dkleinsc claimed:

I saw the bubble in 2004.

My wife and I had just moved to Las Vegas - one of the housing bubble's domestic epicenters - and went looking for a house to buy. Nearly every property we saw had already been sold by the time the "for sale" sign went up on its lawn. Houses were selling for 20-40% over asking price within 45 minutes of appearing on the realty industry's MLS. Often, the same houses - having never been occupied by anyone other than a painting crew - would be back on the market three months later, for 50% more money. And would sell, again, in 45 minutes, for substantially more than their asking price.

We decided to bid on an FHA foreclosure property. The FHA brochure estimated its market value at $121K, so we put in a bid of $135K, just to be safe. It sold to a Mexican family that bid $179K.

That's when I told my wife, "This shows all the signs of a classic bubble market."

I was pretty sure it was a Vegas-only phenomenon, until I happened to talk to a friend of mine whose wife was trying to break into the travel-writing market. They'd recently returned from traveling the Mediterranean, and, when I told him about the crazy housing market in Las Vegas, he said, "It's not just Vegas. We were just in Bulgaria, and the Aegean coast there is completely lined with high-rise condo developments, in all stages of construction. And - we asked out of curiosity - they're all asking half a million dollars for a 1,200-square-foot condo on the 'Bulgarian Riviera'."

That's when I realized that the housing bubble was a global phenomenon - and that its collapse would be a world-wide catastrophe.

What I could not imagine at the time was that the epic level of irresponsibility I saw on the part of everyone from speculators (who, contrary to the blame-the-poor crowd, were the ones who were driving the demand), to mortgage bankers, to Wall Street derivatives brokers, to (especially!) regulators would continue unabated for FOUR MORE YEARS.

Needless to say, we did not buy a house in Vegas.

Greg01851 noted:

Yep. Important datum, that.

However ... since this announcement ONLY applies to 1-3 Earth-mass planets within .25 AU of G-type stars (because it's the result of occulation observations, and that's the limit of resolution for any current telescope), it says nothing whatsoever about Earth-ish planets that obit in the "Golidlocks zone". OTOH, I think it's not unreasonable to extrapolate that, if there're appropriately-sized worlds in too-close orbits around that high a proportion of G-type stars, there's a pretty good likelihood that there're just as many (or more) in the zone where life could evolve.

Perhaps we'll find out when/if the James Webb telescope is launched.

Exciting stuff, regardless.

ShanghaiBill persisted in missing the point, thusly:

Again: exactly which part of NOBODY IS ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE THE DENIERS was unclear to you?

The issue is whether THEIR SOURCES OF FUNDING SHOULD BE REVEALED.

My own, personal opinion is that they should.

Shanghai Bill insisted:

Again, in what way does requiring those who claim to be scientists disputing scientific consensus on a scientific basis to reveal the sources of their funding represents ANY infringement on their free speech?

The short answer is: it doesn't. The long answer is: the fact that the sources of funding for climate scientists who argue for anthropogenic global warming have ALL, ALWAYS been public knowledge, but the sources of funding for the scientists in denial have, in general, been kept purposefully opaque tends, quite rightly, to call into question the motive for their opposition to the consensus - while in no way denying them the right to hold, argue, and publish those opinions. Sure, they're free (under current law) to keep those sources secret - but, since the scientist-deniers' own identities are (necessarily) public knowledge, the presumption HAS to be that they're keeping the sources of their funding secret in order to conceal that their opinions are paid for by the very parties who stand most to benefit from their arguments contra the overwhelming scientific consensus.

In other words: they're trying to hide the fact that they're paid whores of the fossil fuel industry.

Again, no one's questioning their right to express their opinion. Not me, not anyone.

What's being questioned is their integrity - and it is completely legitimate to do so, so long as they refuse to reveal who's paying them to disagree.

ShanghaiBill somehow got modded to +4 Insightful for blathering:

Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase? The overwhelming majority of climate scientists who publish papers that conclude our climate is, in fact, changing (and that the change is largely or exclusively due to human-generated greenhouse gases) and the institutions for which they work make their sources of funding public. Why shouldn't the government require deniers - especially those specifically engaged in high-pressure lobbying of elected officials on the subject - to reveal where their financing comes from? Because they have some supposed divine right to anonymity?

Somehow the phrase "fair and balanced" springs instantly to mind ... and not in a good way.

Swampash blathered:

Compare the revenues Apple received on the Mac II with the revenues it's receiving ON THE MAC II now, Mr. Pathetic.

Under Steve Jobs, Apple always was litigious. Tim Cook is just continuing the same strategy - and, long-term, that's pretty much the problem Apple faces.

What I mean by that is that Jobs, whatever you might think of him as a person, was clearly a visionary. He envisioned products for needs that people didn't even know they had, until Apple produced them - and thereby created markets that hadn't previously existed. The problem Apple faces is that Cook is not Jobs. Not even, not by a long stretch. Jobs was a conceptual thinker and a design maven. Cook is a bean counter. His vision is strictly limited to cost control and supply-line dynamics.

So Apple now faces the same problem it had when its Board of Directors kicked Jobs to the curb in the late 1980's, and handed control of the company over to a series of bean-counting "business leaders", instead: a complete lack of product vision on the part of management led to technological stagnation and chronic laurel-resting on the part of the company. Sure, they retained their profit margins ... but their market share and total sales first stagnated, then started dwindling away. By the time the Board hired egomaniac Gilbert Amelio to run the company and HE hired Ellen Hancock (the woman who previously had single-handedly destroyed IBM's PC software division) as Apple's CTO, the best minds at Apple were diving overboard in lemming-like droves.

And it sure looks like that same cycle of stagnation and decline is facing the latter-day Apple Corp. Sure, the i-Stuff is selling really well now - but there are NO new breakthrough products on Apple's horizon, and my bet is that there aren't going to be. Steve Jobs was pretty much the avatar of the modern Key Man Problem, and, in order to replace him, Apple's Board first would have to FIND the next Jobs, and then would have to push Tim Cook aside and entrust the company to Jobs II. My bet is that that just ain't gonna happen. Ever.

So Apple's riding high on a mountain of cash right now, and the i-Stuff is deluging its coffers with more money every quarter - but the end of that ride is in sight, and it won't be much more than a decade before litigation is ALL the company has left - because Steve Jobs, the technological Elvis, has left the buidling for good.

Montezuma blathered:

The "idiots" in question exercised their 1st Amendment right to publish data that, by New York state law, is public information. Which is to say that their readers have a legal right to this information. It could be argued (I'd argue it, for one - and I'll bet you a shiny, new quarter that H. L. Menchken, who famously stated it is the job of journalists, "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," would have, too) that The Journal News has an actual duty to publish the map in question.

Of course, the hypocritic idiots who love the 2nd Amendment, but disdain the 1st are looking to demonize journalists exercising their rights ...

The irony - which is that your dogmatic drivel was modded +5 Insightful - is not the only thing that's thick.

mcgrew bloviated:

So you only read books by authors with whom you're already familiar?

Like Mr. T, I pity the fool.

As for my "greed" - I make my old Boardwatch columns and articles freely available on my web site. I also make a 38,000-word preview of my novel available there, in a variety of ebook formats. And I permit no ads on my site.

Oh, and I'm the former president of the Friends of the El Cerrito Library.

Three strikes - and you're stupid.

I posited:

Prompting hazah to blather:

In fact, Verne's father was an attorney (i.e. - middle class, not wealthy), and he DISOWNED Jules when he learned he was writing, rather than studying law.

Heinlein was medically discharged from the Navy in 1934, BEFORE THERE WAS A G.I. BILL. So, NO NAVY PENSION.

Thus, neither man had an outside source of income to support them. They both made their livings BY WRITING. Period.

FWIW, Iain Banks' father was a Navy officer. His mother was an ice skater. Neither one was wealthy.

Banks has made his living as a writer since the 1970's - when his first (mainstream) book won the Whitbread Prize.

I then mentioned Theodore Sturgeon, prompting hazah to again quote Wikipedia:

Indeed. I see a professional writer's typical career arc: a seemingly random series of jobs that create a fund of experience that provide the writer with a well of knowledge and incident on which he will later draw when he finally settles on WRITING as a profession.

I see another trend as well: a fucking imbecile who quotes blindly from Wikipedia without ever understanding the implications of the factoids which he selects in a desperate (and doomed) attempt to prop up his ethically and intellectually bankrupt pretext for piracy.

The rest of your response is similarly lame - and for identical reasons. You have the intellectual depth of a Kleenex, you grasp at straws, in the futile hope that no one will notice, and your defensiveness precludes any useful introspection. In short, you're a swine.

Ergo, I will be damned if I will continue to cast pearls before you.

So, get lost, little girl. Go play in traffic.

I contended:

Prompting Omestes to respond:

I doubt most of the yammerheads who currently employ pretzel logic to defend their UNethical piracy would reduce the volume of their bullshit by a single decibel, even if a sane a copyright law revision was implemented. When satisfying your greed depends on ethical blindness, the wise man invests in dark glasses and white canes.

I actually have no problem at all with "try before you buy". No one should be asked to blindly invest his hard-earned money in bad writing. That's why I make a 38,000-word excerpt of my novel freely available for download in a number of ereader-friendly formats (see my .sig for a link). I'm confident that anyone who likes the disaster/thriller genre and reads the excerpt will gladly pay for the full novel.

And, no, I don't think we're far apart on copyright law, at all. Others, however, are badly in need of a one-eyed king.

Omestes demanded:

Because I've made my living as a writer since 1995?

I am convinced that copyright law, as it currently exists, is badly broken, and is contrary to the best interests of civilization. I support a return to strict limits on copyright length and renewability. At the same time, I am unshakably convinced that authors MUST have the right to control the dissemination of their own work. That copyright law is in dire need of major reform is, I think, established beyond debate. That somehow that implies that copyright itself should be abolished is idiocy, promoted exclusively by selfish fools, and it should be rejected by anyone with a particle of sense.

ifiwereasculptor theorized:

Passion alone is insufficient to produce great literature. With VERY few exceptions, it takes lots and lots of time for a talented writer to hone his skills sufficiently to become great. Having to make a living doing something other than writing drastically reduces the time available in which to write.

Try taking a look at Authonomy.com. You will find there THOUSANDS of writers who are passionate about their writing. At best, there are mere hundreds whose work is actually any good.

Writing is a skill. Anyone can learn to do it well enough to achieve some level of competence - but even achieving mere competence is a lot of hard work. Achieving greatness? Like any skill, very few will ever become truly great at it. And next to none of them will do so without the ability to essentially devote their entire lives to the effort.

And there are currently more movies available than any one person, no matter how dedicated, can watch in one lifetime. Should we then simply accept that there will be no more movies made? Ever? How about software? Millions of programs have been written to date. Why would we need any new ones?

If you're that willing to sacrifice an entire realm of human endeavor - not to mention an art form that's been evolving since the Epic of Gilgamesh - you are certainly no friend of civilization. To dispense with the aspiration to create greatness is only to ensure decay. To consign that aspiration entirely to the hands of amateurs is to relegate it to the status of mere hobby. Either mistake would be a disservice to humanity of the very worst, and most pernicious kind.

hazah blurted:

THIS crap is modded "interesting"?

Look - professional writers need to make income from their work. Period.

In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.

I realize that most idiots sincerely believe that professional-quality writing is something that "anybody can do." Being idiots, they are, of course, completely, utterly, and profoundly wrong about that. In fact, there is only a relatively small percentage of the population who have the inherent talent to write well enough to eventually become professionals at it. Idiots like hazah are almost certainly not among them.

And yet hazah has the chutzpah to proclaim, ex cathedra from his asshole, that Belial6 - with whose work he is almost unquestionably totally unfamiliar - has no right to profit from his hard work. Instead, presumably, hazah believes HE has a right to make Belial6 his entertainment slave. "Amuse me, vassal," he demands, from his lofty position atop Selfish Cunt Mountain.

Fuck you, hazah. YOU are the one claiming an unearned privilege, not Belial6. If you don't want to read his work, then don't fucking read it - but don't claim that somehow he has an obligation to provide you with free entertainment. Because he doesn't. Period.

Writing is not easy. It is hard, hard work. The more effortless prose appears to be to the reader, nearly without exception, the more that prose has required long hours of drafting, re-drafting, and polishing to seem to flow that freely. Writing fiction at a professional level is an art form which requires a combination of creativity, vision, persistence, judgement, and stringent self-discipline. Any aspiring professional writer must have the right to charge his audience for the pleasure of reading his work, or there will BE no professional writers. Only amateurs. And what you will quickly create, in a world without professional writers, is a world without professional-quality writing.

So: no more Jules Vernes, no more Robert Heinleins, no more Iain M. Banks, and no more consistently high-quality streams of work from writers who are free to concentrate on writing, because their writing pays the bills, instead of being forced to focus on plumbing, or selling cars, or doing double-entry accounting, because the bills MUST be paid.

The late, great, professional science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon pointed out that 90% of science fiction is utter, irredeemable crap. It is worth noting that he was talking about 90% of published science fiction. If hazah's vision of how the world ought to work were to become reality, that percentage would increase to more like 99.9% - and idiots like hazah would be justly punished by being forced to choke down a steady diet of utter, irredeemable crap, with only the most infrequent relief of merely competent writing to mitigate the ordeal.

Want to prove me wrong? Go ahead, hazah - dazzle us with your authorial brilliance.

C'mon. Whip it out - or else shut the fuck up and go the fuck away.

Headline and summary are both misleading.

The exploit demonstrated is specific to Cisco VOIP phones. No other manufacturer's devices are affected.