sheepleherd

the article says they plan to go beyond Xero, Xero is just... First

any creation of voting districts is a Gerrymander. What method do you favor, and how is yours better?

or, "people with secrets to keep and who enjoy socially frowned upon entertainments are attracted to privacy, anonymity, and encryption projects", ya know, scratch the itch, right.

I was working at one time on a really interesting p2p project but at a certain time it just seemed to me that we were building a "nefarious purposes" anonymous distributed database that didn't really have a strong other reason to exist. It didn't become less technically interesting but I started scrutinizing both my coworkers' zeal and personal quirks for evidence of untoward motivation. I left the project for other reasons and the project fizzled for other other reasons.

you're right, but that's Steve Jobs you're talking about. In contrast, Andreesen spent many years after Netscape in wealthy obscurity which makes me doubt his innate PR tendencies.

Speaking of the power of PR (whether innate or professional), take a look at this bit of Jobs-inalia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNeXlJW70KQ nothing Steve says in that piece is at all remarkable or prescient, nor was it at the time.

Jobs had a great promotional ability, and a great leadership ability, he was a great man, but I'm deeply doubtful about the insight everybody credits him with.

Marc Andreessen is a bubble, or a couple of them.

The guy was a programmer (no insult, so was I) who wrote, while young and enthusiastic, a derivative copy of well known software idea... he got rich, good for him (no sour grapes, so did I) but that hardly makes him a genius of business savvy and economics. His name and commentaries started popping up everywhere a few short years ago which to me smells strongly of having a PR agency (insult+sour grapes, I don't have one)

So, when I say Marc Andreessen is a bubble, I mean his money came from a bubble, and his portfolio has expanded in a bubble, and so has his apparent influence, but I don't myself see evidence of extra-technical genius or being able to see the future. I have no problem with his living the dream; and if you're living the dream, it wouldn't even be surprising if you fell in love with sniffing your own farts (sour, not grapes!) that's human nature. What I have a problem with is, why is everybody else always hanging on his every word, what is notable in what he purportedly says?

by moving from hunter-gatherer economies (where every single person was engaged in food production) to agriculture, and then from agriculture to mechanized agribusiness, we created a vast pool of unemployed humans (like 90 to 99% of the human race) who were available to do all sorts of other things, basically everything in the economy that is not food production. The REAL issue there was the availability of the jobless to do new work. To that vast list of productive economic activities we soon will be able to add jobs for newly-former drivers.

That really is how it works and it really is not an issue, other than it is what has "paved the way" for our modern high income, high nutrition, high health (by historical standards) lifestyles.

the observation that "the markets are too short term focused" is not a useful starting point for a moneymaking strategy because it can be shown with a simple explanation to a layperson that it isn't even an observation, it's a myth... is where I started and where I'm going.

I don't think using terms such as convexity explains anything to anybody, but if it indicates to you that the market is too short term focused, you should just print money with a derivative security that prefers companies that lose money in the short term because that will with no effort uncover all the long term strategies...

Or (4) they do believe the research, and they use it in their calculation that says that while they should err on the side of caution and should overdo force "a little bit" just in case, that they should be careful not go too far...

... which turns out to be the same calculation they used all along.

I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with me or agreeing and adding on.

If you are suggesting that rational behavior is emerging every time, or even much of the time, somebody says "Wall Street is too focused on the short term", I shake my head in sadness at the money you are planning to lose.

Amazon is not an antithesis at all, it's in my column! look, language is imprecise and none of us are writing encylopedias here that we reedit till they are perfect, so to keep it short:

Amazon is pursuing a long term strategy, and it's a public company, and it's getting funded, it's not getting starved for capital. i.e. the market is working, its strategy is being valued, there is no evidence of a market failure. (that is why I covered myself in my previous comment by saying "overemphasize" rather than simply saying emphasize.)

what would be your "antithesis" example would be other similar ideas that were floated and funding dried up because investors "stupidly" didn't get what a great long term idea it was. Of course, nobody can know what woulda coulda, and I'm not saying anybody can; what I'm saying is, if somebody thinks that markets don't properly weigh the long term over the short term, they are essentially saying that they want to sink more of their money into these (hypothetical) "losers" and I'm saying, please don't, it's a bad idea to assume that you know more than people actually in that industry.

I'm also not saying "don't think you have better ideas" and I'm not saying "don't pursue your good ideas" etc. I'm saying, don't think that financial markets are stupider than you. Don't think that the world is this hugely unfair place where all the people with money don't know a good idea when they hear about it, and that all these people with no money have all these great ideas that money seems to make people blind to (which is what "markets just don't get long term like I do" is saying)

I think it's a mistake to apply ideas from the mathematics of functions (other than statistical functions) to "trendlines" observable in financial market data. The idea of local maxima, for instance, suggests to most people who've heard the term that you could find a maximum by finding roots of a derivative function, the proof of which is based on the dynamics of the underlying processes being discernable or model-able as a function.

To convey the intuition I'm trying to describe as quickly as possible, I think you're thinking of market data being useful to help you find the Old Faithful geyser, and once you find it you just need to hang around and scoop up the reliable expulsions. Coupled with the even worse idea that you can see it where nobody else can :) To continue the analogy, I think it's not Old Faithful you found, but a solar flare on the surface of the sun, and while waiting for the next one you are more likely to get scorched.

We aren't going to debate technical analysis here (or resolve it), the point I'm making overall is that people persistently believe that financial markets are leaving money lying around, that these people can see where nobody else can see it, and that is easy to bend over and pick up. I'm trying to use some fairly simple logic and explanation to say, "it's not that easy; if it was, how can you think an entire financial industry somehow can't see what you can see? Wall street hires people just like you."

There are other explanations for such a trend as you describe that do not hinge on long term vs short term thinking.

For example, if you have control over a golden goose asset and managing it to maximize wealth is best achieved by sitting in a room with other oligopolists and carving up markets, that (1) may be best accomplished "in private" and (2) why share unfairly high profits if don't need to? This type of thing has occurred for example in the growth of cable TV companies, go public (yet maintain control) to get access to the capital necessary to grow your networks, then go private again (you already have control) to not have to dilute profit over and in the face of inefficient public regulation.

In any case, the idea that the market is too focused on the short term has been around for decades, and if the shift had occurred as you propose, then we wouldn't still be hearing it.

sigh... lemme tell ya what they taught us in finance theory class: rich investors are not stupider than average investors; in fact, if investing "for the long term" is the right thing to do, rich investors actually have the resources, wherewithal and the time to do it.

The problem is, as hard as it is to predict the future, it is harder to predict farther into the future; and, once you set up a pot of "long term" honey, people have a chance to reorganize their affairs to siphon off said honey and if your idea is to not pay attention to their short term results, you set yourself up for a big long term surprise. Publicly traded companies are mostly companies that have products, markets, customers, service, etc. Generally, when they are losing money compared to other companies, it does not scream "we're pouring money into R&D, great things are around the corner!"

This boils down to, statistically speaking, short term results are actually the best indicator of long term results. You'd be foolish (statistically) to overemphasize long term hypotheticals in the face of short term losses.

TL;DR that financial markets are too tilted in favor of "short term" results is largely a myth. if it were not a myth, wealth would shift from the majority people who supposedly pay attention to short term results and toward people who ignore short term results leading to the end of the myth.

edit (couple above and): I'm not saying that long term projects and ideas and thinking don't ever pay off; I'm saying that saying that they are undervalued and therefore represent an opportunity is a stretch and requires proof that you most likely will not find if you look because others have looked.

The GPL protects users; if you use software, a GPL license protects your right to make changes to the software via the source code to correct problems and make it suit your needs. I understand that many developers and suits to not wish to give this right to users, but trying to never mention that and calling yourself or anybody "pwned" by the GPL that other developers granted to you is quite simply propaganda.

Protecting users' rights is not getting pwned, it's a failure to pwn your users with software that you don't have pwnership of.

early C++ compiling wouldn't be the problem you wouldn't uncover...

I worked on a large early C++ project and we had problems on the scale of a couple of years. Even if C++ wasn't changing, the compilers were.

TL;DR pro-tip: to see the ASCII art in question, just scroll down, they are surfaced in the article, not sequestered as links

Am I the only one here who memorizes passwords, types them in, and it works and they serve their purpose? I've got a few "schemes" to systematize a bit, I share passwords for non critical things, etc.

My biggest beef is the constant asking "do you want the browser to insecurely save this?" How did that become the default? No wonder people can't remember passwords if they never type them. I use many machines, and multiple browsers per machine and I don't synchronize them, so changing the remember passwords setting is such a chore I usually stick to clicking "remember never".

I don't think I can recall (dozens of years of computing) ever having a password hacked. Privilege escalation is the main threat.

Insider trading is a term with a specific meaning, and that is not it; true, but nor is the specific meaning of insider trading what most people think it is.

"Trading on inside information" is a term for what many people attempt to do that is illegal.

"Insider trading", on the other hand, is when insiders trade, which is totally legal, it's just regulated in certain circumstances when the size of the the trade is large or the person's role is at the executive level, an upcoming trade needs to be announced (made public) in advance as if itself it is information.

just as a counterargument to the "unfairness of unattractiveness"... that attractiveness is desirable isn't "unfair", it's just the definition of attractiveness. If physical attractiveness didn't matter, "overall losers" (by whatever definition) would complain that wealth, intelligence, charm, IQ, education, social class, or whatever else shouldn't matter either.

It just seem like people are demanding a world where we'd all just screw whoever we bumped into, or nobody or... what, decide it by the roll of a 20 sided die?

That we have attractiveness might be seen as an interesting thing, like we have delicious foods and beautiful art. Of course, nobody wants to lose on any score, but people do like winning, and winning by its nature creates losers.

please have the parser accept the following ASCII formatted unix stream: FirstName LF MI LF LastName LF

except don't allow trailing whitespaces at the ends of lines so more like

FirstNameLF

MILF

LastNameLF

*if she's a MILF, definitely get her first and last name... did I just ruin it?

Everybody saying "lawyer", ignore, that's expensive and bad advice, you already know what the lawyer is going to say, lawyers are incredibly cautious and not particularly flexible or business savvy in helping you, all you'll get is a bill and no help with anything except what you already know couched in terms of a lot of statements designed for future "I told you so"s

Fire: probably, but not because this infraction was so bad or impossible to deal with (the victim herself said so) but because the guy appears to be a bad egg, just really bad judgement and other employees or customers might not be as adept as she is at dealing with it. So, unless his contract somehow protects him, or he is God's Gift to Business Development and your company is down the tubes without him (in which case you'll still need to figure out a way to head-off/handle his future infractions (promote her above him?)), you don't need to spend more time dealing with this.

other's here have criticized this article pretty effectively.

my own peeve with it is that it further relegates client-server computing to the dustbin of history by thinking of centralized data resources as servers, and users' computers as clients, rather than, say, the user's X desktop (or smartphone screen!) is the server accessed by a centralized computer center information client, which is much more expansive and instructive view of what client-server was supposed to be, a way for computers to talk to each other and distribute resources as it made sense.

The modern implementations seem to be more victim-advertiser than client-server.

yes, as I said in my other response to somebody else, I was not trying to explain the study, I was trying to test out the PP's suggestion about "somebody wanting something from somebody"

First, I was responding not to either the study in question, nor to a question of harassment or stalking, I was trying to make sense of the formulation the PP made about somebody wanting something from somebody to see if I could square it with my experience in the world; I qualified what I said with "for instance", not "for all instances"

In terms of what I said, I'm actually not saying anything is anybody's "fault" nor that a transgression had transpired. I'm saying people interact as they have always done through history and some interactions are termed creepy by some of the parties. I was actually allowing for a sexually alluring woman to feel creeped by some attention but not all attention rather than saying it was her fault or that all interactions fit this mold. Of course individuals can be creepier than avg and individuals can be creeped more than avg, and if you get far enough from average it becomes excessive. I was simply testing the formulation that the PP suggested.

There are people with socialization issues (psychiatric) such that they frequently get termed creepy, and there are people who more frequently experience the feeling of being "creeped out". It's worthy of study.

In addition to being creeped out, other people such as yourself more frequently can experience feeling "shocked, shocked" and outraged.

nobody is excusing it at all. But you are dreaming if you think you are going to stop it cold turkey along with you stopping shoplifting, child abuse, elder abuse, car accidents, bank fraud, armed robbery, etc. Those things are also biologically determined, they simply don't involve the reproductive function directly which seems to make you ... more optimistic? more outraged?

Actually, BTW, I have read (but not looked up myself) that if we count prison rape, men actually experience more sexual violence than women, so that part of the above formulation should perhaps be changed. And in terms of child abuse including to the point of murder, women perpetrate more of it than men do, so there is some value in looking at these issues from the point of view of "strong vs. weak + opportunity" biology rather than "gender".

But you are correct, violence between humans is for the most part a very bad thing, and I too would like to see it reduced as quickly as possible regardless of the cause.

Yes, women realistically do experience a lot more sexual violence than men, so it is not an unfounded worry; but as ordinary and normal and safe reproductive courtship entails a lot more approaches to women, the physically smaller nurturing gender, by men, the larger more aggressive hunting gender, such examples of deviant and opportunistic sexual violence can be seen to "come with the territory" of our evolutionary history. It's nice to imagine that we as a social species could have evolved past this, but in studying our history on the scale of hundreds of years rather than evolutionary scales of thousands of years, and in studying works of scholarship such as the Selfish Gene by Dawkins, one may not be at all surprised that we are where we are, but perhaps by continuing to educate one another we can takes steps to make all people feel, and more importantly be, safer.

The reason I felt it necessary to add the "context" to your statement is that our world consists of many many interacting postitive and negative stochastic processes, and when we look at a simple "violence" statistic it might seem "oh, this is terrible, we must stop this" when in fact things are much more complex than that.

There is a large class of "creepy" which covers men creeping on women. In that case your formulation is correct, but I would reword it as "you're too focused on something you want, my ass and cleavage for instance, that I am locked in competition with other young women to attract some cute guys--that's why we've left left them only scantily and barely clad--but that guy is not you and your leers make me feel self conscious."

Another big class of creepy which works in both gender directions but because men are more threatening (for size if no other reason like testosterone) perhaps seems more one way is, "you seem or are desperate for friendship so you over interpret every little thing I do as a genuine or encouraging bond between us and you overdo your reactions"

But I'm not sure what else people might want that would fall into the same category. Salespeople, for instance, can seem "oily" but not usually creepy.

What I described is actually how it works as I was taught in a university law course. Your "economic analysis" sounds to me like logical speculation on your part, which while it may be a superficially valid way to parse the situation, and under historical common law could have been how courts determined the outcome, is from what I learned simply not how courts actually handle it. "Saved costs" is not a category from which a judgement could be obtained, while "profits" is, and "profits" is an actual motivation to set up an unclean liability shifting arrangement.

You will see this case continue to move forward through the courts which it would not--plaintiff's lawyers would not even pursue it--if you were correct.

and as a final point, I was not drawing an analogy to independent contract workers, I was using one as an example of an arrangement a court would see through; remove that term and my argument still applies.

Cui bono? who benefits?

There are general principles in the law that would say in this specific case, Google is making money off this arrangement, this arrangement is based on making money off of scanning emails, people wronged by this arrangement have a right to recompense, so follow the money, that's where the recompense should come from.

Companies cannot dodge liability for their actions by hiding behind third parties. Otherwise, the UPS or Fedex labelled truck that just ran over your kid would, every time, turn out to be a flat broke independent contractor Uber driver that all the other companies in the chain would point the finger at.

For people interested in the legalities of licenses, it's released under the Apache License 2.0 which is a "free software" opensource license that is compatible when combined with GPL3, but not with GPL 1 or 2.

the Apache 2.0 license includes not just copyright but patent licensing, so the software will contain no hidden patent restrictions for patents owned by the creators and contributors.