I'm truly sorry, but an IT union isn't happening, until at least my generational cohort is out of the system.

A. Too many libertarians.
B. Too many people convinced of their own prowess and respect
C. None of us are at much physical risk
D. We get quite a bit more than a living wage, in general

Those factors add up to an insurmountable barrier, even if I personally think the idea is wise.

I have 100 discs in my Netflix queue that aren't available on streaming. Go through about 6 a week, and have for years (I don't have cable). Only about 10% or what I watch can be streamed. And sadly the count of "very long wait" is up to 20 now, and climbing.

For the most part, it's only recent (but not too recent) content that's streamable. Heck, you can't even stream The Wire, and that's not that old. You can't stream any of the pre-reboot Dr Who episodes, and I could add another 100 discs to my queue just for Dr Who (does the BBC have these streaming yet?)

If there were an alternative to Netflix for disc shipment, I'd switch today. I might pay double, certainly 50% more, for the breadth of selection Netflix once had, if catalog growth continued, stuff got upgraded to BluRay, and so on.

But there's no such animal. Kids these days are all about streaming. Netflix's model of "delayed gratification" for TV watching was a miracle in the first place. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has.

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Netflix streaming is nearly-worthless - there's just no content.

Hulu streaming is totally worthless garbage. Fuck commercials.

Amazon has the wrong model. PPV isn't where it's at.

There's no question Netflix is gradually ending their disc service (selection is falling rapidly), and that really sucks. The ~$1.50 price to watch a disc was right for me, and it's sad to see it die. There's so very much great stuff from the 20th century that seems doomed to vanish with the death of physical media (and the complete and utter failure of government and the legal system when it comes to streaming and licensing).

At this point, I can only hope good rips of everything are around somewhere and being archived by hobbyists, awaiting some fix to copyright law. (Torrents may be plentiful for new stuff, but new stuff is easily available in legal ways for those who aren't broke anyhow. Torrents for last-century works are a different story).

Checking the methodology section of the paper, they didn't feel it was necessary to include any sort of experimental control.

Now it can be hard to come up with controls for this sort of experiment, when you test the ability of an algorithm that tests for kind of nuanced data, like "where in this block code might there be bugs?", but it should've at least gotten a mention in the conclusion that it wasn't comparative to other methods.

After passing through internet filters, your survey response has been submitted.

For your records, here is your submission:

Every time I hear about a terrifyingly invasive means of "improving performance" its targeted at developers. Is it just selection bias, or does the world actually hate us?

Carnegie Mellon is suppressing de-anonymising TOR discussion at Black Hat.

Talk on cracking Internet anonymity service Tor withdrawn from conference

By Joseph Menn

SAN FRANCISCO, July 21 Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:05pm EDT

        Technology

(Reuters) - A heavily anticipated talk on how to identify users of the Tor Internet privacy service has been withdrawn from the upcoming Black Hat security conference.

A Black Hat spokeswoman told Reuters that the talk had been canceled at the request of lawyers for Carnegie-Mellon University, where the speakers work as researchers. A CMU spokesman had no immediate comment. (Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Chris Reese)

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My guess is that someone wants the hole (if there is one) kept open a while longer or the suspicion that TOR is somehow ineffective alive. Let your mind run wild with speculation.

--
BMO

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Right, but since you're making that argument, I'll engage like the GGP should have:

Why are a couple essays by a dead philosopher the only definitions of communism we should accept?

They were happy to call themselves the communist party. They were happy to declare communist ideals the only acceptable ones. Certainly the things they did were colored by the ideals of communism. Is it reasonable to dismiss allegations that they weren't communist as inherently facile?

From experience; I would be willing to bet that ANYONE living with scarcity threatening day to day living is willing to cheat, lie, con, finagle and it can get so bad that you steal, mug, burgle,injure and could possibly kill, dependent on circumstances.

Exactly! Posting this as a difference between "socialism" (as the GDR arguably was not) and "capitalism" (as the FDR certainly was not) is to miss this simple point. Those brought up in a society of relative abundance (FDR) find less need to cheat than those brought up with relative scarcity (GDR). Let's repeat this across Sweden and the US and see if the effect is as marked (or even in the same direction).

"if scaled up, this setup will not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight"

A parabolic mirror trough is an example of something that is not complex or costly.

Wait! The old technology is attached to an autonomous quadrotor. Guess I'd better panic.