of course they don't spend money on R&D, because we won't let them. One company increased prices on one drug to try to fund research on newer drugs, and the news media blew a gasket. I'm not sure how they think that shit gets done or where the money is supposed to come from. Now the goverment is getting into the feeding frenzy.
They increased a cost-to-consumer by over $700. That is not okay, at least not after they have recouped development costs and a healthy profit. Supply-and-demand doesn't work right when you have a monopoly over a lifesaving drug. It's okay to defend big pharma when it comes to recouping development costs of a given drug over a patent's lifetime. It is not okay to defend them when they raise a single drug's cost by $700 overnight.
True for some startups, but twitter's market cap is $19B. It's a publicly listed company with 676,300,000 shares outstanding which are being bought and sold for $28.17 each.
$28.17 x 676,300,000 = $19,051,371,000
Until people want to start literally giving away twitter shares, it's *actually* worth a fuckton of money.
...
You should value companies based on their future profits/cashflows. Anything else is just witchcraft. And there is nothing special about tech companies that exempts them from financial reality.
Yes, you should value companies that way, but no, other ways of valuing a company aren't whichcraft. Once you have a highly liquid public market willing to buy your shares, obviously it's okay to value a company (at least in the short-term) based on what people are willing to pay for it. If they're willing to pay *more* than the expected value of future profits, of course, then you should usually sell, but it's not witchcraft.
Your expectation is that if you discover wrongdoing, you should be the one to do prison time rather than those responsible?
Not at all. My expectation is that if there is something so massive and criminal going on as to be fundamentally treasonous (regardless of the intentions of the people involved) that you feel you have no possible option except for going outside the chain of command and to the *press* to report on something you know will cause harm to your nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus, you should be willing to stay and face the music. It's a question of honor from the individual's perspective and practicality from the country's.
Sometimes you have to break the rules because the rules fail, but if it's important enough to break the rule, it should be important enough to stand up for what you believe in in court. I feel the same way about GWB--he ordered people tortured and should have gone to jail for it, which (if he believed it was important) should have been a price he was willing to pay.
Everyone with half a brain in the IT community knew mass surveillance was going on pre-Snowden, and nobody in the mainstream community believed it could be. Of course there's value to having a democracy know when it's being surveilled by its own government. But if you accept as a premise that nations need to be able to keep secrets, then you simply cannot let individuals decide when to reveal those secrets to the public at their own whim, and certainly not without consequence.
Most drivers consider themselves to be above average. Why would that not extend to server operators?
It's worse than that. Servers are much, much, much more complex than cars. If you have the secret formula for coca-cola, sure, keep it in house and put a billion dollars into securing it, although it really shouldn't be on any internet connected machines at all. But 99% of other stuff, who gives a crap?
See the number of massive public breaches we've had in the last few years? The guys at those companies thought their systems were okay, too.
... requires you reveal information. The laws of physics aren't going to change for anyone.
Not only that, but a good portion of a leakage makes you more secure and is better for the user. How many millions of sites have a facebook login option? So Facebook can see your IP from that... because your browser is loading their javascript.
Would you really rather have a million copies of that javascript file out there that don't get updated when Facebook discovers a vulnerability or improves a security feature? Let's pretend you're not *you*, the tech guy running noscript, but a normal user.
There was a lack of protection. If it was important enough he should have been willing to do the time. You can't have individuals deciding what is and what is not a national security secret with no consequence. A legitimate whistleblower protection for reporting to someone in the chain of command (e.g. someone working for Congress on that specific issue) would have been appropriate.
Traditionally, gov't misconduct are redressed through lawsuits and repeated judicial decisions and appeals, until a high court ends the cycle. In the slow motion days of horses and buggies this process used to work reasonably well. But today, with the high speed prosecutorial activism of modern US presidents (from both parties), and the rapid rise of new police technology, this sort of crap has spun out of control. The appeals process simply takes much too long (years or decade). By that time a whole new round of activism and spy tech has arrived and been abused, and The Rule of Law falls even further behind.
Obviously adding more kangaroo courts like FISA to deter presidential/police abuses before they arise doesn't work. So what will?
Actually funding the regular courts enough to clear up their backlog and preside over the speedy execution of justice. Federal Courts, by-and-large, are fairly competent places run by fairly competent people who have too many cases. Not nearly as bad as state courts, but still overburdened. If your complaint is the time it takes to get things through them, you have to fund them better. Personally I suspect they should be funded by some kind of system that looks at percentage fees for large dollar value cases, but regardless of where you find the money, the answer is find the money. Specialty courts like FISA rarely work well. They get a bit too parochial.
No, it's trying to make people think that having an FCC is useless and to try to associate even subconsciously their annual budget with relatively inexpensive things like this because this is an example of effectiveness. Typical conservative propaganda tactics. Government is useless to them, and if you find something where it's useful they'll try to disparage it anyway. Also, when you elect then they'll take whatever works about government and break it deliberately just so they can say it's broken.
Oh, and it's totally ok for people to pull crap like this illegal wifi blocking to them because capitalism.
Good thing we paid: $375,380,313 this year for the FCC, so that they could accomplish this.
If you're not happy with what the FCC does, stop letting industry players sit on the FCC and give them real power. The fine fine they fined here may be enough to hit a hotel, but it's a pittance to the big companies.
It's not like the Democratic party called him up and gave him permission to run.
It's a democratic primary. If the party really didn't want him to run, he wouldn't be running. They would change debate rules to keep him out and deny him access to anyone of significance in the party at any level, local, state, or federal. They would kill his media coverage more than they have. Everyone in the party would get the message that if they went within ten feet of this guy they would be bucking the party establishment and would not have party support come reelection time. That's how major political parties work. They are engines of political control, not of democracy.
I thought all the Microsoft data was stored in Ireland. Wasn't that their previous excuse?
Of course not. *Some* of their data is stored in Ireland, but they're a global company with a lot of smart engineers who know that things like latency matter. They have more than one data center.
It's not a porno collection problem, it's a photograph and home movies problem.
The cloud is a great place to store those, and if you live for a decade or two, even if you don't photograph all the time, you get a lot. Add that to the documents you have and you go way over a 50G limit. Single SD cards are 8GB at this point. At $1/month for 25 GB, personal RAID starts looking better and better.
When it comes to pigs, you should be pointing a gun, not a camera!
Real pigs would tear you limb from limb, you idiot. There's a reason you call it a "Wild boar" when you're not trying to make it sound nice and domesticated. They have skins so thick that a bullet from a rifle might make them angry and you don't want to run across them.
As to police officers... no. Just no. In most countries in the world that will get you shot. Occasionally it will get you tortured. There's no place where it's a good idea.
Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her
While Bernie Sanders is an independent, he does caucus with the Democrats. He's also trying to get the nomination of the Democratic party. You haven't explicitly defined 'viable' here, but I believe Bernie Sanders does indeed satisfy the criteria to be elected President.
Bernie's okay, but I figure he basically was allowed to run because he was too crazy a prospect to be a real threat to the Clinton machine.
So you're dismissing his candidacy on emotional grounds? How helpful. If only everyone thought like you -- then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a chance at implementing meaningful change in this country.
I find it unlikely he wins the primary. I'd be happy, I think, if he won the general. I'm not dismissing his candidacy on emotional grounds, I just think that he was allowed to run primarily because somebody decided he didn't pose a threat. Being outside the classic party establishment may also have made it practical.
Because the Clintons have the party establishment tied up, Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her
Never mind that Sanders has been polling above Clinton at least part of the time, he's not "viable" because "reasons."
Of course, the only reason people believe Sanders is "crazy" is because the media keeps claiming so, but that's a total lie -- in reality, Sanders' positions are completely reasonable and moderate.
He's not viable because the general election is going to be a whole lot worse for him than the primaries, no matter how he's polling generally now. The attack ads almost write themselves. They do for Hillary too because of how much is anti-Clinton on the right, so neither of them are great for a general, but she's already been through all of them and her general numbers now are the result of that, whereas Bernie will see a hit once the general public has seen more attack aimed at him. Things like "socialist" may not matter as much on the left, but that label alone will cost him points on the right. And some of his lines in debate will kill him on the right. In reality he *might* be a better president than HRC, he'd certainly care about Americans more and try to make better policy changes, although HRC might get more done even though being much less trustworthy, just because she's a good politician. Most of Bernie's more leftist ideas would be blocked by Congress, but he'd probably get some good things done. It's really hard to say who would ultimately be better.
But either will be better than the Republicans, because the next president gets to appoint major voices to the Supreme Court for the next several decades.
This is the Democrat Party we are talking about. The coronation of Hillary for 2016 was decided years ago.
No, his main problem was nobody knew who the fuck he was outside of a few nerds.
This guy was less prepared to run a presidential campaign than that fucking idiot Rick Perry. And that makes him a bigger idiot than Rick Perry--now there's an accomplishment.
It doesn't matter how prepared he is. Because the Clintons have the party establishment tied up, Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her, and she has a lot of legacy antipathy that will make the general election harder for her. Bernie's okay, but I figure he basically was allowed to run because he was too crazy a prospect to be a real threat to the Clinton machine.
Q? Well acted, but still a universe changing plot device that does not change the universe gets a bit old after the third time. Farscape saw that failing in Trek and took that plot weakness head on:
Crichton: Godlike aliens, man, do I hate godlike aliens! I'll trade a critter for a godlike alien any day!
Actually, I find it much more interesting than one that *does* change the universe. Changing the universe is the lazy part.
Enterprise was a return to what made Star Trek good - the ideas. Voyager had some, but always copped out by resolving every moral or philosophical question by firing an inverse tachyon beam at it.
My worry is that this new TV series will suck like the new movies did. They were okay as action movies I guess, if you like being blinded by lens flare, but as Star Trek they were the worst of what Voyager wanted to be - an action driven show. DS9 had action but you actually cared about it, not so much in Voyager or the two new movies.
Absolutely. Enterprise was mostly a return to the Greek morality play model of traditional trek or TNG, with the occasional shark-jumping. Alien Nazis somehow didn't make it as bad as Voyager, and Scott Bacula with his Quantum Leap background fit really well into the morality play aspect of it.
The new Trek movies are fun but not intellectual; I'll appreciate them for what they are but know they're not designed to provoke thought.
A new Trek could go too many ways for us to know how it'll be at this point. I don't trust CBS, and Trek has had obvious writing problems in the past, but TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, and Enterprise all added something meaningful to television. And even Voyager had the doctor. So hopefully they'll come up with something worth watching.
Barbie of Borg was there only to rescue the failing ratings. The character added nothing of significant value beyond looking good in a tight jumpsuit.
She didn't add anything of sci-fi value, but she added some more fun storylines. The doctor taking over her body and eating all that cheesecake was funny.
T'Pol was somewhat interesting in a repressing emotions way, although not nearly as interesting as she could have been in they had written her differently. The half-human part of Spock was important to making him an interesting character, which was why Tuvok was not engaging. With T'Pol, you saw some influence on her character from living with humans, and that was somewhat interesting.
Linda Park could have been interesting--pretty, smart, and well-travelled language genius--but they managed to pull a Uhura and turn her into the ship's receptionist. We hardly see her at all in good character development stories. It's like the writers didn't know how to write strong women.
Oh sure, and everyone was shocked to discover Voice of Russia radio stations happen to trend pro-Putin.
In the real world, Napoleon was the greatest general in the world not because he won every battle, but because he bought every newspaper. Please remember that almost every news story you read is propaganda of one sort or another--we've developed a whole ecosystem of it.
Star Trek still exists because the original series was all about social justice. The original series was a commentary on society as much as it was science fiction.
Let This Be Your Last Battlefield.
TOS wasn't pro-hippie in that it recognized the importance of duty and responsibility and the complexities of life, but it was pro-equality, pro-egalitarian, anti-discriminatory.
Did you see what they did with supergirl last week? They took what could have been a fun season's worth of plot development and jammed into an episode as cliche and absurd as possible. I am not encouraged by CBS's ability to do good work with big fantasy franchises.
It doesn't really matter that it was shut down--what matters is that it demonstrates the problem with forum-shopping, which the EFF is trying to prevent.
This is further complicated by the fact that The Federal Circuit *can't* overturn its own earlier decisions easily. The three-judge panel on a particular case has to respect the precedents set by an earlier case. So they may be able to weaken or strengthen a case, but they can't really overturn it. (Otherwise the law would depend entirely on which judges you happen to get.)
Slashdot Mirror
of course they don't spend money on R&D, because we won't let them. One company increased prices on one drug to try to fund research on newer drugs, and the news media blew a gasket. I'm not sure how they think that shit gets done or where the money is supposed to come from. Now the goverment is getting into the feeding frenzy.
They increased a cost-to-consumer by over $700. That is not okay, at least not after they have recouped development costs and a healthy profit. Supply-and-demand doesn't work right when you have a monopoly over a lifesaving drug. It's okay to defend big pharma when it comes to recouping development costs of a given drug over a patent's lifetime. It is not okay to defend them when they raise a single drug's cost by $700 overnight.
True for some startups, but twitter's market cap is $19B. It's a publicly listed company with 676,300,000 shares outstanding which are being bought and sold for $28.17 each.
$28.17 x 676,300,000 = $19,051,371,000
Until people want to start literally giving away twitter shares, it's *actually* worth a fuckton of money.
...
You should value companies based on their future profits/cashflows. Anything else is just witchcraft. And there is nothing special about tech companies that exempts them from financial reality.
Yes, you should value companies that way, but no, other ways of valuing a company aren't whichcraft. Once you have a highly liquid public market willing to buy your shares, obviously it's okay to value a company (at least in the short-term) based on what people are willing to pay for it. If they're willing to pay *more* than the expected value of future profits, of course, then you should usually sell, but it's not witchcraft.
Your expectation is that if you discover wrongdoing, you should be the one to do prison time rather than those responsible?
Not at all. My expectation is that if there is something so massive and criminal going on as to be fundamentally treasonous (regardless of the intentions of the people involved) that you feel you have no possible option except for going outside the chain of command and to the *press* to report on something you know will cause harm to your nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus, you should be willing to stay and face the music. It's a question of honor from the individual's perspective and practicality from the country's.
Sometimes you have to break the rules because the rules fail, but if it's important enough to break the rule, it should be important enough to stand up for what you believe in in court. I feel the same way about GWB--he ordered people tortured and should have gone to jail for it, which (if he believed it was important) should have been a price he was willing to pay.
Everyone with half a brain in the IT community knew mass surveillance was going on pre-Snowden, and nobody in the mainstream community believed it could be. Of course there's value to having a democracy know when it's being surveilled by its own government. But if you accept as a premise that nations need to be able to keep secrets, then you simply cannot let individuals decide when to reveal those secrets to the public at their own whim, and certainly not without consequence.
Most drivers consider themselves to be above average. Why would that not extend to server operators?
It's worse than that. Servers are much, much, much more complex than cars. If you have the secret formula for coca-cola, sure, keep it in house and put a billion dollars into securing it, although it really shouldn't be on any internet connected machines at all. But 99% of other stuff, who gives a crap?
See the number of massive public breaches we've had in the last few years? The guys at those companies thought their systems were okay, too.
... requires you reveal information. The laws of physics aren't going to change for anyone.
Not only that, but a good portion of a leakage makes you more secure and is better for the user. How many millions of sites have a facebook login option? So Facebook can see your IP from that... because your browser is loading their javascript.
Would you really rather have a million copies of that javascript file out there that don't get updated when Facebook discovers a vulnerability or improves a security feature? Let's pretend you're not *you*, the tech guy running noscript, but a normal user.
There was a lack of protection. If it was important enough he should have been willing to do the time. You can't have individuals deciding what is and what is not a national security secret with no consequence. A legitimate whistleblower protection for reporting to someone in the chain of command (e.g. someone working for Congress on that specific issue) would have been appropriate.
Traditionally, gov't misconduct are redressed through lawsuits and repeated judicial decisions and appeals, until a high court ends the cycle. In the slow motion days of horses and buggies this process used to work reasonably well. But today, with the high speed prosecutorial activism of modern US presidents (from both parties), and the rapid rise of new police technology, this sort of crap has spun out of control. The appeals process simply takes much too long (years or decade). By that time a whole new round of activism and spy tech has arrived and been abused, and The Rule of Law falls even further behind.
Obviously adding more kangaroo courts like FISA to deter presidential/police abuses before they arise doesn't work. So what will?
Actually funding the regular courts enough to clear up their backlog and preside over the speedy execution of justice. Federal Courts, by-and-large, are fairly competent places run by fairly competent people who have too many cases. Not nearly as bad as state courts, but still overburdened. If your complaint is the time it takes to get things through them, you have to fund them better. Personally I suspect they should be funded by some kind of system that looks at percentage fees for large dollar value cases, but regardless of where you find the money, the answer is find the money. Specialty courts like FISA rarely work well. They get a bit too parochial.
True. The first one that came up on google was 8GB. :)
No, it's trying to make people think that having an FCC is useless and to try to associate even subconsciously their annual budget with relatively inexpensive things like this because this is an example of effectiveness. Typical conservative propaganda tactics. Government is useless to them, and if you find something where it's useful they'll try to disparage it anyway. Also, when you elect then they'll take whatever works about government and break it deliberately just so they can say it's broken.
Oh, and it's totally ok for people to pull crap like this illegal wifi blocking to them because capitalism.
Good thing we paid: $375,380,313 this year for the FCC, so that they could accomplish this.
If you're not happy with what the FCC does, stop letting industry players sit on the FCC and give them real power. The fine fine they fined here may be enough to hit a hotel, but it's a pittance to the big companies.
It's not like the Democratic party called him up and gave him permission to run.
It's a democratic primary. If the party really didn't want him to run, he wouldn't be running. They would change debate rules to keep him out and deny him access to anyone of significance in the party at any level, local, state, or federal. They would kill his media coverage more than they have. Everyone in the party would get the message that if they went within ten feet of this guy they would be bucking the party establishment and would not have party support come reelection time. That's how major political parties work. They are engines of political control, not of democracy.
I thought all the Microsoft data was stored in Ireland. Wasn't that their previous excuse?
Of course not. *Some* of their data is stored in Ireland, but they're a global company with a lot of smart engineers who know that things like latency matter. They have more than one data center.
It's not a porno collection problem, it's a photograph and home movies problem.
The cloud is a great place to store those, and if you live for a decade or two, even if you don't photograph all the time, you get a lot. Add that to the documents you have and you go way over a 50G limit. Single SD cards are 8GB at this point. At $1/month for 25 GB, personal RAID starts looking better and better.
When it comes to pigs, you should be pointing a gun, not a camera!
Real pigs would tear you limb from limb, you idiot. There's a reason you call it a "Wild boar" when you're not trying to make it sound nice and domesticated. They have skins so thick that a bullet from a rifle might make them angry and you don't want to run across them.
As to police officers... no. Just no. In most countries in the world that will get you shot. Occasionally it will get you tortured. There's no place where it's a good idea.
Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her
While Bernie Sanders is an independent, he does caucus with the Democrats. He's also trying to get the nomination of the Democratic party. You haven't explicitly defined 'viable' here, but I believe Bernie Sanders does indeed satisfy the criteria to be elected President.
Bernie's okay, but I figure he basically was allowed to run because he was too crazy a prospect to be a real threat to the Clinton machine.
So you're dismissing his candidacy on emotional grounds? How helpful. If only everyone thought like you -- then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a chance at implementing meaningful change in this country.
I find it unlikely he wins the primary. I'd be happy, I think, if he won the general. I'm not dismissing his candidacy on emotional grounds, I just think that he was allowed to run primarily because somebody decided he didn't pose a threat. Being outside the classic party establishment may also have made it practical.
Never mind that Sanders has been polling above Clinton at least part of the time, he's not "viable" because "reasons."
Of course, the only reason people believe Sanders is "crazy" is because the media keeps claiming so, but that's a total lie -- in reality, Sanders' positions are completely reasonable and moderate.
He's not viable because the general election is going to be a whole lot worse for him than the primaries, no matter how he's polling generally now. The attack ads almost write themselves. They do for Hillary too because of how much is anti-Clinton on the right, so neither of them are great for a general, but she's already been through all of them and her general numbers now are the result of that, whereas Bernie will see a hit once the general public has seen more attack aimed at him. Things like "socialist" may not matter as much on the left, but that label alone will cost him points on the right. And some of his lines in debate will kill him on the right. In reality he *might* be a better president than HRC, he'd certainly care about Americans more and try to make better policy changes, although HRC might get more done even though being much less trustworthy, just because she's a good politician. Most of Bernie's more leftist ideas would be blocked by Congress, but he'd probably get some good things done. It's really hard to say who would ultimately be better.
But either will be better than the Republicans, because the next president gets to appoint major voices to the Supreme Court for the next several decades.
This is the Democrat Party we are talking about. The coronation of Hillary for 2016 was decided years ago.
No, his main problem was nobody knew who the fuck he was outside of a few nerds.
This guy was less prepared to run a presidential campaign than that fucking idiot Rick Perry. And that makes him a bigger idiot than Rick Perry--now there's an accomplishment.
It doesn't matter how prepared he is. Because the Clintons have the party establishment tied up, Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her, and she has a lot of legacy antipathy that will make the general election harder for her. Bernie's okay, but I figure he basically was allowed to run because he was too crazy a prospect to be a real threat to the Clinton machine.
Q?
Well acted, but still a universe changing plot device that does not change the universe gets a bit old after the third time.
Farscape saw that failing in Trek and took that plot weakness head on:
Actually, I find it much more interesting than one that *does* change the universe. Changing the universe is the lazy part.
Enterprise was a return to what made Star Trek good - the ideas. Voyager had some, but always copped out by resolving every moral or philosophical question by firing an inverse tachyon beam at it.
My worry is that this new TV series will suck like the new movies did. They were okay as action movies I guess, if you like being blinded by lens flare, but as Star Trek they were the worst of what Voyager wanted to be - an action driven show. DS9 had action but you actually cared about it, not so much in Voyager or the two new movies.
Absolutely. Enterprise was mostly a return to the Greek morality play model of traditional trek or TNG, with the occasional shark-jumping. Alien Nazis somehow didn't make it as bad as Voyager, and Scott Bacula with his Quantum Leap background fit really well into the morality play aspect of it.
The new Trek movies are fun but not intellectual; I'll appreciate them for what they are but know they're not designed to provoke thought.
A new Trek could go too many ways for us to know how it'll be at this point. I don't trust CBS, and Trek has had obvious writing problems in the past, but TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, and Enterprise all added something meaningful to television. And even Voyager had the doctor. So hopefully they'll come up with something worth watching.
Barbie of Borg was there only to rescue the failing ratings. The character added nothing of significant value beyond looking good in a tight jumpsuit.
She didn't add anything of sci-fi value, but she added some more fun storylines. The doctor taking over her body and eating all that cheesecake was funny.
T'Pol was somewhat interesting in a repressing emotions way, although not nearly as interesting as she could have been in they had written her differently. The half-human part of Spock was important to making him an interesting character, which was why Tuvok was not engaging. With T'Pol, you saw some influence on her character from living with humans, and that was somewhat interesting.
Linda Park could have been interesting--pretty, smart, and well-travelled language genius--but they managed to pull a Uhura and turn her into the ship's receptionist. We hardly see her at all in good character development stories. It's like the writers didn't know how to write strong women.
Oh sure, and everyone was shocked to discover Voice of Russia radio stations happen to trend pro-Putin.
In the real world, Napoleon was the greatest general in the world not because he won every battle, but because he bought every newspaper. Please remember that almost every news story you read is propaganda of one sort or another--we've developed a whole ecosystem of it.
Star Trek still exists because the original series was all about social justice. The original series was a commentary on society as much as it was science fiction.
Let This Be Your Last Battlefield.
TOS wasn't pro-hippie in that it recognized the importance of duty and responsibility and the complexities of life, but it was pro-equality, pro-egalitarian, anti-discriminatory.
Did you see what they did with supergirl last week? They took what could have been a fun season's worth of plot development and jammed into an episode as cliche and absurd as possible. I am not encouraged by CBS's ability to do good work with big fantasy franchises.
Judge Davis retired... No one is hearing patent cases anymore in the Eastern District of Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It doesn't really matter that it was shut down--what matters is that it demonstrates the problem with forum-shopping, which the EFF is trying to prevent.
This is further complicated by the fact that The Federal Circuit *can't* overturn its own earlier decisions easily. The three-judge panel on a particular case has to respect the precedents set by an earlier case. So they may be able to weaken or strengthen a case, but they can't really overturn it. (Otherwise the law would depend entirely on which judges you happen to get.)