All GOOG stock holders have voting rights, it just doesn't do any good because Larry and Sergey have majority control so nobody else's vote matters. But they do have the right to cast a meaningless vote.

(Nobody bought GOOG stock with the expectation that they'd have an influence of the company - the IPO letter and successive founders' letters have said so repeatedly)

The reason it's so visceral is because it's happening so quickly. And that's happening because housing stock is so limited. Complicating the issue is that transportation sucks so hard that there's nowhere else to go that isn't like being the other side of the moon. This is 30 years of bad policy coming home to roost.

A few thousand new people with money really shouldn't be this disruptive.

But nobody's suggesting that they go live on the street.

I live in New York City. One area or another has been gentrifying since before they came up with the name. You know what this means? It means the city is healthy - there is an influx of new people. Yuppie types (who themselves, like these protesters, kicked out people as well) come in and move to the cheaper areas they can afford and make them fashionable. Some of them stay (and make more money as they advance), and some richer people move in now that there's restaurants and other amenities. And the next generation of yuppies goes somewhere else and the process repeats. For example, my parents now couldn't afford the apartment I was born in - it's now worth more than their decently-sized house in one of the wealthiest suburbs in NJ. The Daily News loading dock across the street was turned into a bunch of really, really nice condos.

And this is a good thing! And it's been happening forever. The '66 West Side Story movie showing a grimy Upper West Side was actually filmed in the grimy UWS - about where Lincoln Center is now - and now that neighborhood is one of the most expensive parts of one of the most expensive parts of one of the most expensive cities. You know why you don't hear people in NYC bitching about it? It's because people don't feel like they have a right to live anywhere in particular, so they're comfortable with moving, and public transit is so good that there's a large area you can move to (including parts of NJ) without significantly affecting your commute. There's also a lot of housing, at various price levels.

Now, of course, SF isn't really like that. Public transit sucks, so moving makes it really hard to get to work, and they've been so adverse to improving it - or building more housing of any type - that housing is dramatically supply limited. There simply aren't any units available, and whenever one is, some techie who can afford to pay 6 months rent in advance is going to get it. Can you really blame them, or the landlord? It's a supply problem exacerbated by no-transit hyperlocality (e.g., it has to be *right here*)

Yes, I think everybody - including the techies! - agree that the status quo sucks. Perhaps the proud, longtime residents of SF shouldn't have spent 30 years making it impossible to avoid this problem, and shouldn't be fighting the solutions now!

We already have a name for the right to stay in your apartment for as long as they like - it's called "ownership", and it can suck. Renting avoids that hassle, and is cheaper, but the whole point is someone has to agree to rent it to you, and that can be withdrawn. You can't have it both ways.

Yeah, sure, OK, but that's why the time to start all this lengthy work was like 4 years ago, right? That's a really long time to sort out even some pretty massive problems, and have endless meetings with department heads, and testing them, and waiting for the DBA, and waiting for the network configuration - and then have like a year and a half left to actually do the upgrade!. I mean, if a business have such a complicated setup that it's going to take X years to migrate off an OS, doesn't it make sense to start that migration at least X years before the published cut-off date? I guarantee you that there's a dozen 0-days just waiting around for the end of support - even if they didn't care about basing their entire organization on top of a vendor-unsupported product with no recourse for problems, it seems incredibly dangerous for a company to not be 100% sure they'd avoid that attacker free-for-all, right? Presumably the reason for all those computers is people have to use them for work.

Nobody's talking about "overnight" here. Windows XP is more than twelve years old. The viable replacement has been available for more than four years. What would more time ever gain anybody? Clearly the people right at the edge now punted until they couldn't punt any longer, so more time would just lead to longer punting followed by this same rush.

That's basically my point - the jurisprudence is this absurd mess because the law doesn't make much sense.

I had this long paragraph that I elided because it was boring, but the gist of it was: Let's say you put an antenna on your roof - fine. What if you have land at the top of the hill that's blocking your reception, and you put the antenna there and run a cable down? Fine as well. What if you and your neighbor split the cost of a better antenna, and you run the cable to both houses? What if a whole block does this? What if you make people pay a subscription for the upkeep of this mess of coax?

Eventually the line is crossed and it becomes illegal, but there's no obvious place to put that line. One answer is "when there's profit", but there's no legal basis for that since nothing they're doing is illegal in the absence of the Cable Act, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with profits (IANAL, of course).

You (and me and the judges so far) have this mental model of people having antennas on their roofs, which is clearly OK. The law is clear that cable companies have to get permission, but the law isn't particularly good at excluding the other cases. Check out the definitions from the 1982 law, which are reused in the 1992 law - it looks like if you set up an antenna for 2 single-occupant houses (there is an exclusion only for MDUs), you'd have a 'cable system' and therefore be a 'cable operator'. The ruling will probably hinge on fairly boring and narrow interpretations of those terms - namely, is Aereo a cable system as defined (intentionally vaguely) by the law? Because if they are, it's clear that they are subject to the retransmission consent rule.

Also, CBS can kiss my ass. They're pretty much the only ones trying to push this crap.

Frankly, it probably is illegal. But it shouldn't be.

Check out the history of cable TV (or Community Access Television - CATV - as it was once known). Basically, it started out with a big mountaintop antenna and feeding the broadcast signals down to a poor-reception valley. Essentially what Aereo would argue they're doing now, just they're using the Internet. It was the same progression - the broadcasters complained that the cable companies were mooching and not paying anything back, and the cablecos said "hey, we're just retransmitting - people could just set up an antenna". This all came to a head with the "Cable Act" back in 1992, which set up retransmission consent. I don't see how Aereo is any different than those cable providers who just were retransmitting from an antenna, and those cable providers have to ask permission.

Now, requiring consent is stupid. Part of the deal of broadcasting anything is that you can't control its reception (this is why people complaining about the Google WiFi bug are horribly misguided). That's a very simple, straightforward, and fair model, and it's worked for a long time. Cable companies should be able to set up an antenna like anybody else and connect your house to it. But, they shouldn't be able to modify that stream at all - in particular, they shouldn't be able to substitute their commercials. They could of course negotiate a deal with the broadcaster for a direct feed (better video quality!) or the right to put some of their own ads in, but they shouldn't be required to.

He was modded redundant because it's bullshit. In the same breath, he complains about useless results due to spam as well as Google's attempt to stop people making the results useless due to spam. And apparently Google's algorithms are "broken" because they "created" a problem, namely SEO manipulation. But then he goes on to explain that AltaVista was subject to SEO manipulation as well. And he's condemning Google for attempting to fix it, while blaming them for being unable to! After using this silly logic to come to some (wrong, but still) weak conclusions, he goes on to make broad proclamations about the demise of Google, while complaining about lawsuits (like what?) and "arbitrary rules" (like these? Seems like they're pretty reasonable, and Rap Genius admitted to violating them). Easily the most worthless comment I've read on Slashdot in months, at least above score 0, and that's saying something.

It gets even better when the website in question has said (from the fine summary!): "First of all, we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages. We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked". But apparently this is Google being abusive and throwing a temper tantrum (which he says twice). Someone should tell Rap Genius, because they don't seem to think so.

While I can't say I've personally spoken to that many Creationists, at least about Creationism, it's pretty hard to dispute that they are... well, 'morons' is a loaded term, but lacking in any sincere interest in evidence and reason. After all, the whole argument is "The Bible says it happened this way" - which, whatever your beliefs, is not logic.

At some point, beliefs just become ridiculous and attempting to debate them seriously is more credit than is deserved. Especially when the whole reason for the 'disagreement' (I'm being generous) is because they have a different conception of reality that is fundamentally opposed to one based on observation and, without getting into a epistemological debate, fact. The Flat Earth people are the same in this regard - how do you show someone a picture of a curved Earth, demonstrations of a Focault pendulum, or sunlight down separate holes making two different angles at the same time, when all they will do is claim that you're lying or that there are various other tricks, and it's really all a conspiracy? If they accepted any - really, all - the evidence there is, they wouldn't have had that belief in the first place and you wouldn't be there!

When it gets down to it, Bill Nye will be debating someone who is not willing to accept the premise - that is, that science and logic are useful ways of understanding the world. I agree with the GP on this one - the most Nye will manage is to funnel yet more money out of the believer's hands into whoever was smart enough to open a museum about this.

Ah, well there are definitely unknown unknowns, like quantum mechanics and relativity, that we don't know about until somebody figures it out (powered flight was like this, but on a smaller scale). But they're getting fewer and far between, pretty much by definition. We've done a level or two since Einstein, and the unknowns we're working on now (like the Higgs boson) are comparatively smaller.

Although Kelvin was right, essentially. With more precise measurements, we discovered that light and moving objects didn't quite do what we expected, so eventually this led to the discovery of the missing terms. This isn't meant to diminish the impressiveness of the theories, but they didn't spring forth de novo - like all other theories, they were attempts to explain observations.

I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but the fact is that because as a species we've been systematically looking into the unknowns for a few hundred years now, there's not very much low-hanging fruit left. You do certainly hear stories about some teenager discovering something really cool, and that's great and should be encouraged and celebrated. But the fact of the matter is that most scientists (let alone the average public) won't do much more than add a tiny bit of knowledge to some very specific field. We're past the days where you could invent powered, controlled flight in a garage, in the same way the Wright brothers were past the days where you could invent calculus, and so on. Science is like a tree, and if you're lucky you might discover the next level in the tree - but the nodes are smaller.

And that's great! The reason it's so hard to discover new things is because we know so much now, and the stuff we know we don't know requires building huge rings under Europe, or launching satellites, or building telescopes that cover entire deserts or something. Basically, we're advancing as a species. But yeah, the size of discoveries nowadays do tend to be proportional to resources.

More doctors and lawyers nowadays are women, actually. Try again.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think whether someone learns programming is intrinsically tied to wanting to figure out "the rules". For as long as I've been alive, I've noticed that whenever I've looked at some system it was clear that it operated according to some rules that were understandable. And understanding those rules was its own reward, but it also enables more effective or efficient usage. Programming (and mathematics and physics and chemistry and...) is just learning the rules of computers (or their respective fields). We're so eager to find the rules to every system that it gets us into trouble with systems (like people) that don't have inviolate rules.

In my observation, women (as a class) are more likely than men (as a class) to discount understanding those kinds of rules, because they're useless for interacting with people - and women tend to be more people-oriented than men. It's not for anybody to say whether this is better or worse, I think it's just that there are many different kinds of people, and that they consider different things important.

As another observation, I know a lot of really great female programmers and scientists, and they all see the world broadly as I do - as something to be understood, with rules that are worth discovering. And I know many men who see the world as full of things that just happen, and the reason isn't as important or relevant as the consequences to them and the people they care about. But of the latter type, I know more women than men, and of the former, more men than women - so assuming that the former type are more likely to program (arguably the most rigorous and least-nuanced system), it's not surprising to me that more men are programmers.

Still, I'm offended by this notion that women constantly need cajoling and reassurance to do pretty much anything. Every woman I know is perfectly happy to decide to do something, or not, and they're not stupid or uninformed or incapable of deciding for themselves what they want to do or not do. If the goal is equal treatment, why do we seem to consider women as less capable of deciding their interests than men? A lot of women are behind this, but that doesn't mean it's not sexism.

I think we really need to separate access and opportunity from results. The former is the important one, though admittedly hard to measure. But emphasizing for percentages leads to some really peverse outcomes. Just as an example, I went to university with several top-notch female coders - and each one had to spend a lot of effort both throughout university and when they entered industry that they weren't there to fill some admissions or HR quota. It's ridiculous, of course, as they were top-notch - but quotas, implicit or explicit, by definition lower the bar from "as competent as possible" to "as competent as possible, while meeting the quota" , so the only logical conclusion is that the average within the quota is lower than the average outside it (otherwise they wouldn't need a quota). It's really messed up that we've made what should be labeled sexist thinking, into a reasonable conclusion - all in the name of giving a leg up to minorities!

Do you even know any programmers? I don't know a single one (out of dozens and dozens) who thought "hey, I wonder what I should do with my life" and picked up the idea of coding from a career fair or something. Every single one started on their own, and it's easier than ever to do that nowadays.

I'm sure they would. It can't do them any less good than their war with the British, and continued attempts to convince the actual residents that they don't want to be British citizens.