No way will Google go the full mile and keeping building fiber around the country indefinitely.
I wouldn't count on it, because in addition to pushing other providers to roll-out faster service that enables more online applications to replace desktop ones, Google being an ISP is insurance for their core business against other major ISPs, especially given those ISPs legal challenges to net neutrality regulations and the potential that they would act on plans many of them have discussed to seek compensations from major sources of traffic for delivery.
Google Fiber is strategic in much the same way as Android is.
From what they've said, I expect they don't really want to be in the ISP business, but as their core business depends in large part on growing bandwidth, they felt they had to do something to push the boundary.
I think, as with Chrome and the browser business, that they didn't want to be in the ISP business before they felt the need to in order to push the boundary -- but once they decided to get into the business, they committed to making it work, and not just as a demonstration.
Well, to the extent that remote processing is used for things that would be processed locally otherwise, sure, since the RAM you are relying on for them is no longer in the box you are buying, but the one the service provider owns.
That said, I don't think that TFA is correct in suggesting that the cloud, overall, has reduced the need for extra memory; maybe slowed the rate of increase. Maybe.
This part I agree with. A characteristic of a plurality voting system [wikipedia.org] like that in the U.S. is that optimization tends to drive it towards two parties. In terms of the simplistic left-right spectrum, one party will be right of the average of the electorate, the other party will be to the left. If you take a bell curve and lop it in half, the median of each half will fall a fair distance outside the center of the aggregate bell curve. Meaning that representation never truly reflects the average (mean or median) of the electorate, and those with more extreme positions get more influence in government than they should have/would have with a runoff voting system.
Presumably, by a "runoff voting system" you mean "instant runoff voting" (IRV), rather than majority/runoff (which is actually what many elections in the US use instead of plurality), and that's mostly true (though overly specific, as "runoff" isn't really what you should focus on so much as "effective preference voting", which IRV is, at least compared to majority/runoff or plurality, but there are plenty of non-runoff alternatives, most especially the whole family of Condorcet methods), if you ignore the effect that the electoral system has on political communication and thus the actual distribution of political beliefs. As well as producing a two-party system, long-term use of plurality and/or majority/runoff in an an electoral system tends to produce a bimodal distribution of actual beliefs
Only in the sense that Trades Unions are creatures of government, that is because their existence is legally recognised.
Corporations aren't merely "recognized" by government, they are created by government action. (And, yes, in many cases trade unions are organized as corporations, so, yes, they are identical. Doesn't change the point.)
If you had no government, you would still have corporations
No, you wouldn't, corporations are government created entities to insulate investors in business enterprises from legal liability in exchange for government-imposed conditions as to how the enterprise is governed. Without government, you have neither anyone to create corporations nor any legal liability to protect a business enterprise from.
No, its not. Censorship is an act anyone can do. Its an act that raises a particular set of issues when governments do it (which is the reason that, e.g., the U.S. government is restrained in its power to do it by the First Amendment to the US Constitution), a related but distinct set of issues when powerful private interests do it, and reduced or no significant issues when less powerful non-government interests do it.
A number of people have a limited understanding of censorship based on the fact that government censorship is typically the kind of censorship that they are most likely to have encountered much discussion of in the course of their education, but government censorship isn't the only censorship, and its not the only censorship that can raise serious issues with regard to the free flow of information.
(There's also an argument that all acts of corporations, which are not natural persons but creatures of government, are in fact acts of government so that corporate censorship is in fact government rather than private censorship, but that's a separate issue.)
Since when does any private entity have the power to shut you up at gunpoint or cuff you and put you in jail?
I never said they did. In fact, the fact that they generally don't is why, whereas (as I stated in GP) private censorship, particularly by a party with substantial market power, can raise some similar ethical issues to government censorship (specifically, in allowing one party to control the ideas that can effectively be communicated), they don't raise an identical spectrum of issues to government censorship.
Apple isn't doing that, they're just saying "not in my app store"
how exactly you see American government confiscating computers in China? or Russia?
I'm pretty sure if I knew exactly how they would do it in any specific case, I wouldn't be allowed to talk about it.
But large nation-states have a long history of seizing persons and property located in foreign countries, and often have well-funded agencies with highly-trained personnel specialized in that task.
Anyone can censor, but only government censorship is typically limited by legal "free speech" provisions like those of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
Private censorship -- especially by a player with substantial market power -- can have similar effects and raise similar ethical issues to government censorship, even if it isn't addressed by the same legal provisions.
I use essay questions for tests and I teach in a technical field. My instructions note that a good answer is complete and succinct. Many students don't know the word "succinct" and end up thinking it means "short" or "brief". Most college students lack the language skills to be complete and succinct on a timed exam.
To the extent that's true, its because most instructors, despite expressing a desire for succinctness, don't create sufficient incentives for students developing these skills. Probably the best thing that ever happened to my writing are the instructors I had who set what seemed, at first, very short length limits on essays/papers and strictly ignored anything beyond the limit (even if it was reached mid-sentence), while grading just as stricly on completeness as other instructors. (Though experience in competitive improptu and extemporaneous speech, and team and individual debate, certainly also helped.) Saying succinctness is desired isn't enough..
But, even so, succinctness isn't binary; even while there may be some general lack of skill in honing responses down to the minimum necessary, smarter people are going to, all other things being equal, produce more succinct responses, with fewer non-sequiturs, non-communicative self-contradictory constructions, etc.
It isn't that length correlates to quality (you always get someone who thinks they can bury their ignorance in a pile of words), its that brevity is a strong indicator for a lack of quality.
"Brevity is a strong indicator of lack of quality" means the same thing as "length correlates to quality", so this is self-contradictory.
Significant sections of most answers could be deleted without detracting from the answer (it isn't succinct), but it takes skill and/or time to pare down the verbage.
That this is true of "most answers" does not suppor the assertion that "smart people [...] write voluminously on the subject", rather, it supports the contrary argument that relatively unskilled writers tend to write voluminously, due to the verbiage you reference.
OTOH it/is/ a pain to grade. Much more time consuming than using traditional multiple choice exams.
How hard it is to grade is a non-sequitur, but, in any case, multiple choice eams aren't any more traditional than essays.
With respect to your statement, it isn't that "smart people" write concisely, it is that skilled people with time and motivation to do so write concisely.
It is both, both because clarity of thought itself contributes to conciseness, and because smart people acquire skills faster making "smart" and "skilled" are correlated here.
The brevity of your post betrays the lack of quality in your contribution.
Conversely, the length of your post is due to the things that detract from its quality: non-sequiturs, meaningless self-contradictions, etc.
Linux is a kernel, a key software component in an operating system. Inasmuch as it needs a brand image, it needs it among people assembling OS's, not among consumers.
Sure, geeks care about things like OS kernels, but geeks will pay attention to things like that even when there is no "Linux inside" sticker.
News flash: when presented with an essay topic, smart people spend a few minutes planning and then proceed to write voluminously about the subject, because they are fluent writers. Dumb people start muddling along, lose track of where they are, and stop when they've stated (though not proved) their main point, because they're not.
IME, smart people write concisely and to the point of the prompt, while dumb people write voluminous, rambling, redundant, and unfocussed walls of text.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(1) Moderate inflation isn't a problem in a medium of exchange, even moderate deflation is. Insofar as Bitcoin is engineered in such a way that it "solves inflation", that's a very bad (fatal, even) for its utility as a currency (though, so long as the conditions supporting that hold, a positive thing for it as an investment, if nothing else as a collectible item, which is a completely different thing than a currency.)
There's no central authority to control inflation, it's going to swing in value according to it's ACTUAL VALUE
"Actual value" of bitcoin is a nonsense phrase. Either its just value in the same sense as the value of a fiat currency -- i.e., what people will accept it for -- or its nothing at all. Bitcoin -- unlike commodity currency -- has no inherent value.
without politicians and the FED having a say about how many bitcoins they get to genesis.
Fed isn't an acronym. And you seem to think this is a good thing, but you haven't explained why (except "solves inflation", as if that was a benefit.) Something with a fixed upper limit of supply, with no utility value, doesn't really have anything that makes it attractive as a medium of exchange. Right now, Bitcoin has a couple of short-term things that are driving it (immaturity in regulation compared to traditional currency and novelty). But its completely pointless as a currency, even as insurance against fear of a general economic collapse (it doesn't even have the feature of holding gold coins that you can expect that it will have utility in the event of a general collapse.)
I hope that others will see Blink as I do: as a chance to take the WebKit codebase to exciting new places. I hope someday that many of the ideas we pursue in Blink will find their way into many platforms, including WebKit.
For those interested in the technical details, we’ll be posting more of our thoughts and plans to blink-dev at chromium.org.
WebKit and Chromium have a long, shared history, and we hope to continue our relationship. We will be available on #webkit and webkit-dev and hope to continue our connections with this great community for years to come.
Thank you again.
Eric
p.s. Adam and I are happy to work with other reviewers to remove PLATFORM(CHROMIUM) code and other messes we may have caused over the years from webkit.org. Adam and I are still running queues.webkit.org and associated EWS/CQ/sherriff-bot and plan to do so for the next few weeks as we work to transition them to new owners.
Yes, that's the reason FDIC is a moral hazard, it 'insures' deposits.
The moral hazard argument has been made (repeatedly) elsewhere in the thread, tacking it on as a response to a post about different claims to which it is irrelevant is pointless.
As to the FDIC 'assets' being 25 Billion in debt, and being a liability and asset at the same time (it's a wash), clearly you don't understand that FDIC doesn't exist at all, they have nothing.
The FDIC does exist as much as any other corporation does, and what it holds are, in fact, assets, (they are liabilities to someone else, but that's irrelevant.)
There are no assets, even those 25 Billion are not assets, they are a liability, yes, to the Treasury.
No, they are not liabilities to the Treasury, they are liabilites of the Treasury to the FDIC. Which does exist.
However that's not what the FDIC will be relying on to bail out banks (depositors).
Depositors and banks aren't the same thing. A bank bailout would almost certainly be an action of the government proper (as was the case with the bank bailouts under TARP, or the auto industry bailouts), as the FDIC has no authority to conduct bank bailouts. That kind of bailout relies on the government's assets (including its taxing power.)
What the FDIC does only becomes an issue if a bank is allowed to fail, not if it is bailed out.
The Fed, it all comes down to the Fed.
What comes down to the Fed? You are confusing so many different things in this post that it is hard to tell what you are arguing here.
Well, yeah, research, which is what they mostly get paid for. (Though, really, at many universities, the people who this is freeing up to do more of the primary focus—again, research—is likely to be more often graduate students working as graders/TAs, not professors.)
While I am rather skeptical about the quality of AI essay grading, I'd be very surprised if software in this area hasn't advanced since 1991. I mean, software in most other domains certainly has.
Even if the computer can grade an essay well (which I remain to be convinced of, although I am sure I will soon have the chance to test it for myself), there is no claim made about the computer giving useful advice to the student.
Since being able to grade well requires the ability to make the exact same distinctions required to identify the feedback that would need to be given, I would be very surprised if software that could do one could not also do the other.
I'd also be surprised if current software was able to do either.
As to the nominal numbers, the 25Billion in debt that FDIC has (really, Treasuries are not assets, they are a liability, they have to be sold first, so the only true backing here is the Fed with its 'printing press')
They are really an asset, not a debt, for the FDIC. They are also a liability for the US Treasury, but those are different entities.
More generally, a debtor's liabilities are also assets to their creditors. If you don't understand that, you have no business even discussing assets and liabilities.
it's not enough to bail out ANY USA bank.
The FDIC doesn't insure banks against failure, it insurers depositors against bank failure. The FDIC doesn't bail out any bank.
Except that Apple said they would have been perfectly happy to have Google contribute the changes Google wanted to make, except Google refused
That claim by someone claiming to be from Apple is contradicted by someone claiming to be from Google in the same thread, is unsupported by any evidence, and is, apart from all that, quite dubious on its face (since if Apple wanted it WebKit, since it wasn't closed source, they could have brought it into WebKit whether or not Google agreed, and, if they preferred the Google approach, then one would have expected that when they went and made their own implementation, it wouldn't have followed a different basic approach.)
And, even if it was true, it still is not relevant to the changes Google wants to make now that they have cited regarding the split (where they have identified the specific barriers preventing them from making the changes within the WebKit project), as it relates to an earlier point of divergence between Chrome and WebKit.
Smells like Embrace and Extinguish to me.
WebKit isn't a standard, its a particular implementation, and Google forking its rendering engine from WebKit won't "extinguish" WebKit unless Google was the only party who cared enough about WebKit to make it viable (in which case, this is more of a name- and governance-change for WebKit).
Additionally, Blink is open source, so the triple-E model of destroying open standards in favor of proprietary solutions which others aren't free to implement hardly works.
Right, they're literally saying "we don't want to contribute anything back to the other guys because it takes up our time."
Everyone who can use the work Google was contributing to WebKit is equally free to use the work that Google is doing for Blink, since like WebKit its all open source; so there is no reduction is what is being contributed. What they don't want to do is be held back by WebKit's policies of not changing certain things that Google wants to change for Chrome. (They also may not want the extra work provided by WebKit's policies on whose-responsibility-is-it-to-make-things-work, which are platform biased, but while that's certainly been cited as an issue in some places, they haven't cited it as a motivation.)
I stand by my "not exactly model open source citizens" statement.
If you believe that a model open source citizen has to be a serf to whoever runs the project whose work they are using, then, sure, Google isn't being a model open source citizen. But, in my view of open source, working together on a project as long as your goals and that of the project are sufficiently aligned, and forking -- but still keeping the work open and under licenses which don't prevent the forked project from pulling back anything that might be useful -- when that is no longer the case is not at all incompatible with being a "model open source citizen".
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't count on it, because in addition to pushing other providers to roll-out faster service that enables more online applications to replace desktop ones, Google being an ISP is insurance for their core business against other major ISPs, especially given those ISPs legal challenges to net neutrality regulations and the potential that they would act on plans many of them have discussed to seek compensations from major sources of traffic for delivery.
Google Fiber is strategic in much the same way as Android is.
I think, as with Chrome and the browser business, that they didn't want to be in the ISP business before they felt the need to in order to push the boundary -- but once they decided to get into the business, they committed to making it work, and not just as a demonstration.
Well, to the extent that remote processing is used for things that would be processed locally otherwise, sure, since the RAM you are relying on for them is no longer in the box you are buying, but the one the service provider owns.
That said, I don't think that TFA is correct in suggesting that the cloud, overall, has reduced the need for extra memory; maybe slowed the rate of increase. Maybe.
Presumably, by a "runoff voting system" you mean "instant runoff voting" (IRV), rather than majority/runoff (which is actually what many elections in the US use instead of plurality), and that's mostly true (though overly specific, as "runoff" isn't really what you should focus on so much as "effective preference voting", which IRV is, at least compared to majority/runoff or plurality, but there are plenty of non-runoff alternatives, most especially the whole family of Condorcet methods), if you ignore the effect that the electoral system has on political communication and thus the actual distribution of political beliefs. As well as producing a two-party system, long-term use of plurality and/or majority/runoff in an an electoral system tends to produce a bimodal distribution of actual beliefs
No, its not probably the start of the term; it goes back, in that specific form, at least to IBM's tactics against competitors in the 1970s.
Corporations aren't merely "recognized" by government, they are created by government action. (And, yes, in many cases trade unions are organized as corporations, so, yes, they are identical. Doesn't change the point.)
No, you wouldn't, corporations are government created entities to insulate investors in business enterprises from legal liability in exchange for government-imposed conditions as to how the enterprise is governed. Without government, you have neither anyone to create corporations nor any legal liability to protect a business enterprise from.
No, its not. Censorship is an act anyone can do. Its an act that raises a particular set of issues when governments do it (which is the reason that, e.g., the U.S. government is restrained in its power to do it by the First Amendment to the US Constitution), a related but distinct set of issues when powerful private interests do it, and reduced or no significant issues when less powerful non-government interests do it.
A number of people have a limited understanding of censorship based on the fact that government censorship is typically the kind of censorship that they are most likely to have encountered much discussion of in the course of their education, but government censorship isn't the only censorship, and its not the only censorship that can raise serious issues with regard to the free flow of information.
(There's also an argument that all acts of corporations, which are not natural persons but creatures of government, are in fact acts of government so that corporate censorship is in fact government rather than private censorship, but that's a separate issue.)
"Send to jail" isn't part of the definition of censorship.
I never said they did. In fact, the fact that they generally don't is why, whereas (as I stated in GP) private censorship, particularly by a party with substantial market power, can raise some similar ethical issues to government censorship (specifically, in allowing one party to control the ideas that can effectively be communicated), they don't raise an identical spectrum of issues to government censorship.
Which is, exactly, private censorship.
I'm pretty sure if I knew exactly how they would do it in any specific case, I wouldn't be allowed to talk about it.
But large nation-states have a long history of seizing persons and property located in foreign countries, and often have well-funded agencies with highly-trained personnel specialized in that task.
Except that, as noted in even TFS, they haven't for similar non-gay sexual depictions sold through the same venues.
Anyone can censor, but only government censorship is typically limited by legal "free speech" provisions like those of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
Private censorship -- especially by a player with substantial market power -- can have similar effects and raise similar ethical issues to government censorship, even if it isn't addressed by the same legal provisions.
To the extent that's true, its because most instructors, despite expressing a desire for succinctness, don't create sufficient incentives for students developing these skills. Probably the best thing that ever happened to my writing are the instructors I had who set what seemed, at first, very short length limits on essays/papers and strictly ignored anything beyond the limit (even if it was reached mid-sentence), while grading just as stricly on completeness as other instructors. (Though experience in competitive improptu and extemporaneous speech, and team and individual debate, certainly also helped.) Saying succinctness is desired isn't enough..
But, even so, succinctness isn't binary; even while there may be some general lack of skill in honing responses down to the minimum necessary, smarter people are going to, all other things being equal, produce more succinct responses, with fewer non-sequiturs, non-communicative self-contradictory constructions, etc.
"Brevity is a strong indicator of lack of quality" means the same thing as "length correlates to quality", so this is self-contradictory.
That this is true of "most answers" does not suppor the assertion that "smart people [...] write voluminously on the subject", rather, it supports the contrary argument that relatively unskilled writers tend to write voluminously, due to the verbiage you reference.
How hard it is to grade is a non-sequitur, but, in any case, multiple choice eams aren't any more traditional than essays.
It is both, both because clarity of thought itself contributes to conciseness, and because smart people acquire skills faster making "smart" and "skilled" are correlated here.
Conversely, the length of your post is due to the things that detract from its quality: non-sequiturs, meaningless self-contradictions, etc.
Linux is a kernel, a key software component in an operating system. Inasmuch as it needs a brand image, it needs it among people assembling OS's, not among consumers.
Sure, geeks care about things like OS kernels, but geeks will pay attention to things like that even when there is no "Linux inside" sticker.
IME, smart people write concisely and to the point of the prompt, while dumb people write voluminous, rambling, redundant, and unfocussed walls of text.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(1) Moderate inflation isn't a problem in a medium of exchange, even moderate deflation is. Insofar as Bitcoin is engineered in such a way that it "solves inflation", that's a very bad (fatal, even) for its utility as a currency (though, so long as the conditions supporting that hold, a positive thing for it as an investment, if nothing else as a collectible item, which is a completely different thing than a currency.)
"Actual value" of bitcoin is a nonsense phrase. Either its just value in the same sense as the value of a fiat currency -- i.e., what people will accept it for -- or its nothing at all. Bitcoin -- unlike commodity currency -- has no inherent value.
Fed isn't an acronym. And you seem to think this is a good thing, but you haven't explained why (except "solves inflation", as if that was a benefit.) Something with a fixed upper limit of supply, with no utility value, doesn't really have anything that makes it attractive as a medium of exchange. Right now, Bitcoin has a couple of short-term things that are driving it (immaturity in regulation compared to traditional currency and novelty). But its completely pointless as a currency, even as insurance against fear of a general economic collapse (it doesn't even have the feature of holding gold coins that you can expect that it will have utility in the event of a general collapse.)
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Full text:
The moral hazard argument has been made (repeatedly) elsewhere in the thread, tacking it on as a response to a post about different claims to which it is irrelevant is pointless.
The FDIC does exist as much as any other corporation does, and what it holds are, in fact, assets, (they are liabilities to someone else, but that's irrelevant.)
No, they are not liabilities to the Treasury, they are liabilites of the Treasury to the FDIC. Which does exist.
Depositors and banks aren't the same thing. A bank bailout would almost certainly be an action of the government proper (as was the case with the bank bailouts under TARP, or the auto industry bailouts), as the FDIC has no authority to conduct bank bailouts. That kind of bailout relies on the government's assets (including its taxing power.)
What the FDIC does only becomes an issue if a bank is allowed to fail, not if it is bailed out.
What comes down to the Fed? You are confusing so many different things in this post that it is hard to tell what you are arguing here.
Well, yeah, research, which is what they mostly get paid for. (Though, really, at many universities, the people who this is freeing up to do more of the primary focus—again, research—is likely to be more often graduate students working as graders/TAs, not professors.)
While I am rather skeptical about the quality of AI essay grading, I'd be very surprised if software in this area hasn't advanced since 1991. I mean, software in most other domains certainly has.
The same as what they get hired and paid for now, research.
You notice the common statement is "publish or perish" not "educate or expire", right?
Since being able to grade well requires the ability to make the exact same distinctions required to identify the feedback that would need to be given, I would be very surprised if software that could do one could not also do the other.
I'd also be surprised if current software was able to do either.
They are really an asset, not a debt, for the FDIC. They are also a liability for the US Treasury, but those are different entities.
More generally, a debtor's liabilities are also assets to their creditors. If you don't understand that, you have no business even discussing assets and liabilities.
The FDIC doesn't insure banks against failure, it insurers depositors against bank failure. The FDIC doesn't bail out any bank.
That claim by someone claiming to be from Apple is contradicted by someone claiming to be from Google in the same thread, is unsupported by any evidence, and is, apart from all that, quite dubious on its face (since if Apple wanted it WebKit, since it wasn't closed source, they could have brought it into WebKit whether or not Google agreed, and, if they preferred the Google approach, then one would have expected that when they went and made their own implementation, it wouldn't have followed a different basic approach.)
And, even if it was true, it still is not relevant to the changes Google wants to make now that they have cited regarding the split (where they have identified the specific barriers preventing them from making the changes within the WebKit project), as it relates to an earlier point of divergence between Chrome and WebKit.
WebKit isn't a standard, its a particular implementation, and Google forking its rendering engine from WebKit won't "extinguish" WebKit unless Google was the only party who cared enough about WebKit to make it viable (in which case, this is more of a name- and governance-change for WebKit).
Additionally, Blink is open source, so the triple-E model of destroying open standards in favor of proprietary solutions which others aren't free to implement hardly works.
Everyone who can use the work Google was contributing to WebKit is equally free to use the work that Google is doing for Blink, since like WebKit its all open source; so there is no reduction is what is being contributed. What they don't want to do is be held back by WebKit's policies of not changing certain things that Google wants to change for Chrome. (They also may not want the extra work provided by WebKit's policies on whose-responsibility-is-it-to-make-things-work, which are platform biased, but while that's certainly been cited as an issue in some places, they haven't cited it as a motivation.)
If you believe that a model open source citizen has to be a serf to whoever runs the project whose work they are using, then, sure, Google isn't being a model open source citizen. But, in my view of open source, working together on a project as long as your goals and that of the project are sufficiently aligned, and forking -- but still keeping the work open and under licenses which don't prevent the forked project from pulling back anything that might be useful -- when that is no longer the case is not at all incompatible with being a "model open source citizen".