What's keeping these movies out of theaters is not a lack of interest among theatergoers, but a decision by Netflix to shore up their content monopoly.
I'm all for keeping walled gardens out of the Oscars. This is has nothing to do with venue, but universal access to venue. Does the Netflix content ever come to DVD? Surprisingly to some, many people still watch movies (at home) the old-fashioned way.
If we were about to split up the Oscars, my first choice for a dividing line would be franchise films on one side of the house, non-franchise films on the other side of the house. Then we could pretty much eliminate the "best original script" Oscar from the franchise side of the house, because after the first installment, these rarely ever have an original script. (Every five years or so, you could award a special-edition originality achievement award, for when a franchise film miraculously exceeds the established mold in a valiant subsequent effort.)
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
When your teleporter pad finally proves itself—less than one melted person per thousand—visit us again, and we'll talk.
In 2008, the price of transporting material from the surface of Earth to the surface of Mars was approximately US$309,000 per kilogram.
That's very expensive for four days total work on the ground when you decide not to send an air plant because that would weight many thousands of pounds.
I got to witness the wholesale destruction of jobs as each company outsourced those services to low-cost countries...
Yeah, there's this one guy in India, who has more work to do than you could possibly imagine, but it barely makes ends meet, so he's reluctant to relax his outsource monopoly.
But the truth, revealed only through security failures and careful security research, tells a different story: China's leaders seem to care little for the privacy, or the freedom, of millions of its citizens.
Wrong bullhorn.
Apathy is not the issue here. Cynicism is not the issue here.
The Chinese authorities have an outright death wish for the individual freedoms of China's many citizens.
So I'm thinking hard about a work problem on the morning commute for half an hour (which I never bill), and I'm supposed to worry about saving myself a trip to Office Depot to replenish a few pads of note paper, by stuffing my rucksack with a couple of pads from office supplies?
True, my employer has good reason to be pissed off: I might have invested 15 unbilled minutes into resolving a work problem in the car on the drive across town.
Compared to a pen, the loss of 15 unbilled minutes they might have otherwise claimed practically amounts to grand theft.
This is the level of baitshit we have reached, ladies and gentlemen. Twitter banning white people is "insightful" and not just some far right race-war conspiracy bullshit now.
I totally agree with you. But you're slightly misconstruing what "insightful" means on slashdot.
It means "I think intersectionality sucks fetid donkey balls, but I'm typing on a damn phone so I can't actually manage to write 'intersectionality' and 'i15y' hasn't caught on yet among the Black Panther set."
[*] No argument here on i15y sucking fetid donkey balls.
Humans are flexible organisms. When one form of communication fails (typing articulately), there's always the mouse-driven moderation system to take up the slack.
Furthermore, you've misconstrued the word "white". There are two types of white people: people of many gifts, and people where whiteness is their only gift.
The ionized adjective "white" is rarely used to refer to the former, and always used to refer to the later. This later group does experience exclusionary prejudice on a routine basis, especially the incel subclique, who are so far from being endowed with many gifts, that they willingly wind their entire self-identity around their inability to wow any woman with their sense of humour, anywhere, ever.
All it takes is three incels with moderation points to boost any comment on slashdot into the lamelight.
[*] I see your "baitshit" and raise you a "lamelight".
Don't really know why I would want to go back and forth within a single tab.
The answer is obvious: it's because it doesn't make sense for your particular workflow.
For my own workflow, even with three browser windows full screen on three different monitors, I soon end up with so many tabs open, the tabs shrink to where I can't read the page title, and I start to lose my mental map of how to get back to other contexts I've recently visited.
This typically happens when I'm involved in adding a lot of new information to my personal wiki, and while in the process of doing so, various small or medium refactoring projects calve off.
I fork entirely new windows and fill those full of pertinent tabs when this suits the purpose, then close the window entirely when the subtask is complete (I even have an extension which allows me to give the entire window an appropriate working title for the duration).
Other times I fork off tabs by the dozens in the current working window using middle click (middle click works just about anywhere, including drop down history lists, and weird social media overlays, though with a small number of exceptions concerning pages boasting particularly heinous JavaScript, which I preferentially flee once discovering Cthulhu's grubby fingerprints).
Other times it's just better to let tabs stack up in my tab history list.
I pretty much never close a tab without popping down the history stack to see whether I've left a task incomplete. Also, I generally don't navigate backwards page at a time. If there are twenty edit previews stacked up, I use the history list to jump directly across the entire mess.
I actually modified my wiki software to display the symbol  as the first character of every page title opened in edit mode, so that more of the useful title displays, and it's even more obvious what I need to jump across to restore a previously interrupted context.
Workflows are highly idiosyncratic. This is why you need features for all types. Mine is a complex hybrid of about five different major workflow patterns. And I use every one for a good reason, proven by the test of time.
Sometimes while adding new material to my own wiki (often starts with a survey of twenty pertinent articles located in Google search), I decide to annotate my own pages with chunks of leads scraped from pertinent Wikipedia articles. Then I discover that I need to add a handful of related pages to my wiki, so as to keep my topic map precise. Along the way, I discover that one of these Wikipedia pages has a tragically flawed lead, so I stop to fix that, but while I'm fixing that problem I have to confirm that my edit remains valid within the given citation, so I open up the citation, and discover the citation was horrible misused in the first place. So now I have to do another Google search to figure when the citation is salvageable, or if I should just slap in a better cite altogether. But while I'm doing this (now very boring task, if only for five minutes) the idle part of my brain goes "you know what, if you connect X to Y, you might actually get an interesting idea out of it."
Now the whole point of all this intensive notetaking is to generate creative ideas, so even the smallest glimmer of a creative idea is an immediate stop work order, and then I rush off to file that idea appropriately in my wiki, only to discover that it needs to be linked into page previously opened (with unsaved edits) as part of a suspended refactor.
Now I need to be very astute, and unwind exactly enough to capture the new idea, without losing partially finished work from a previous refactor, or complicating my route back so much that I lose the bubble before closing off all the broken edges.
At this point, long stacked edits in a single tab history are a godsend.
I can drop the history list down, middle click from somewhere in its depths to extract a page to edit out of sequence, then back the tab back to
You probably weren't expecting a serious response to a post entitled "WTF". But then again, you're a self-confessed neophyte of alphaghetti grunticons, tip-toeing tentatively into a Brave New World of soon-to-shatter Spanish dominion.
As all pre-modern narratives do, this story begins at the beginning.
———
Once upon a time there was a coyote. Legend has it that he was a solitary, Edisonian ne'er-do-well. But this is not entirely true. Solitary, yes. Somewhat crackpotty, indubitably. Persistent to a fault, yes yes yes. But ne'er-do-well, not so much. He was, in actual fact, an extraordinarily well-healed Prairie Dog Erectus of independent means (with lusciously plump toes and chubby cheek-flews to die for). He had—by this juncture in his crotchety life trajectory—two lucrative gigs going. For one thing, in his identity as sole proprietor and chief bottle washer of Perpetual Ventures Unlimited, he practically commanded his own private Pony Express to the U.S. Patent office. While he had never actually commercialized a single patent himself, some of his patents had been snapped up on the open market, to his great advantage. In particular, his patent for loosely affixing a length of string to a short, barbed cylinder had set him up in the lap of arid luxury for a coon's age. (Not that he ever found out, but this patent had been voted Troll Patent runner up for Scoop-of-the-Year honours in the secretive Annual Regards Gala, more commonly known as ARG). As for his second reliable gig, he was also contracted to provide general landscaping services for one Georgia O'Keefe, which involved a phenomenal amount of taxidermy, mostly in attendance of giant vats of boiling vinegar to scour skulls without number to a luminous Pepsodent sheen, which more than provided enough gas money for all the Acme Corporation Pemmican Mouse Paste a coyote could possibly want (one hasn't lived until one spreads pemmus over lembas).
Indeed, a lot more pemmus paste than a coyote could possibly want. And there lies the problem.
His chosen Arizonian abode was stark and beautiful, but not exactly a teeming reserve. If you had an insatiable tooth throbbing under your gelatinous flew for a glutinous drumstick (or two), the available options were thin on the ground. In fact, your options were immediately whittled down to just one highly migratory specimen of the delectable drumstick-dervish.
Nobody really knows why the Road Runner was quite so migratory. One rumour has it that he subcontracted to the Pony Express to handle one mysteriously busy route to the middle of nowhere which simply did not economically justify an entire pony procession. If so, it was probably at most a side gig. More likely, this particular Road Runner had a complicated double (or quadruple) life, in the manner of Catch Me If You Can–cum–Enemies, A Love Story. In any event, his peregrinations between A and B were toot toot Teutonic in their ineluctable inevitability.
One fine Saturday—or as Wile E. termed it, Eve of Sunday Rotisserie Spit—the Acme Amadrone spied Wile E. occupying a high vantage point, surveying his dusty domain with an outstretched compass and straightedge. "Ah! My new bowsaw!" said Wile E., practically bouncing up and down on all eight plush toes. And of course, you have to try it out, ASAP, before the torn packaging so much as flutters to rest on the ground below, so Wile E. immediately kneels down and begins sawing for all he's worth. "A fine saw indeed!" Wile E. exclaimed, as the timber beneath his feet feel peeled away in much the same way as would a recently unsupported brick. Still safely ensconced in his customary 0.99998 gee bubble of upward acceleration Wile E. ostentatiously bumpclaps green sawdust from his paws in alternate ham strokes, while giving his forecoat a subtle but effective shimmy. This is surely a fine new addition to his customary arsenal, though with one small snag: there's nary a tree to be seen
Most any project worth having is a system at heart.
Sometimes a quick chunk of code will get you a feature. But wherever true systems roam, actually software developers will be found to formulate the interactions and clean up the mess.
You aren't going to protect your computer against a malicious hard drive or graphics card, and the Lightning port is a port for hard drives and graphics.
Jane Random servicewoman who comes into your house would have trouble opening your case, installing a device, and rebooting your computer all in the time it takes you to hit the head to squeeze a drop.
An actual case might even be locked and alarmed, too.
Personally, if I was wearing a protective cup, I'd hang my balls on the inside. But perhaps that's just me.
I doubt that would stand up in court though. If you deliberately set things up so that the fact you received a secret subpoena will be disclosed by your inaction, all you really did is demonstrate intent to violate the secrecy requirement through pre-meditation.
That is not all you did.
What you also did was engage in civil protest about legislative hypocrisy.
For reputational reasons, the government wants to pretend that compelled secrecy is not equivalent for forcing non-governmental bodies (individuals, corporations) to actively tell lies on the government's behalf. Furthermore, also for reputational reasons, the government does not want to go around explicitly saying "the law forbids anyone to discuss, in any terms, positive or negative, whether we just shoved a bug up your ass".
But you are saying that's what these laws amount to—obviously—even if the government does not see fit to write this down in black and white. I'm saying that this is a clear instance of hypocrisy: wanting it to be true implicitly, without having to say so in black and white.
Witness that the government could easily amend the legislation in question to actually say so in black and white: that these kinds of canaries are clearly forbidden (and not merely by statist inference chains). The principle is clear. If the government wants to wade into curtailing civil liberties, the standard for legislation in this area ought to be all available explicitness, precisely so that the government doesn't enjoy one kind of PR, while enacting a different kind of reality on the ground.
If the government wishes to go there, people who wish to argue about excessive government power ought to be able to point to the legislative text in absolute black and white. In no way should the government curtail individual freedom on any chain of mere legislative inference, most definitely not when it's trivial to behave otherwise (e.g add another paragraph of explicit "thou may not" verbiage).
This might be a slim defense in practice, but it's substantially different than no defense, as your little word "all" would direct people to believe.
If paleontologists cannot even govern members of their own profession, what hope do they have convincing a far larger audience to stop selling and buying dinosaur bones?
Where in the article did it specify they aren't attempting to do all of the above?
Of course, it's entirely obvious that if you don't attempt to control the buy side, you'll not have much luck on the sell side, either. For example, if you don't squeeze equally hard on both sides, someone—likely someone such as yourself—will immediately point this discrepancy out on an internal mailing list, to justify flipping the bird at The Inconsistent Man upstairs.
Returning to planet earth, usually internal discipline is handled by internal communications. Rare does a director achieve lengthy tenure after leaking to the press "our professional society is riddled with stinking, dirty rats".
You must be an eternal rage kitten if you go around parsing everything you read through such a tiny gun slit.
I'm neither a giant nor a douchebag, so I'm left with sub-par, handicapped phones to choose from.
Well, I'm both, and it's an awesome way to express my disdain over the spine-rupturing kitchen-counter height convention established in the dwarf-like 1950s (as optimized for female physiology, due to yet another patriarchal conspiracy).
Now I just need to find myself a phone that looks like a 4" thick Boos board (without which I cannot function on my feet in any normal kitchen).
How about just selectively omitting the outrage porn that seems to be the big problem for most people?
Spectacular algorithm. If you know that drinking three pints and three whiskey shooters per day makes you feel unwell, try drinking four pints and two whiskey shooters (do you really think that spooling some yellow police tape around the outrage-porn crop circle would result in less total consumption?)
And if that's not enough, I'm sure you'll propose getting rid of another whiskey shooter. (To also be replaced by another pint of beer.) This could even work: someone might actually feel somewhat better drinking six pints, instead of three and three. Possibly even enough better to blithely continue consuming six pints a day for another three years.
Algorithmic manta:
If at first you break the camel's back, try first removing the heaviest straw. Iterate until camel's back bends horrifically, but without any ghastly snapping sounds.
———
I once tried Twitter for a month. And I enjoyed it a tiny bit, when I was following three people. But as soon as I started following ten people—all people who are serious thinkers—the hurly-burly randomness of my feed started to make my brain hurt. Then I found out that Twitter offers no controls to keep like-with-like, and so I immediately dumped it with extreme prejudice.
As I see it, rage porn is a side show. The actual problem is excessive context switching. Research shows (almost without exception) that everyone suffers under excess context switching, though some people have done this for so long, they no longer even knows what it feels like to have those other gears working again: insensate like a chronic alcoholic, for whom less hungover seems like fantastic progress—so long as it doesn't involve less drunk.
It's worth noting that man (even most) previous inventors of groundbreaking technologies had several seemingly-absurd ideas prior to the true invention of historical significance which ended up being tied to their name.
Absurd because it pushes God to the sidelines? Or a better caliber of absurd than this absurd absurdity? Once you start with God as your hypothesis, that pretty much renders all true progress absurd, in one fell swoop. It has taken us basically 400 years so far to peel God's cold dead fingers off the physical universe, and even now—miraculously—it remains a work in progress.
I can think up absurd observations which turned the world upside down far more readily than "seemingly" absurd theories: Michelson Morley, the photoelectric effect, neutron scattering, the double slit, cosmic background radiation, cosmic red-shift.
All these combined into a picture of the universe weirder than any crackpot could possibly have invented from whole cloth.
Of course, there's always an exception to prove the rule:
In 1982 materials scientist Dan Shechtman observed that certain aluminium-manganese alloys produced the unusual diffractograms which today are seen as revelatory of quasicrystal structures. Due to fear of the scientific community's reaction, it took him two years to publish the results for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.
But generally the moral of the story goes like this: abandon all hope of normal increments, if God is your Bayesian prior.
———
[*] Weirdly, in the case of gravitational lensing, the absurd theory preceded the absurd observation, but this was an exceptional act of genius, off to the side of another discovered that earned an actual Nobel Prize, and yet another one that was also in frame; I suspect many physicists would gladly trade in their Nobel Prize for the ultimate honour of having invented GR out of whole cloth while seated in a comfy chair with your eyes closed.
For starters, it's a more popular platform by number of chips in the wild.
The blind-census argument is itself extremely popular based on its relentless occurrence in the wild, at least that part of the wild with limited binocular vision.
———
Sage: You can't judge a book by its cover.
Simpleton: Uh, what else is there?
Sage: The pages inside.
Simpleton: You mean all those repetitive black marks, the ones that resemble a box of Fruit Loop alphaghetti filmed in black and white?
Sage: Their arrangement matters.
Simpleton: You mean like tea leaves?
Sage: [Takes a slow sip from his steaming mug.] Exactly right—like tea leaves filtered through a brain worth having.
Simpleton: [Thinks really hard.] Are you dissing mathematicians?
Sage: Not at all. Leaves produce more symbols at lower intensity, beans produce fewer symbols at higher intensity. You can't judge a theorem by its cover, because there's never enough pages to bind.
Simpleton: I see what you mean about not judging a book by its cover: some books don't even have covers. Very subtle, but I'm onto your koan. For example, I can still judge a theorem by it's lack of cover. That would still work out just fine.
Sage: Sure—suit yourself. Looks good on you. Now if you will please excuse me for five minutes, I need to hit the head.
———
[*] Alfred Renyi to Paul Erdos: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
For obvious reasons, this quip probably originated in Hungarian, not German, even thought the Satz pun is pretty good.
In Economics 101, when a supply curve shifts to a lower price point (e.g. due to a technology such as this one) the demand curve almost always shifts to higher demand. And so every plenitude uptick is slated to run out in about a hundred years, no matter how much greater the new plenitude over the incumbent what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.
This phenomena is especially well known in the department of traffic congestion, which is why you can't build your way out of a snarl. Spanky new roads induce spanky new suburban commuter swarms emanating from spanky new gated communities.
There's also a bit of irony here that the Leela–Stockfish TCEC superfinal has just concluded with Stockfish winning by a hair (50-49, with game 100 in a position Leela can't win, and the TCEC client server momentarily 404). And sure enough, people are found in the chess comments sections complaining that Leela trains too slowly, given only petaflops do to her business.
Aww, shucks. Only meagre petaflops for an unfunded vanity project (yes, I admit, one that's super cool).
Plenitude: they just don't build it like they used to.
A complete shutdown of comments solves the problem, and, harms no one (except the egomaniacs who need a thousand comments telling them how great they are).
Glad to see you're hot on the job of speaking for all humanity.
Surprise, surprise: I completely disagree with you. I find the comments almost indispensable. And my ego has nothing to do with it.
Without the comments, the "like" button becomes effectively castrated, because you have no way to double check what ridiculous reasons people are coming up with to vote one way or another. I'm highly invested in sociology. Society is crumbling. You can't reassemble an egg without getting you's hands dirty; you can't perfect your listening skills inside a tame filter bubble.
Finally, I don't see any parallel between Facebook and YouTube. Facebook went far above and beyond the call the duty in being obtuse to reality.
Apart from copyright law, YouTube is in the same nasty social media hot tub as every other social media service, and not doing a particularly worse job of it. In terms of getting in between the creative class and their revenue streams, how is this different from Apple? They're different models, but with more or less the same end result: content is not king.
Being annoyed about the content situation, then trying to throw YouTube under the Facebook bus in a fit of pique won't change this reality one bit.
I rarely watch videos with comments disabled, because then there's no way to find out in advance that the critical parts of the video were filmed through a potato, that the audio is 1.5 s out of sync, that another version is available without all the problems, that the most improbable sequence on a blooper real was actually filmed as a commercial (even if never aired), or where to find the associated PDF of a technical talk, etc. etc.
But I suppose I rely more on comments than most people, because I never subscribe to any channel, and most of what I watch is a la carte.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for keeping walled gardens out of the Oscars. This is has nothing to do with venue, but universal access to venue. Does the Netflix content ever come to DVD? Surprisingly to some, many people still watch movies (at home) the old-fashioned way.
If we were about to split up the Oscars, my first choice for a dividing line would be franchise films on one side of the house, non-franchise films on the other side of the house. Then we could pretty much eliminate the "best original script" Oscar from the franchise side of the house, because after the first installment, these rarely ever have an original script. (Every five years or so, you could award a special-edition originality achievement award, for when a franchise film miraculously exceeds the established mold in a valiant subsequent effort.)
When your teleporter pad finally proves itself—less than one melted person per thousand—visit us again, and we'll talk.
That's very expensive for four days total work on the ground when you decide not to send an air plant because that would weight many thousands of pounds.
There goes the entire birth control industry in a giant, ugly puff of logic.
Yeah, there's this one guy in India, who has more work to do than you could possibly imagine, but it barely makes ends meet, so he's reluctant to relax his outsource monopoly.
Let me fix that for you:
Is the attention economy land-grab petering out?
Betteridge's law of headlines carves out an important exception for headlines of the form:
Does what goes up, still go down?
Wrong bullhorn.
Apathy is not the issue here. Cynicism is not the issue here.
The Chinese authorities have an outright death wish for the individual freedoms of China's many citizens.
Some places pump water into a power generation reservoir in times of power surplus. This is no different.
I have yet to see any hard efficiency numbers to determine which one is worse.
I normally like the Guardian, but I'm annoyed they didn't mention the names of the ministers in Malaysia and Canada who immediately buckled.
So I'm thinking hard about a work problem on the morning commute for half an hour (which I never bill), and I'm supposed to worry about saving myself a trip to Office Depot to replenish a few pads of note paper, by stuffing my rucksack with a couple of pads from office supplies?
True, my employer has good reason to be pissed off: I might have invested 15 unbilled minutes into resolving a work problem in the car on the drive across town.
Compared to a pen, the loss of 15 unbilled minutes they might have otherwise claimed practically amounts to grand theft.
I think you lack imagination. Big trees grow from small seeds.
Where network effects are particularly strong, the dynamics in play resemble marriage counselling far more than you suspect.
I totally agree with you. But you're slightly misconstruing what "insightful" means on slashdot.
It means "I think intersectionality sucks fetid donkey balls, but I'm typing on a damn phone so I can't actually manage to write 'intersectionality' and 'i15y' hasn't caught on yet among the Black Panther set."
[*] No argument here on i15y sucking fetid donkey balls.
Humans are flexible organisms. When one form of communication fails (typing articulately), there's always the mouse-driven moderation system to take up the slack.
Furthermore, you've misconstrued the word "white". There are two types of white people: people of many gifts, and people where whiteness is their only gift.
The ionized adjective "white" is rarely used to refer to the former, and always used to refer to the later. This later group does experience exclusionary prejudice on a routine basis, especially the incel subclique, who are so far from being endowed with many gifts, that they willingly wind their entire self-identity around their inability to wow any woman with their sense of humour, anywhere, ever.
All it takes is three incels with moderation points to boost any comment on slashdot into the lamelight.
[*] I see your "baitshit" and raise you a "lamelight".
The answer is obvious: it's because it doesn't make sense for your particular workflow.
For my own workflow, even with three browser windows full screen on three different monitors, I soon end up with so many tabs open, the tabs shrink to where I can't read the page title, and I start to lose my mental map of how to get back to other contexts I've recently visited.
This typically happens when I'm involved in adding a lot of new information to my personal wiki, and while in the process of doing so, various small or medium refactoring projects calve off.
I fork entirely new windows and fill those full of pertinent tabs when this suits the purpose, then close the window entirely when the subtask is complete (I even have an extension which allows me to give the entire window an appropriate working title for the duration).
Other times I fork off tabs by the dozens in the current working window using middle click (middle click works just about anywhere, including drop down history lists, and weird social media overlays, though with a small number of exceptions concerning pages boasting particularly heinous JavaScript, which I preferentially flee once discovering Cthulhu's grubby fingerprints).
Other times it's just better to let tabs stack up in my tab history list.
I pretty much never close a tab without popping down the history stack to see whether I've left a task incomplete. Also, I generally don't navigate backwards page at a time. If there are twenty edit previews stacked up, I use the history list to jump directly across the entire mess.
I actually modified my wiki software to display the symbol  as the first character of every page title opened in edit mode, so that more of the useful title displays, and it's even more obvious what I need to jump across to restore a previously interrupted context.
Workflows are highly idiosyncratic. This is why you need features for all types. Mine is a complex hybrid of about five different major workflow patterns. And I use every one for a good reason, proven by the test of time.
Sometimes while adding new material to my own wiki (often starts with a survey of twenty pertinent articles located in Google search), I decide to annotate my own pages with chunks of leads scraped from pertinent Wikipedia articles. Then I discover that I need to add a handful of related pages to my wiki, so as to keep my topic map precise. Along the way, I discover that one of these Wikipedia pages has a tragically flawed lead, so I stop to fix that, but while I'm fixing that problem I have to confirm that my edit remains valid within the given citation, so I open up the citation, and discover the citation was horrible misused in the first place. So now I have to do another Google search to figure when the citation is salvageable, or if I should just slap in a better cite altogether. But while I'm doing this (now very boring task, if only for five minutes) the idle part of my brain goes "you know what, if you connect X to Y, you might actually get an interesting idea out of it."
Now the whole point of all this intensive notetaking is to generate creative ideas, so even the smallest glimmer of a creative idea is an immediate stop work order, and then I rush off to file that idea appropriately in my wiki, only to discover that it needs to be linked into page previously opened (with unsaved edits) as part of a suspended refactor.
Now I need to be very astute, and unwind exactly enough to capture the new idea, without losing partially finished work from a previous refactor, or complicating my route back so much that I lose the bubble before closing off all the broken edges.
At this point, long stacked edits in a single tab history are a godsend.
I can drop the history list down, middle click from somewhere in its depths to extract a page to edit out of sequence, then back the tab back to
You probably weren't expecting a serious response to a post entitled "WTF". But then again, you're a self-confessed neophyte of alphaghetti grunticons, tip-toeing tentatively into a Brave New World of soon-to-shatter Spanish dominion.
As all pre-modern narratives do, this story begins at the beginning.
———
Once upon a time there was a coyote. Legend has it that he was a solitary, Edisonian ne'er-do-well. But this is not entirely true. Solitary, yes. Somewhat crackpotty, indubitably. Persistent to a fault, yes yes yes. But ne'er-do-well, not so much. He was, in actual fact, an extraordinarily well-healed Prairie Dog Erectus of independent means (with lusciously plump toes and chubby cheek-flews to die for). He had—by this juncture in his crotchety life trajectory—two lucrative gigs going. For one thing, in his identity as sole proprietor and chief bottle washer of Perpetual Ventures Unlimited, he practically commanded his own private Pony Express to the U.S. Patent office. While he had never actually commercialized a single patent himself, some of his patents had been snapped up on the open market, to his great advantage. In particular, his patent for loosely affixing a length of string to a short, barbed cylinder had set him up in the lap of arid luxury for a coon's age. (Not that he ever found out, but this patent had been voted Troll Patent runner up for Scoop-of-the-Year honours in the secretive Annual Regards Gala, more commonly known as ARG). As for his second reliable gig, he was also contracted to provide general landscaping services for one Georgia O'Keefe, which involved a phenomenal amount of taxidermy, mostly in attendance of giant vats of boiling vinegar to scour skulls without number to a luminous Pepsodent sheen, which more than provided enough gas money for all the Acme Corporation Pemmican Mouse Paste a coyote could possibly want (one hasn't lived until one spreads pemmus over lembas).
Indeed, a lot more pemmus paste than a coyote could possibly want. And there lies the problem.
His chosen Arizonian abode was stark and beautiful, but not exactly a teeming reserve. If you had an insatiable tooth throbbing under your gelatinous flew for a glutinous drumstick (or two), the available options were thin on the ground. In fact, your options were immediately whittled down to just one highly migratory specimen of the delectable drumstick-dervish.
Nobody really knows why the Road Runner was quite so migratory. One rumour has it that he subcontracted to the Pony Express to handle one mysteriously busy route to the middle of nowhere which simply did not economically justify an entire pony procession. If so, it was probably at most a side gig. More likely, this particular Road Runner had a complicated double (or quadruple) life, in the manner of Catch Me If You Can–cum–Enemies, A Love Story. In any event, his peregrinations between A and B were toot toot Teutonic in their ineluctable inevitability.
One fine Saturday—or as Wile E. termed it, Eve of Sunday Rotisserie Spit—the Acme Amadrone spied Wile E. occupying a high vantage point, surveying his dusty domain with an outstretched compass and straightedge. "Ah! My new bowsaw!" said Wile E., practically bouncing up and down on all eight plush toes. And of course, you have to try it out, ASAP, before the torn packaging so much as flutters to rest on the ground below, so Wile E. immediately kneels down and begins sawing for all he's worth. "A fine saw indeed!" Wile E. exclaimed, as the timber beneath his feet feel peeled away in much the same way as would a recently unsupported brick. Still safely ensconced in his customary 0.99998 gee bubble of upward acceleration Wile E. ostentatiously bumpclaps green sawdust from his paws in alternate ham strokes, while giving his forecoat a subtle but effective shimmy. This is surely a fine new addition to his customary arsenal, though with one small snag: there's nary a tree to be seen
Most any project worth having is a system at heart.
Sometimes a quick chunk of code will get you a feature. But wherever true systems roam, actually software developers will be found to formulate the interactions and clean up the mess.
Jane Random servicewoman who comes into your house would have trouble opening your case, installing a device, and rebooting your computer all in the time it takes you to hit the head to squeeze a drop.
An actual case might even be locked and alarmed, too.
Personally, if I was wearing a protective cup, I'd hang my balls on the inside. But perhaps that's just me.
That is not all you did.
What you also did was engage in civil protest about legislative hypocrisy.
For reputational reasons, the government wants to pretend that compelled secrecy is not equivalent for forcing non-governmental bodies (individuals, corporations) to actively tell lies on the government's behalf. Furthermore, also for reputational reasons, the government does not want to go around explicitly saying "the law forbids anyone to discuss, in any terms, positive or negative, whether we just shoved a bug up your ass".
But you are saying that's what these laws amount to—obviously—even if the government does not see fit to write this down in black and white. I'm saying that this is a clear instance of hypocrisy: wanting it to be true implicitly, without having to say so in black and white.
Witness that the government could easily amend the legislation in question to actually say so in black and white: that these kinds of canaries are clearly forbidden (and not merely by statist inference chains). The principle is clear. If the government wants to wade into curtailing civil liberties, the standard for legislation in this area ought to be all available explicitness, precisely so that the government doesn't enjoy one kind of PR, while enacting a different kind of reality on the ground.
If the government wishes to go there, people who wish to argue about excessive government power ought to be able to point to the legislative text in absolute black and white. In no way should the government curtail individual freedom on any chain of mere legislative inference, most definitely not when it's trivial to behave otherwise (e.g add another paragraph of explicit "thou may not" verbiage).
This might be a slim defense in practice, but it's substantially different than no defense, as your little word "all" would direct people to believe.
Where in the article did it specify they aren't attempting to do all of the above?
Of course, it's entirely obvious that if you don't attempt to control the buy side, you'll not have much luck on the sell side, either. For example, if you don't squeeze equally hard on both sides, someone—likely someone such as yourself—will immediately point this discrepancy out on an internal mailing list, to justify flipping the bird at The Inconsistent Man upstairs.
Returning to planet earth, usually internal discipline is handled by internal communications. Rare does a director achieve lengthy tenure after leaking to the press "our professional society is riddled with stinking, dirty rats".
You must be an eternal rage kitten if you go around parsing everything you read through such a tiny gun slit.
Well, I'm both, and it's an awesome way to express my disdain over the spine-rupturing kitchen-counter height convention established in the dwarf-like 1950s (as optimized for female physiology, due to yet another patriarchal conspiracy).
Now I just need to find myself a phone that looks like a 4" thick Boos board (without which I cannot function on my feet in any normal kitchen).
Spectacular algorithm. If you know that drinking three pints and three whiskey shooters per day makes you feel unwell, try drinking four pints and two whiskey shooters (do you really think that spooling some yellow police tape around the outrage-porn crop circle would result in less total consumption?)
And if that's not enough, I'm sure you'll propose getting rid of another whiskey shooter. (To also be replaced by another pint of beer.) This could even work: someone might actually feel somewhat better drinking six pints, instead of three and three. Possibly even enough better to blithely continue consuming six pints a day for another three years.
Algorithmic manta:
If at first you break the camel's back, try first removing the heaviest straw. Iterate until camel's back bends horrifically, but without any ghastly snapping sounds.
———
I once tried Twitter for a month. And I enjoyed it a tiny bit, when I was following three people. But as soon as I started following ten people—all people who are serious thinkers—the hurly-burly randomness of my feed started to make my brain hurt. Then I found out that Twitter offers no controls to keep like-with-like, and so I immediately dumped it with extreme prejudice.
As I see it, rage porn is a side show. The actual problem is excessive context switching. Research shows (almost without exception) that everyone suffers under excess context switching, though some people have done this for so long, they no longer even knows what it feels like to have those other gears working again: insensate like a chronic alcoholic, for whom less hungover seems like fantastic progress—so long as it doesn't involve less drunk.
Absurd because it pushes God to the sidelines? Or a better caliber of absurd than this absurd absurdity? Once you start with God as your hypothesis, that pretty much renders all true progress absurd, in one fell swoop. It has taken us basically 400 years so far to peel God's cold dead fingers off the physical universe, and even now—miraculously—it remains a work in progress.
I can think up absurd observations which turned the world upside down far more readily than "seemingly" absurd theories: Michelson Morley, the photoelectric effect, neutron scattering, the double slit, cosmic background radiation, cosmic red-shift.
All these combined into a picture of the universe weirder than any crackpot could possibly have invented from whole cloth.
Of course, there's always an exception to prove the rule:
But generally the moral of the story goes like this: abandon all hope of normal increments, if God is your Bayesian prior.
———
[*] Weirdly, in the case of gravitational lensing, the absurd theory preceded the absurd observation, but this was an exceptional act of genius, off to the side of another discovered that earned an actual Nobel Prize, and yet another one that was also in frame; I suspect many physicists would gladly trade in their Nobel Prize for the ultimate honour of having invented GR out of whole cloth while seated in a comfy chair with your eyes closed.
The blind-census argument is itself extremely popular based on its relentless occurrence in the wild, at least that part of the wild with limited binocular vision.
———
Sage: You can't judge a book by its cover.
Simpleton: Uh, what else is there?
Sage: The pages inside.
Simpleton: You mean all those repetitive black marks, the ones that resemble a box of Fruit Loop alphaghetti filmed in black and white?
Sage: Their arrangement matters.
Simpleton: You mean like tea leaves?
Sage: [Takes a slow sip from his steaming mug.] Exactly right—like tea leaves filtered through a brain worth having.
Simpleton: [Thinks really hard.] Are you dissing mathematicians?
Sage: Not at all. Leaves produce more symbols at lower intensity, beans produce fewer symbols at higher intensity. You can't judge a theorem by its cover, because there's never enough pages to bind.
Simpleton: I see what you mean about not judging a book by its cover: some books don't even have covers. Very subtle, but I'm onto your koan. For example, I can still judge a theorem by it's lack of cover. That would still work out just fine.
Sage: Sure—suit yourself. Looks good on you. Now if you will please excuse me for five minutes, I need to hit the head.
———
[*] Alfred Renyi to Paul Erdos: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
For obvious reasons, this quip probably originated in Hungarian, not German, even thought the Satz pun is pretty good.
And ... that somebody is you.
In Economics 101, when a supply curve shifts to a lower price point (e.g. due to a technology such as this one) the demand curve almost always shifts to higher demand. And so every plenitude uptick is slated to run out in about a hundred years, no matter how much greater the new plenitude over the incumbent what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.
This phenomena is especially well known in the department of traffic congestion, which is why you can't build your way out of a snarl. Spanky new roads induce spanky new suburban commuter swarms emanating from spanky new gated communities.
There's also a bit of irony here that the Leela–Stockfish TCEC superfinal has just concluded with Stockfish winning by a hair (50-49, with game 100 in a position Leela can't win, and the TCEC client server momentarily 404). And sure enough, people are found in the chess comments sections complaining that Leela trains too slowly, given only petaflops do to her business.
Aww, shucks. Only meagre petaflops for an unfunded vanity project (yes, I admit, one that's super cool).
Plenitude: they just don't build it like they used to.
Glad to see you're hot on the job of speaking for all humanity.
Surprise, surprise: I completely disagree with you. I find the comments almost indispensable. And my ego has nothing to do with it.
Without the comments, the "like" button becomes effectively castrated, because you have no way to double check what ridiculous reasons people are coming up with to vote one way or another. I'm highly invested in sociology. Society is crumbling. You can't reassemble an egg without getting you's hands dirty; you can't perfect your listening skills inside a tame filter bubble.
Finally, I don't see any parallel between Facebook and YouTube. Facebook went far above and beyond the call the duty in being obtuse to reality.
Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook — April 2018
Apart from copyright law, YouTube is in the same nasty social media hot tub as every other social media service, and not doing a particularly worse job of it. In terms of getting in between the creative class and their revenue streams, how is this different from Apple? They're different models, but with more or less the same end result: content is not king.
Being annoyed about the content situation, then trying to throw YouTube under the Facebook bus in a fit of pique won't change this reality one bit.
I rarely watch videos with comments disabled, because then there's no way to find out in advance that the critical parts of the video were filmed through a potato, that the audio is 1.5 s out of sync, that another version is available without all the problems, that the most improbable sequence on a blooper real was actually filmed as a commercial (even if never aired), or where to find the associated PDF of a technical talk, etc. etc.
But I suppose I rely more on comments than most people, because I never subscribe to any channel, and most of what I watch is a la carte.