venus

I don't understand this comment. What's "bad" about the movie? I think it works very well. Of course the characters say cheesy things sometimes, they're brainwashed kids acting macho. I always found the action compelling and the acting is good - it's a very well made movie, as you'd expect.

I think you're missing some sort of point here. None of the points in your comment hit home for me at all. Galaxy Quest is a baffling comparison to make and is not in the same league at all.

Edit: You do realise there's a difference between parody and satire, right? GQ is the former, ST is the latter.

You're pretty dismissive, but I've read some pretty credible sources saying that exercise was quite the upset. You cannot possibly expect enemies to "follow rules" either. In a real war Blizzard wouldn't be able to "reset".

Intuitively speaking, too, I have great difficulty understanding how carriers could possibly repel massed attacks of low value craft/missiles. And that's not even counting the Dong Fengs, etc. I have a romantic nostalgia for carriers as much as anyone but I can't see how they are anything other than gigantic sitting ducks in the microchip era.

> Younger Japanese (age 40 and below) [..] understand that the social structures which served their parents and grandparents are keeping Japan held back and isolated

I don't know where you're getting this from. Decline of those old structures is roughly equated in the public mind with the decline of Japanese society as a whole. Holding the country back? From what? From being like America? Neoliberal economic excess is not viewed positively in Japan. Go and watch any finance-related drama (Hagetaka, Hanzawa Naoki) to understand the cultural norms better.

The generation you're talking about who are more worldly (roughly, the shibuya-kei generation) rose on the back of those old structures, and fell with them, too. The current generation is as inward-looking as ever, perhaps more so.

> But because of deeply ingrained Confucian cultural values about submission to elders, there's little they can do about it

So submission to elders prevents them from voting, is that what you're trying to say? Rubbish, if so. If not, I don't know what you're trying to say.

Your depiction of otaku culture as headstrong rebels determined to do their own thing, damn the criticism, is the inverse of reality as I know it. And if the hikikomori phenomenon is a pure reaction to a restrictive social culture, where was it 20 years ago? Nowhere, of course - hikikomori is an internet-enabled phenomenon, and it is everywhere, not just Japan.

For someone who criticised Gibson for his pseudo-intellectual pontifications, you're spouting quite a bit yourself.

> didn't think that his livelihood was worth backing up

Came here to make this exact point. Not to kick someone who's already down, but for god's sake people: If you do not do backups, your data is ephemeral.

There's only so many times one can hear sob stories about people losing all their un-backed-up data, especially from people who should know better, before one stops feeling all that sorry. Don't complain to me if you roll the dice and lose.

There'd be a lot of people inside the FBI with knowledge. Proving it was an NSL recipient, let alone nailing down which one, would be difficult if not impossible in court.

Snowden's leaked a whole lot more than any NSL recipient ever did...

> “[W]e’re compelled by industry policies to revoke certs when we become aware that the private key has been communicated to a 3rd-party and thus could be used by that party to intercept and decrypt communications”

This raises an interesting possibility of civil disobedience. Imagine if there was a site hosted in, say, russia, which received tip-offs from NSL recipients about these SSL seizures. And imagine they then informed the SSL issuers, who would revoke the certs, rendering the old ones useless and forcing the FBI back into court, with no-one to point a finger at.

I suppose the FBI would just request an order for all future certs as well.

That's a very dangerous attitude. The availability heuristic is very real when determining attitudes and beliefs, especially at scale. When you hear something bad about company X - especially when it smacks of "dirt", as this does - do you then go and perform analysis on other similar companies, in an effort to re-balance your perspectives? Of course not. Who has time for that?

If all the dirt on political party A was laid bare in the public, but B managed to cover theirs up, it could swing an election. Do you care about that?

Availability of information is extremely important in the public discourse and closing your eyes to factors affecting it - such as manipulation attempts, as this could be - is bad mental hygiene.

I don't know. I haven't seen these financials. But it's a frigging database, and not a particularly good one. A billion dollars!?

Look, I'm not claiming to be omniscient. I'm sure they're smart people. But would you buy stock in MongoDB at a 1.2b valuation? Would you?

As for me - Absolutely not.

Thank goodness for that! If there was, this development would be quite concerning.

Well let me be the first to say that I think that is an absolutely fucking crazy valuation and that MongoDB are either nuts or disingenuous for signing up for it.

I would be astounded - astounded - if MongoDB generate even a tenth of that, just in revenue, ever.

One point two billion dollars. You have got to be kidding me. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I wonder if there is anyone who believes - really believes - it has not.

The war on drugs is kind of this diorama encapsulation of everything that is wrong with our politics, media, and society.

That's a lovely straw man you're hacking to pieces there.

No-one has said anything of the sort except you.

> they blew their budget harrassing children and illusionists about bunnies

Blew their entire $155 billion budget on bunny inspections, did they? How many of their 100,000+ staff are bunny inspectors? All of them? Or just 90%? What a load of nonsense.

Your hysterical "talking point" style comments add nothing but noise.

UR says it best:

> All subterfuges and evasions to the contrary, the basic economic problem faced by 20th-century governments (somewhat less in the 19C; far more in the 21C) is unemployment. The cause of unemployment is simple: in an industrial economy, most human beings are economically useless. They are not productive assets at all. They are liabilities. For a brief transitional period, they could still be used as industrial robots. This period is close to its end.

[..]

> as the Singularity nears, the future of work becomes clear - there is an IQ threshold below which any human, no matter how cheap to feed, is a liability. Classic unskilled manual labor remains productive in some domains - gardening, housecleaning, and so on. Perhaps this will be true for another decade or two. It will not be true indefinitely.

It's a big problem all right, and we'll start to face it for realz by the end of this decade, IMO.

Irony, you say? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I agree with you, of course - Putin is by all accounts a monster, and he has no moral standing whatsoever. That doesn't mean he's wrong.

Hm. Well, I agree actually, and in fact it does have some media at least associated with articles, via the "wikimedia commons".

I was more trying to illustrate that multimedia alone does not make a high quality resource, as proved the downfall of the "Multimedia CD-ROM" era of content production, which I feel these concept videos are rooted in.

Like all MS concept videos, it's all very pretty but useless except for the most shallow kinds of collaboration - it's not so much promising any specific technology so much as a future in which you don't actually have to do any work. How many people do companies really need whose role in its entirety consists of quickly slapping together pretty-looking "reports" full of 3D graphs?

These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.

I don't really disagree with you but you're operating on the assumption that the Japanese Gov't will continue playing "the game". Bear in mind there is absolutely nothing stopping them simply declaring that they have paid back all debts.

Hyperinflation happens in countries that were collapsing anyway. Under other circumstances, you could call it "quantitative easing" just like the USA has been doing, or who knows what they will call it, but mark my words, that debt will never be repaid, or if it is, it will be with "new money".

If you doubt me, answer this quesrtion - why is anyone still lending to the Japanese Gov't?

The answer is of course that it's not real debt. You can't have real debt to an entity that can print the currency the debt is based on. The risk is not that the Gov't cannot repay, the risk is that inflation will reduce the value of the payment, and the 1% interest tells you the assessment of that risk.

> Japan is in the gutters and has a debt of 230% of GDP (twice of what Greece has)

Greece's debt is to foreigners. In a foreign currency. Big, big, BIG difference.

Japan can erase its debt with a stroke of a pen. So could have Greece, actually, but at least someone would have complained.

I mean it's ridiculous really. 230% GDP debt - it's a complete joke. Everyone knows it's unpayable, if it had to actually be repaid, which it doesn't. If you are exposed to that, you deserve what you're going to get, which is nothing. But that's OK, because no-one is exposed, because it's basically the Japanese Govt writing a bunch of cheques to itself, and the only effect will be to devalue the yen, if anyone cares, which they don't.

Frankly Japan's debt is turning into a sort of glitch in the matrix where something is obviously wrong but no-one mentions it because to do so would be to prove that none of it is real anyway.

Not sure why you're making such a big deal about it. Misuse of loan words is common in many languages, not least Japanese. Why, not 3 hours ago I was talking to someone who is about to rent a マンション (mansion) in Tokyo. Needless to say it is not any kind of mansion an english speaker would recognise, and I didn't see any pictures of same on the japanese wikipedia page. [1]

It happens. It will probably happen less now the world's so interconnected. Not worth four comments in a row!

[1] For the uninitiated, in japan a "mansion" basically refers to an apartment in a building built to a certain quality.

Service sector workers are most likely casual (ie not permanent part or full time) and thus their minimum wage is AUD$20.30/hr [1]

Tipping the scales further against America is that they are also fully covered by the national health insurance system, Medicare.

That said, it's hard to directly compare Australia and the USA - there's just too many variables. You are correct in that food is a little cheaper in the States; not 50% but probably 30% cheaper on average, from experience. Rent, too, is higher in Australia.

All things considered, though, I think it's pretty inarguable that a service sector worker is going to have a higher income and better quality of life in Australia. That's a consequence of deliberate economic policy. It's not without its negatives, of course - service hours in Australia are much less than in the USA, and certainly a factor in that is the higher cost of staff. For example, there is not a single 24-hour supermarket in Sydney!

[1] https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay/national-minimum-wage/pages/...

So what? On my salaried job I sometimes have busy days, sometimes have quiet days. And?

I imagine that if you abolished tips, then the service sector would be like all those other sectors without tips, or like all those service sectors in all those other countries without tips, i.e. just another job and completely normal. But a lot fairer.

Don't understand this attitude at all.

Tips are nothing but a demeaning way to tell low-status workers that the value of their time is arbitrary and their livelihood is always subject to whim. Do you tip your doctor? Do you tip anyone with a high-status job? Of course not.

Tipping should just be abolished. Set a price and charge it. Pay people fairly and consistently so they can feel secure and plan for the future. Anything else is just sneaky.

Not for a while, but I've heard the same thing.

Like Copenhagen I believe it is extremely intermingled with substance addiction problems, especially alcohol. It's a hard nut to crack, that's for sure.

I'd imagine the main reason is that SF is walkable - not only for the homeless themselves, but also for the targets of their begging activity. The weather is liveable, I suppose, but LA's is better - if that's all it was, they'd be in LA, but LA's much more car-based.

Anyway, whatever the reason, I think it is actually a "situation". Many cities have homeless problems, but SF's is amazingly in your face. Most SF people I know would simply not walk through Tenderloin at any time, even in broad daylight. It's in the middle of the freaking city! That is not normal.

From wikipedia:

> In North America, Japanese instant noodles were imported starting in the 1970s bearing the name "ramen", causing the term "ramen" to be often used in North America to refer to instant noodles.

So there you go. I'm sure it will disappear in time, as awareness of asian cuisine develops.

I'm no expert on Denmark but I bet that Copenhagen's homeless issues are a mix of lack of resources and a politically correct unwillingness to forcibly detain people who really should be placed into care (chronic alcoholism, mental disease, drugs). That is perhaps what the parent meant by "choosing" to be homeless: substance abuse/mental health cases who opt out of the system to pursue their addictions. No point arguing about the definition of "choose".

America's situation is different; they have an idealogical opposition to social welfare and there is no system to opt out of. The homeless situation in SF is far worse than in any EU city I know of.

Manipulation was only allowed in the "experimental" category - mostly the ones with timelapses. If you have some evidence that entries in the other categories have been 'shopped, I'm sure the organisers would be very interested to hear from you.

That one with the satellite dish is masterful.

Do you know what a heuristic is?

Basically, being an Oracle puppet is an extremely negative heuristic for being a useful voice on anything related to software IP. Absent compelling evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to ignore any and all opinions of said puppet.

And FWIW, being a Microsoft employee defending an Oracle stooge doesn't play all that well either.

Isn't this all common sense?

> Trying to muddy the discussion with irrelevant speculation about people's motives is totally unnecessary

In an ideal world, where we all had an infinite amount of time to research any and all items of controversy in their entirity, I would agree with you.

In this hyper-specialized world, where we basically look to others to do the research and summarize for us, motives are extremely relevant and it is the height of naivety to pretend otherwise.