It's a very old arrangement actually, dating back to the middle ages. 'The City of London' is not the city of London, it's a medieval corporation whose territory encompasses a small stretch of the most expensive property in London, and whose constituents are not the handful of people that live there, but the medieval guilds and the big corporations that own property there.
Which one will move freight more efficiently is an entirely different question from which one is faster. If you are looking for a car that will move a lot of freight, you will say you want that. You will not, barring congenital idiocy, say you want a fast car and expect that to be understood to mean you actually want a road train.
"Value has nothing to do with how much advertising is associated with it"
You're using language to blur rather than delineate meaning here. Value is not *determined* by advertising, in general that is true. Advertising may be used as a rough statistical indicator of value, nonetheless. There is a clear (and well understood) statistical correlation here, which someone attempting to rationally deal with the 'no time to be an expert on everything' problem rather than simply use it as an excuse to roll over and die would be interested in leveraging. You see, a good product at a good price does not need advertising. Spectacularly bad deals, on the other hand - those need (and often receive) expensive 'campaigns' to succeed.
"As a simplistic example, consider tampons. They have significantly less value to a post-menopausal woman than they do to a premenopausal woman."
I must congratulate you, unlike the typical poster your understanding of economics appears to have at least caught up with the 19th century and let go of the labour theory of value. Well done.
Now consider that when we talk about aggregate market behaviour the 'value' we refer to here is the clearance price - the price at which all the sellers and all the buyers will match up and everyone will be happy. The individual value you place on a good does not always have a direct effect on the market value set by the crowd in aggregate, except in a purely negative sense, e.g. your women who do not use tampons simply dont figure into THAT market valuation at all, excepting when they are the ones selling them of course.
"It isn't about being sheeple, it is about not being an expert."
It's about using 'I am not an expert' as a mantra to avoid thinking, actually.
Sure, you arent an expert. Guess what? You do not have to be an expert to know that the value of an offer has an *inverse* relationship to the amount of advertising you are bombarded with for it. A child can easily understand that. Yet people continue to buy what the TV tells them to buy, and as a result marketing people whose *only function* is to destroy language in order to lie more effectively continue to ply their trade in greater numbers than ever before. Young people who have the capacity to become productive members of society are in fact being directed to marketing instead.
"In the case of centralized messaging services, the overwhelming majority of users would not directly benefit from using some more decentralized."
Another anti-intellectual lesson the schools are obviously very good at teaching. Only consider direct immediate benefits! Keep that attention span very short and do not over-use your brain young man!
You dont need to be an expert or even really smart to understand that indirect effects are sometimes much more important than direct benefits.
They do need freight but we do not refer to the vehicles that carry it as being particularly 'fast.' The only time you would find someone using that word to refer to a land train would be in comparison with something actually slower, perhaps a seagoing freighter, not in relation to a Maserati. A Maserati is not an efficient cargo carrier but it is obviously quite a bit faster than a semi.
And it is market speak, they know customers want 'fast' but customers dont typically understand the technology enough to have the faintest idea what fast really means in this context, so what marketing people have done over the past 15 years is to make up their own definition of fast that bears no resemblance to any normal use of the word, but just happens to be what they have plenty of for sale.
A link with a 5ms latency and 25mb symmetrical upload and download width is a faster link than a link with a 350ms latency and 1024mb/1mb asymmetrical width by any reasonable definition of the word.
"The real problem is that centralized proprietary shit like Twitter and Facebook have marketing departments and open standards do not."
The real problem is that most people are affected by marketing. Their intellectual growth is stunted early for this very purpose, leaving them ignorant and vulnerable.
"USENET used to be a viable communications platform until it became Googlified. I pine for the days of Usenet and newsreaders unencumbered by web browsers, providing a means of sharing information, asking questions and receiving knowledgeable answers all from the comfort of my glowing green/blue/orange/red terminal."
Google has a browser interface to an archive. They dont and cant keep you from firing up a newsreader and using it like normal.
It seems at this point the marketeer assault on the English language has proceeded to the point where even NASA does not understand what speed is.
The link described is a very slow pipe by any measure, and that is imposed by the distance involved and the speed of light itself. It is the dimension of *width* they compare, which cannot in any reasonable way be equated with speed. If 'speed' is measured by bandwidth, then it would follow that a semi tractor with two trailers is much faster than a Maserati.
I have not seen as much damage to the hoses as I was afraid of, but my car is not one of the really old ones either - I think it was actually designed to tolerate some ethanol.
Still not at all impressed. 10% ethanol seems to result in ~8% mileage decrease, so in terms of cutting down on petroleum use it seems nearly ineffective. The best I can tell it's just a scheme to prop up the cost of corn.
The Buffalo in particular was not a bad plane. After the US decided it was unusable the stock was sold east and these planes actually served with the Finnish air force with distinction against the Russians through the end of the war.
A few differences of course. The Russian airplanes were probably a notch below the Japanese at the beginning of the war, though by the end that was no longer true. But two changes the Finns made were crucial - modifications to the engine to improve reliability, and a very different tactical doctrine - flying to the planes strengths and avoiding testing it where it was weak.
"That being said, I agree that the anticircumvention language of the DMCA should be removed entirely. It's one thing to say "ripping a DVD and sharing it with fifteen people is against copyright law." It's another thing to say "ripping a DVD is against copyright law because if you do so you MIGHT share it with fifteen people."
It's actually even wierder than that. Ripping the DVD is completely legal, however distributing a tool that allows you to rip the DVD is not. It may not even be legal to tell someone how to rip the dvd. But as long as they figure it out on their own, and dont tell anyone else, they're legal.
"It hasn't happened quite yet, but soon Ethernet will be bundled along with AV feed in that HDMI cable."
Just isolate the pins involved and cut them physically. That's not so hard.
But wouldnt it be better if we all just quit buying this crap until they got the message and built something we wanted? Are we really that incapable of saying no?
"Having said that, not connecting it at all is not an option for me, that would break netflix. If only we could configure our own hosts file on our tv, or something."
My preferred solution is simply to refuse to buy this sort of hardware at all.
That said, having it and apparently being unable to return it, what you want to do is figure out exactly what ports and addresses it needs access to in order to get your netflix, then program your router firewall to default deny that one device, and give it as small a whitelist as possible.
The birth of Primates and the birth of our species are only separated by about 60 million years, a period during which many ice ages have come and gone. Conflating the two and vaguely associating them with an ice age really does not mean much.
"... and therein lies the taxi-cab loophole OP was talking about; Do you honestly think a company like Yellow Cab would get away with calling all their drivers "independent contractors" as a method of shirking liability?"
Taxi companies all over the US do in fact call their drivers independent contractors as a method of shirking liability.
Taxi regulations in the US are local and unless there is a local rule requiring the company to independently verify the licensing of their drivers they would be able to get away with not doing that as well. I dont know of a jurisdiction that would allow it but I only know a tiny fraction of them, so it very well might be the case somewhere. Unlikely because taxi regulations are normally written by and for the incumbents to limit the competition and so tend to be heavy on licensing requirements, but with every little town in the country setting their own rules you never know.
It's an interesting situation, because it's clearly not reasonable or practicable for a worldwide service to try and be aware of, check, and enforce thousands of local municipal codes on its users. But the big cab companies that have bought the markets in the big cities will continue to fight tooth and nail to preserve their privilege and can expect some success in the political arena.
"Doesn't matter - in some states, you must have at least a chauffer's license if you use your vehicle commercially, period, no exceptions; for example, here's the requirement straight from MODOT's website:"
That is a legal requirement that appears to apply to anyone that is offering their services via uber. It would not appear to apply in any to uber itself.
I will add that the 'proprietary installer' is a shell script, not an object file, so really any objections to running it are solved by running it in your own head, extracting the correct commands, and performing them yourself after verifying that they are safe/not malware. This way you can also make sure that if/when you remove it, it will be removed cleanly, since you will know every place the installer touched in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth do you allow flash to auto-run in your browser to begin with?
It's a very old arrangement actually, dating back to the middle ages. 'The City of London' is not the city of London, it's a medieval corporation whose territory encompasses a small stretch of the most expensive property in London, and whose constituents are not the handful of people that live there, but the medieval guilds and the big corporations that own property there.
"Torrentz.eu on the other hand probably do not honour take down requests"
They could not if they wanted to, they do not host any content, remember?
The store analogy is not apt, however. They are not selling torrents, they arent hosting torrents, it's a straight search engine.
Which one will move freight more efficiently is an entirely different question from which one is faster. If you are looking for a car that will move a lot of freight, you will say you want that. You will not, barring congenital idiocy, say you want a fast car and expect that to be understood to mean you actually want a road train.
"Value has nothing to do with how much advertising is associated with it"
You're using language to blur rather than delineate meaning here. Value is not *determined* by advertising, in general that is true. Advertising may be used as a rough statistical indicator of value, nonetheless. There is a clear (and well understood) statistical correlation here, which someone attempting to rationally deal with the 'no time to be an expert on everything' problem rather than simply use it as an excuse to roll over and die would be interested in leveraging. You see, a good product at a good price does not need advertising. Spectacularly bad deals, on the other hand - those need (and often receive) expensive 'campaigns' to succeed.
"As a simplistic example, consider tampons. They have significantly less value to a post-menopausal woman than they do to a premenopausal woman."
I must congratulate you, unlike the typical poster your understanding of economics appears to have at least caught up with the 19th century and let go of the labour theory of value. Well done.
Now consider that when we talk about aggregate market behaviour the 'value' we refer to here is the clearance price - the price at which all the sellers and all the buyers will match up and everyone will be happy. The individual value you place on a good does not always have a direct effect on the market value set by the crowd in aggregate, except in a purely negative sense, e.g. your women who do not use tampons simply dont figure into THAT market valuation at all, excepting when they are the ones selling them of course.
I see your school taught you well.
"It isn't about being sheeple, it is about not being an expert."
It's about using 'I am not an expert' as a mantra to avoid thinking, actually.
Sure, you arent an expert. Guess what? You do not have to be an expert to know that the value of an offer has an *inverse* relationship to the amount of advertising you are bombarded with for it. A child can easily understand that. Yet people continue to buy what the TV tells them to buy, and as a result marketing people whose *only function* is to destroy language in order to lie more effectively continue to ply their trade in greater numbers than ever before. Young people who have the capacity to become productive members of society are in fact being directed to marketing instead.
"In the case of centralized messaging services, the overwhelming majority of users would not directly benefit from using some more decentralized."
Another anti-intellectual lesson the schools are obviously very good at teaching. Only consider direct immediate benefits! Keep that attention span very short and do not over-use your brain young man!
You dont need to be an expert or even really smart to understand that indirect effects are sometimes much more important than direct benefits.
They do need freight but we do not refer to the vehicles that carry it as being particularly 'fast.' The only time you would find someone using that word to refer to a land train would be in comparison with something actually slower, perhaps a seagoing freighter, not in relation to a Maserati. A Maserati is not an efficient cargo carrier but it is obviously quite a bit faster than a semi.
And it is market speak, they know customers want 'fast' but customers dont typically understand the technology enough to have the faintest idea what fast really means in this context, so what marketing people have done over the past 15 years is to make up their own definition of fast that bears no resemblance to any normal use of the word, but just happens to be what they have plenty of for sale.
A link with a 5ms latency and 25mb symmetrical upload and download width is a faster link than a link with a 350ms latency and 1024mb/1mb asymmetrical width by any reasonable definition of the word.
"The real problem is that centralized proprietary shit like Twitter and Facebook have marketing departments and open standards do not."
The real problem is that most people are affected by marketing. Their intellectual growth is stunted early for this very purpose, leaving them ignorant and vulnerable.
"USENET used to be a viable communications platform until it became Googlified. I pine for the days of Usenet and newsreaders unencumbered by web browsers, providing a means of sharing information, asking questions and receiving knowledgeable answers all from the comfort of my glowing green/blue/orange/red terminal."
Google has a browser interface to an archive. They dont and cant keep you from firing up a newsreader and using it like normal.
Here's how it works. You take the fruit. You chop it up real fine, put it through the printer and you get a fruit!
So much better than that nasty fruit you started with. Revolutionary! WE HAVE INVENTED FRUIT THIS DAY!!!!
Ãf you think that a loaded road-train is faster than a Maserati you are the idiot.
You have to twist yourself into a pretzel to justify the marketing speak, why do you even try?
It seems at this point the marketeer assault on the English language has proceeded to the point where even NASA does not understand what speed is.
The link described is a very slow pipe by any measure, and that is imposed by the distance involved and the speed of light itself. It is the dimension of *width* they compare, which cannot in any reasonable way be equated with speed. If 'speed' is measured by bandwidth, then it would follow that a semi tractor with two trailers is much faster than a Maserati.
Yeah. Right.
I have not seen as much damage to the hoses as I was afraid of, but my car is not one of the really old ones either - I think it was actually designed to tolerate some ethanol.
Still not at all impressed. 10% ethanol seems to result in ~8% mileage decrease, so in terms of cutting down on petroleum use it seems nearly ineffective. The best I can tell it's just a scheme to prop up the cost of corn.
The Buffalo in particular was not a bad plane. After the US decided it was unusable the stock was sold east and these planes actually served with the Finnish air force with distinction against the Russians through the end of the war.
A few differences of course. The Russian airplanes were probably a notch below the Japanese at the beginning of the war, though by the end that was no longer true. But two changes the Finns made were crucial - modifications to the engine to improve reliability, and a very different tactical doctrine - flying to the planes strengths and avoiding testing it where it was weak.
"That being said, I agree that the anticircumvention language of the DMCA should be removed entirely. It's one thing to say "ripping a DVD and sharing it with fifteen people is against copyright law." It's another thing to say "ripping a DVD is against copyright law because if you do so you MIGHT share it with fifteen people."
It's actually even wierder than that. Ripping the DVD is completely legal, however distributing a tool that allows you to rip the DVD is not. It may not even be legal to tell someone how to rip the dvd. But as long as they figure it out on their own, and dont tell anyone else, they're legal.
"It hasn't happened quite yet, but soon Ethernet will be bundled along with AV feed in that HDMI cable."
Just isolate the pins involved and cut them physically. That's not so hard.
But wouldnt it be better if we all just quit buying this crap until they got the message and built something we wanted? Are we really that incapable of saying no?
"Having said that, not connecting it at all is not an option for me, that would break netflix. If only we could configure our own hosts file on our tv, or something."
My preferred solution is simply to refuse to buy this sort of hardware at all.
That said, having it and apparently being unable to return it, what you want to do is figure out exactly what ports and addresses it needs access to in order to get your netflix, then program your router firewall to default deny that one device, and give it as small a whitelist as possible.
Copyright law actually makes an explicit exception for copying e.g. to RAM in the course of normal use. So that line will not hold up on court.
The birth of Primates and the birth of our species are only separated by about 60 million years, a period during which many ice ages have come and gone. Conflating the two and vaguely associating them with an ice age really does not mean much.
Smarter people do not build on floodplains.
"... and therein lies the taxi-cab loophole OP was talking about; Do you honestly think a company like Yellow Cab would get away with calling all their drivers "independent contractors" as a method of shirking liability?"
Taxi companies all over the US do in fact call their drivers independent contractors as a method of shirking liability.
Taxi regulations in the US are local and unless there is a local rule requiring the company to independently verify the licensing of their drivers they would be able to get away with not doing that as well. I dont know of a jurisdiction that would allow it but I only know a tiny fraction of them, so it very well might be the case somewhere. Unlikely because taxi regulations are normally written by and for the incumbents to limit the competition and so tend to be heavy on licensing requirements, but with every little town in the country setting their own rules you never know.
It's an interesting situation, because it's clearly not reasonable or practicable for a worldwide service to try and be aware of, check, and enforce thousands of local municipal codes on its users. But the big cab companies that have bought the markets in the big cities will continue to fight tooth and nail to preserve their privilege and can expect some success in the political arena.
Only $200 to go to prison? Not a great deal.
What I was actually wondering is how this thing injects and what you need to find to remove it. Anyone know?
"Doesn't matter - in some states, you must have at least a chauffer's license if you use your vehicle commercially, period, no exceptions; for example, here's the requirement straight from MODOT's website:"
That is a legal requirement that appears to apply to anyone that is offering their services via uber. It would not appear to apply in any to uber itself.
LMGTFY:
http://sourceforge.net/p/pm4linux/wiki/FAQ/#icanhazpkg
I will add that the 'proprietary installer' is a shell script, not an object file, so really any objections to running it are solved by running it in your own head, extracting the correct commands, and performing them yourself after verifying that they are safe/not malware. This way you can also make sure that if/when you remove it, it will be removed cleanly, since you will know every place the installer touched in the first place.