When at least some portion of General Relativity was confirmed by the 1919 eclipse, did that mean all the cosmologists could go home, their work done?
Certainly not. But again, if their major focus of study was to determine if Relativity was to make sense or not, then perhaps they were done in 1919 and they could move on to its applications.
In this case, there are grants given to determine certain things. In this case the grants or the programs ended.
No one is saying that we don't need climate scientists anymore, no more than anyone is saying you don't need soldiers any more when the war is over.
However, you do generally move them back home or at least back to their bases, release a lot back to obtain employment elsewhere, or alternately employ them in other capacities under different budgets.
In this case, the government is doing what it should, ending programs that have achieved their goals. While it means that climate scientists have lost a job, it doesn't mean there are no jobs for them elsewhere.
You know whenever I hear "cyber" used, I know it is some US Government flunky who is using the term. Nobody calls it "cyberspace" anymore unless you're talking to senior citizens or the government. It's as jarring as listening to actors trying to sound "hip" on some 1960s filmstrip in school.
Actually, while it annoys me to see meta-comments about where the stories come from (like Forbes or StartsWithABang or whoever), it does seem to show a need for a forum where people can post these complaints and then perhaps show the site admins whether that is a common sentiment or not with some voting or at least discussion.
I agree that the Forbes articles are something I do not wish to disable my ad blocker to look at and it could be a reasonable request to not accept links to sites that require Ad Block to be turned off. Of course, that does hit right to the heart of supporting ad block when Slashdot itself is Ad supported.:)
Slashdot doesn't release "scoops", really. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although it is amusing at times to see them beaten out for tech news by CNN.com. As an aggregator that relies on posting from other sites, it's always going to lag a little.
On the other hand, perhaps that means the Slashdot needs to stop reporting on mainstream crap and return to a more specialized set of news.
I asked, "Why would I pirate something that costs $0.99?" That could include the ability to format shift and maintain your own copies and own them for that 99 cents.
The point I'm making is that, as the price goes down, the ability and desire for people to pay for it goes up. Some people don't care if they can hear it in their car. But that inability to listen to it in the car is *still* an artifact of old types of control.
Some other people are okay with paying five bucks to hear it in their car, but do not want to pay twenty bucks for an album with one song on it that they wanted to hear.
I don't think piracy as it stands right now is actually reducing profits that music companies would have made to begin with. Even if I couldn't hear their music via piracy, I was never going to beggar myself to buy more of their product.
When I had no choice about buying CDs, I never owned more than two dozen in my entire lifetime. Nothing short of a winning lottery ticket was going to increase the money I spent on CDs. So, if I am paying the music industry the same proportion of money now that I paid them in the past, they haven't lost a cent on me, even if I was to pirate 5,000 tracks on top of my legal buys. If I had to pay for 5,000 tracks, I wouldn't be able to, and I'd just refuse to bother to try to listen to other music except that which I very carefully vetted beforehand by hearing if from somewhere free and legal.
However, if I hadn't heard that one particular track by this one obscure artist I would never have taken a $20 bet on in a music store, that artist may never have gotten any money from me at all.
I'm not saying that piracy can't hurt profits or even cut into the bottom line. I just don't see where that is happening in the music industry today. Sure, there are poor artists out there, but I don't think that having to pay $20 for their album was ever going to make them less poor. All it was going to do is make them less *heard*. There's always going to be poor artists out there. Art is a matter of taste, and some artists provide more mainstream sounds than others. And some artists are more talented than others. I just think that piracy isn't the zero sum game that the music business wants you to believe it is.
Did you suggest that to him? Or did you just get mad because he made you wait because his register didn't work and you only had two items and tell him to get bent?
We should always verify. But presumably that's just science.
Also, China does have a habit of controlling their media. That calls for more independent verification.
Further, their desire to look like a leading producer of science has caused them to do things that hurt the practice of science. There was an article in the past which went over how many retractions that journals have had to make for submissions that PRC scientists have made. This is because the Party decreed that scientists who used to be appointed to cushy jobs for political or patronage reasons, suddenly needed to publish to justify their jobs. Those that were shitty researchers simply made up data to publish and keep their jobs.
Yes, there are some people who see China as The Enemy, and that's not a good thing, but China isn't an innocent victim of propaganda either. It sometimes digs its own credibility holes.
The right thing to do is interview people who can verify this, and then to report that verification. If it can be verified, then the fact that it is Chinese should be irrelevant.
The fact that you _know_ about Flint means it's already different from China.
This.
China is willing to make strides on the back of their population. They can support this because they control information and refuse to accept responsibility for their failures or even allow the existence of the failures to be shown internally.
There have been "Flint" style issues in China too. The fact that we are an open country doesn't mean Flints cannot happen. It means that someone is held accountable publicly when they do. That tends to lead to something like Flint not happening again.
That said, there is *some* accountability within the Chinese Communist Party for this sort of thing, but it's the same sort of "backdoor" accountability you'd find anywhere. It does work, but if the people in those positions are too powerful to be held to account, or it is too embarrassing for the Party to admit a failure, they simply cover it up.
Here's the thing. It's not always a matter of do A or B.
Regime change in Syria on one level, is exactly the right thing to do. The problem is that it creates complications based on how it is executed.
Assad, like his father, is a psychopathic dictator willing to do anything to stay in power. His people are better off without him. They know this, and that is why they were asking for reforms and are now in rebellion.
However, if the means by which the regime is changed is careless or not properly executed, then yes, things can certainly get worse than Assad. That does *not* mean that removing Assad is the wrong decision. It means that there is a risk to doing so that needs to be planned for and addressed.
Our attempt to push regime change in Syria, while remaining "hands off" because the Obama Administration did not want to get too involved was definitely the wrong decision. That does not mean that the choice was always "keep Assad or create ISIS". Obama did not want to create the complication for himself, so he offered lukewarm support to the rebels. That lack of support prevented the rebels from getting the upper hand and it turned into chaos.
The one thing I have learned is that wishy washy "solutions" often make the problems they were intended to solve worse. We took a side against Assad, and we should have fully committed to what it takes to make that happen. Maybe not troops on the ground, but we certainly could have taken stronger more decisive steps than we did to support the rebels.
The FBI is charmingly quaint in how it deals with computer crime because it is made up of government employees using government procedures.
Now, however, you're making them care on a personal level about taking out hackers, which has a tendency to increase the effectiveness of people in previously mundane positions.
Kids, the first rule of treasure hunting is: "Don't wake the dragon".
Math up to about logic and maybe trig is useful in daily life for most careers. You need calc only in fields where you have to use those methods to make pertinent calculations or you're an academic.
I've spent 20 years being shitty in calculus and having not suffered in the slightest. However, coding has kept me employed (in part) and well paid.
It's good to know advanced math, and you should pursue it if you are good at it, but if you don't have the knack for it, you're better off learning something else. Not all "nerds" are good at math.
He had a point. The register isn't for math, it is for *accounting*. He has to true up his drawer against the receipts for that shift. One loaf of bread isn't going to be a huge issue, but if loaves start walking out the door and the cameras pick up the cashier taking cash and not entering it, it is possible that the cashier gets in trouble at least for failing to account for things.
Worse, if someone actually is stealing those loaves or cans of spaghetti (low amounts of shoplifting are common in stores) and the cashier is seen taking money for those things which is not accounted for, they assume he or she is running a side business and pocketing the cash.
So yeah, he's probably not going to jail, but you were not entirely in the right there.
Yes, but none of that is "basic science". Presumably, they'd be keeping the specialists. Or these scientists will simply need to apply for a new specialist job that will be opening up.
Hard to say what this means, but if all they're doing is cutting the scientists who are trying to prove that it is real, then yeah, they're redundant.
When you've won the war, you send the soldiers home. Keeping a standing army like that has a tendency to cause people to find uses for it and make work.
Don't cross the streams here. The question of whether fiat money is real or not is really sort of a tangent against the actual point.
Fiat money might be based on something other than gold bars in a bank vault, but you can use it for buying and selling almost everything and it is legal tender. That's close enough to "real" for this discussion. In that sense, it is a lot more "real" than Bitcoin, which is really the issue here, although there's no need to suggest that Bitcoin is "pretend", but it is definitely of *limited* utility.
Someone who uses Bitcoin to get themselves dollars, for instance, has become "actual rich" if he can get away with keeping it. Whether Bitcoin is "pretend currency" or not is actually not even the point here, but it certainly makes the Ponzi comparison much more apt.
No, because while *git* allows you to clone repos and mail patches, we're talking about *GitHub* working or not. I have GitHub so I don't have to do that stuff.
If I write software or have a service, and it doesn't stay up, then the answer to someone complaining about it isn't , "Go email yourself a patch and be happy that you're using a service based on git so that you don't have to fail when we fail. Thanks! Be sure to rate us really highly and keep the hype up so that we can sell our company at some point!"
Yeah, we use GitHub too. Not saying I hate it, because I don't, but no one would accept downtime from my app without complaint, I don't see why I have to simply accept downtime from their app without being able to complain about theirs. And free or not, it is clear that this is a business. People are being paid for this to work and there is the expectation that it *will* work.
I agree that they may not immediately suspend/revoke it immediately, but they should have opened an investigation. And in *two whole years*, they should have been able to establish that it was validating malware. That by itself should have been enough to revoke a developer cert, even if he also signed legit software too with it too.
OR (if the cert was somehow compromised) they could have issued a new cert to the developer for his legit software and cancelled the old one. The developer would need to let everyone know to upgrade to the newest version, but that's his problem since he got his certificate pinched.
It's not pretend rich if people actually accept his pretend currency for actual goods and services.
Make no mistake, the people at the top of the Ponzi pyramid have a shit load of very real money at the end of it. It's just that it usually gets taken away by the government when they're hauled off to jail before they can escape with it.
Yes, everyone would have to be on board with the new model, I don't want to give the impression that I think Starz could just decide to offer things for free. But it benefits the studio as much as the cable channel, in the end. If you have more eyes on the screen, there's more demand for product to be produced.
Either way, the whole system should rethink how it does business. Piracy can be a problem, but it isn't automatically a drain on income. That's because with something like movies or music, you can make unlimited copies of it. You don't have to keep an inventory around and pay to store it. Your job is to get as many eyes or ears on your product as possible, and then extract the payment from those people.
Currently, they rely on trying to keep the product exclusive to people who purchase through controlled channels, and then charge those people as much as possible because they're making their product exclusive and unable to be seen by everyone.
If they, instead, get more customers, they can charge less on volume and they will get more *paying* customers because at some point, people will look at the price and go "Why would I pirate something that costs $0.99?
I think the entertainment business wants it both ways. They want the ability to cheaply distribute quality media for low prices to everyone, but they want everyone to pay those absurd prices that were more justifiable when you actually had to produce and distribute expensive physical media. In effect, they want to make as big a profit as possible with no downside. That's just greed and I lack sympathy for that scenario. The new media they want to take advantage of works because it makes things *less exclusive*, so their means of control become more and more complex, corrupt, and retrograde as time goes on.
It may be that some you'll realize that the Democractic Party is the center-right pro-business party in the US, but I won't be holding my breath. Few people can overcome the color-coding of the flags. Once a red, always a red.
You're coming from a position of a world-wide relativist. Yes, most parties in the US would be considered to be conservative compared to those in Europe. That doesn't really change the way they are arrayed in the US.
The US isn't interested in being a world centralist, it is a conservative country that doesn't care to join the rest of the world because the electorate sees the rest of the world as not being applicable to life in the US.
Europe does not have the same demographics or challenges as the US so the world-wide relativist scale is useless. We don't care if we're all arch-conservatives compared to some leftist in France because this isn't France.
Of course it's not a simple knob, but let's face it, there's no way that centralized health care is turning it in a downward direction. And Sanders is a firm proponent of socialism, which asserts that it's the government's job to promote social and economic equality and well-being. I'm not saying I believe any of the Republicans are necessarily going to do better, but at least they're not actually *promising* to increase the government.
I'm not pretending that you can just dial it down from 11 to 1 (or even 8) easily. It will take time and effort to pare things down without complete chaos, and I fear that a calm, ordered paring down of the system is not possible in this political climate.
That's the problem with the Republican side. They sort of try to shrink it, but their idea is to brutally cut everything they don't like, and justify continuing to fund the things they do like at the same, or higher levels.
More to the point, when they do cut things, they don't care if the government or the things that currently rely on the system break with them. They're just wielding their axe like a corporate executive does at layoff time to look good for his shareholders.
I can't really pretend that I have some sort of system worked out, but if you can say that I have a political goal, it's very simply for people to understand that the size of the government we have is too large, which makes it prone to extreme inefficiency, and it also makes it extremely prone to being captured by special interests.
However, at the same time, I understand that you can't just shut it down. So the real effort is to ask people to consider how their problems can be solved by something *other* than some law or regulation enforced by the government.
I don't see a problem with free health care. Who in their right mind would, except some weird-ass social Darwinist? The problem is, if it is provided by the government it comes with strings attached and those cause problems. Even if the program somehow remains solvent for an extended period of time without a catastrophic failure in the future, it just increases the size and power of the government.
People in the United States don't realize, or don't really like to admit how close we've come at times to being subverted into something resembling a one party state or even a state run by martial law. It's just lucky that the people who had the ability to accrue that sort of power, like a Lincoln or FDR, did not care for that sort of power, and *they didn't live past the crisis* to have the time to change their mind.
Look at Donald Trump. He's a joke. Except, apparently he's not because there are people who would vote for someone who says the things he says. People who get mad or are only thinking of their own fears tend to bring people like him to power. Hell, even Obama had that sort of odd quasi-religious thing going on before he demonstrated his lack of ability to get shit done. A person who is able to command that sort of following AND who is interested and capable of wielding the rather massive power of the Federal government is going to be a terror to behold.
I would not argue with your decision to not pirate a series out of principle.
However, the fact is that for Starz to be affected by piracy, piracy has to be removing subscribers who would pay to watch their series. If that is happening, there is a loss.
That said, I've never seen Black Sails. If it is an awesome show, I might well want to watch it regularly, even pay to do so. But if I never see it, I may never generate the interest in the first place.
I do think that piracy can create more interest and actually create more sales than losses. Of course, that works much better for a continuing series or network than it does for a one-off, because the continuing situation can take advantage of increased sales upon pirate exposure of their content.
Strictly speaking, I think if Starz wants more viewers and it has a great show, it should simply offer one or two episode of their shows entirely for free and hook people on them. Presumably, this also keeps people subscribing if Starz is shown to be a quality network making good series. I mean, consider if someone had pirated an HBO series in the past. They'd know the general quality of HBO in that regard, and might decide that HBO is worth their money in the future, thus obtaining a subscriber who they wouldn't have.
I agree with your point about a good price point as well. That's why I pay for music these days instead of simply doing without or using shitty radio. I can't afford to spend $20 dollars speculatively on an album that only has one song on it I like because of publisher greed and artistic hubris. Now, I can spend 10 dollars a month to have the ability to set my own playlist. If some artist then wants to make an album that stands on its own, then it needs to actually have an even quality about it so I'll actually want to listen to the other songs.
I think piracy is simply how people who don't even have that sort of disposable income can become part of the audience. You just have to make sure you can find a business model that takes advantage of it.
I wish they'd simply say: "Not hackable by all currently known methods". This is not an OTP encrypted device, it's breakable in some manner, even if the necessary capability or process is completely impractical at present.
I hope this is just journalistic bullshitting, because a researcher should know better than that.
Please. Sanders will do the same shit, he's just going to throw in some socialism to shut people up. One of the biggest reasons to *not* vote for Sanders is that the free health care giveaway is just going to make people more dependent on the central government. You know, the same one who pulls *this* shit.
I've said it many times before. Why do people who hate the overreach of the government keep voting for more government? Do they have the naive expectation that there's any way that information or powers accrued to one part of it will not simply end up at the disposal of another part? That should have been debunked years ago when the supposedly separate Social Security fund started becoming the First Bank of Congress.
Democrat or Republican or even Socialist, it doesn't matter. You'll give more power to someone you think's a pretty swell guy, like Sanders, and even if he personally does not abuse it, the next guy will. It's not like those powers or taxes go away when you elect President Evil, you know....
And hacking doesn't even really require you to sit there and type really fast for those four hours like they show in Hollywood. Most of these tools are fully automated (this is *computer* crime after all). Your major time expenditure is running scans or exploits and reviewing the results. If you do get in, you have a flurry of work to extrude data, cause havoc, deface web pages, and cover your tracks (if you even care to), but at that point, you've already hit paydirt.
So, much of the time used for these hacks is probably spent with the hacker playing on their PS4 or Xbone while they wait. They have to be there, but they're not actually doing anything but waiting for something to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
When at least some portion of General Relativity was confirmed by the 1919 eclipse, did that mean all the cosmologists could go home, their work done?
Certainly not. But again, if their major focus of study was to determine if Relativity was to make sense or not, then perhaps they were done in 1919 and they could move on to its applications.
In this case, there are grants given to determine certain things. In this case the grants or the programs ended.
No one is saying that we don't need climate scientists anymore, no more than anyone is saying you don't need soldiers any more when the war is over.
However, you do generally move them back home or at least back to their bases, release a lot back to obtain employment elsewhere, or alternately employ them in other capacities under different budgets.
In this case, the government is doing what it should, ending programs that have achieved their goals. While it means that climate scientists have lost a job, it doesn't mean there are no jobs for them elsewhere.
You know whenever I hear "cyber" used, I know it is some US Government flunky who is using the term. Nobody calls it "cyberspace" anymore unless you're talking to senior citizens or the government. It's as jarring as listening to actors trying to sound "hip" on some 1960s filmstrip in school.
Actually, while it annoys me to see meta-comments about where the stories come from (like Forbes or StartsWithABang or whoever), it does seem to show a need for a forum where people can post these complaints and then perhaps show the site admins whether that is a common sentiment or not with some voting or at least discussion.
I agree that the Forbes articles are something I do not wish to disable my ad blocker to look at and it could be a reasonable request to not accept links to sites that require Ad Block to be turned off. Of course, that does hit right to the heart of supporting ad block when Slashdot itself is Ad supported. :)
Slashdot doesn't release "scoops", really. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although it is amusing at times to see them beaten out for tech news by CNN.com. As an aggregator that relies on posting from other sites, it's always going to lag a little.
On the other hand, perhaps that means the Slashdot needs to stop reporting on mainstream crap and return to a more specialized set of news.
To be fair, I did not ask,
"Why would I pirate something from iTunes?"
I asked, "Why would I pirate something that costs $0.99?" That could include the ability to format shift and maintain your own copies and own them for that 99 cents.
The point I'm making is that, as the price goes down, the ability and desire for people to pay for it goes up. Some people don't care if they can hear it in their car. But that inability to listen to it in the car is *still* an artifact of old types of control.
Some other people are okay with paying five bucks to hear it in their car, but do not want to pay twenty bucks for an album with one song on it that they wanted to hear.
I don't think piracy as it stands right now is actually reducing profits that music companies would have made to begin with. Even if I couldn't hear their music via piracy, I was never going to beggar myself to buy more of their product.
When I had no choice about buying CDs, I never owned more than two dozen in my entire lifetime. Nothing short of a winning lottery ticket was going to increase the money I spent on CDs. So, if I am paying the music industry the same proportion of money now that I paid them in the past, they haven't lost a cent on me, even if I was to pirate 5,000 tracks on top of my legal buys. If I had to pay for 5,000 tracks, I wouldn't be able to, and I'd just refuse to bother to try to listen to other music except that which I very carefully vetted beforehand by hearing if from somewhere free and legal.
However, if I hadn't heard that one particular track by this one obscure artist I would never have taken a $20 bet on in a music store, that artist may never have gotten any money from me at all.
I'm not saying that piracy can't hurt profits or even cut into the bottom line. I just don't see where that is happening in the music industry today. Sure, there are poor artists out there, but I don't think that having to pay $20 for their album was ever going to make them less poor. All it was going to do is make them less *heard*. There's always going to be poor artists out there. Art is a matter of taste, and some artists provide more mainstream sounds than others. And some artists are more talented than others. I just think that piracy isn't the zero sum game that the music business wants you to believe it is.
Did you suggest that to him? Or did you just get mad because he made you wait because his register didn't work and you only had two items and tell him to get bent?
We should always verify. But presumably that's just science.
Also, China does have a habit of controlling their media. That calls for more independent verification.
Further, their desire to look like a leading producer of science has caused them to do things that hurt the practice of science. There was an article in the past which went over how many retractions that journals have had to make for submissions that PRC scientists have made. This is because the Party decreed that scientists who used to be appointed to cushy jobs for political or patronage reasons, suddenly needed to publish to justify their jobs. Those that were shitty researchers simply made up data to publish and keep their jobs.
Yes, there are some people who see China as The Enemy, and that's not a good thing, but China isn't an innocent victim of propaganda either. It sometimes digs its own credibility holes.
The right thing to do is interview people who can verify this, and then to report that verification. If it can be verified, then the fact that it is Chinese should be irrelevant.
The fact that you _know_ about Flint means it's already different from China.
This.
China is willing to make strides on the back of their population. They can support this because they control information and refuse to accept responsibility for their failures or even allow the existence of the failures to be shown internally.
There have been "Flint" style issues in China too. The fact that we are an open country doesn't mean Flints cannot happen. It means that someone is held accountable publicly when they do. That tends to lead to something like Flint not happening again.
That said, there is *some* accountability within the Chinese Communist Party for this sort of thing, but it's the same sort of "backdoor" accountability you'd find anywhere. It does work, but if the people in those positions are too powerful to be held to account, or it is too embarrassing for the Party to admit a failure, they simply cover it up.
Here's the thing. It's not always a matter of do A or B.
Regime change in Syria on one level, is exactly the right thing to do. The problem is that it creates complications based on how it is executed.
Assad, like his father, is a psychopathic dictator willing to do anything to stay in power. His people are better off without him. They know this, and that is why they were asking for reforms and are now in rebellion.
However, if the means by which the regime is changed is careless or not properly executed, then yes, things can certainly get worse than Assad. That does *not* mean that removing Assad is the wrong decision. It means that there is a risk to doing so that needs to be planned for and addressed.
Our attempt to push regime change in Syria, while remaining "hands off" because the Obama Administration did not want to get too involved was definitely the wrong decision. That does not mean that the choice was always "keep Assad or create ISIS". Obama did not want to create the complication for himself, so he offered lukewarm support to the rebels. That lack of support prevented the rebels from getting the upper hand and it turned into chaos.
The one thing I have learned is that wishy washy "solutions" often make the problems they were intended to solve worse. We took a side against Assad, and we should have fully committed to what it takes to make that happen. Maybe not troops on the ground, but we certainly could have taken stronger more decisive steps than we did to support the rebels.
The hackers are stupid too.
Why?
The FBI is charmingly quaint in how it deals with computer crime because it is made up of government employees using government procedures.
Now, however, you're making them care on a personal level about taking out hackers, which has a tendency to increase the effectiveness of people in previously mundane positions.
Kids, the first rule of treasure hunting is: "Don't wake the dragon".
Math up to about logic and maybe trig is useful in daily life for most careers. You need calc only in fields where you have to use those methods to make pertinent calculations or you're an academic.
I've spent 20 years being shitty in calculus and having not suffered in the slightest. However, coding has kept me employed (in part) and well paid.
It's good to know advanced math, and you should pursue it if you are good at it, but if you don't have the knack for it, you're better off learning something else. Not all "nerds" are good at math.
He had a point. The register isn't for math, it is for *accounting*. He has to true up his drawer against the receipts for that shift. One loaf of bread isn't going to be a huge issue, but if loaves start walking out the door and the cameras pick up the cashier taking cash and not entering it, it is possible that the cashier gets in trouble at least for failing to account for things.
Worse, if someone actually is stealing those loaves or cans of spaghetti (low amounts of shoplifting are common in stores) and the cashier is seen taking money for those things which is not accounted for, they assume he or she is running a side business and pocketing the cash.
So yeah, he's probably not going to jail, but you were not entirely in the right there.
Yes, but none of that is "basic science". Presumably, they'd be keeping the specialists. Or these scientists will simply need to apply for a new specialist job that will be opening up.
Hard to say what this means, but if all they're doing is cutting the scientists who are trying to prove that it is real, then yeah, they're redundant.
When you've won the war, you send the soldiers home. Keeping a standing army like that has a tendency to cause people to find uses for it and make work.
Even an insurance company can't shake down God for money. He's got better lawyers than they do.
I mean, His acts are literally excluded from almost every contract ever written by a lawyer. Talk about having a good legal team.
Don't cross the streams here. The question of whether fiat money is real or not is really sort of a tangent against the actual point.
Fiat money might be based on something other than gold bars in a bank vault, but you can use it for buying and selling almost everything and it is legal tender. That's close enough to "real" for this discussion. In that sense, it is a lot more "real" than Bitcoin, which is really the issue here, although there's no need to suggest that Bitcoin is "pretend", but it is definitely of *limited* utility.
Someone who uses Bitcoin to get themselves dollars, for instance, has become "actual rich" if he can get away with keeping it. Whether Bitcoin is "pretend currency" or not is actually not even the point here, but it certainly makes the Ponzi comparison much more apt.
Yes and no. Yes, you can do it. Praise be to git.
No, because while *git* allows you to clone repos and mail patches, we're talking about *GitHub* working or not. I have GitHub so I don't have to do that stuff.
If I write software or have a service, and it doesn't stay up, then the answer to someone complaining about it isn't , "Go email yourself a patch and be happy that you're using a service based on git so that you don't have to fail when we fail. Thanks! Be sure to rate us really highly and keep the hype up so that we can sell our company at some point!"
Yeah, we use GitHub too. Not saying I hate it, because I don't, but no one would accept downtime from my app without complaint, I don't see why I have to simply accept downtime from their app without being able to complain about theirs. And free or not, it is clear that this is a business. People are being paid for this to work and there is the expectation that it *will* work.
I agree that they may not immediately suspend/revoke it immediately, but they should have opened an investigation. And in *two whole years*, they should have been able to establish that it was validating malware. That by itself should have been enough to revoke a developer cert, even if he also signed legit software too with it too.
OR (if the cert was somehow compromised) they could have issued a new cert to the developer for his legit software and cancelled the old one. The developer would need to let everyone know to upgrade to the newest version, but that's his problem since he got his certificate pinched.
It's not pretend rich if people actually accept his pretend currency for actual goods and services.
Make no mistake, the people at the top of the Ponzi pyramid have a shit load of very real money at the end of it. It's just that it usually gets taken away by the government when they're hauled off to jail before they can escape with it.
Yes, everyone would have to be on board with the new model, I don't want to give the impression that I think Starz could just decide to offer things for free. But it benefits the studio as much as the cable channel, in the end. If you have more eyes on the screen, there's more demand for product to be produced.
Either way, the whole system should rethink how it does business. Piracy can be a problem, but it isn't automatically a drain on income. That's because with something like movies or music, you can make unlimited copies of it. You don't have to keep an inventory around and pay to store it. Your job is to get as many eyes or ears on your product as possible, and then extract the payment from those people.
Currently, they rely on trying to keep the product exclusive to people who purchase through controlled channels, and then charge those people as much as possible because they're making their product exclusive and unable to be seen by everyone.
If they, instead, get more customers, they can charge less on volume and they will get more *paying* customers because at some point, people will look at the price and go "Why would I pirate something that costs $0.99?
I think the entertainment business wants it both ways. They want the ability to cheaply distribute quality media for low prices to everyone, but they want everyone to pay those absurd prices that were more justifiable when you actually had to produce and distribute expensive physical media. In effect, they want to make as big a profit as possible with no downside. That's just greed and I lack sympathy for that scenario. The new media they want to take advantage of works because it makes things *less exclusive*, so their means of control become more and more complex, corrupt, and retrograde as time goes on.
It may be that some you'll realize that the Democractic Party is the center-right pro-business party in the US, but I won't be holding my breath. Few people can overcome the color-coding of the flags. Once a red, always a red.
You're coming from a position of a world-wide relativist. Yes, most parties in the US would be considered to be conservative compared to those in Europe. That doesn't really change the way they are arrayed in the US.
The US isn't interested in being a world centralist, it is a conservative country that doesn't care to join the rest of the world because the electorate sees the rest of the world as not being applicable to life in the US.
Europe does not have the same demographics or challenges as the US so the world-wide relativist scale is useless. We don't care if we're all arch-conservatives compared to some leftist in France because this isn't France.
Of course it's not a simple knob, but let's face it, there's no way that centralized health care is turning it in a downward direction. And Sanders is a firm proponent of socialism, which asserts that it's the government's job to promote social and economic equality and well-being. I'm not saying I believe any of the Republicans are necessarily going to do better, but at least they're not actually *promising* to increase the government.
I'm not pretending that you can just dial it down from 11 to 1 (or even 8) easily. It will take time and effort to pare things down without complete chaos, and I fear that a calm, ordered paring down of the system is not possible in this political climate.
That's the problem with the Republican side. They sort of try to shrink it, but their idea is to brutally cut everything they don't like, and justify continuing to fund the things they do like at the same, or higher levels.
More to the point, when they do cut things, they don't care if the government or the things that currently rely on the system break with them. They're just wielding their axe like a corporate executive does at layoff time to look good for his shareholders.
I can't really pretend that I have some sort of system worked out, but if you can say that I have a political goal, it's very simply for people to understand that the size of the government we have is too large, which makes it prone to extreme inefficiency, and it also makes it extremely prone to being captured by special interests.
However, at the same time, I understand that you can't just shut it down. So the real effort is to ask people to consider how their problems can be solved by something *other* than some law or regulation enforced by the government.
I don't see a problem with free health care. Who in their right mind would, except some weird-ass social Darwinist? The problem is, if it is provided by the government it comes with strings attached and those cause problems. Even if the program somehow remains solvent for an extended period of time without a catastrophic failure in the future, it just increases the size and power of the government.
People in the United States don't realize, or don't really like to admit how close we've come at times to being subverted into something resembling a one party state or even a state run by martial law. It's just lucky that the people who had the ability to accrue that sort of power, like a Lincoln or FDR, did not care for that sort of power, and *they didn't live past the crisis* to have the time to change their mind.
Look at Donald Trump. He's a joke. Except, apparently he's not because there are people who would vote for someone who says the things he says. People who get mad or are only thinking of their own fears tend to bring people like him to power. Hell, even Obama had that sort of odd quasi-religious thing going on before he demonstrated his lack of ability to get shit done. A person who is able to command that sort of following AND who is interested and capable of wielding the rather massive power of the Federal government is going to be a terror to behold.
I would not argue with your decision to not pirate a series out of principle.
However, the fact is that for Starz to be affected by piracy, piracy has to be removing subscribers who would pay to watch their series. If that is happening, there is a loss.
That said, I've never seen Black Sails. If it is an awesome show, I might well want to watch it regularly, even pay to do so. But if I never see it, I may never generate the interest in the first place.
I do think that piracy can create more interest and actually create more sales than losses. Of course, that works much better for a continuing series or network than it does for a one-off, because the continuing situation can take advantage of increased sales upon pirate exposure of their content.
Strictly speaking, I think if Starz wants more viewers and it has a great show, it should simply offer one or two episode of their shows entirely for free and hook people on them. Presumably, this also keeps people subscribing if Starz is shown to be a quality network making good series. I mean, consider if someone had pirated an HBO series in the past. They'd know the general quality of HBO in that regard, and might decide that HBO is worth their money in the future, thus obtaining a subscriber who they wouldn't have.
I agree with your point about a good price point as well. That's why I pay for music these days instead of simply doing without or using shitty radio. I can't afford to spend $20 dollars speculatively on an album that only has one song on it I like because of publisher greed and artistic hubris. Now, I can spend 10 dollars a month to have the ability to set my own playlist. If some artist then wants to make an album that stands on its own, then it needs to actually have an even quality about it so I'll actually want to listen to the other songs.
I think piracy is simply how people who don't even have that sort of disposable income can become part of the audience. You just have to make sure you can find a business model that takes advantage of it.
I wish they'd simply say: "Not hackable by all currently known methods". This is not an OTP encrypted device, it's breakable in some manner, even if the necessary capability or process is completely impractical at present.
I hope this is just journalistic bullshitting, because a researcher should know better than that.
Please. Sanders will do the same shit, he's just going to throw in some socialism to shut people up. One of the biggest reasons to *not* vote for Sanders is that the free health care giveaway is just going to make people more dependent on the central government. You know, the same one who pulls *this* shit.
I've said it many times before. Why do people who hate the overreach of the government keep voting for more government? Do they have the naive expectation that there's any way that information or powers accrued to one part of it will not simply end up at the disposal of another part? That should have been debunked years ago when the supposedly separate Social Security fund started becoming the First Bank of Congress.
Democrat or Republican or even Socialist, it doesn't matter. You'll give more power to someone you think's a pretty swell guy, like Sanders, and even if he personally does not abuse it, the next guy will. It's not like those powers or taxes go away when you elect President Evil, you know....
And hacking doesn't even really require you to sit there and type really fast for those four hours like they show in Hollywood. Most of these tools are fully automated (this is *computer* crime after all). Your major time expenditure is running scans or exploits and reviewing the results. If you do get in, you have a flurry of work to extrude data, cause havoc, deface web pages, and cover your tracks (if you even care to), but at that point, you've already hit paydirt.
So, much of the time used for these hacks is probably spent with the hacker playing on their PS4 or Xbone while they wait. They have to be there, but they're not actually doing anything but waiting for something to happen.