There is an obligation to not be abusive

Hi! Welcome to the real world. You'll find the dumpster for your "participation" trophies to the left; and here, you get paid for winning, not "trying" or "good sportspersonship".

Linus doesn't suffer fools gladly. And I applaud him for that.

This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments.

The war in Syria doesn't involve a nuclear state casually bulldozing civilian houses, complete with civilians inside, all because a handful of pesky terrorists keep lobbing ineffective bombs into empty fields.

Israel's problem really boils down to a matter of proportion. Yes, they have an unenviable situation to deal with; but they have chosen to respond in a way that makes them look like monsters (to the point that even many Jewish Israelis consider their government's behavior nothing short of reprehensible). When you cook ants with a magnifying glass, no one blames the ants, even if one or two do manage to sting you.


As for the FP's hypothetical French forum moderator - You count as part of the problem. When people can freely say things such as what I wrote above, they can contribute to the discussion, sometimes even vent a bit, and move on. When, however, fairly peaceful discussion vanishes under some bullshit pretense of racism - People then feel the need to escalate the impact of their few words making it through to other eyes.

Heck, even the Supreme Court [supremecourt.gov] disagrees with you. But whatever, it's not like it is their job to interpret the constitution.

Believe it or not, the USSC does not have that as part of their job description - The constitution just sets it up as essentially the highest appellate court in the land. Not until John Marshall's tenure, and particularly starting with Marbury v. Madison, did they claim the power to overrule Congress in "interpreting" the legality of a law.

That said, I generally don't agree with sumdumass, but on this one, he has it nailed. We can reinterpret the applicability of the constitution to the modern world, and if necessary, amend it; But the words themselves must of necessity retain their original meaning even as the common use of those words may change. Anything else leads to exactly what the GP described - crackers and chocolate, to some degree.

Or if you're into math, you invoke the pigeonhole principle

Though technically true, in fairness we need to differentiate between meaningful data and noise. Yes, a universal compressor doesn't care. Human users of compression algorithms, for the most part, do care.

So the limit of useful compression (Shannon aside) comes down to how well we can model the data. As a simple example, I can give you two 64 bit floats as parameters to a quadratic iterator, and you can fill your latest 6TB HDD with conventionally "incompressible" data as the output. If, however, you know the right model, you can recreate that data with a mere 16 bytes of input. Now extend that to more complex functions - Our entire understanding of "random" means nothing more than "more complex than we know how to model". As another example, the delay between decays in a sample of radioactive material - We currently consider that "random", but someday may discover that god doesn't play dice with the universe, and an entirely deterministic process underlies every blip on the ol' Geiger counter.


So while I agree with you technically, for the purposes of a TV show? Lighten up. :)

It is also possible the the VPN packets are transiting a different upstream peer from Verizon and bypassing the peering bottleneck at issue. Assuming that Verizon is performing inspection of packets and throttling only Netflix packets is quite a leap.

Failing to have peerage agreements in place to honor your downstream sales commitments is a form of throttling - Or, I would daresay, a form of outright fraud.

If I offer to sell you "unlimited" beers from my fridge for $50 a month, but I only resupply it at a rate of one six-pack per week, I have intentionally cheated you. That basic relationship doesn't magically change because of some hand-waving technobabble about peerage agreements and network congestion.

(Yes, I know those don't strictly count as technobabble, and what they really mean - But they effectively reduce to Verizon having zero interest in upgrading its infrastructure to support its commitments to their customers as long as the FCC and FTC will allow them to outright lie)

Or a month's unlimited data [three.co.uk] for $25. And interestingly (for this topic) a 3UK SIM can be used in a handful of countries without roaming charges - including the USA [three.co.uk] (but data's limited to 25 gigabytes per month and you're not allowed to tether.)

Holy crap... Can I sign up with them AS an American? Tethering aside, that beats my current plan by 5GB and $50.

No, the US doesn't need to regulate the greedy-four in charge of our cell networks - We clearly have the best products and services available at the best prices thanks to free market pressures.

Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree

So perhaps he can reconcile those two concepts and explain why we allow H1Bs when we have MILLIONS of unemployed college grads?

Mr. Biden, I have a word of advice for you - CEOs lie. And not just a little, but as their primary (and sometimes only) qualification. You might not want to go around repeating the crap they spew to try to sway you to do their bidding. It just, y'know, make you look like a little like a Special Olympics winner, if you get my meaning.

And that said, I'm still fucking pissed that my state labor regulator basically told me I wasn't a contractor and had no right to negotiate a contract like that, and basically scared me into not being able to help them in the future.

When the state steps in on contractor-vs-employee issues, they have no authority to do anything to you-the-contractor. They can only punish the company by making them retroactively pay your portion of payroll taxes. "Labor regulator" doesn't actually mean they regulate the laborers, it means they regulate employers. You can negotiate any contract you damned well want - Whether the employer can get away with it? Not your problem, so sleep well, friend! Worst case, you end up owing 10k less in taxes. How awful, right?

If you really want to worry about it, you can either work through a contracting agency (aka "give them a cut"), or just make sure you having more than one client at a time, and the whole issue becomes moot. This only comes up when you contract directly with a single client for long stretches. FWIW, my employer actually has a standing agreement with a local outsourcing agency for exactly this purpose - If we need someone back for a few weeks, they sign up with the token shell-temp-agency and get "placed" with us. I honestly don't know how well that arrangement would hold up in court, but again, who cares - not the contractors who have the potential to get screwed here.

None of that relates to the present situation, however - Microsoft's layoff memo spells it out pretty clearly: "We expect to focus phone production mainly in Hanoi, with some production to continue in Beijing and Dongguan. We plan to shift other Microsoft manufacturing and repair operations to Manaus and Reynosa respectively, and start a phased exit from Komaron, Hungary". Microsoft has too many highly paid Western workers, and needs more 3rd-world slaves. Simple as that, really.

Wrong. It has not centrally defined value, but it has value. If you give me X for this painting on my wall, then X is its value, regardless of what X is. It could be US$ or pieces of cake or a service.

Yes, I said that poorly, but you chose to ignore my point. The whole reason we use token currencies comes from the convenience of not pricing things in terms of goods or services. We don't need to value a shovel in terms of chickens, or a cow in terms of a number of hours spent weeding your garden. We can agree that X units of currency will pay for a shovel, Y units for a cow, and Z units per hour for weeding the garden.

As for the "value" of DocuCoin, I would repeat (or perhaps clarify) that the coins themselves have no value, in the same way that me scribbling a crappy picture of a cat on an old napkin has no value. Now, if Jim Davis draws a cat on a napkin, you might have something you can sell on ebay for a buck or two - But that has nothing to do with the underlying "coin" of doodling-on-a-napkin. The drawing, and more importantly, who made it, has value; but that puts us back to "how many Garfield sketches does a cow cost?"

FTA: "The value of each coin will be completely subjective, depending on who creates the coin and why."

I don't think this has a problem with double-spending, because it has no actual value.

This has almost no resemblance to "currency" in any meaningful sense, and calling it such amounts to nothing short of deceptive. This looks more like a formalized system of LinkedIn endorsements, except still with the same underlying flaw that your technophobe mother can "endorse" your 133t Perl scripting skills. Or perhaps in the best case, it amounts to a built-in certificate of authenticity for things like celebrity signatures on books or baseball cards.

Bitcoin doesn't need to worry about the competition.

The order of society is far more important than a single insignificant persons life.

You might want to re-think that stance - Not because I particularly value human life, but because it negates your own point.

A rolling-right-on-red doesn't threaten to undermine the order of society. Punishing people who haven't committed any crime, however, does. When people stop believing in at least the theory that our system of crime-and-punishment more-or-less works, the motivation to at least give lip-service to pointless laws completely vanishes.

1,000 out of 4,000,000 tickets makes a 0.025% error rate. That's a perfectly acceptable margin of error.

You need to discriminate between positive and negative error rates in situations like this.

If it failed to ticket 0.025% of red-light runners, we would consider it an amazing success.

If, however, it tickets even one law-abiding driver, then it very much needs an angry mob ripping these damned things down from the poles, throwing them on the front lawn of City Hall, and demanding an end to the outsourcing of "justice" to for-profit companies.

So log the workorder, then repair the system, then close the workorder. Just like in the municipal code manuals.

You, uh, didn't even make it through the summary, did you? :)

But hey, you got 1st p, so, I guess that counts for something.

More to the point, it's the Right Thing to do, because the *privilege* of occupying a chunk of Internet resource comes with the *responsibility* of being contactable if bad things are emanating from it.

Bullshit, straight-up.

The right of all humans to communicate freely with one another - and to avoid communicating with those they don't want to - trumps archaic administrative nonsense about the accuracy of a DNS record as enforced solely through US hegemony over the internet.

Once upon a time, if you had a problem coming from a domain, you would contact the admin as a peer, explain the situation, and he'd put the smack-down on whichever of his users had screwed up. Today? Even at the likes of Sony they admit they don't monitor it, so why bother having it there at all? If you have a problem coming from a domain today, you either report it to the FBI (if a credible attack), or you blacklist them at the router (if a mere nuissance). The days of getting things done on the internet through the mutual respect of admins ended a looong time ago.

here's the law. you want me to do any of your other homework for you?

Not the GP, but yeah, I do - Can you explain what an anti-domainsquatting law that specifically deals with trademarks and identity theft, and absolutely nothing to do with simply giving fake info to a registrar, has to do with your original claim that giving ACCURATE contact info counts as US law?

Now, ICANN can enforce its policies on the registrars themselves, simply by virtue of the fact that a registrar requires ICANN's continued blessing to operate. But the only recourse they have about (non-identity-stealing) fake registration info comes down to taking the domain away from you. For someone like Sony, that might look like an end-of-the-world scenario. For someone who just wants a named place to stick stuff online for my own personal use? Meh, worst case, I've lost $10-$15 and I have to wait three days for a new domain to propagate (and not always even out the money - Much to my surprise, I actually had GoDaddy refund me when I flatly refused to send them a photocopy of my license, three months into a registration).