Well enlighten us, Big Sexy Joe, what's so awesome about wherever it is that you live that you can so easily look down on the clueless 8 million or so that can't possibly have a good reason for living in the SF bay area?

What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.

Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.

There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.

This is a definition of a free market that even Adam Smith would not have recognized. It was not regulation per se that he was opposed to, but mercantilism and state granted monopolies. He looked favorably regulations which protected workmen (citation Wealth of Nations I.10.121). He was also in favor of regulating banks where their actions endanger society, even at the expense of curtailing natural liberties (citation: Wealth fo Nations II.2.94
).

The free market is free of price or supplier choice regulations. It's not necessarily free of regulation per se, such as regulations of weights and measures, of worker or consumer safety, or even of public morality (e.g. drugs and prostitution).

In any case you can't use the actions of states to indict the federal government for hypocrisy, although there is plenty of other material for that.

While I agree that kids need downtime, a two or two-and-a-half month break means schools waste time refreshing material they've forgotten at the start of the year. If the summer break were shorter you could give kids *more* vacation, more frequently through the year.

A typical US school years is 180 days or 36 weeks. This leave 16 weeks off, of which about two are holidays. This leaves 14 weeks of vacation, of which it's customary to divide up into three one week vacations and one eleven week vacation.

You could give kids four weeks off in January and July, and eight one week vacations distributed through the rest of the year mostly coinciding with holidays.

It depends on whether the particles are accumulating faster than they are leaving the system. If the figures we're talking about represent an equilibrium that will continue indefinitely into the future, surely we are not doomed. But if the concentration of particles is increasing and people need to do something about this before it becomes a problem, we might be.

Eventually something's going to get our species. Either changes in the Sun will make the Earth uninhabitable to anything recognizably human, or we'll do ourselves in before then.

Well, it probably makes no difference to the clean-up, but it does add to the take-away lessons from the disaster. It's an ongoing theme that TEPCO knew less about what was going on at the time than they thought or led us to believe. You have to set that against the overall good news that the failsafe designs of even this relatively primitive reactor mostly contained the accident. The principles of engineering are sound; management, not so much; at least not in a disaster.

I agree there was some trickery there. Since they did not address this at all, I am assuming that the answer is simply that they had to manually paint in the parts of the photos that were revealed when other parts were removed. Having to point that out in the video would take away from the apparent magic which is probably why they didn't mention it (and that's somewhat disingenous if you ask me). It's possible that they provide some tool that attempts to automatically fill in the background, and if so it would appear that it was used in some of the examples (such as when the apple or whatever it was was moved in the painting, the area that was revealed looked more like the cloudy background than it did like the table that the apple was on), but there's no way that they automatically compute the background for anything that is not on top of a pattern or more or less flatly shaded surface. I also noticed that in some examples, they were merely adding new objects to the scene (such as the NYC taxi cab example), and although they started with a scene that looked like the cab was already there is moved it to reveal painted chevrons underneath, it's likely that those chevrons were already in the photo and didn't need to be recreated.

In short: they glossed over that detail and used examples that didn't require explaining it, but it'c certainly an issue that a real user would have to address and doesn't happen as "magically" as it would appear from the video.

BTW, CMU alum here. Went back to campus for the first time in nearly 20 years earlier this year. My how things have changed. I suppose every college is the same way now, but holy crap it's so much more cushy than it used to be! Guess all that cush keeps the computer science juices flowing ...

It just happens to be denominated in dollars.

You don't seriously think when the Fed decides to add a trillion dollars to the US money supply that they call up the Treasury Department and tell them to fire up the printing presses? There's only about $4000 of physical currency for every US citizen, and a majority of the physical currency is being held overseas.

Most dollars "exist" as part of aggregate numbers sitting in databases. There's no reason to create an elaborate cryptographic algorithm for identifying each individual unit of currency for a centrally controlled money supply. The whole bitcoin thing, the interesting thing about it, is an attempt to create decentralized money.

Why in their right mind would believe that they will be delivered "boundless; infinite" bandwidth just because they signed up for a plan that called itself "unlimited"? I absolutely agree that the companies should not be using the term "unlimited" in their advertising, but can't we all recognize that this is a term now deeply embedded in the nomenclature of internet service that has a clear definition in that context (that should be especially clear to the highest bandwidth users, who certainly must be seasoned users), that doesn't actually mean "truly infinite" as you would suggest we should expect it to mean?

Nope, COMMON FUCKING SENSE is realizing that words are not always used literally and should not be expected to mean such. It's realizing that when an advertisement for Tylenol says that it cures headaches, that doesn't mean you can sue the manufacturer if your headache doesn't go away. It means understanding the context of meanings reflected in how the world actually works instead of pedantically insisting on meanings that clearly are impossible.

That, my friend, is COMMON FUCKING SENSE. It's the skill that we all have to understand WHAT IS MEANT, even when it is not exactly the same as WHAT WAS SAID.

In this context, anyone who believes that you really can take as much as you want of something that has been advertised as "unlimited" is not using common sense. You're saying that if I use so much bandwidth that it drives the company out of business, I should expect them to allow me to do it? If I use so much bandwidth that the company providing the service has to take out loans to support the infrastructure to provide my service, go broke, and starve to death, I should exect them to do that? COMMON FUCKING SENSE, man. There is no such thing as unlimited.

I disagree. They are the same thing. A certain amount of hyperbole is allowed, even expected, in advertising.

People who are using so much bandwidth that they are subject to throttling are almost certainly the *most* savvy, *most* knowledgeable users. There is no way that they don't know what bandwidth is, how networking works, and there really is no such thing as an "unlimited data cap", so pretending like they don't is really just disingenuous.

The problem is, no one wants to be first, because the first one to change their advertising will put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against those who continue to bogusly advertise unlimited internet.

So I guess this is where government regulation is supposed to kick in and force all such businesses onto a level, more honest playing field?

Too true. And when I go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant, I expect to be able to take the entirety of all of the food in the buffet, throw it in garbage bags, and carry them to my table, denying everyone else in the restaurant anything to eat.

Yeah, that works.

You know what really works? People using common sense and realizing that there is no such thing as "unlimited" bandwidth, food, or anything else. When such services are advertised I think we all realize, or at least the reasonable among us realize, that "unlimted" means "much more than the average consumer would utilize, and thus from the perspective of the average consumer, unlimited", not "as much as you can possibly use".

Who doesn't realize that limiting the highest users is sometimes necessary to ensure quality of service for everyone? Hey I paid my Verizon bill too, how come my service is slower because some dork has to torrent down 100 movies per month to add to his never-watched "collection"? Shouldn't I be complaining also about not getting the quality of service *I* paid for?

I have always wondered why the photographs that come back from space are so grainy/blurry and have poor color reproduction. Why aren't the images clearer? Why don't we get to see movies instead of just crummy looking stills?

There *must* be a reason that they can't make photos that come from space exploration better or include full color videos so that we can see what these things would look like if we were really there.

I can only posit that either the radiation hardening necessary for space exploration somehow precludes the use of large CCD/CMOS sensors, or the bandwidth limitation of sending data from that far out makes anything other than tiny images with low resolution possible, and makes video impossible.

But still I can't help wondering why, if they can spend tens of millions to put these things up there, they can't produce better images for whatever millions are left over for on board equipment.

Like the author Jeffrey Grupp explains, corporatism (as Mussolini called it) is the idea that the government, the major corporations, and the military function as one entity. It's always been this way since the kings of old; read up on the East India Company sometime. Eisenhower focused on the military and defense contract aspects and referred to it as the military-industrial complex. Sometimes it's called the military-industrial-media complex (so how 'bout those scary WMDs Iraq was supposedly threatening us with?). To focus on "government being evil" or "evil corporation" is a form of tunnel vision that denies the scope of the problem. It's one of those "pet causes" people get caught up in while nothing changes.

The problem with the marketing datamining is that many of these organizations are in bed with the government. There's a definite double standard here. If you hired someone to perform an illegal act on your behalf, both you and your hireling would be guilty of a crime. Yet somehow the government can pay companies for data that would be illegal for the government to directly collect itself and this is legal.

So if it were merely about trying to sell you "adult diapers" versus the regular kind, it would be more benign. At least in G. Gordon Liddy's day, surveillance was expensive, required a certain determination and commitment of resources, and consequently would only be done on targets considered important enough. With modern tech, the idea that "obviously I'm not interesting enough to spy on" is obsolete. This didn't happen though without plenty of support from government, media, marketers, and various other corporations all working towards their own common interests.