elwin

I think it's more accurate to say that the free market currently does not think that Internet surveillance is a problem. Consumers in general have decided that for Internet services and Internet access devices, factors such as cheapness, ease of use, and trendiness are more important than privacy.

Governments are able to reach more definitive consensus than free markets - a market would be not easily be able to make everyone use an anonymizing proxy, for example, but a government could legislate that. Governments can also move costs around, such as by funding a national proxy service with tax money.

But on one level, free markets and democratic governments are both just methods that societies use to enforce their collective wills. There are limits to how much their decisions can differ. There's a reason Schneier calls a situation created by Internet companies a surveillance state.

The Higgs field is something like the idea of an ether, pervading all space, but it is not related to the propagation of light.

I haven't had any recent trouble with it. Back in the early days, it didn't always work well with SDL, but that was fixed years ago. I've been able to crash the daemon with stress tests, but it seems to restart automatically.

I can't understand all the dislike of PulseAudio either. It certainly has a nicer API than /dev/dsp.

Then I shall be clearer and say that I disagree that vi/vim is harder to use than an editor that needs a command-line flag to enable search-and-replace and doesn't do case-insensitive search at all.

I disagree that Pico is easy to use. The only way to move around within a line is to hit the arrow keys sixty times. By default, cut and paste works on whole lines only. If you want to cut just one word you have to figure out the commands for select mode.

> I don't 100% get the band limited signal bit. How does band limiting imply that there's only a single possible reconstruction of the digital signal? I can kind of picture the fourier transform meaning that there's only one representation but it's a bit of a leap for me. Can the converter itself not create the signal incorrectly?

Band limiting means that there's a maximum frequency. You can think of it as a limit on how fast the signal can change. There's only one possible way to draw a curve that goes through all the points without changing too quickly.

It's something like graphs of polynomials. There's only one possible line (first-degree polynomial) going through any two points. Three points completely determine a second-degree polynomial (parabola), etc. There are an infinite number of parabolas you can draw through two points, just as there are an infinite number of squiggles you could draw through the digital sample points. But you can't create a different solution without adding higher-order terms to the polynomial/higher frequencies to the signal. The number of points you have is sufficient to completely specify the curve.

Though there's only one theoretical solution, the converter can still "create it incorrectly".

The suppression of dissent during WWI. Hayes' "corrupt bargain" and Southern "redemption". The Kansas-Nebraska Act.

> The only question that seems silly to me is the last one. Of course a DoJ prosecutor is aware of the concept of prosecutorial discretion. To be fair, it's also a good counterpoint to the current silly "Congress made us be mean" line the prosecution is taking. It's just more of a statement than a question.

Keep in mind, the question is coming from a Senator on the Judiciary Committee. It could be a preemptive objection to having the blame sent back at him, perhaps also a threat to alter the law to reduce the "discretion to charge defendents".

You're right that is is more of a statement than a question. Political letters like this are often calculated more to produce effects than answers.

It's easy to talk about using political power for good purposes when you don't have it yet.

If Silicon Valley actually tried to become a political force, it might discover that the tech community doesn't agree on what the nation's most important problems are. Or that there is little correlation between the ability to make a lot of money putting advertisements on people's screens and the ability to find practical solutions to complex social problems. Or that the rest of the country doubts the goodness of its motives.

Yes, SSN's get assigned shortly after birth.

This is neat. I was skeptical about the rhyme matching feature, but I ended up using one of its suggestions.

When lines wrap, they stop lining up with the syllable counts. It would also be nice if the continued lines were indented, but I'm not sure if that's possible with CSS2.

Different observers will perceive different values for the photons' energy, but they will all observe that the total energy does not change.

This kind of tutoring is already very common among homeschoolers, though without involving frustrated teachers. Homeschooling law varies by state and local district, but I've never heard of requirements for teaching to physically take place at the home.

That sentence is from the Phoronix article, not Kristian's announcement, which is quite fluent (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-Oct...). Phoronix writing is always like that.

> I swear, De Beers has probably pulled off the greatest marketing stunt in the history of humanity.

De Beers has the advantage of selling a luxury good. The point of buying a diamond is to demonstrate one's financial ability. People don't really want cheap diamonds.

I doubt their marketing campaign is a good pattern for normal products.

The songs were flagged by Youtube's ContentID system, which looks for infringing material and gives the labels the option of directly removing it. No DMCA notices were involved.

sort -k 3

During Charles Dickens' early career, his books had no copyright protection in America, and British copyright law could be evaded by just changing the protagonist's name to "Oliver Twiss". He was still able to become independently wealthy.

The article links to Oracle's argument, which does not mention Klingon.

I ignored xterm because the defaults were ugly. Then I figured out how to use a nice font at a reasonable size and added tmux, and I haven't looked back.

I don't think RMS could advance the Free software movement by using a more normal setup. There are already plenty of people who think open source is sort of cool, and install it on their MacBook Pros when it's convenient, and sometimes help develop it. And they're better at making Free software accessible for everyone than RMS could be. They don't need his help. He contributes more by disturbing our perspectives in a way that no one else does.

To give one example, there's Brad Sucks http://www.bradsucks.net/about/ , who has always distributed his music online for free. Over ten years, he's built a following and been able to switch from having a day job to being mostly a full-time musician.

> I also notice that lots of early church hymns and political songs were merely new sets of lyrics put on the same melody over and over again.

That's because those songs were meant to be singable by everyone, most of whom had no formal musical training. Tunes were reused because people could start singing the new lyrics right away if they were already familiar with the melody.

Assuming the errors are random and uncorrelated, the total significance is the square root of the sum of the squares. In this case, that's only 4.3 sigma.

How about "write-closed" vs. "write-open"? Or more simply, "read-only open source".

The purported purpose of patents is to increase the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy. The purpose of patent trolling is the opposite: the product stops getting produced, and the amount of useful stuff decreases. That makes patent trolling more harmful to consumers than normal patent lawsuits.

> Isn't there a law of thermodynamics that says that entropy increases in a system over time?

Not exactly. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all processes cause the entropy of a system to increase. But entropy doesn't naturally increase over time without any processes happening.

> And doesn't general relativity state that time is a function of gravity or acceleration or relative mass?

The apparent passage of time ("proper time" in a particular reference frame) is influenced by gravity and acceleration.

> So wouldn't increasing gravity/acceleration/mass, i.e. relatively increasing the passage of time, also relatively increase entropy?

What actually happens is that gravity and acceleration decrease the passage of time (as compared to a reference frame not influenced by the gravity/acceleration.)

So if there are two otherwise identical experiments, the one with more gravity/acceleration will experience less time passage, and accumulate less entropy. But since increases in entropy aren't a direct result of the passage of time, it doesn't follow that increases in entropy lead to more passage of time, or any effect on gravity.

Hopefully that makes sense and is mostly correct, it's been a while since I studied this.

That perspective takes into account the industries' positions, but ignores the position of consumers. The Internet may have destroyed jobs, but it hasn't destroyed productive work. The work will still be done, in a more efficient, consumer-friendly way. The people who lose jobs will have to find new ones that provide something customers want.

I don't download torrents, and I'm finding a new productive job.

Well spotted. Also, the four trochaic lines list the steps of the tree-building process, and the iambic couplets explain the purpose of it all. She's using meter to reflect a semantic division.

I'm not sure this is what the parent meant, but in America at least, the antislavery movement was part of a broad social reform movement which was strongly tied to the popular Christianity of the day. For example, see the connections between Charles Finney (a prominent theologian) and Oberlin College (one of the first integrated universities). Also, look up the full lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic- it sounds like nonsense outside of the context of 19th century revivalism. The reform movement and its consequences make an interesting historical topic.