Social media will quickly be your company's undoing as no one will want to live in place where they are forced to pay for a crippled internet as a condition of living in one of your properties. There will quickly be expensive lawsuits essentially forcing your company to decouple your internet service from the rent and making it optional. I would simply waggle my middle finger at your company and find a different place to live.

The causes of obesity are a multitude of factors. This article makes an overly simplistic suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight. As someone that has lost over a hundred pounds, I'll tell you this: it is making good food choices, counting calories, and getting physical activity. Certainly adequate rest is helpful but there is no credible study to suggest that someone that is doing these things yet doesn't get enough sleep is obese.

I've been parsing this kind of press release for a long, long time now. I can pretty much tell what we're dealing with by how hard it is to state the advantage of a new approach in narrow and precise language.

That this blurb doesn't even disclose the error model class (error correction is undefined without doing so) suggests that the main advantage of this codec lies more in the targeting of a particular loss model than a general advance in mathematical power.

Any error correction method looks good when fed data that exactly corresponds to the loss model over which it directly optimises.

The innovators of this might have something valuable, but they are clearly trying to construe it as more than it is. This suggests that there are other, equally viable ways to skin this particular cat.

Hmmm, I saw that in a movie once. Wonder how much the air will cost?

Snowden is going to be the first person in human history to have a suspicious death at the age of one-hundred and five.

There's a big difference between what these agencies do under cover of darkness, and what they do under the glare of a public spotlight. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after two decades in exile, whereupon he continued to criticise his homeland for another fourteen years, before dying of heart failure under suspicious circumstances at age eighty-nine.

There's a good reason they get mighty twisted about having their darkness aired: no more summary judgement, no more page 13 obituaries of A-list adversaries.

Hurricane Lolita:

I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said, when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people would furiously envy him.

No, Snowden's exile is something different: a life not envied, not one little bit. That much his button-down steampunk adversaries can manage under the broad light of day.

I must respectfully disagree with you on every point you raise.

A randomised stack would cause certain types of bugs to manifest themselves much earlier in the development process. Nothing decreases the cost of a bug hunt more than proximity to the actual coding event.

Such an environment rewards programmers who invest more to validate their loops and bounds more rigorously in the first place. Nothing reduces the cost of a bug more than not coding it in the first place.

There's nothing that stops the debugging team from debugging against a canonical build, if they wish to do so. If they have a bug that the canonical build won't manifest, they wouldn't even have known about the bug without this technique added to the repertoire. If many such bugs become known early in the development process—bugs that manifest on some randomised builds, but not on the canonical debug build—you're got an excellent warning klaxon telling you what you need to know—your coding or management standards suck. Debugging suck, if instigated soon enough to matter, returns 100x ROI as compared to debugging code.

Certainly the number of critical vulnerabilities that exist against some compiled binary can only increase in number. So what? The attacker most likely doesn't know in advance which version any particular target will run. The attacker must now develop ten or one hundred exploits where previously one sufficed (or one exploit twice as large and ten times more clever).

If the program code mutated on every execution, you would have some valid points. That would be stupid beyond all comprehension. An attacker could just keep running your program until it comes up cherries.

The developer controls the determinism model. It's an asset in the war. There can be more when it helps our own cause, and less when it assists our adversaries.

Determinism should be not reduced to a crutch for failing to code correctly in the first place. Get over it. Learn how. Live in an environment that punishes mistakes early and often.

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

I notice re-reading my own post that I have an "out" missed and an "out" added. Must be how it passed through casting nines.

The Amazon share price demonstrates that investors anticipate profit from the Amazon business model at some point, which they will point very loudly when it begins to appear that growth has reached a plateau. (It's only mildly conceivable that this whole thing is a Ponzi scheme held afloat by successive ranks of the greater fool.)

By some weird co-incidence I breezed through The Everything Store by Brad Stone yesterday afternoon (and following up, just an hour ago, MacKenzie Bezos's misguided one-star review).

I wanted to get a better sense of the author, so I also watched Discussion: Author Brad Stone on The Everything Store, hosted by Daniel Siciliano, professor at the Stanford Law school, who turns out to be sharp, engaged, articulate, and charismatic. Brad largely stays on script with his own book.

Brad did take certain liberties with his book (small ones) of the kind an author is pretty much forced to take if he wishes to have a readership. Mr Bezos would not be so principled as to fact check his profit into oblivion. MacKenzie needs to get a grip on her entitlement double standard.

Brad regards his critical chapter as the one entitled Expedient Convictions. His recap was the best bit in the entire Q/A: "Amazon [aka Jeff] rationalise their customer focus to excuse a lot of things. This paper-thin rationalization is actually naked self-interest."

No shit Sherlock. He then goes on talk about how Amazon engineered their operation to pay no sales tax at the state level by claiming not to operate in any of those states, which is only true in the narrowest legal sense. Amazon runs huge operations in those states structured as legally independent subsidiaries (which are nevertheless totally under Amazon's thumb).

In the book Jeff is quoted as saying they don't use any services provided by those states, so why should they pay a sales tax? Their subsidiaries are using plenty of government provided infrastructure in those states to make those products and services possible. The whole story is just an accounting shell game. Their products come from somewhere, somehow. I don't think you find out at the center of the nested Russian dolls that the Amazon fulfillment center is a Xen machine instance on EC2. In mathematics, Mr Bezos, this analysis is known as the pigeonhole principle, which in layman's terms says you can't ethically pay tax nofuckingwhere on $74b dollars in revenue. But you know that already, don't you? And MacKenzie knows that you know that, doesn't she? Right, I though as much. Pity Brad got the influence of Remains of the Day on your regret minimization framework misplaced in time by about a year in his origin story. How will we ever trust another word this man says?

Which of those two errors concerns a million dollars or more? Bzzzt. Looks like Jeff wins the milliravi award for speaking with forked cheek.

Anyway, this story today is nothing new, and hardly the worst. Anyone interested can check out how Amazon sat on Lovefilm in the UK/EU. It was brutal.

Stone makes Amazon's internal culture sound like The Passion of the Christ which I think was dramatised by Stone somewhat, but hardly given the full Oliver (the answer to my fey verbal riddle is Natural Born Killers if anyone cares).

As I recall it from an early chapter, among the fringe whingers MacKenzie complains are insignificant and overrepresented was one Shel Kaphan whom Bezos himself described as "the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com" as part of his great and commendable summing up of a valued resource so totally no longer needed.

Quick, someone hand me a gold pen, I want to stick it down my throat.

Jules Verne envisioned the submarine. Does that make a submarine impossible? Does the concept sink on the basis of its sci-fi roots? Oh, lordy, what a fucked up standard of evidence on which to accuse any theory of being faith based.

* [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/pictures/110208-jules-verne-google-doodle-183rd-birthday-anniversary/ 8 Jules Verne Inventions That Came True]

The guy predicted pretty much everything but the click trap.

FYI - it is more politically correct to refer to them as Tea Baggers.

I also have the landscape/portrait combination. It would take far more than this to tempt me to switch. My gutter has a slight fold, so my visual perpendiculars are about six inches apart, and I'm not viewing the wings at some weird oblique angle (or buttock balancing, which can only end badly if like many software developers one is treadmilling the 50/50/50, where 50 is the new 40).

My landscape screen hails from the era where 1680x1050 was king, and a godly stout and square king at that. It's not quite wide enough to triple tile, so I had to solve the console problem differently.

I configured Tilda terminal to pop up (always on top) in the bottom 1/3 of the vertical display, where the pixels begin just two inches above the top of my desk. The vertical display always has my primary browser, maximized. When Tilda pops up, I still have as much vertical height for my browser than on the landscape screen, so I just have to scroll the web content to the top portion of the browser window while I'm using the console (like hell I'm going to manually demax my browser window every time I pop up Tilda with my Windows menu key).

The problem that drove me nuts is that the content at the bottom of a web page won't scroll up to the top of the window. FF just doesn't think the user ought to be able to scroll past the point where the bottom pixel of the content is any higher than the bottom pixel of the display window. No empty bottom margin allowed! The right side of your screen can taper into nothingness, but not the bottom. That makes it pretty clear already that there's an industry-wide potato famine for vertical real estate: they didn't even consider that it might be ergonomically more acceptable to scroll the portion of the content you're actually reading up to eye level, because to a first dipshit–designer approximation nearly every screen is a horizontal slit (I chose the ndash rather than a hyphen in that compound modifier, by a nose).

One loses pretty much nothing running a browser in portrait mode if combined with NoSquint. On 80% of web sites (denominated by the sites I willingly chose to visit) I just magnify the fonts until all the loopy cruft blows off the sides of the screen, leaving that portion which I wish to attend gloriously enlarged on my jumbo page. It is certainly true that some sites are coded in relative units where it's impossible to achieve a horizontal enlargement of the main content column by fiddling with NoSquint. For these, there's always Stylish. If even Stylish fails (mainly because the selectors are too cluttered and generic) I either (A) actively seek an alternative resource better behaved, or (B) switch that specific page into Chrome. Yes, I treat the web like a kindergarten full of unruly children (and graphic designers) forever requiring a heavy thumb. It's worth the effort. One font to rule them all!

I've long lived by the adage that for primary reading, fonts should be large enough that the user can lean back and operate the Page Dn key with your big toe. Your own spine will thank you on the home stretch of the 50/50/50.

That mainly leaves the annoying scrolling problem. Fixed with Stylish.

body:after {
content: 'Tail';
color: #505050;
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 1vmax;
padding-bottom: 40vh !important;
}

Yes, this breaks a few web layouts and the word 'Tail' shows up sometimes in the strangest places (this is how I know when it's my own diddle—and which of many—breaking the layout). Easy enough to switch off if the need arises.

The 40vh is empirically just big enough to cause web pages to scroll above the top of my Tilda terminal.

I love this desktop configuration. It rocks. Even my black gutter, slightly crooked like the spine of a book, is more of a feature than a bug.

One sees those big flat screens in a different light after one multiplies by the love-slave vector 50/50/50. The applicable units are hours, weeks, years. Not seconds, minutes, and dazzle.

The entire premise of this post is built on stupidity escalation.

Corporations often pass off short-term financial hardship (mainly of the cash flow variety) as a legitimate reason to prune staff—generally fooling no-one, yet successfully biding time in the PR war saying nothing much at all until some new outrage of the moment shifts the spotlight to a different circus ring. Among the best-paid professionals in our society are the engineers of running issues aground against the acidic shoals of going nowhere fast with the greatest expense (first, we kill the injunctions). Business as usual, on both fronts.

This is irritating, so we pretend to become stupid as bricks in turning the table, as if the converse contains the least shred of cognitive viability: that any company not under present fiscal duress could not possibly benefit under best management from another round of lay-offs.

If anything, the converse is even dumber than the original stonewall, and about 100x more bloody minded. God forbid that by such asinine manoeuvres we return Karl Marx to the rank of essential reading, who at least spat upon the pathos from a viable view of systems.