wireprotocol

They seem bad because they are everywhere and neither you nor the bees can escape.

If we employed more variety, then some areas would be good for bees and bad for owls, other areas would be good for owls and bad for bees, and things could sort themselves out a bit.

The problem is not that we can't repay the debt. The problem is that we are so dependent on increasing our debt with deficit spending. If we inflate our currency to get out, then new debt will be at a higher interest rate and so will all debt we roll over into new debt.

Then, all of a sudden we are in a spiral of high interest rates.

It's like we are hooked on debt, and that's fine as long as it's free and keeps coming. But when the party is over it will be very painful to see that federal spending has to fall by a third overnight.

There's a big enviromental problem with the notion that things are either approved/acceptable or not; binary.

Neonicotinoids are probably good compared to a lot of alternatives. But by being one of few approved choices, they are used to such a huge extent that minor problems become major.

Another example is gasoline. It's very clean, especially with a catalytic converter. It's so clean that one of the worst things you can say about it is: if billions of people use gasoline, it upsets the balance of CO2.

If we use a little more variety, even if average "badness" seems worse, we will be better off. But our policies push us toward homogeneity.

We have lived and evolved with human decision making since we've existed.

Taking a new system of machine decisions and adding it to the mix sounds problematic.

"I have done nothing wrong" => "I have nothing to hide" iff everyone is good and always will be good in the future and never punish me unless I do something wrong.

Free speech is not about the cost. A lot of kinds of speech require some outlay. Censorship is when you are willing to pay the cost, but it's still banned due to content.

Yes, I know we are discussing private censorship which is more acceptable than government censorship. But if FB wants to be considered a general platform, they have to be careful filtering content, including ads.

What's the alternative? It's not like Blizzard has given any meaningful apology or done anything to remedy the situation.

All customers can do is boycott and protest. Nothing else will cause any change in behavior. Unfortunately, employees will be hurt in the process.

Wouldn't it be better for employees to stage a big moment now, force Blizzard to backpedal, and resume being a game company sooner? A long, drawn out thing is worse for everyone.

There are also hotel brands and official indeoendent star ratings.

So why don't they walk out of work until Bizzard makes a change?

Assuming Einstein is correct is not the end, because we still have so many questions. For instance, why is Einstein correct?

Assuming we find dark matter, do you think it will represent some departure from our current understanding of gravity and how it relates to mass? Or do you think it will just be some boring dust clouds?

The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.

In this context, the question is whether something is political speech or something else. What is included and excluded from that category will get pretty interesting.

We saw the same thing with compelled union dues in the public sector. Were those for political speech or just routine union activity? SCOTUS said it couldn't tell the difference, so a public institution couldn't compel employees to pay dues.

I guess twitter thinks they can tell the difference, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy.

It's hard to beat the ease-of-use of Access for simple data management. I don't see any modern replacement.

There is tension between two fundamental ideas: is the server offering content and allowing the client to interpret it as they see fit; or is the server offering an experience that is out of the hands of the user?

Out of these two conflicting ideas come all sorts of issues. Accessibility is one, but so are things like scraping, copy/paste, DRM, confidentiality, artistic integrity, cross-platform compatibility, new devices, peformance & resource consumption, etc.

"What's really needed there is to make it easier for generics manufacturers to get regulatory approval."

That seems like a sensible solution to the extent the quality/safety itself is not compromised. For instance maybe there is difficulty importing from other countries, but there should be no problem importing regular insulin from Germany, for instance.

There is no patent protection on regular insulin, so it's some kind of ordinary monopoly problem, it appears.

I suspect a better set of regulations around generics would solve the problem with ordinary market forces. Probably there are quite a few policies that protect the existing drug companies that don't make any sense for generics.

I'm not so sure it's easy to represent the exact behavior of a complex system.

What would your estimate be to: "rewrite facebook in language L, with the same behavior, bugs and all".

It's strange to me how anyone can have such arrogance about a complex system -- especially a social system -- that they "lacerate" those who question them.

What exactly should they do differently? How should you run a power company in a tinderbox?

I'm not blaming all of these fires on PGE. The state is simply not resilient to fire -- the smallest fires quickly become infernos.

They deserve some blame, of course. Clearly arson is wrong, and so is negligence. But how negligent are they really being? It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.

Does the steady-speed method work, even with cooperation?

The problem is usually people merging in front, requiring that everyone else slow down. I don't see how steady speed is even really possible there, let alone how it helps.

Let's say everyone has a two-second following distance. Then each lane moves one car by every 2 seconds, and that's that.

"Solid state digital" is a fairly generic term, and the actual device may bear little resemblance to what you think of as an SSD.

For instance, it could be a ROM, or something more closely resembling a flashable bios, or who knows what else.

It's unfortunate that the issues are being used to make non-serious amendment proposals.

Your reasoning assumes that a VPN couldn't hurt, but it can. If someone wants to track you and you don't have a VPN, they need to compromise your ISP. If you do have a VPN, they need to compromise your ISP or your VPN.

What is high on your list?

It looks like this is a case where a process is holding lock A while waiting on lock B; and every other process is waiting on lock A. That's normal enough, though it seems like there are two mistakes:

First: Never spin waiting on a lock for 3 seconds. If you expect a lock to be released very quickly, you spin K times and then, if you still don't have the lock, try something heavier that can deschedule your process. K should be small enough that your time slice is unlikely to expire while spinning, otherwise, it just causes confusion and wasted work because it looks like your process is doing work when it's not.

Second: It seems dubious that using a feature like system restore causes all Write calls to wait for a lock held by a process in the middle of I/O. I'm sure there are some cases where that must happen (like if out of buffer space to hold the writes), but I would think it would be harder to hit.

EDIT: Rephrased my comment in terms of two problems rather than just the first one.

Kind of. But the standard of trademark violation is not "did a competitor use it". The standard for violation is closer to: "was the trademark used in a way that might confuse customers over which products or services are authorized/provided by you".

I'm not a lawyer so obviously this is not legal advice.

That's very important, but we in the U.S. still need to be vigilent.

There is a cycle where thing X is scary and everyone gets worked up about it, and the politicians are given a free pass to sidestep the Bill of Rights.

Thing X might be drugs, or might be guns, and the laws might have those things in their title. But the laws are never really about thing X, they are about trampling the Bill of Rights. Aside: the biggest myth is that the gun debate is about the Second Amendment. The proposed (and sometimes enacte) laws violate some combination of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, and 10th Amendments.

Generally speaking, people know how to spot a con artist intuitively. The difficulty is figuring out who is part of the con, and who is a mark. Sometimes one person is both, or changes from partner to mark overnight.

You are making a lot of assumptions. Maybe he saw himself as creative, and believed he was building important things? Maybe he was a great family man? Maybe his death had nothing to do with overwork? Maybe he did stop caring about money at 40, and continued for other reasons?