arg01

I too like the ads. But programs with "tip of the day"s in them have had this problem solved for a long time, just including a check box for never show me again. You could make the argument with some programs that it interferes with a minimalist design, but you'd have to admit this does not appear to be what steam is going for.

Well you can look at how the US has done in the middle east for an example of the economic cost of asymmetric warfare. Though I generally agree with your point that it's not going to work out well for the invaded country either unless another state actor comes to their aid. It's also worth noting that the French Resistance was considered important not just for the acts of sabotage and intelligence it gave the allies as they advanced but also in the rapid growth of the FFI after the allies invaded.

When you read it your also copying it into cache. We could argue the technicalities but really it's about copyright law not the colour of bits. Or if you prefer we can just say it's legal to copy the ebook to a new owner if you remove your own copies (which is one process the above poster refereed to by writing "bar some caveats").

Netflix did offer to have their client generate random upstream traffic to balance the load. Which netflix says was met with silence in the meeting where they proposed it. It has some amusing implications where netflix saturates verizon's network to pay less.

It's actually a historical issue. In the US cellphones orginaly used standard POTS numbers while in other countries cellphones often had an easily distinguishable format. This means that in the US granny wouldn't know she was calling a cellphone so charging her extra would be an unpleasant suprise, while in other countries she knew and was thus implicitly accepting to pay the charge.

Seems to me a government mandated program might seem more limitless and be less personal and thus you don't feel like your taking advantage of the kindness of caring people or stopping resources going to those who are possibly even more needy.

On a related note: One of the things I somewhat like about taxes for welfare rather than "rely on the largess of charitable billionaires/private entities" argument is that it helps ensure expenses from charitable acts wouldn't be a drain on a business competing. Thus 'asshole' private entities wouldn't have a concrete market advantage over 'nice' private entities.

One of the problems is they're natural monopolies. You only need the one data link and so it's (arguably) more cost effective to have a single regulated monopoly on the last mile side. You can create hybrid systems (like the UK) where other businesses buy capacity wholesale from the monopoly provider and compete over the same infrastructure.

Region locking fun. The worst part being they say in the eula that you can not use VPN services with the Origin shop. So the choices is between either play guess the interface with real money or having them be able to say we blocked your account you no longer have access to your games.

The fix isn't particularly ridiculous. Updating an exisiting databases value from an 8 bit to 32 bit integer would have required quite possibly rebuilding the entire database and any software that was bound to getting an 8 bit integer as a return value (For example messages split by length rather than coupled with a label). Which might have been made harder because the hardware costs involved (say for the extra 20 hardrives to store the 20GB of data) would have been much higher than now. Much easier just to create another table that includes century and a foreign key pointing back to the database entry. Not great but it does the job and you can patch over what look like minor visual or selection errors as they pop up rather than dealing with every custom form that relies on the database throwing exceptions that stop workflow altogether.

As embarrassing as this headline is you can at least say the people who were supposed to get the communications did.

To simplify: Bitcoin miners race to discover a code that gives them 50 bitcoins. This code gets harder to find each time it is found. This decision is pre-baked in using the bitcoin system (other e-currencies have different traits.)

If you join a mining pool then you split the 50 coins with everyone else in the pool (and they'll split with you) if you are the lucky machine than found the code.

The analogy is pretty direct: mining is the same as going and doing work to dig up gold, buying from the market is the same as buying gold in the market.

I don't think there's any particular outrage. Unless it's along the lines of not having the systems in place so that this doesn't occur. Whether this is outrageous (others in the thread have pointed out solutions) it's definitely a reason to be news worthy.

Somewhat ironically some countries have laws that make work-to-rule (usually phrased in law as malicious compliance) as illegal.

Plenty of civil disobedience is of the form of ignore bad laws and complain loudly when they are enforced.

This is without passing comment on whether copyright infringement is terrorism or freedom fighting.

The New Zealand treasury actually did a preliminary impact paper on BI several years ago and it was noted that many of the people currently on welfare would likely end up with less money. (They use the term GMI, but it seems to be framed as a BI based on my general understanding of the concepts)

http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...

There are multiple studies and meta studies presenting a link between inequality and crime. So even if it's not for basic subsistence it does appear that raising the lower end of society up could improve the crime rate. Though I admit that's not a comment on the reason for the crime.

http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/18/2/182.abstract

You are not volunteering to engage, you are an externality in someone else's transaction. It's comparable in the outcome to your life. Though admittedly there is a difference in that the single entity purports to obey rules that they claim are for your good while the other multiple actors aren't likely to have expressed any concern for you at all.

I don't think that's a given (possibly even after the leaks). If your giving up very real technical capabilities and increasing costs to protect your self from an ally it seems like a reasonable argument could be made either way. Of course after it's shown that that ally is no longer acting like an ally that changes the weighting of the argument significantly.

I'll also point out a lot of people expect the US would be able to compromise a system if they were actively targeting it even if it was reasonably hardened and in house. They also didn't expect (even if they should of) that the bulk collection was so widespread that it meant common practice implementations were compromised even without serious targeting. So the ROI for in house didn't look as good as it does today.

Depends on the type of redistribution. It's not hard to imagine inflation as an effect for a lot of them (though the inflation could have a net positive effect depending on the redistribution scheme). At the very least people may quit horrible jobs for low pay if they can feed themselves without doing them (you can at least nominally call that bad from one point of view).

I'd point out that your definition of slavery is just as applicable to any work were the person being employed needs to work to get the basics of survival (with corresponding parallels between changing jobs and changing countries, choosing not to eat and choosing not to work for income above the tax free limit, etc).

The only reason I point this out is because while there are plenty of rational arguments for different forms of tax (including whether or not income scales to labour and whether this means a tax on income (especially a tiered one) is actually comparable to a tax on labour) however comparing it to slavery is not productive as it re-frames the conversation to an area of extremes where quite reasonable tax systemss become either no slavery or everyone's a slave. Much like calling the other person either a libertarian if you believe "any type of free market is ok" or a communist if you believe "any taxation is ok" would not be productive.

Interesting to see that this does not include a similar declaration for someone with expertise in the field that the investment opportunity is in. Still I guess it could be argued that even if the business is successful you could be hard done by if you don't understand the financial instruments involved as well as you should.

There are similar restrictions for flying visually or by instruments. Even flying visually you wouldn't pass your flight test if you restricted your field of view to anything like a normal camera.

It's amazing how prescriptive the aviation industry is, often with demonstrable reason, so it doesn't surprise me that drones/models are also evaluated in an equally stern light. Though I think there's a good argument for exemptions the lower hazards involved.

It's one of those nebulous things. For example.

Is it illegal for me to pay you a commission to sell products for me?

Is it illegal for you to subcontract selling these products?

Is it illegal for the subcontractors to subcontract?

Is it illegal for me to give a signing bonus if you recruit your friends to work for me?

Is it illegal for you to get a bonus based on your direct and indirect contribution to how well the company is doing?

Of course none of these are illegal on their face but if you add them all up into a pyramid scheme you can bet that it's objectionable to many and that in many countries it's illegal.

It's a shade of gray. Many people here believe that the importance of keeping the net neutral is huge (even while giving a wink and a nod to QOS and other realistic compromises). You can even tell by the mixed reactions throughout the comment thread that people believe this to be a very slippery slope, they want this but are worried about even precedents like this one. As your comment highlighted net neutrality can be nebulous so when you push a boundry it is quite possible that there is very little to stop you continuing to push.

Having said that I don't necessarily disagree with your reasoning, it's one of the reasons I support Aero being legal. Possibly a little hypocritically.

A classic one in the US would be the choice of visiting the doctors. The rich can afford to have regular checkups(or insurance) and get a sniffle checked out early. The poor can not afford to visit the doctor over minor ailments and because of this end up spending big in lost time at work and more expensive one off treatments for a serious illness they didn't nip in the bud.

But I'd have to concede that you'd be right to say it still doesn't fit the boots analogy with out some rather lax semantics around up front vs long term cost. You could also argue that any individual might get lucky/unlucky and so it's not clear cut there, but I think it would be fair to argue that in aggregate the outcome on cost is a reasonable example.

That's very no true scotsman with regards to freedom. Saying the road is private inherently infringes on my freedom to use that land just as much as anyone else. Under this idea of free I could buy a road and the land around your house and declare it for my personal use only. I could then offer you a silly price to either go along that road or a silly price for your, now worthless to you, house. How is that any more free than a public system. Sure there's soloutions to this under a private system but once you've constructed it in your mind ask just how similar the entity you've constructed is to a local government, then ask how it's any more or less free.

So I think it's fair to say that a public system has drawbacks but being generally less free than a private system is definitely not the case.

The innovation only seems to come from the fact that the monopoly has a large enough war chest but it's the competition that distributes the fruits of that innovation to the public.

Which really seems more like an argument for high funding for centralized research that can be distributed to multiple competing companies.

The problem is that when you're talking about a free market benefiting all its actors you're talking about those actors being rational. Psychological tricks like skinner boxing really lower any credibility in that assumption.

Too look at the freedom thing another way, I may have no right to stop someone from trying to fly away off a cliff but if it looks like they are just about to jump to their doom I feel I should step in.

Though I agree it's a dangerous line that could be drawn anywhere between requirements to go to church, prohibition, scams, and the ability to sell yourself into slavery.

It will be based on the idiom "forest for the trees", effectively having the same meaning but also includes the fact that they are a part of what makes up the forest.

You'll know how to manage your condition better than others but I'll point out that there is talk about a rather high GI for soylent thanks to the maltodextrin. Which could possibly mean it's not suited for you (or rather you might have to have a lot of smaller meals). Alternatively you could lookup DIY soylent and roll your own more appropriate recipe.

Yes and no, you can buy some solutions but the daily extra effort associated with using them doesn't outweigh the occasional effort/annoyance of the mistake at this point.

It's one of those things that would take a large amount of work for a company to get it to the point where the ease of use is the same as the current system, I'm sure we'll eventually see a usable system (as it seems that computer vision and object classification techniques being developed in other areas will be applicable here).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_refrigerator

The problem is it's a thousand little things not just one big thing.

The real power is that every item can be improved a little with automation. Your dryer starts an hour before you wake up so that your clothes are dry, your underwear is warm and toasty to face that cold winter's day. You can check from the supermarket if there was anything you don't have at home for the cake you're baking. The lights slowly dim to get your brain thinking it's ready for bed. Your lights change colour to make the room feel warmer or colder. The blinds slowly open just before you're supposed to wake up so that you can be woken by light rather than an alarm clock. Your oven begins cooking the roast to work around your schedule. Stopping the microwave from continuing to nuke the popcorn from the other room so you can wait for it to cool without getting up.

None of these are particularly brilliant and maybe you would look at it and ask why spend an extra thousand on a fridge for this? An extra 50 a light-bulb... A few thousand for installation of a base system just to have the privilege. Another 500 for motors for blinds. And each of those is just for one nice hardly noticeable difference in your day.

Maybe the cost for the value doesn't make sense. It won't for a lot of people. Having said that it seems to me that what we're talking about here is automating some of the duties of a butler/body servant type job, at a lower cost than employing one for something that will be in place longer.

I'll also add some good old anecdotal stuff at the end about some of the silly little contraptions I've found in my apartment in Japan and the difference they make. I've got an automatic bath tub push a button and it fills to an appropriate level at a temperature you set. It seems so silly to spend the money to save yourself two minutes of faffing about with taps for something you might do every other week or once a month. But without that two minutes and without the pressure to not let it overflow I have nice relaxing baths much more often because all I need to do is push a button and finish whatever I'm doing before grabbing a book. There are also remotes for the lights. It's great to walk in the door grab the one remote and walk through the place turning on and off the lights on my way to the lounge to settle down all without having to go slightly off towards one wall or another, this seems small (or ridiculously lazy) but I honestly think I'll spend the money when I move to keep this tiny freedom. Being able to turn the lights on and off from bed and freely rearrange rooms without worrying about light-switches is an added bonus as well as dimming by remote are all great and have made ever day slightly more pleasant. There are a few other contrived convenience around (there are others that I was used to that are missing here though) and I can honestly say that quite a few of them are something that have made necessities slightly easier or enjoyable things more accessible. I'll definitely be hunting out these little conveniences when I've left. So there's my two cents.