Eh. Was not as impressed by Shadow of Victory, Weber and Flint had already re-hashed the same several months in both the Saganami Island subseries and the Crown of Slaves subseries. Didn't need to see that same timeframe rehashed yet again. I want some forward momentum dammit. It's almost like they're trying to get the readers to leave.
Finished At the Sign of Triumph last night. Enjoyed the story, but Weber has added significant numbers of typos to the already problematical abuses of the letters "y" and "z" in proper names. Some of the typos were grammatical to where it was hard to understand what the sentence was trying to say, and in others the wrong proper noun was used such that it seemed that they were talking about the wrong character. I enjoyed where the story ultimately went, but Tor did a piss-poor job proofing this book. The Baen advanced reader copy e-books that came on the Baen CDs for the various Honorverse stories contained fewer errors; Tor is supposed to be the big publisher that gets this stuff right and Baen is the small guy. Should not be the other way around especially when the book cost me $25 for the dead-tree edition.
I am sort of looking forward to Weber and Presby's The Road To Hell but given the problems with both the Honorverse book and with the Safehold book I'm not sure that I want to jump in feet-first at the moment. I'd re-read the entire Honorverse in the last couple of months prior to Shadow of Victory and I probably could've skipped doing that if I'd known it was going to be a retelling of the same timeframe.
In the context of open-source software I always read ESR as Eric S. Raymond...
I just wish that FF would cut out the Chrome-style version numbering. They've screwed the pooch on major/minor/tweak versioning that I and a lot of other people were accustomed to, and it is annoying.
Well, from my court it's not exactly hate, but having known someone that was conflicted back when I was in my early twenties and knowing the intense emotional struggle this person was dealing with, seeing transgender issues become chic is kind of insulting. For my perspective it doesn't help that other people surrounding this individual who were not exactly the best examples of rational thought themselves were recklessly encouraging only further exacerbates my distaste for the current fad.
I don't want to see people make radical, permanent changes to themselves without long-considered, well reasoned thought, and without lots of counseling. I also want said counseling to act as gatekeepers on the nature of the process of any that ultimately do begin to explore living as the other sex and ultimately having reassignment surgery so that the entire process is less subject to abuse.
I'm trying to figure out how this is news. Snowden was granted asylum by the Russian Government. Naturally there will be some kind of interview process that includes intelligence officials even if such interviews are conducted in the least confrontational way possible.
The more telling part is that if it's true that the CIA actively refused to grant him access to information (ie, evaluated and made a choice, versus simply not granting access as the default policy) and he was later granted that access by the NSA as a different employer, then perhaps there needs to be better protocols for how the various agencies determine risk.
In a future world, every automated taxi might be inspected by a human operator for quality control as often as three times a day... they won't be out there risking their lives and interacting with the public, but they could be checking the cleanliness and safety of the vehicle and holding it to a higher standard than today's taxis.
Yeah, right.
The only passenger livery vehicles that will see this level of service will be the replacements for the sedan services. Right now, without a subscription those services cost approximately $60/ride in a high density city where the mileage is low. Let's pretend for a minute that a monthly subscription for that same metro area, with a reasonable amount of use, is that price per day instead of per ride, and that they're even polite enough to not charge commuter-customers for weekend use. That's 22 workdays a month, times $60. $1320 a month before taxes and other costs. Almost $16,000 per year.
Everyone else gets low-end sedans that are not inspected terribly regularly. Cars that are vandalized with grafitti. Cars that have trash in them. Cars that have been pissed in or shat in or vomited in. Probably even the occasional car that people have had sex in. And the customer will be stuck because if they reject the disgusting car then they'll have to wait for the next car, and they have no guarantee that the next car will be any cleaner.
As for attempting to seek compensation from those customers that have abused the car, good luck with that. It's very likely that over time any sort of video surveillance in the cars will degrade as vandalsim and simple equipment failure add up, and even if at one point the company had a policy of holding customers liable for damage, it will be inenforceable as they won't be able to prove who left the vehicle trashed.
metaphor and hyperbole have their places, but this usage was so hamhanded it was cringeworthy. It makes me want to ignore the speaker rather than helping to support his arguments.
Why would a celebrity or other person that wants to influence people pay for a service like Twitter when a free service (like Twitter has been) will supplant it?
So not having any idea who this Chowdry is, how is Twitter supposed to make money? I don't value their 140-character service, but I at least see what it is. When you limit your message-length to something that a Motorola Alphapager or an SMS message can accommodate then I don't get how you can make money. Users aren't going to pay to send or receive tweets or for any kind of paid subscription, and I see no practical way to do advertising within the platform's current constraints without pissing off users and causing them to stop using the service.
Twitter has already established ways for their service to function without using client software that would deliver ads too.
If you can demonstrate how forwarding essentially telegrams for free can be profitable I'm sure the management at Twitter would love to talk to you.
they'll just go to Reddit and whargarrbl into an even stronger echo-chamber. Or get mad when they run afoul of the ever-shifting rules and move over to voat.
The problem with this kind of study is that if it's illegal in an area, then it's tough to say what depresses supply and how demand on particular days affects supply.
When they hold national-level sporting events around here the local media makes a big deal of talking about sex trafficking. It makes sense after all, if a big event is coming here that sex traffickers would take the opportunity to market to visitors looking for easy access to sex and even if law enforcement presence increases, it's probably not going to increase proportionately to the attendance. In short, the environment is rich and the chances of being caught are probably not worse than normal. It's likely that all those girls and their pimps are coming in and temporarily abandoning their usual markets for the duration.
Why do some people who make a show of piety and THEIR religion forget all about love, tolerance and compassion.
Because actually forgiving people for their faults is hard. Attempting to live with the piety for themselves instead of just imposing it upon others is also hard. The vast majority of people are hypocrites. The point, which is lost in nearly all cases, is to recognize one's own hypocrisy and to attempt to correct one's own flaws in one's character. Look at expressions like, "he who is without sin; cast the first stone." Except that very few people are going to acknowledge their sins or let such arguments guide them even if they are aware of them.
Last time I rode in a Pacifica, the vehicle could accommodate seven passengers in standard configuration, two in the front row, two in the middle row, and three in the back row. On top of that there is an optional installable jumpseat that goes between the middle-row captains' chairs to enable the van to seat eight.
If it were all things equal perhaps I would agree with you, but given that people treat sex differently than other occupations even in places that it is legal, I doubt that standard market forces would entirely apply.
Your assertion requires that enough women would become sex workers to sate the market, and that there isn't some segment of the market that would still be without sex workers fulfilling it.
If what I've been told about sex trafficking is correct then the girls in it are not there voluntarily. They're essentially kidnap victims that are not really free to leave for a myriad of possible reasons, and they personally earn nothing beyond what their pimps think they need to have in order to remain effective.
It could also be that human trafficking would continue because the price for services with such girls would be cheaper than with those working voluntarily as prostitutes. Just to assume some numbers, if a woman that works as a prostitute charges $500 for services and if a pimp charges $250, the pimp might have to spend some of that money on the girl, but he may pocket $200. If he has four girls consistently working then that's $800 for him with only $200 outlay for expenses, and the customer sees that one girl costs twice what the other costs.
Tenuous implies more of a relationship than I expect actually exists.
Pornography requires overt marketing of the subjects. It's the images or videos themselves that make the financial transaction happen. While there are some pornographic actresses that have been reported to have also worked as prostitutes, they're usually still working for themselves.
If I understand sex trafficking correctly, those managing the girls being used don't really want their actual girls being photographed or otherwise made personally identifiable on a large scale. That kind of overt look would probably make it hard for them to continue to use that particular girl because she'd draw the attention of the authorities. Being part of the black market is what makes it possible for them, if it's exposed for what's going on then it comes apart.
It's been my experience that most people that have actually read the scriptures that they hold dear are much less likely to try to force said scripture down everyone else's throats, and are much more likely to actually live by what they feel are the messages.
The vast majority of people that claim a religion are basically like your average sports fan. They have a team, they support that team, they get loud and boisterous and abrasive about their team, but they don't play, they never really played other than dabbling in it as a child, and they have no idea what it actually takes to make the team successful. They simply buy the merchandise and spout off expressions that they've heard with no deeper understanding.
So as a customer I either have to pay for nebulous software that will be of no use to me (ie, won't run under my operating system) or else I have to pay a $20 tax to a nebulous "fight against human trafficking".
Yep. I don't need a desktop operating system that serves ads to me. It's bad enough that I get ads served by the default applications that were preloaded on my smartphone, I don't need my computer now doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a Church of the Subgenius tie-in...
Eh. Was not as impressed by Shadow of Victory, Weber and Flint had already re-hashed the same several months in both the Saganami Island subseries and the Crown of Slaves subseries. Didn't need to see that same timeframe rehashed yet again. I want some forward momentum dammit. It's almost like they're trying to get the readers to leave.
Finished At the Sign of Triumph last night. Enjoyed the story, but Weber has added significant numbers of typos to the already problematical abuses of the letters "y" and "z" in proper names. Some of the typos were grammatical to where it was hard to understand what the sentence was trying to say, and in others the wrong proper noun was used such that it seemed that they were talking about the wrong character. I enjoyed where the story ultimately went, but Tor did a piss-poor job proofing this book. The Baen advanced reader copy e-books that came on the Baen CDs for the various Honorverse stories contained fewer errors; Tor is supposed to be the big publisher that gets this stuff right and Baen is the small guy. Should not be the other way around especially when the book cost me $25 for the dead-tree edition.
I am sort of looking forward to Weber and Presby's The Road To Hell but given the problems with both the Honorverse book and with the Safehold book I'm not sure that I want to jump in feet-first at the moment. I'd re-read the entire Honorverse in the last couple of months prior to Shadow of Victory and I probably could've skipped doing that if I'd known it was going to be a retelling of the same timeframe.
In the context of open-source software I always read ESR as Eric S. Raymond...
I just wish that FF would cut out the Chrome-style version numbering. They've screwed the pooch on major/minor/tweak versioning that I and a lot of other people were accustomed to, and it is annoying.
The King?
Well, from my court it's not exactly hate, but having known someone that was conflicted back when I was in my early twenties and knowing the intense emotional struggle this person was dealing with, seeing transgender issues become chic is kind of insulting. For my perspective it doesn't help that other people surrounding this individual who were not exactly the best examples of rational thought themselves were recklessly encouraging only further exacerbates my distaste for the current fad.
I don't want to see people make radical, permanent changes to themselves without long-considered, well reasoned thought, and without lots of counseling. I also want said counseling to act as gatekeepers on the nature of the process of any that ultimately do begin to explore living as the other sex and ultimately having reassignment surgery so that the entire process is less subject to abuse.
But that's just me.
I'm trying to figure out how this is news. Snowden was granted asylum by the Russian Government. Naturally there will be some kind of interview process that includes intelligence officials even if such interviews are conducted in the least confrontational way possible.
The more telling part is that if it's true that the CIA actively refused to grant him access to information (ie, evaluated and made a choice, versus simply not granting access as the default policy) and he was later granted that access by the NSA as a different employer, then perhaps there needs to be better protocols for how the various agencies determine risk.
In a future world, every automated taxi might be inspected by a human operator for quality control as often as three times a day... they won't be out there risking their lives and interacting with the public, but they could be checking the cleanliness and safety of the vehicle and holding it to a higher standard than today's taxis.
Yeah, right.
The only passenger livery vehicles that will see this level of service will be the replacements for the sedan services. Right now, without a subscription those services cost approximately $60/ride in a high density city where the mileage is low. Let's pretend for a minute that a monthly subscription for that same metro area, with a reasonable amount of use, is that price per day instead of per ride, and that they're even polite enough to not charge commuter-customers for weekend use. That's 22 workdays a month, times $60. $1320 a month before taxes and other costs. Almost $16,000 per year.
Everyone else gets low-end sedans that are not inspected terribly regularly. Cars that are vandalized with grafitti. Cars that have trash in them. Cars that have been pissed in or shat in or vomited in. Probably even the occasional car that people have had sex in. And the customer will be stuck because if they reject the disgusting car then they'll have to wait for the next car, and they have no guarantee that the next car will be any cleaner.
As for attempting to seek compensation from those customers that have abused the car, good luck with that. It's very likely that over time any sort of video surveillance in the cars will degrade as vandalsim and simple equipment failure add up, and even if at one point the company had a policy of holding customers liable for damage, it will be inenforceable as they won't be able to prove who left the vehicle trashed.
And its language left a bit to be desired too...
metaphor and hyperbole have their places, but this usage was so hamhanded it was cringeworthy. It makes me want to ignore the speaker rather than helping to support his arguments.
Why would a celebrity or other person that wants to influence people pay for a service like Twitter when a free service (like Twitter has been) will supplant it?
Twitter relies on 140 character messages. How are you supposed to monetize the store and forward of 140 character messages?
So not having any idea who this Chowdry is, how is Twitter supposed to make money? I don't value their 140-character service, but I at least see what it is. When you limit your message-length to something that a Motorola Alphapager or an SMS message can accommodate then I don't get how you can make money. Users aren't going to pay to send or receive tweets or for any kind of paid subscription, and I see no practical way to do advertising within the platform's current constraints without pissing off users and causing them to stop using the service.
Twitter has already established ways for their service to function without using client software that would deliver ads too.
If you can demonstrate how forwarding essentially telegrams for free can be profitable I'm sure the management at Twitter would love to talk to you.
This comment is concise enough that it would fit into Twitter's 140 character limit...
...and it doesn't even have any abbreviations or netspeak!
they'll just go to Reddit and whargarrbl into an even stronger echo-chamber. Or get mad when they run afoul of the ever-shifting rules and move over to voat.
But I already have an Alternative. What I need is an Escape.
The problem with this kind of study is that if it's illegal in an area, then it's tough to say what depresses supply and how demand on particular days affects supply.
When they hold national-level sporting events around here the local media makes a big deal of talking about sex trafficking. It makes sense after all, if a big event is coming here that sex traffickers would take the opportunity to market to visitors looking for easy access to sex and even if law enforcement presence increases, it's probably not going to increase proportionately to the attendance. In short, the environment is rich and the chances of being caught are probably not worse than normal. It's likely that all those girls and their pimps are coming in and temporarily abandoning their usual markets for the duration.
Why do some people who make a show of piety and THEIR religion forget all about love, tolerance and compassion.
Because actually forgiving people for their faults is hard. Attempting to live with the piety for themselves instead of just imposing it upon others is also hard. The vast majority of people are hypocrites. The point, which is lost in nearly all cases, is to recognize one's own hypocrisy and to attempt to correct one's own flaws in one's character. Look at expressions like, "he who is without sin; cast the first stone." Except that very few people are going to acknowledge their sins or let such arguments guide them even if they are aware of them.
The new vehicle for six passengers
Last time I rode in a Pacifica, the vehicle could accommodate seven passengers in standard configuration, two in the front row, two in the middle row, and three in the back row. On top of that there is an optional installable jumpseat that goes between the middle-row captains' chairs to enable the van to seat eight.
Sorry, laissez-faire is just as much a fantasy as a well run command economy is.
If it were all things equal perhaps I would agree with you, but given that people treat sex differently than other occupations even in places that it is legal, I doubt that standard market forces would entirely apply.
Don't know if I'd go quite that far.
Your assertion requires that enough women would become sex workers to sate the market, and that there isn't some segment of the market that would still be without sex workers fulfilling it.
If what I've been told about sex trafficking is correct then the girls in it are not there voluntarily. They're essentially kidnap victims that are not really free to leave for a myriad of possible reasons, and they personally earn nothing beyond what their pimps think they need to have in order to remain effective.
It could also be that human trafficking would continue because the price for services with such girls would be cheaper than with those working voluntarily as prostitutes. Just to assume some numbers, if a woman that works as a prostitute charges $500 for services and if a pimp charges $250, the pimp might have to spend some of that money on the girl, but he may pocket $200. If he has four girls consistently working then that's $800 for him with only $200 outlay for expenses, and the customer sees that one girl costs twice what the other costs.
Tenuous implies more of a relationship than I expect actually exists.
Pornography requires overt marketing of the subjects. It's the images or videos themselves that make the financial transaction happen. While there are some pornographic actresses that have been reported to have also worked as prostitutes, they're usually still working for themselves.
If I understand sex trafficking correctly, those managing the girls being used don't really want their actual girls being photographed or otherwise made personally identifiable on a large scale. That kind of overt look would probably make it hard for them to continue to use that particular girl because she'd draw the attention of the authorities. Being part of the black market is what makes it possible for them, if it's exposed for what's going on then it comes apart.
Sex, pedophilia, rape, incest, bigamy/polygamy, bestiality, murder, infanticide, fratricide, matricide, patricide, genocide.
It's been my experience that most people that have actually read the scriptures that they hold dear are much less likely to try to force said scripture down everyone else's throats, and are much more likely to actually live by what they feel are the messages.
The vast majority of people that claim a religion are basically like your average sports fan. They have a team, they support that team, they get loud and boisterous and abrasive about their team, but they don't play, they never really played other than dabbling in it as a child, and they have no idea what it actually takes to make the team successful. They simply buy the merchandise and spout off expressions that they've heard with no deeper understanding.
So as a customer I either have to pay for nebulous software that will be of no use to me (ie, won't run under my operating system) or else I have to pay a $20 tax to a nebulous "fight against human trafficking".
Just so we're on the same page here...
Yep. I don't need a desktop operating system that serves ads to me. It's bad enough that I get ads served by the default applications that were preloaded on my smartphone, I don't need my computer now doing the same thing.