Google "6 inches in attoparsecs" and it replies "4.93895". In other words, not a flattering unit for the male anatomy, but useful if you want a close approximate to a decimal foot.
The most disappointing commentary track I can presently recall was Steven Soderbergh on Traffic.
He must have uttered the phrase "available light' 17,000 times, in an apparent effort to cement his status as the Guru King of the low-production-cost / high-visual-quality movie producer orgasm quadrant.
Hey, Mr Greenlight, was it as good for you as it was bad for me? If so, you probably won't walk straight for another week.
On the other side, an unexpected treat was director Fernando Trueba on Belle Epoque. This is an underrated film in my opinion, perhaps known best for featuring an 18-year-old Penelope Cruz as one of four sisters, each more impossibly beautiful than the last.
Trueba spent the entire commentary discussing where his heart lives.
Bad commentaries: * 90% butter — you simply can't go wrong in the Hollywood fraternity of eternal harmony and love * miraculous sets and available light * oh look at my hair!
Middle of the road: * that was a long shoot, you can't believe how cold and tired we all were at the end of the day
Decent commentaries: * which scenes were deliberately shot in chronological order so that actor didn't lose track of a complex story arc (note that in a film like Memento chronological order is a term paper assignment for a typical audience member)
Good commentaries: * the attitudes I hoped to express
The elite, wage-slave aristocracy everywhere leans Democrat. It's that simple.
Spend $200,000 on your tuition at an elite university, you're pretty much guaranteed (trust us) a highly compensated job in a city with a very high cost of living (such as New York, where you make nowhere near enough to command a spacious appartment—one not situated at the distal terminus of the Origami subway line—but plenty enough to pay the hand-to-mouth legions of the service industry to cook your food for you; and even service your debt a tiny bit, too, at the end of the month).
Where are these jobs? In the knowledge economy. Such as journalism. Or anywhere that knowledge and literacy are thick on the ground. The knowledge economy always concentrates in large cities, and generally coastal cities, because the billionaires of the knowledge economy do so love their secluded, clifftop beach homes (like hell your head office winds up in Cleveland, unless you sell some kind of weed killer).
Often these jobs have a fair amount of clout, and with enough staying power, some percentage graduate from wage-slave circumstances. But not for a long time, and always in minority terms.
The wage-slave aristocracy is a strange power base. For one thing, it's debt financed. Back when junk bonds were all the rage, debt-financed corporations were also a strange power base. Real corporations glanced at them sideways.
One thing this group has in common is that they all been sufficiently trained not to automatically believe whatever they read (just because it's got an Apple Pie masthead). So this group is a constant sticking point in political discourse. And you can't simply ignore them, because they're so deeply embedded in the white-collar corporate machinery that makes the world go around on a daily basis.
So if you can't bluster effectively with seven-word talking points, and you can't ignore an audience with enough aggregate power to tilt the landscape, you have to treat them like a cancer, with a daily chemotherapy regime of "fake news!"
Journalists will always hate this shit, because any significant job in journalism (below the Murdoch C-suite) is typically held by a wage-slave aristocrat.
Jon Stewart completely nailed the fifth estate in his altercation with Chris Wallace when he described the flaws of journalism as tilting toward the lazy and the sensational.
I think their bias is towards sensationalism and laziness.
We all pander to what pays the bills. Especially after forking $200,000 to your alma mater.
Analyzing 100,000 documents to write a 14,000 word piece on how the Trump family evaded $400 million in taxes (by more separate ruses than you can count) was definitely not lazy. So maybe you have to lard up half the rest of the publication with celebrity click bait (People lite) in order to retain a viable readership. Humans are stupid, myopic animals most of the time. There's nothing here that "biased" against Republicans. It's a fundamental, predictable difference of opinion about how the world works.
The Republicans believe you can fashion curt language which unifies their ridiculously broad tent: the plutocrats and the evangelicals. The wage-slave aristocracy doesn't think those two flavours go together like chocolate and peanut butter. (And they never will.) As soon as you write more than 300 words, any superficial, Frank Luntz alignment between the interests of the plutocrats and the evangelicals start to look parlous. The wage-slave aristocracy has a 300-word attention span (many of us have a 3000-word attention span, and some of us only drummed our fingers impatiently once or twice during that entire 14,000-word expose).
Literacy: the ability to unpack hollow slogans.
Most people settle for the owner's manual (Trump's twitter feed). But I've read the source code, in so far as the source code can be obtained. Probably on the order of five 2000-word articles per day for two ye
Yours is the kind of narrow argument that makes me groan inside.
Given the enormous asset base (5.7 million articles in English alone, plus all of the discussion and history behind that process), and the public visibility and reach, it's pretty easy to slap a valuation on Wikipedia well north of $5B, were it commercialized in any way similar to its closest comparables.
When you're playing on such a big stage, even if you aren't commercialized to the full potential of your underlying asset, you are actually on the radar of other enterprises worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You don't necessarily need to throw your weight around (you don't have a revenue model to protect), but you also don't want to be discouraged from operating in your natural domain because you can't even afford the coffee, on the way to the limo, on the way to the fancy conference hall.
As a ratio to a putative (but defensible) capital asset base, the management cost of Wikipedia is on the order of 1.5% annually.
Oh, profligate waste! thy name is the WikiMedia Foundation.
As a net value to society, I would say the $5B valuation greatly underestimates the present state of affairs: permanently free leads to the virtuous circle of ubiquity, where the asset is repurposed in so many ways that barely anyone knows about, because each additional marginal use is too cheap to meter (the Foundation sees only the marginal bandwidth costs).
Perhaps its a paradox too great for your axe-contracted mind to absorb, but even a socialist utopia of altruistic knowledge workers requires an interface with the capitalist world where you don't get pushed around in every possible way. The price of that interface is not tied to internal models of the cost of production, it's tied to the external model of how you sit eye-to-eye at those tables with the power brokers like Google and Amazon.
Wikipedia pre- and post-Sue Gardner are two completely different organizations.
When she arrived at Wikimedia, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, in 2007, the organization had under 10 employees and was raising less than $3 million dollars annually. In 2011, Wikimedia's number of donors had increased ten times over, raising $23 million.
Gardner is focused on expanding Wikipedia's scope for readers and contributors, especially in the global South. In 2012, she partnered with Orange and Telenor, two European telecommunications companies, in a move that will provide Wikipedia free of data charges to millions of users across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
Also in 2012, Gardner led the full-day Wikipedia blackout in protest against SOPA, one of the only major websites to do so.
Gardner's roots are in journalism, graduating from Ryerson University with a journalism degree and acting as head of Canada's national public broadcaster, CBC.CA, prior to joining the Wikimedia Foundation.
There are many corporations which pay $70 million to a single executive to drive those kinds of agendas forward in the world, and they justify this by looking at their bottom line, a line which Wikipedia does not have. But if you imagine a bottom line based on their assets and clout, you'd not be hopelessly out of the ballpark of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.
Now, with a $20 million gift from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting the Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be the Markup's executive dir
Don't worry, they'll totally stand down if you drop the gun.
That's purely a design decision.
If you're not pointing the gun at something living, the robot doesn't have much game theoretic motivation to mow you down, just for the sake of it.
The robot's overlord, however, might have his/her own agenda... But airlines don't kill us for no reason, so I wouldn't jump to conclusions too quickly.
Machine vision for narrow tasks (such as gun identification) is likely to become far more reliable than human vision. And there's almost guaranteed to be visual footage after the fact (shooting with no visual record is surely a Volkswagon-class regulatory violation).
Quite possibly, you'll have fewer montages of the families of dead police officers who fell in the line of duty placing wreaths on a fresh grave. This could hurt the gun lobby, to be honest.
Erich Andersen: "Microsoft sees open source as a key innovation engine, and for the past several years we have increased our contributions to the open source community.
And half the time I say back (one has to pause to breath):
Microsoft uses the word "innovation" because so many people are conditioned to assume it means "technical innovation" whereas (during the 1990s, especially) Microsoft was mainly good at business method innovation subtype: limiting their competitor's air supply through rampant violations of trade law, where enforcement never caught up in time to make a true difference.
Sure, you can boycott Sony. But to make this effective in reducing your exposure, it probably involves boycotting most of the gaming industry, as a whole.
If you're a gamer, you've probably heard a term for this: collateral damage. Welcome to Collateral Damage. Please enjoy your stay. Amenities available: the great outdoors, and old school shit like that.
I was an avid game in the 1990s and I purchased a system to be able to run Microsoft software to be able to run a favourite game.
Worst decision I ever made. It should have been a Linux or BSD box. End of story. And all those hours should have been invested in mastering bash (or zsh) instead of mastering spin, strafe, jump, grapple in a single motion.
What A Beautiful Mind failed to explain about John Nash: it's never just a single containing matrix.
For every matrix you solve, another enclosing matrix springs into being. You solve one matrix about being shit on by a single software vendor, another matrix springs into being about being shit on by an entire software segment.
As WOPR once said, sometimes the only winning move is to not play.
Sure, you care about your virtual trophies, and the immense skill you cultivated in achieving those. But you didn't have to choose to go down that path in the first place. Many other paths would have offered comparable thrills, and some of those were probably far more on your own terms. But now you have sunk cost because you did go down that path, and your next move is dominated (in the game theoretic sense) because you are 100% committed to accepting a local frame stacked against your desires.
Jordan Peterson says start by cleaning up your own bedroom.
The sooner you jettison local frames stacked against your own interests, the sooner your life will track a better slope.
I got involved as a sports fan for a while. It was a great Petri dish to explore human cognition. But then my favourite resource disappeared behind a paywall. Sure, I could pay. But now the discussion is limited to include only those people who choose to pay. The group structure is now inherently different. It's no longer such a great Petri dish for me to explore human cognition (having become far more captive and insular). I have no hard feelings about this.
But I decided to blow my cherished franchise off, rather than follow it into the paywall penumbra. Is this a stable penumbra, or just an incubating umbra waiting to swallow me whole? Why should I risk an eventuality of that nature, entirely outside of my own control. Lesson learned, way back in the 1990s.
Soon enough, of course, I found other rewarding activities which now occupy those energies. And I'm certainly not the worse off for it. There was a three month period where I felt a bit mopey, because I missed the familiar context for injecting ludicrous things with a long inside-baseball group context. That can't be replaced overnight.
There are many box-control business models out there. I'm now loyal to none of these, and I never will be again.
If only I had a time machine, that's one message I would surely send to my younger self making foolish choices back in the 1990s.
Dear younger self:
I know you get a completely unreasonable joy from the simultaneous spin, strafe, jump, grapple frag, but trust me, it's a trap. I know you think shell script was designed by a colony of drunken monkeys, but trust me, it's NOT a trap. All you do in the shell is construct strings, fork/exec, and test exit codes to control program flow. Yes, some of the quoting rules in complex commands are Unix's version of Microsoft's DLL hell. Get over it. You'll thank me later.
With chagrin, your pathetic older self
[*] P.S. every quotation mark should be two instances of a 32-character random nonce, never to be ever used again. That's how you make nested quoting work without exponential escape growth. You'l
The silicon needed for a typical CPU only costs about $5 - similar size ARM processors with similar transistor counts typically cost about $10-$20.
It's not just transistor count or silicon area which determines how much your production process actually costs on a marginal basis. Volumes, layers, process steps, interconnects (pin counts), yields, testing and a lot more can dominate the cost equation.
Two cars with a V8 engine: sometimes one of them costs a lot more than the other.
Two chips with 3 billion transistors. Would it surprise you that sometimes one of these chips costs a lot more than the other?
More to the point, if the chips are well designed, they can achieve a very long service life (say ten years, instead of three years). So now Intel's engineers are struggling to provide enough value add to turn today's chips into yesterday's chips at anywhere near the conventional turn rate.
* Data centers love density, so innovation continues there. * Broken security models have the potential to drive all-new waves of chip adoption (think Volkswagon). * Raw performance increases across the board are mostly off the table. * Targeted performance increases still appeal to many niche sectors (who then flip their old chips on eBay to the less demanding).
In all of this (which I've barely explored), marginal production costs (abstracting out infrastructural sunk costs, engineering sunk costs, validation, testing, marketing, software tooling, and support) is the least informative term.
I've never taken for granted that it's within the purview of peer-reviewed science to recommend economic policy actions, even at a modest scale, must less terraforming the entire human economy.
Economic policy is not science, and scientific peer review does not apply.
The science is the peer-reviewed part. The economic recommendations are the communist fraternity part, with no qualified peer review whatsoever.
I'm all for a new academic discipline of economic and political risk mitigation. But please don't call these people scientists. They're not. They are academics of a completely different stripe, meta-scientists who consume technology, but digest it in a different stomach.
In related news, Google has promptly re-enabled the use of the + sign as a quick way to mark a search term as required.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Charlie Brown.
But no, even thought their karma will never quite overcome the + expropriation event, I doubt they will ever reverse this spectacularly arrogant syntactic earmark.
If the minions of the undark web weren't so busy implementing stealth TLS MITM (so that the web server doesn't know there's a validated MITM on the client end), the invasive middleware could simply intercept the encryption part, without fudge-hammering end-to-end authentication and the client negotiation of security parameters concerning the public side of the link; if the server knew the client preferences for certain, it would simply drop traffic whose public security envelope was mangled by the MITM layer.
Most screens are polarized the same way to mostly get along with polarized sunglasses, but there is still a good 10-15% of screens that are in portrait orientation.
Apparently the 4k generation has never seen a display with a portrait/landscape pivot stand. Because if the display was designed portrait only, they would have fixed the polarization problem (of course, every vendor makes two versions of every panel, just in case someone wants to sell a portrait-only monitor with sunglass-compatible polarization).
Or maybe they could put screens of opposite polarization on either side (small cost delta for a good cause) but then some clever sot would have to design a pivot mechanism that rotates on the axis of a diagonal with an angle entirely unlike 45 degrees.
(Then I'd get myself a pair of sunglasses with similar I suspect it would be some kind of giant semi-circular C-clamp (affixed to opposite corners). Terry Gilliam could make that look really cool.
I'd take a Terry Gilliam industrial design over a Jony Ive design any day of the week.
[*] You could have similar reversible-polarization frame mounts for your bottle-cap sunglasses, too, but just for symmetrical focal-length corrections; this would not work for astigmatism or prisms.
Meanwhile, however, we've obtained the government we deserve:
Powell Memorandum
On 23 August 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the US Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum titled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."
This memo was to be an anti-Communist, anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America for the chamber.
It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 expose on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement.
Powell saw it as an undermining of Americans' faith in enterprise and another step in the slippery slope of socialism.
His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.
He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry. That was the point where Powell began to focus on the media as biased agents of socialism.
The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US.
It sparked wealthy heirs of earlier American Industrialists like Richard Mellon Scaife; the Earhart Foundation, money which came from an oil fortune; and the Smith Richardson Foundation, from the cough medicine dynasty to use their private charitable foundations, which did not have to report their political activities to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Scaife in 1964 to fund Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimalist government-regulated America as it had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint of the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as: * The Heritage Foundation * American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as well as inspiring the US Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.
Marxist academic David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.
Other sources trace the rise of Newt Gingrich to Richard Mellon Scaife, but this is all of a piece.
Whatever your political slant, it's interesting to revisit the original anti-government hot-buttons that infused the first-wave neoliberal movement: those MSM bastards who won't print our claims that badly designed cars and cigarettes don't kill people.
* Victory (in principle): Ralph Nader. * Victory (on the ground): the appellation "fake news".
Where would America now be if an Elon Musk had answered Nader back in the early 1970s (with an engineering response), instead of this asshole (with a memo response)?
Intended effect: safer cars forty years sooner.
Unintended effect: Nader's head would have expanded, and the Russians would now be actively interfering in our elections to diminish our peculiar brand of Godless social democratic communism.
[*] For all I know, first-wave neoliberals:third-wave neoliberals::first-wave feminists:third-wave feminists. By no means do I visit on the son the sins of the father. Except for you, Eric.
"This is the EXACT reason they viciously attack our family!" Eric wrote, enthusiastically, echoing his father's literary cadence. "They can't stand that we are extremely close and will A
Let's see. About 10 million Slashdot posters have been predicting this.
No, that's not what was going on.
10 million Slashdot posters were busy advertising how they were going to pile on to the issue with a big "said so" at the first sign of human fallibility (as infallibly projected), despite the original prediction having a zero value add.
In the he-said/she-said fiasco now playing out on the national American stage, you can pretty much bet that the loudest voices in the camp of "well, if the accusers aren't perfect in every way, if there is ever any abuse at all, then we shouldn't listen hardly at all" are the ones with the haziest, alcohol-infused recollections of their own youthful misdeeds.
Systems theory has a name for loud voices demanding perfection concerning non-traditional door #2, while tolerating rampant imperfection in traditional door #1.
You see, the only reason you'd ever improve a working system (flawed though it might be, as we all know from long experience) is if the replacement system achieves outright perfection. And I can personally predict, right now, that the replacement system will have failure mode X, and when that day comes, 10 million voices will join in unison to proclaim that 10 million voices having collectively predicted the inevitable surely can't be wrong.
That's the not terribly charitable view.
The slightly more charitable view is that this is an exercise in proof by induction, basis step only.
You see, it happened once, and by the lemma stating that every bad that can happen does happen, QED. Because if it happened once, it can surely happen again.
You see, in human systems, that's how induction properly works.
In a correctly designed phone system, it shouldn't be possible to generate DTMF tones on a call you didn't originate yourself without first spelling "DMMF" by a sequence of Morse-code hook flashes.
DMMF = dox me, motherfuckers.
Your address book should have little padlocks beside "verified" numbers, where the name of the organization and the number are known by the smart phone mafia to correspond.
It really ought to be required to originate the call from a verified address book entry in order to access inline DTMF tone generation (in your address book entry—when you enable DTMF tone generation—you would be able to click "I know the risks", and barge through all the shrunken human heads on pointy pikes, just like with broken SSL certificate overrides).
SCGC's solution to this problem is to make every Canadian pay an extra fee when they use over 15 gigabytes of data per month. This money would then be used to compensate composers and fix the so-called "value gap."
So much for amateur astronomy. Seriously, serious people should collect a tax whenever a proposal this stupid is taken seriously.
I foresee bad karma by the metric firkinton for these Halloween wet-wipe razor blades.
Extracting unpaid labour from the teenage geek help support desk was a core feature of Microsoft's business model from the mid 1980s through to Y2K.
But this point, almost everyone realized that the product churn was deliberate and was never going to stop. (Even the briefest contact with the life of times of Visual Basic for Applications accelerated the pin drop to near light speed.)
But in the end, this business model reality took most of a generation to sink in.
Unfortunately, as they say, a fool is born every minute, and so we revisit the Eternal Microsoft PSA.
In my experience some Excel is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tools makes the job a lot easier.
How about we rewrite that using Systems Theory 101.
In universal experience, technology tier X is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tier such as Y makes the job a lot easier.
In universal experience, technology tier Y is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tier such as Z makes the job a lot easier.
In universal experience, technology tier Z is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. When technology tier Z fails to handle the complexity, you have entered the technology zone known as "innovation".
Hold onto your hats, it's going to be a rough ride.
NB: Don't ever, ever, ever hand free reign to deploy technology tier Z to a zoo full of sales managers or script monkeys.
Also, if agile, don't ever, ever, ever hand free reign to deploy technology tier Y to a zoo full of sales managers or script monkeys.
Slashdot Mirror
Google "6 inches in attoparsecs" and it replies "4.93895". In other words, not a flattering unit for the male anatomy, but useful if you want a close approximate to a decimal foot.
The most disappointing commentary track I can presently recall was Steven Soderbergh on Traffic.
He must have uttered the phrase "available light' 17,000 times, in an apparent effort to cement his status as the Guru King of the low-production-cost / high-visual-quality movie producer orgasm quadrant.
Hey, Mr Greenlight, was it as good for you as it was bad for me? If so, you probably won't walk straight for another week.
On the other side, an unexpected treat was director Fernando Trueba on Belle Epoque. This is an underrated film in my opinion, perhaps known best for featuring an 18-year-old Penelope Cruz as one of four sisters, each more impossibly beautiful than the last.
Trueba spent the entire commentary discussing where his heart lives.
Bad commentaries:
* 90% butter — you simply can't go wrong in the Hollywood fraternity of eternal harmony and love
* miraculous sets and available light
* oh look at my hair!
Middle of the road:
* that was a long shoot, you can't believe how cold and tired we all were at the end of the day
Decent commentaries:
* which scenes were deliberately shot in chronological order so that actor didn't lose track of a complex story arc (note that in a film like Memento chronological order is a term paper assignment for a typical audience member)
Good commentaries:
* the attitudes I hoped to express
The elite, wage-slave aristocracy everywhere leans Democrat. It's that simple.
Spend $200,000 on your tuition at an elite university, you're pretty much guaranteed (trust us) a highly compensated job in a city with a very high cost of living (such as New York, where you make nowhere near enough to command a spacious appartment—one not situated at the distal terminus of the Origami subway line—but plenty enough to pay the hand-to-mouth legions of the service industry to cook your food for you; and even service your debt a tiny bit, too, at the end of the month).
Where are these jobs? In the knowledge economy. Such as journalism. Or anywhere that knowledge and literacy are thick on the ground. The knowledge economy always concentrates in large cities, and generally coastal cities, because the billionaires of the knowledge economy do so love their secluded, clifftop beach homes (like hell your head office winds up in Cleveland, unless you sell some kind of weed killer).
Often these jobs have a fair amount of clout, and with enough staying power, some percentage graduate from wage-slave circumstances. But not for a long time, and always in minority terms.
The wage-slave aristocracy is a strange power base. For one thing, it's debt financed. Back when junk bonds were all the rage, debt-financed corporations were also a strange power base. Real corporations glanced at them sideways.
One thing this group has in common is that they all been sufficiently trained not to automatically believe whatever they read (just because it's got an Apple Pie masthead). So this group is a constant sticking point in political discourse. And you can't simply ignore them, because they're so deeply embedded in the white-collar corporate machinery that makes the world go around on a daily basis.
So if you can't bluster effectively with seven-word talking points, and you can't ignore an audience with enough aggregate power to tilt the landscape, you have to treat them like a cancer, with a daily chemotherapy regime of "fake news!"
Journalists will always hate this shit, because any significant job in journalism (below the Murdoch C-suite) is typically held by a wage-slave aristocrat.
Jon Stewart completely nailed the fifth estate in his altercation with Chris Wallace when he described the flaws of journalism as tilting toward the lazy and the sensational.
We all pander to what pays the bills. Especially after forking $200,000 to your alma mater.
Analyzing 100,000 documents to write a 14,000 word piece on how the Trump family evaded $400 million in taxes (by more separate ruses than you can count) was definitely not lazy. So maybe you have to lard up half the rest of the publication with celebrity click bait (People lite) in order to retain a viable readership. Humans are stupid, myopic animals most of the time. There's nothing here that "biased" against Republicans. It's a fundamental, predictable difference of opinion about how the world works.
The Republicans believe you can fashion curt language which unifies their ridiculously broad tent: the plutocrats and the evangelicals. The wage-slave aristocracy doesn't think those two flavours go together like chocolate and peanut butter. (And they never will.) As soon as you write more than 300 words, any superficial, Frank Luntz alignment between the interests of the plutocrats and the evangelicals start to look parlous. The wage-slave aristocracy has a 300-word attention span (many of us have a 3000-word attention span, and some of us only drummed our fingers impatiently once or twice during that entire 14,000-word expose).
Literacy: the ability to unpack hollow slogans.
Most people settle for the owner's manual (Trump's twitter feed). But I've read the source code, in so far as the source code can be obtained. Probably on the order of five 2000-word articles per day for two ye
For that AMAZING statistic, you pretty much HAVE TO capitalize "Up".
One exclamation mark for the price of none. Who would ever turn that offer down?!!
But then, what do you do with "in"?
Lower cased, after the gleeful orgasm, it has a conspicuously deflationary appearance.
So UP it goes TOO.
Nice external link.
https://motherboard.vice.com/e... ?utm_source=reddit.com
Ha ha ha. That's a new one for me.
s/but don't own me a freaking dime/but you don't owe me a freaking dime/
I've witnessed this failure mode many times, in myself and others. It takes roughly 95% of your brain to suppress the f-word.
Meanwhile, the other 5% of my brain was preparing to engage the cherished screed-culmination "submit" button.
Yours is the kind of narrow argument that makes me groan inside.
Given the enormous asset base (5.7 million articles in English alone, plus all of the discussion and history behind that process), and the public visibility and reach, it's pretty easy to slap a valuation on Wikipedia well north of $5B, were it commercialized in any way similar to its closest comparables.
When you're playing on such a big stage, even if you aren't commercialized to the full potential of your underlying asset, you are actually on the radar of other enterprises worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You don't necessarily need to throw your weight around (you don't have a revenue model to protect), but you also don't want to be discouraged from operating in your natural domain because you can't even afford the coffee, on the way to the limo, on the way to the fancy conference hall.
As a ratio to a putative (but defensible) capital asset base, the management cost of Wikipedia is on the order of 1.5% annually.
Oh, profligate waste! thy name is the WikiMedia Foundation.
As a net value to society, I would say the $5B valuation greatly underestimates the present state of affairs: permanently free leads to the virtuous circle of ubiquity, where the asset is repurposed in so many ways that barely anyone knows about, because each additional marginal use is too cheap to meter (the Foundation sees only the marginal bandwidth costs).
Perhaps its a paradox too great for your axe-contracted mind to absorb, but even a socialist utopia of altruistic knowledge workers requires an interface with the capitalist world where you don't get pushed around in every possible way. The price of that interface is not tied to internal models of the cost of production, it's tied to the external model of how you sit eye-to-eye at those tables with the power brokers like Google and Amazon.
Forbes Power Women 2012: #70 Sue Gardner
There are many corporations which pay $70 million to a single executive to drive those kinds of agendas forward in the world, and they justify this by looking at their bottom line, a line which Wikipedia does not have. But if you imagine a bottom line based on their assets and clout, you'd not be hopelessly out of the ballpark of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.
News site to investigate Big Tech, aided by Craigslist founder — 23 September 2018
That's purely a design decision.
If you're not pointing the gun at something living, the robot doesn't have much game theoretic motivation to mow you down, just for the sake of it.
The robot's overlord, however, might have his/her own agenda ... But airlines don't kill us for no reason, so I wouldn't jump to conclusions too quickly.
Machine vision for narrow tasks (such as gun identification) is likely to become far more reliable than human vision. And there's almost guaranteed to be visual footage after the fact (shooting with no visual record is surely a Volkswagon-class regulatory violation).
Quite possibly, you'll have fewer montages of the families of dead police officers who fell in the line of duty placing wreaths on a fresh grave. This could hurt the gun lobby, to be honest.
(Unintended effects cut both ways.)
And half the time I say back (one has to pause to breath):
Microsoft uses the word "innovation" because so many people are conditioned to assume it means "technical innovation" whereas (during the 1990s, especially) Microsoft was mainly good at business method innovation subtype: limiting their competitor's air supply through rampant violations of trade law, where enforcement never caught up in time to make a true difference.
On Wikipedia, this kind of begging prose is shot down in flames with one short word and four brace characters. For all its problems, what a godsend.
Sure, you can boycott Sony. But to make this effective in reducing your exposure, it probably involves boycotting most of the gaming industry, as a whole.
If you're a gamer, you've probably heard a term for this: collateral damage. Welcome to Collateral Damage. Please enjoy your stay. Amenities available: the great outdoors, and old school shit like that.
I was an avid game in the 1990s and I purchased a system to be able to run Microsoft software to be able to run a favourite game.
Worst decision I ever made. It should have been a Linux or BSD box. End of story. And all those hours should have been invested in mastering bash (or zsh) instead of mastering spin, strafe, jump, grapple in a single motion.
What A Beautiful Mind failed to explain about John Nash: it's never just a single containing matrix.
For every matrix you solve, another enclosing matrix springs into being. You solve one matrix about being shit on by a single software vendor, another matrix springs into being about being shit on by an entire software segment.
As WOPR once said, sometimes the only winning move is to not play.
Sure, you care about your virtual trophies, and the immense skill you cultivated in achieving those. But you didn't have to choose to go down that path in the first place. Many other paths would have offered comparable thrills, and some of those were probably far more on your own terms. But now you have sunk cost because you did go down that path, and your next move is dominated (in the game theoretic sense) because you are 100% committed to accepting a local frame stacked against your desires.
Jordan Peterson says start by cleaning up your own bedroom.
The sooner you jettison local frames stacked against your own interests, the sooner your life will track a better slope.
I got involved as a sports fan for a while. It was a great Petri dish to explore human cognition. But then my favourite resource disappeared behind a paywall. Sure, I could pay. But now the discussion is limited to include only those people who choose to pay. The group structure is now inherently different. It's no longer such a great Petri dish for me to explore human cognition (having become far more captive and insular). I have no hard feelings about this.
But I decided to blow my cherished franchise off, rather than follow it into the paywall penumbra. Is this a stable penumbra, or just an incubating umbra waiting to swallow me whole? Why should I risk an eventuality of that nature, entirely outside of my own control. Lesson learned, way back in the 1990s.
Soon enough, of course, I found other rewarding activities which now occupy those energies. And I'm certainly not the worse off for it. There was a three month period where I felt a bit mopey, because I missed the familiar context for injecting ludicrous things with a long inside-baseball group context. That can't be replaced overnight.
There are many box-control business models out there. I'm now loyal to none of these, and I never will be again.
If only I had a time machine, that's one message I would surely send to my younger self making foolish choices back in the 1990s.
Dear younger self:
I know you get a completely unreasonable joy from the simultaneous spin, strafe, jump, grapple frag, but trust me, it's a trap. I know you think shell script was designed by a colony of drunken monkeys, but trust me, it's NOT a trap. All you do in the shell is construct strings, fork/exec, and test exit codes to control program flow. Yes, some of the quoting rules in complex commands are Unix's version of Microsoft's DLL hell. Get over it. You'll thank me later.
With chagrin,
your pathetic older self
[*] P.S. every quotation mark should be two instances of a 32-character random nonce, never to be ever used again. That's how you make nested quoting work without exponential escape growth. You'l
It's not just transistor count or silicon area which determines how much your production process actually costs on a marginal basis. Volumes, layers, process steps, interconnects (pin counts), yields, testing and a lot more can dominate the cost equation.
Two cars with a V8 engine: sometimes one of them costs a lot more than the other.
Two chips with 3 billion transistors. Would it surprise you that sometimes one of these chips costs a lot more than the other?
More to the point, if the chips are well designed, they can achieve a very long service life (say ten years, instead of three years). So now Intel's engineers are struggling to provide enough value add to turn today's chips into yesterday's chips at anywhere near the conventional turn rate.
* Data centers love density, so innovation continues there.
* Broken security models have the potential to drive all-new waves of chip adoption (think Volkswagon).
* Raw performance increases across the board are mostly off the table.
* Targeted performance increases still appeal to many niche sectors (who then flip their old chips on eBay to the less demanding).
In all of this (which I've barely explored), marginal production costs (abstracting out infrastructural sunk costs, engineering sunk costs, validation, testing, marketing, software tooling, and support) is the least informative term.
I've never taken for granted that it's within the purview of peer-reviewed science to recommend economic policy actions, even at a modest scale, must less terraforming the entire human economy.
Economic policy is not science, and scientific peer review does not apply.
The science is the peer-reviewed part. The economic recommendations are the communist fraternity part, with no qualified peer review whatsoever.
I'm all for a new academic discipline of economic and political risk mitigation. But please don't call these people scientists. They're not. They are academics of a completely different stripe, meta-scientists who consume technology, but digest it in a different stomach.
In related news, Google has promptly re-enabled the use of the + sign as a quick way to mark a search term as required.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Charlie Brown.
But no, even thought their karma will never quite overcome the + expropriation event, I doubt they will ever reverse this spectacularly arrogant syntactic earmark.
If the minions of the undark web weren't so busy implementing stealth TLS MITM (so that the web server doesn't know there's a validated MITM on the client end), the invasive middleware could simply intercept the encryption part, without fudge-hammering end-to-end authentication and the client negotiation of security parameters concerning the public side of the link; if the server knew the client preferences for certain, it would simply drop traffic whose public security envelope was mangled by the MITM layer.
Problem solved.
What's the pressing demand for 100% space telescope operational continuity?
Are there experiments in progress which demand a precisely timed sequence of images updates, no frame loss allowed?
Or are you just projecting your personal wrath over YouTube frame drop after you shelled out for a $5000 graphics card? (Never mind $10 billion.)
Apparently the 4k generation has never seen a display with a portrait/landscape pivot stand. Because if the display was designed portrait only, they would have fixed the polarization problem (of course, every vendor makes two versions of every panel, just in case someone wants to sell a portrait-only monitor with sunglass-compatible polarization).
Or maybe they could put screens of opposite polarization on either side (small cost delta for a good cause) but then some clever sot would have to design a pivot mechanism that rotates on the axis of a diagonal with an angle entirely unlike 45 degrees.
(Then I'd get myself a pair of sunglasses with similar
I suspect it would be some kind of giant semi-circular C-clamp (affixed to opposite corners). Terry Gilliam could make that look really cool.
I'd take a Terry Gilliam industrial design over a Jony Ive design any day of the week.
[*] You could have similar reversible-polarization frame mounts for your bottle-cap sunglasses, too, but just for symmetrical focal-length corrections; this would not work for astigmatism or prisms.
Meanwhile, however, we've obtained the government we deserve:
Powell Memorandum
Other sources trace the rise of Newt Gingrich to Richard Mellon Scaife, but this is all of a piece.
Whatever your political slant, it's interesting to revisit the original anti-government hot-buttons that infused the first-wave neoliberal movement: those MSM bastards who won't print our claims that badly designed cars and cigarettes don't kill people.
* Victory (in principle): Ralph Nader.
* Victory (on the ground): the appellation "fake news".
Where would America now be if an Elon Musk had answered Nader back in the early 1970s (with an engineering response), instead of this asshole (with a memo response)?
Intended effect: safer cars forty years sooner.
Unintended effect: Nader's head would have expanded, and the Russians would now be actively interfering in our elections to diminish our peculiar brand of Godless social democratic communism.
[*] For all I know, first-wave neoliberals:third-wave neoliberals::first-wave feminists:third-wave feminists. By no means do I visit on the son the sins of the father. Except for you, Eric.
No, that's not what was going on.
10 million Slashdot posters were busy advertising how they were going to pile on to the issue with a big "said so" at the first sign of human fallibility (as infallibly projected), despite the original prediction having a zero value add.
In the he-said/she-said fiasco now playing out on the national American stage, you can pretty much bet that the loudest voices in the camp of "well, if the accusers aren't perfect in every way, if there is ever any abuse at all, then we shouldn't listen hardly at all" are the ones with the haziest, alcohol-infused recollections of their own youthful misdeeds.
Systems theory has a name for loud voices demanding perfection concerning non-traditional door #2, while tolerating rampant imperfection in traditional door #1.
You see, the only reason you'd ever improve a working system (flawed though it might be, as we all know from long experience) is if the replacement system achieves outright perfection. And I can personally predict, right now, that the replacement system will have failure mode X, and when that day comes, 10 million voices will join in unison to proclaim that 10 million voices having collectively predicted the inevitable surely can't be wrong.
That's the not terribly charitable view.
The slightly more charitable view is that this is an exercise in proof by induction, basis step only.
You see, it happened once, and by the lemma stating that every bad that can happen does happen, QED. Because if it happened once, it can surely happen again.
You see, in human systems, that's how induction properly works.
Hmmm, I was feeling bold today, and didn't click preview, having forgotten that I had used any markup at all.
Very exciting.
In a correctly designed phone system, it shouldn't be possible to generate DTMF tones on a call you didn't originate yourself without first spelling "DMMF" by a sequence of Morse-code hook flashes.
DMMF = dox me, motherfuckers.
Your address book should have little padlocks beside "verified" numbers, where the name of the organization and the number are known by the smart phone mafia to correspond.
It really ought to be required to originate the call from a verified address book entry in order to access inline DTMF tone generation (in your address book entry—when you enable DTMF tone generation—you would be able to click "I know the risks", and barge through all the shrunken human heads on pointy pikes, just like with broken SSL certificate overrides).
In my experience, hardly any machine learning courses have an upbeat backing track.
Worst case scenario: because under this proposal I would have effectively already paid for the music, they might add one.
So much for amateur astronomy. Seriously, serious people should collect a tax whenever a proposal this stupid is taken seriously.
I foresee bad karma by the metric firkinton for these Halloween wet-wipe razor blades.
Extracting unpaid labour from the teenage geek help support desk was a core feature of Microsoft's business model from the mid 1980s through to Y2K.
But this point, almost everyone realized that the product churn was deliberate and was never going to stop. (Even the briefest contact with the life of times of Visual Basic for Applications accelerated the pin drop to near light speed.)
But in the end, this business model reality took most of a generation to sink in.
Unfortunately, as they say, a fool is born every minute, and so we revisit the Eternal Microsoft PSA.
How about we rewrite that using Systems Theory 101.
In universal experience, technology tier X is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tier such as Y makes the job a lot easier.
In universal experience, technology tier Y is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tier such as Z makes the job a lot easier.
In universal experience, technology tier Z is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. When technology tier Z fails to handle the complexity, you have entered the technology zone known as "innovation".
Hold onto your hats, it's going to be a rough ride.
NB: Don't ever, ever, ever hand free reign to deploy technology tier Z to a zoo full of sales managers or script monkeys.
Also, if agile, don't ever, ever, ever hand free reign to deploy technology tier Y to a zoo full of sales managers or script monkeys.