Why purchase an imitator when you can buy the original âoeModel Mâ. We have produced the buckling spring âoeClickâ keyboard for IBM and thousands of discriminating users worldwide for 15 yearsâ¦. Join the many that have made the switch to a much more accurate data entry alternative.
Filibustering the CIA director's nomination is nothing but grandstanding. The CIA doesn't have any authority inside the USA, so WTF does Eric Holder's comments about drones have to do with the CIA?
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
No. This is a form of the prisoner's dilemma. Individually, it makes sense for each of us to take the easy way out, but collectively, this is bad public policy. Private accusations of crime, followed by private punishments, is odious to our system of justice.
More and more court cases are ending up like this one, where minimal evidence gets turned away as insufficient. The real truth is that the copyright industry doesn't want to prosecute these cases, because lawyers and discovery and expert witnesses are expensive. Even Hollywood can't afford 10,000 cases at a time.
I am not unsympathetic to their problem, but the solution needs to balance the due process rights of the people with the interests of big business. That hasn't happened since the copyright owners discovered the scale of infringement couldn't be cheaply addressed by the existing legal system.
I trust the autopilot in the commercial jet I'm flying in because it's got nearly 80 years of engineering heritage in control theory that keeps it from doing things like flipping the plane upside down for no reason or going into a nose dive after some turbulence, and nearly 70 years of heritage in avionics and realtime computers that keeps it from freezing when a cosmic ray flips a bit in memory or from thinking it's going at the speed of light when it crosses the dateline or flies over the north pole.
You should try giving the FAA and NTSB a little credit. It was only 6 years ago that the F-22 borked itself crossing the dateline, because the military didn't force their contractor to follow the FAA's best practices in writing the software.
So the Hollywood Elite can use their fame to push left leaning ideas and that's fine with you, but if someone famous tries to push conservative positions? Double standard much?
Fuck off. This is not a left or right issue, it's a civil rights issue.
So the Hollywood Elite can use their fame to push for more civil rights and that's fine with you, but if someone famous tries to push for less civil rights? Double standard much? Does that clear it up?
If they're going to benefit from running wires on public land, or using public spectrum, then they need to become a public utility.
The joke is that the regulated parts of the telco industry are now pushing as aggressively as possible to switch their entire infrastrucute over to internet protocols so that they aren't regulated anymore. AT&T recently made a FCC submission requesting that they not have to continue supporting their switched telephone network (TDM). Here's all the responses for and against
They'll still be using wires on public land and providing phone service over *copper wires, just not under the auspices of "legacy" FCC regulations. I.E. if AT&T gets their way, they'd no longer have a legal obligation to continue wired phone service to the middle of Montana or even the poor part of town.
*only a fraction of U-Verse customers have fiber to the home
The pay of top executives is usually determined by a supervisory board. Getting on a board doesn't require much work, in exchange for which members enjoy a number of benefits determined by executives. Getting onto and staying on boards in the first place requires staying in the good graces of company executives. Thus, a positive feedback loop occurs, resulting in executive pay and departure packages determined not by metrics that benefit the owners, but by friends doing each other favors.
Studies have shown that executive compensation boards/consultants lead to higher executive salaries than in companies that decide pay internally. Mostly because the board of directors doesn't have to shoulder any responsibility for the salary numbers they approve.
The biggest problem we should be worried about is that old, out of date, and less safe (than modern) plants will be kept active WAY past their best before dates because so much effort has gone in to making it basically impossible to even design, let al9ong build next generation plants that there is little choice.
TFA
Nor is there a serious case to be made that interest in new reactors has been suppressed by decades of overregulation. The candidates for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1980 have almost all been subject to what amounts to a nuclear industry veto.4 In many cases, they have had outright industry endorsement. The idea that these industry-vetted commissioners have overseen 30 years of excessive regulation doesnâ(TM)t pass the straight-face test.
I'm not disputing that NIMBY and environmental regulations have retarded nuclear growth, but the real reason we're still running decades old power plants waaaaaaaay past their end-of-life date is regulatory capture.
The nuclear industry says "don't worry, we can run a 40 year old plant safely" and the regulators say "okay, we believe you" This is despite every indication that the plants are corroding in place and the operators are doing as little maintanence as possible.
Their specs claim between 5400 and 7200 rpm, but my understanding is that it's much more 5400 than 7200, which is how they get less power usage and lower noise levels than 7200 rpm drives.
It's like having 1000hp hooked to an automatic transmission.
Anyone generating serious horsepower is using an automatic transmission. The guys at Bugatti will sell you a 1,000* horsepower 7-speed manual transmission for $120,000. The guys at Hughes Performance will sell you a 3~4,000 horsepower 2 or 3 speed automatic transmission for $8,000.
Really high horsepower cars don't even have transmissions, just a bunch of clutch plates that progressively engage until the tires are 1:1 with the engine. *The Bugatti has to electronically limit the horsepower at low speeds or it would destroy their manual transmission.
The fact that the Librarian of Congress can issue a directive making it illegal under the DMCA for consumers to unlock phones that have been locked by providers
The LoC did not make unlocking illegal. The default status of cell phone unlocking is 'not legal'
The LoC allowed for an exemption to the law and then decided not to renew that exemption.
If people like you are this scared by the increase in spending slowing down, how are they going to react if there is ever a proposal to actually reduce spending?
I'm not scared of reducing spending. I am scared of only reducing spending while not fixing the tax code to remove the kind of income equality which preceded the Great Depression.
Remember the good old days when Republicans refused to entertain the possibility of $1 in tax increases for $10 in spending cuts? Yea. They should have taken that deal while it was on the table.
IANAR, but just no. Both sides may take the blame for failing to come up with real cuts, but the full burden of responsibility for the sequester rests solidly on Barry's broad shoulders.
House Republicans voted 174 for and 66 against the Budget Control Act of 2011, which created the Sequester. House Democrats were evenly split 95:95
The Sequester could never have become law without overwhelming Republican support in the House And guess who's been pointing fingers and screaming the loudest about the sequester.
"Why the hell are you spending so much more than you make????"
Metaphors comparing personal and government spending tend to fall apart once you reach that question, because personal and government spending do not fundamentally operate the same way.
So without getting into interests rates or international trade flows, the short version is that you spend more than you make as an investment in the future.
The only real crisised have been the ones manufactured by the Republican party. The US Government isn't broke and this wasn't a problem that needed to be solved post-haste.
You mean the House Republicans who passed not one but two bills as alternatives to replace sequestration
Republicans passed those bills in the 112th Congressional session. Which means those bills are dead right now, since we're in the 113th session. They'd need to be resubmitted and brought back for a vote if Republicans were serious about putting them into play.
The real problem is that Republicans think that cutting spending is the only way to fix the budget, despite the fact that taxes are at historic lows and austerity is actually a really shitty idea (see: europe).
*skip down to the last section if you don't want to read a bunch of political posturing
There isn't a single Federal department that will not spend more money this year even with the sequester than they spent last year. The $85B in cuts from the sequester is somehow magical: the whole government â" every basic function â" apparently falls apart without this sliver of money (in a $3.6T overall spending plan), again noting that they will still spend more money than last year, even with the sequester. Amazing, really.
Your point being that.... nothing bad is going to happen? Because if that's what you're trying to say, you might as well come right out with it.
I think you're missing the fact that the sequester isn't x% off the total budget. It's x% off of almost every item in the budget. How long is your landlord going to accept 95% of your rent bill? How long are your pets going to eat 95% of their regular diet? How long are you going to spend 95% of the maintanence required for your car?
The end-game here is to supplant and possibly replace sovereign currencies entirely.
The problem with replacing sovereign currencies is that there's no one steering the ship when things get ugly. Europe is a prime example where sovereign currencies were replaced, everything has gone to shit, and there's 27 competing agendas.
I'm happy to see bitcoins form the foundation of a parallel economy, but fuck no I don't want it to supplant or replace the dollar.
It may seem overly ambitious, but from all the financial scandals and other daily scams that are perpetuated by the banking and financial industry - people are getting *sick* of how the current system operates.
This could be fixed, but the bankers and the regulators are far too tightly intertwined. Look at the shit show created by Republicans because Obama and Elizabeth Warren created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be independant of Congress. Republicans have held a gun to the CFPB's head since its inception, because Obama wouldn't neuter the organization.
A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places. Therefore, 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest amount that can be handled in a transaction. If necessary, the protocol and related software can be modified to handle even smaller amounts.
I'm surprised you had so much to say about bitcoins without knowing this fact.
That's because the FA-18 used the normal aquisitions process and not the F-22/F-35's "design and build at the same time" process. The F-22/F-35 should have been finalized instead of the US Government shelling out megabucks for flying prototypes.
3) The same content can be unlocked with effort/talent rather than money.
Remember when the same content could be unlocked with cheatcodes? IDDQD, IDKFA, and IDBEHOLD want their microtransactions back
I can think of several games (JRPGs are notoriously bad with this) where to get a certain item or to get to a certain boss, the process was basically "spend 10 hours doing mindless tasks". Currently, there are two choices: don't see the content, or spend valuable time on meaningless tasks unlocking it. Microtransactions provide a third choice.
Cheat codes provide a 3rd choice. Microtransactions are an anti-gamer 4th choice.
The immense efforts that go into manipulating eligibility and registration, understaffing polling places in poor areas, and historically even outright violence prove that the powers that be are afraid of voters.
Are we not mentioning which of the two "pre-bought," "support the system," "wolves" that do this?
I have a hard time with "both parties are bad," when anyone can make a cursory investigation and see that actually, one party is actively trying to redress economic and social injustices while the other party is actively trying to further them.
I'm not trying to excuse the overlap where the two wolves are killing sheep, but only one of the wolves seems to care about the long term health of its food supply. /Sorry I couldn't come up with a car analogy
There are photographers who've made careers out of recreating famous photos by using the "same camera, settings, direction, time of day, physical location etc" Usually landscapes, since it's not too hard to find the exact spot a picture was taken from and because the pictures usually show some progression of time.
Much like two bullets fired from a gun clamped in a vise will never hit exactly the same point, so too is a photograph unique
Unique? The grouping should be close enough that it doesn't make any practical difference... much like two photographers using the same cameras and the same settings in the same locations. Nobody says that every daily paper in a run is somehow unique because there are minute variations in the printing process.
Every non-trivial arrangement of atoms in the universe is unique. Either uniqueness is sufficient (and every process can be art), or else it isn't and you need a more robust discriminator.
Well... the GP made a decent argument that uniqueness is not sufficient and provided us a set of criteria that can be used as "a more robust discriminator." You haven't really made any arguments, just a bunch of declaratory statements.
That only happens with companies that are failing anyway. Its in nobody's interest to destroy a thriving business, or at least one that is worth more alive than dead.
[Citation Needed] More importantly, you are making assumptions about what is and isn't rational behavior from your perspective.
From the perspective of a corporate raider: Mortgaging a healthy company to the hilt and then selling off its assets is wildly profitable. They don't want to run the company and earn a respectable return on investment. They are not in it for long term profits. They want X00% return on investment within a few years and they can get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why purchase an imitator when you can buy the original âoeModel Mâ. We have produced the buckling spring âoeClickâ keyboard for IBM and thousands of discriminating users worldwide for 15 yearsâ¦. Join the many that have made the switch to a much more accurate data entry alternative.
http://www.pckeyboard.com/
IBM originally contracted out their keyboards to Lexmark and, when the contract ran out, Lexmark employees bought the rights and formed Unicomp.
Filibustering the CIA director's nomination is nothing but grandstanding.
The CIA doesn't have any authority inside the USA, so WTF does Eric Holder's comments about drones have to do with the CIA?
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
No.
This is a form of the prisoner's dilemma.
Individually, it makes sense for each of us to take the easy way out, but collectively, this is bad public policy.
Private accusations of crime, followed by private punishments, is odious to our system of justice.
More and more court cases are ending up like this one, where minimal evidence gets turned away as insufficient.
The real truth is that the copyright industry doesn't want to prosecute these cases, because lawyers and discovery and expert witnesses are expensive.
Even Hollywood can't afford 10,000 cases at a time.
I am not unsympathetic to their problem, but the solution needs to balance the due process rights of the people with the interests of big business.
That hasn't happened since the copyright owners discovered the scale of infringement couldn't be cheaply addressed by the existing legal system.
I trust the autopilot in the commercial jet I'm flying in because it's got nearly 80 years of engineering heritage in control theory that keeps it from doing things like flipping the plane upside down for no reason or going into a nose dive after some turbulence, and nearly 70 years of heritage in avionics and realtime computers that keeps it from freezing when a cosmic ray flips a bit in memory or from thinking it's going at the speed of light when it crosses the dateline or flies over the north pole.
You should try giving the FAA and NTSB a little credit.
It was only 6 years ago that the F-22 borked itself crossing the dateline,
because the military didn't force their contractor to follow the FAA's best practices in writing the software.
The interesting thing here is that the story Didn't push his agenda yet his story was still rejected.
It wasn't the story that was rejected, it was Orson Scott Card.
The story is collateral damage.
So the Hollywood Elite can use their fame to push left leaning ideas and that's fine with you, but if someone famous tries to push conservative positions? Double standard much?
Fuck off.
This is not a left or right issue, it's a civil rights issue.
So the Hollywood Elite can use their fame to push for more civil rights and that's fine with you, but if someone famous tries to push for less civil rights? Double standard much?
Does that clear it up?
If they're going to benefit from running wires on public land, or using public spectrum, then they need to become a public utility.
The joke is that the regulated parts of the telco industry are now pushing as aggressively as possible to switch their entire infrastrucute over to internet protocols so that they aren't regulated anymore.
AT&T recently made a FCC submission requesting that they not have to continue supporting their switched telephone network (TDM).
Here's all the responses for and against
They'll still be using wires on public land and providing phone service over *copper wires, just not under the auspices of "legacy" FCC regulations.
I.E. if AT&T gets their way, they'd no longer have a legal obligation to continue wired phone service to the middle of Montana or even the poor part of town.
*only a fraction of U-Verse customers have fiber to the home
The pay of top executives is usually determined by a supervisory board. Getting on a board doesn't require much work, in exchange for which members enjoy a number of benefits determined by executives. Getting onto and staying on boards in the first place requires staying in the good graces of company executives. Thus, a positive feedback loop occurs, resulting in executive pay and departure packages determined not by metrics that benefit the owners, but by friends doing each other favors.
Studies have shown that executive compensation boards/consultants lead to higher executive salaries than in companies that decide pay internally.
Mostly because the board of directors doesn't have to shoulder any responsibility for the salary numbers they approve.
The biggest problem we should be worried about is that old, out of date, and less safe (than modern) plants will be kept active WAY past their best before dates because so much effort has gone in to making it basically impossible to even design, let al9ong build next generation plants that there is little choice.
TFA
Nor is there a serious case to be made that interest in new reactors has been suppressed by decades of overregulation. The candidates for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1980 have almost all been subject to what amounts to a nuclear industry veto.4 In many cases, they have had outright industry endorsement. The idea that these industry-vetted commissioners have overseen 30 years of excessive regulation doesnâ(TM)t pass the straight-face test.
I'm not disputing that NIMBY and environmental regulations have retarded nuclear growth, but the real reason we're still running decades old power plants waaaaaaaay past their end-of-life date is regulatory capture.
The nuclear industry says "don't worry, we can run a 40 year old plant safely" and the regulators say "okay, we believe you"
This is despite every indication that the plants are corroding in place and the operators are doing as little maintanence as possible.
I don't know why you would use budget drives when there are drives designed for multi-stream recording and playback.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=150
Optimized for smooth, .
(Western Digital also makes a cheaper version that does 5 streams)
Their specs claim between 5400 and 7200 rpm, but my understanding is that it's much more 5400 than 7200,
which is how they get less power usage and lower noise levels than 7200 rpm drives.
If a leader is unpredictable, no one can do business with them.
North Korea and Iran have been fairly predictable, but they've been sanctioned like hell by western nations.
It's like having 1000hp hooked to an automatic transmission.
Anyone generating serious horsepower is using an automatic transmission.
The guys at Bugatti will sell you a 1,000* horsepower 7-speed manual transmission for $120,000.
The guys at Hughes Performance will sell you a 3~4,000 horsepower 2 or 3 speed automatic transmission for $8,000.
Really high horsepower cars don't even have transmissions, just a bunch of clutch plates that progressively engage until the tires are 1:1 with the engine.
*The Bugatti has to electronically limit the horsepower at low speeds or it would destroy their manual transmission.
The fact that the Librarian of Congress can issue a directive making it illegal under the DMCA for consumers to unlock phones that have been locked by providers
The LoC did not make unlocking illegal.
The default status of cell phone unlocking is 'not legal'
The LoC allowed for an exemption to the law and then decided not to renew that exemption.
If people like you are this scared by the increase in spending slowing down, how are they going to react if there is ever a proposal to actually reduce spending?
I'm not scared of reducing spending.
I am scared of only reducing spending while not fixing the tax code to remove the kind of income equality which preceded the Great Depression.
Remember the good old days when Republicans refused to entertain the possibility of $1 in tax increases for $10 in spending cuts?
Yea. They should have taken that deal while it was on the table.
IANAR, but just no. Both sides may take the blame for failing to come up with real cuts, but the full burden of responsibility for the sequester rests solidly on Barry's broad shoulders.
House Republicans voted 174 for and 66 against the Budget Control Act of 2011, which created the Sequester.
House Democrats were evenly split 95:95
The Sequester could never have become law without overwhelming Republican support in the House
And guess who's been pointing fingers and screaming the loudest about the sequester.
An even BETTER question to ask is:
"Why the hell are you spending so much more than you make????"
Metaphors comparing personal and government spending tend to fall apart once you reach that question, because personal and government spending do not fundamentally operate the same way.
So without getting into interests rates or international trade flows, the short version is that you spend more than you make as an investment in the future.
The only real crisised have been the ones manufactured by the Republican party.
The US Government isn't broke and this wasn't a problem that needed to be solved post-haste.
You mean the House Republicans who passed not one but two bills as alternatives to replace sequestration
Republicans passed those bills in the 112th Congressional session.
Which means those bills are dead right now, since we're in the 113th session.
They'd need to be resubmitted and brought back for a vote if Republicans were serious about putting them into play.
*Here's a summary of the Democratic proposal from Feb 14th which the Republican House leadership has refused to allow a vote on.
And the full text of the bill HR 699: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr699/text
The real problem is that Republicans think that cutting spending is the only way to fix the budget,
despite the fact that taxes are at historic lows and austerity is actually a really shitty idea (see: europe).
*skip down to the last section if you don't want to read a bunch of political posturing
There isn't a single Federal department that will not spend more money this year even with the sequester than they spent last year. The $85B in cuts from the sequester is somehow magical: the whole government â" every basic function â" apparently falls apart without this sliver of money (in a $3.6T overall spending plan), again noting that they will still spend more money than last year, even with the sequester. Amazing, really.
Your point being that.... nothing bad is going to happen?
Because if that's what you're trying to say, you might as well come right out with it.
I think you're missing the fact that the sequester isn't x% off the total budget. It's x% off of almost every item in the budget.
How long is your landlord going to accept 95% of your rent bill?
How long are your pets going to eat 95% of their regular diet?
How long are you going to spend 95% of the maintanence required for your car?
The end-game here is to supplant and possibly replace sovereign currencies entirely.
The problem with replacing sovereign currencies is that there's no one steering the ship when things get ugly.
Europe is a prime example where sovereign currencies were replaced, everything has gone to shit, and there's 27 competing agendas.
I'm happy to see bitcoins form the foundation of a parallel economy, but fuck no I don't want it to supplant or replace the dollar.
It may seem overly ambitious, but from all the financial scandals and other daily scams that are perpetuated by the banking and financial industry - people are getting *sick* of how the current system operates.
This could be fixed, but the bankers and the regulators are far too tightly intertwined.
Look at the shit show created by Republicans because Obama and Elizabeth Warren created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be independant of Congress.
Republicans have held a gun to the CFPB's head since its inception, because Obama wouldn't neuter the organization.
Hell, Wall Street is probably looking at ways to set up fractional bitcoin systems so they can do HFT in bitcoins,
Right now the problem is the increasing value of a bitcoin - at $30 each, 1 bitcoin is seriously going to overpay for a lot
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_divisible_are_bitcoins.3F
How divisible are bitcoins?
A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places.
Therefore, 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest amount that can be handled in a transaction.
If necessary, the protocol and related software can be modified to handle even smaller amounts.
I'm surprised you had so much to say about bitcoins without knowing this fact.
That's because the FA-18 used the normal aquisitions process and not the F-22/F-35's "design and build at the same time" process.
The F-22/F-35 should have been finalized instead of the US Government shelling out megabucks for flying prototypes.
3) The same content can be unlocked with effort/talent rather than money.
Remember when the same content could be unlocked with cheatcodes?
IDDQD, IDKFA, and IDBEHOLD want their microtransactions back
I can think of several games (JRPGs are notoriously bad with this) where to get a certain item or to get to a certain boss, the process was basically "spend 10 hours doing mindless tasks". Currently, there are two choices: don't see the content, or spend valuable time on meaningless tasks unlocking it. Microtransactions provide a third choice.
Cheat codes provide a 3rd choice.
Microtransactions are an anti-gamer 4th choice.
The immense efforts that go into manipulating eligibility and registration, understaffing polling places in poor areas, and historically even outright violence prove that the powers that be are afraid of voters.
Are we not mentioning which of the two "pre-bought," "support the system," "wolves" that do this?
I have a hard time with "both parties are bad," when anyone can make a cursory investigation and see that actually,
one party is actively trying to redress economic and social injustices while the other party is actively trying to further them.
I'm not trying to excuse the overlap where the two wolves are killing sheep, but only one of the wolves seems to care about the long term health of its food supply.
/Sorry I couldn't come up with a car analogy
I can't even start with how wrong that is.
There are photographers who've made careers out of recreating famous photos by using the "same camera, settings, direction, time of day, physical location etc"
Usually landscapes, since it's not too hard to find the exact spot a picture was taken from and because the pictures usually show some progression of time.
Much like two bullets fired from a gun clamped in a vise will never hit exactly the same point, so too is a photograph unique
Unique? The grouping should be close enough that it doesn't make any practical difference...
much like two photographers using the same cameras and the same settings in the same locations.
Nobody says that every daily paper in a run is somehow unique because there are minute variations in the printing process.
Every non-trivial arrangement of atoms in the universe is unique. Either uniqueness is sufficient (and every process can be art), or else it isn't and you need a more robust discriminator.
Well... the GP made a decent argument that uniqueness is not sufficient and provided us a set of criteria that can be used as "a more robust discriminator."
You haven't really made any arguments, just a bunch of declaratory statements.
That only happens with companies that are failing anyway. Its in nobody's interest to destroy a thriving business, or at least one that is worth more alive than dead.
[Citation Needed]
More importantly, you are making assumptions about what is and isn't rational behavior from your perspective.
From the perspective of a corporate raider:
Mortgaging a healthy company to the hilt and then selling off its assets is wildly profitable.
They don't want to run the company and earn a respectable return on investment.
They are not in it for long term profits.
They want X00% return on investment within a few years and they can get it.
Different motives and different agendas leads to different 'rational' behaviors. /. story today which showed us that 'rational' behavior is not a universal constant
Hence regulation to reign in the more destructive, yet completely rational, actors.
There was even a