equally inane.
accused of something ranging from a misdemeanor sexual assault to something like date-rape.
Actually, it's not in this range at all, unless by "accused" you mean "accused by random people and the mainstream media", since Assange has not been charged with any crime in Sweden. They want him for "questioning", so they have an EU (!) arrest warrant out, but that's it. It is clear as day they have a deal to extradite him to US as soon as he lands there. If they were in fact interested in questioning him, they could use linphone.
Ecuadorian officials at the London embassy offered to allow Swedish prosecutors to question Assange there. This offer was rejected by the Swedish authorities.
NY will lose this one, though. In particular, because individual renters won't stand for being shaken down. If NY steps on AirBNB's throat, then a less centralized system will replace it, operating on razor-thin or even zero margins, and everyone will happily rent without reporting ANYTHING. If that's what they want, they should send black vans to the AirBNB headquarters right now. A more prudent course of action would be to make this service explicitly legal, tax it, and regulate it.
Now switching to green energy will result in USA residents loosing jobs (nevermind that more jobs will be created in the green sector), and so it will be easier to mount a political opposition to giving up fossil fuels, which is exactly what oil barons want. Indeed, it looks like the planet will warm up by 4-6 degrees and the see will go up by a few meters before the major players start doing ANYTHING. As an individual, I am getting extremely concerned with being in the right place when this shit hits the fan: in the US it means a state with plenty of elevated ground far away from the coast, plenty of water, and good social safety net.
The point of a standard is to describe a specific way to do what everyone is going to do anyway.
This is inane, since different standards have different points to them. Security standards, for example, are often in direct conflict with what everyone is doing anyway, which is the whole point for having them: so that those who abide can get security.
But this is not the only way your statement is silly. Mozilla, for example, will never implement digital restriction management, and Mozilla is a big player, so by your logic the standard should drop the DRM.
But neither Mozilla nor M$ are the biggest players, and this is the biggest problem with your argument. The biggest player is the frigging USER, and the whole point of the HTML standard is to make sure that the USER can browse the Web and enjoy full functionality with any compliant browser. DRM is not functionality from the point of view of the USER, but a bug, and has no place in the standard. The biggest player will be taking screenshots if he can't copy and paste. If HTML5 has DRM in it, then I can confidently predict the only possible outcome: the standard will be forked or replaced altogether by 3-4 dudes in T-shirts, and W3C, WHATWG, and anyone else tied to HTML5 will fade into irrelevance.
If those were the problems, then white-listing characters was a totally wrong solution. So is the "spam filter", which amounts to censorship for idiotic reasons. The same moderation system that can "fix" GNAA's messages can also "fix" text art and right-to-left text. As a bonus, they could have a robot identify non-paragraph (and/or non-English) content and have a user setting to collapse it regardless of score. Problem solved.
What I've seen of the redesign is completely pointless. The current layout works pretty well, actually, so a useful thing to do would be to polish it, to document the style-sheets, and to add features that are 10 years overdue. Instead we'll be getting more neon barf, looks like.
Why all the hate? The dude connected a computer interface directly to his nervous system, and it worked as intended. Even without knowing any details, I think this is quite nice.
While we are at it, can you please define what you mean by "impressive" things in the field of Cybernetics, "meaningful" papers, and bringing "glory" to the school? You dismiss the talent for raising money, which is an extremely useful skill for anyone but a pure mathematician, and the one we can quantify more or less objectively. You then ask him to satisfy your personal, hopelessly subjective goals. I got news for you: the fundamental science is basically leisure, the very opposite of planting seeds or digging a ditch. We don't do it for any kind of profit or return, we do it because it's fun, we share the results with the world, and every now and then a small portion of our research happens to be useful hundreds of years in the future, which is the best we can hope for.
Slashdot Mirror
From http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/what-kind-problem-aca-rollout-liberalism
The biggest front-end problem is that users, before they can register, must “cross a busy digital junction in which data are swapped among separate computer systems built or run by contractors.”
Why is that? It is because the government needs to determine how much of a coupon it’ll write each person to go and buy private insurance. Beyond the philosophical components of means-testing (what the philosopher Jonathan Wolff calls “shameful revelations”), the actual process requires substantial coordination between multiple government agencies with very different infrastructures.
As the GAO notes, “the data hub is to verify an applicant’s Social Security number with the Social Security Administration (SSA), and to access the data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that are needed to assess the applicant’s income, citizenship, and immigration status. The data hub is also expected to access information from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Department of Defense (DOD), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Peace Corps to enable exchanges to determine if an applicant is eligible for insurance coverage from other federal programs that would make them ineligible for income-based financial subsidies.”
Rather than just being an example of bureaucratic infighting, each of these pieces of information is necessary to determine how aggressively the government should subsidize the private insurance individuals will buy, and the entire process will stall and fall apart if one of these checks isn’t completed quickly.
This by itself might not be a problem; however, the second issue is that the means-testing is necessary to link individuals up with individual private insurers. As the Washington Post notes, the back-end problems are in part the result of the site being “designed to draw from the offerings of private insurers, each with their own computer systems, rates and offerings.”
Instead of doing it in a cheaper, more straightforward, and more humane manner, representatives insisted that private insurers stay in the mix, and they got exactly the system they wanted. They got a needlessly complicated back-end: a Katamari-like glue ball of various databases, both private and public, all hosted by different entities, and all indispensable by law. So given that the government never had a chance to design or even see significant parts of that system, is it surprising that it is overwhelmed by the initial demand? Not to me. But instead of patiently waiting a few months (which worked for every other massively online game, no matter how fubar the game or the launch was), the plutocracy supporters will now point fingers at Democrats, blaming them for correctly implementing what used to be the Republican vision of healthcare just a few years ago.
What you are saying doesn't make any sense. What skyscraper? Who is to say I cannot run a server that uses its own logic to resolve URIs starting with bestnameresolverevar:// ? Will anyone be upset I took over this particular URI scheme? Will I collide with an existing standard? Will the rest of the Internet or the Web be affected in any way? Any way besides offering resolutions for URIs that were, up until now, unresolvable?
Imagine a fractured internet, where if you want your site accessible from the world, you have to buy domain names and have your site be vetted by every country that you want your site accessible from.
OK... Uh, I can't seem to do that, may be you can help? What way of fracturing the Internet cannot be fixed by client software? I mean, besides unplugging the cables? China is spending billions of dollars and millions of full-time workers on fracturing the internet, and what do they have to show for it? People have to use https proxies to get connected, oh horror! They are suffering the global Internet which is slightly slower, and takes an extra step to set up.
What do you even mean by "fracturing"? IP? DNS? IP is already fractured: we have 2 versions working side by side. I didn't notice any difference, did you? DNS? I pray to the Internet God they split already, so that we have a bloody marketplace instead of a one-man show. The space of ASCII character sequences is big enough to accommodate any number of providers. So your client will be connecting to several different DNS servers or an entirely different kind of name resolver, depending on the URL format or content. Where's the downside?
I'd argue that "Colony" is sort of an unfair term
I'd argue that the judging by the summary, TFA is a crock of shit. European countries that are themselves not US colonies own the entirety of their Internet infrastructure, a.k.a. the tubes. They can (and do) run their own DNS if they so please. US has colonized the German Internet about as much as it colonized the German forests. US plays a huge role in the development of the world-wide network, but that influence is more akin to the influence of Hollywood on film. Like you say, "colony" is not the right word. A "captive audience" is not a right word even, since the audience loves it. More like, US have captured the world's imagination.
That's the beauty of the free software: very cheaply, we now have several versions of the program, each created with a different purpose in mind, and together they cater to every possible audience.
Thanks, but I got a user-friendly fork that was created with the intention to fix what Palant has broken. It does so by not exploiting the end user. It doesn't have an "acceptable ads" option, so I don't need to uncheck anything.
No one should use AdblockPlus over Adblock Edge or TrueBlockor Adblock Lite or any other fork that removed malicious features introduced in version 2.0. If you haven't heard, Palant sold out to advertizers (the ironing is delicious), and has now "allow acceptable ads" option enabled by default, where "acceptable" likely means that Palant got paid. Since that's his game now, I would only use AdblockPlus if I wanted to be get another update with a malicious payload.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_plus#Advert_filtering_and_.22acceptable.22_ads
The comment about being sex-crazy applies to nearly all Christian blends. Indeed, it is impossible to base anything on a 2000-old Jewish text without taking at least some of their views on the subject. But when I was talking about the savage hypocrisy, I was very careful not to hang it on Christians in general. I am well aware that some (especially smaller, independent) churches at least try to live up to Christian and/or Paulian ideal. This is not the case, though, with any of the major movements. All of them, starting with Orthodox and Catholic, and ending with huge Pentecostal churches such as AoG, are copying and improving on the old Jewish paradigm, which boils down to crowd control via a death grip on all manifestations of the reproductive function. Opium for the masses and all that great stuff.
And if you want to showcase your church, you could at least tell us your denomination, so that we know your theological leaning, as well as give us the idea about the money trail (do all donations stay in your church, or do some go to the umbrella organization somewhere in mid-south).
At least here in USA, it's because Puritan Christians rule, and Christians tend to believe it's OK to make preaching the gospel a commercial activity, but not sex (go figure). The MO for every "respectable" movement has been the same since about 200 AD, and is the same as that of the Jewish Temple of 40 AD, you know, the one where Jesus got processed. It's almost as if the leaders of major churches actually figure things out by looking at Jesus and doing exactly the opposite: they make churches into shops, and slam the door on women who are forced into selling sex by the shitty economy. Hehe, no, that would be too ironic. I am sure, they are just re-inventing the wheel first patented by the Jewish prophets...
On the other hand, for the "it's my work, so it's my choice" crowd, the -NC option ensures that nobody can copy their work and make a profit.
It also ensures that the copyright holders can walk up to any non-trivial entity with non-zero assets (like Debian) and shake it down for cash or creative control, regardless of whether the entity is distributing anything "commercially". A fear of lawsuit will be more than enough to censor legitimate uses by entities that are not equipped for a legal battle. Every piece of non-free software is a liability both for the user and for the distributor, so Debian is wise to stay away.
Google marketing bots are modding us down :) Artificial intelligence at work.
No-no, running spyware just to kill time is what the computer geniuses of tomorrow are all about, or at least should be, according to Google's marketing department. God forbid they should stop playing a game for a second and write a free version of a popular non-free program.
I have no idea what you are saying, except that you seem to be resorting to name-calling and attacking my personality. Which is ironic, at best, since you are a game developer, and just as guilty of seeking to make a living by doing something no one asked you to do. And while my point is, I buckle down, work my ass off teaching, and spend whatever leisure I can get on my personal pet projects, your point seems to be, you DESERVE to be paid for game development, and you MUST have the means to CENSOR other game developers, or you will take your marbles and go home. Well, bon voyage.
I'll tell you exactly where I am coming from. If you want to make money by making video games, you have a plethora of options. If you don't care about being independent, you could just get hired and get paid per hour. And besides that (and this goes for your potential employer, too), you could
* raise money before you start
* try to survive on donations
* try to get reasonably popular and then sell endorsements and merchandise
* go mmo route, whereas the client is free, but the server is a trade secret, and you are the only one with a functional server, so you can sell service subscriptions
As you can see, the copyright-less market provides plenty of ways to make money by writing entertainment software. The public shouldn't put up with censorship just so that you can have yet another one.
But I can't see how authors retaining control over their works is a bad thing for creativity.
Copyright is not a "retention of control", which is a gross mischaracterization at best. Copyright is an exclusive right to distribute: that is, the power to censor everyone else. Can you imagine how CENSORSHIP may be a bad thing for creativity?
Like it or not, self-interest is a powerful motivator that shouldn't be dismissed.
In your particular field, entertainment, every motivator can be safely dismissed, since what you are not making has absolutely no utility, unless by accident. If you can't make money programming time sinks, may be you'll get hired by the fed to write a free educational game, and we will ALL be better off as a result. As a professional logician, I'd like to get paid for sitting on my ass all day and thinking about new formal languages, which is what I do best. Instead, I am teaching calculus and statistics, hoping that one day I will have enough leisure to dedicate more time to theoretical research.
Devil's advocate: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Try being less philosophical. In statistics, the difference between the two is blurred. I don't know how those particular copyright studies have been done, but if people keep sampling and coming up with zero for correlation coefficient, then the correlation coefficient is near zero with high degree of confidence, and so any claim that "increasing _____ is correlated with increasing _____" is extremely likely to be false.
Also, you don't need to put carriage returns to wrap your text, the site does that for you. It just makes it obnoxious for people who want to quote a section of your reply.
I am a modern poet.
I could live with the long copyrights if we also had big social safety nets and Basic Income
But why should you??? There is no silver lining to copyright. Its intentions aside, there is absolutely no proof that it spurs innovation or creativity, whichever industry you look in, whatever the term, and however you quantify the goods. And economists looked into this many times by now. So our best economics research tells us that the ONLY perceptible effect of copyright is censorship, which is a BREAK on creativity and innovation, and an infringement on our rights as humans, as outlined in the UDHR.
The only good part of copyright is the right to attribution. Authors, and authors only should be able to compel people who distribute their work to attribute it correctly, as long as it does not raise distribution costs too much. This right shouldn't be perpetual, but could last as much the current copyright: lifetime + some more. In other words, the only type of license enforceable by copyright should be a BSD-style license.
Copyleft enforcement would not hurt too much, but it wouldn't be needed either, given just one thing. There should be a law which mandates free software use for all government, all education, all healthcare. Other public goods may be added to this list as needed. As long as we have that (and I can argue UDHR implies we should), non-free software will live on the fringes (hi-fi games), and things like GPL simply won't make any impact. Reckless fools will still pay for spyware masquerading as appliances, toys, and games, but I am just not convinced we should ever legislate to save individuals from their own stupidity.
Oh, juicy memories. http://www.putergeek.com/scandisk_defrag/defrag_working.gif
It could not be more transparent: without opening this bag, you can plainly see it's full of shit.
Emails leaked by WikiLeaks from Stratfor, a private intelligence firm, have discussions surrounding a secret grand jury with a secret indictment. Later, the media organisation received declassified diplomatic cables that confirm a secret indictment exists.
So he is, in fact, accused of something here in US of A, probably "aiding the enemy" or something equally inane.
accused of something ranging from a misdemeanor sexual assault to something like date-rape.
Actually, it's not in this range at all, unless by "accused" you mean "accused by random people and the mainstream media", since Assange has not been charged with any crime in Sweden. They want him for "questioning", so they have an EU (!) arrest warrant out, but that's it. It is clear as day they have a deal to extradite him to US as soon as he lands there. If they were in fact interested in questioning him, they could use linphone.
Ecuadorian officials at the London embassy offered to allow Swedish prosecutors to question Assange there. This offer was rejected by the Swedish authorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_assange#Request_for_political_asylum_in_Ecuador
Questioning my ass.
NY will lose this one, though. In particular, because individual renters won't stand for being shaken down. If NY steps on AirBNB's throat, then a less centralized system will replace it, operating on razor-thin or even zero margins, and everyone will happily rent without reporting ANYTHING. If that's what they want, they should send black vans to the AirBNB headquarters right now. A more prudent course of action would be to make this service explicitly legal, tax it, and regulate it.
Now switching to green energy will result in USA residents loosing jobs (nevermind that more jobs will be created in the green sector), and so it will be easier to mount a political opposition to giving up fossil fuels, which is exactly what oil barons want. Indeed, it looks like the planet will warm up by 4-6 degrees and the see will go up by a few meters before the major players start doing ANYTHING. As an individual, I am getting extremely concerned with being in the right place when this shit hits the fan: in the US it means a state with plenty of elevated ground far away from the coast, plenty of water, and good social safety net.
The point of a standard is to describe a specific way to do what everyone is going to do anyway.
This is inane, since different standards have different points to them. Security standards, for example, are often in direct conflict with what everyone is doing anyway, which is the whole point for having them: so that those who abide can get security.
But this is not the only way your statement is silly. Mozilla, for example, will never implement digital restriction management, and Mozilla is a big player, so by your logic the standard should drop the DRM.
But neither Mozilla nor M$ are the biggest players, and this is the biggest problem with your argument. The biggest player is the frigging USER, and the whole point of the HTML standard is to make sure that the USER can browse the Web and enjoy full functionality with any compliant browser. DRM is not functionality from the point of view of the USER, but a bug, and has no place in the standard. The biggest player will be taking screenshots if he can't copy and paste. If HTML5 has DRM in it, then I can confidently predict the only possible outcome: the standard will be forked or replaced altogether by 3-4 dudes in T-shirts, and W3C, WHATWG, and anyone else tied to HTML5 will fade into irrelevance.
If those were the problems, then white-listing characters was a totally wrong solution. So is the "spam filter", which amounts to censorship for idiotic reasons. The same moderation system that can "fix" GNAA's messages can also "fix" text art and right-to-left text. As a bonus, they could have a robot identify non-paragraph (and/or non-English) content and have a user setting to collapse it regardless of score. Problem solved.
What I've seen of the redesign is completely pointless. The current layout works pretty well, actually, so a useful thing to do would be to polish it, to document the style-sheets, and to add features that are 10 years overdue. Instead we'll be getting more neon barf, looks like.
Why all the hate? The dude connected a computer interface directly to his nervous system, and it worked as intended. Even without knowing any details, I think this is quite nice.
While we are at it, can you please define what you mean by "impressive" things in the field of Cybernetics, "meaningful" papers, and bringing "glory" to the school? You dismiss the talent for raising money, which is an extremely useful skill for anyone but a pure mathematician, and the one we can quantify more or less objectively. You then ask him to satisfy your personal, hopelessly subjective goals. I got news for you: the fundamental science is basically leisure, the very opposite of planting seeds or digging a ditch. We don't do it for any kind of profit or return, we do it because it's fun, we share the results with the world, and every now and then a small portion of our research happens to be useful hundreds of years in the future, which is the best we can hope for.