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Comment Re:Stupid nomenclature. (Score 1) 35

Confusing terminology by co-opting accepted terms already in common use.

We're going to name this golf cart "Jet Plane"!
We're going to call this jet plan "submarine"
We're going to name this sailboat "family car".
We're going to make this snowmobile "toboggan"

Sorry. Stupid shit like this makes it impossible to take anything these people say seriously.

Now that I realize how they use terminology, suddenly Amazon's search results make sense. If I really want a Bluetooth keyboard and not some wireless USB keyboard, I should search for FireWire keyboard, and if I really want a wireless USB keyboard, I should search for PS/2 keyboard.

Comment Severe design flaw? Stupid user choices? (Score 1) 49

It's hard to know whether this is something harmless or a sign of a serious design flaw in Discord without more information.

If this company is just assuming that Dumbledore32168 is the same user on server A and server B, then either:

  • users chose to use the same name on every server with the expectation that people from other servers would recognize them, in which case there's really no problem at all, or
  • some servers don't allow you to set your username, in which case that's a real problem, and a good reason to use something other than Discord,

and I have no idea which of these is the case.

If, however, they are doing something more clever and matching people even when they have different usernames, then this suggests a *major* design flaw.

It should not be possible for anyone other than the actual owner of the server to obtain any identifier for a user that is shared across multiple servers. Other people should be able to see your local (per-server) username, period. There are reasons for a signed-in user to pass uniquely identifying values *to* the server, and there are legitimate reasons for the server to store that mapping, but there are no reasons for there to be any web-facing API for converting from a username back to that identifier, period, under any circumstances. Even things like private messaging should be sending the local username or a local user identifier, not any sort of global identifier.

And even during the sign-in/sign-up process, the identifier sent from the authentication server to the content server need not be shared across servers. There's nothing inherently preventing discord from providing a different per-user unique identifier to each server, and if privacy were a serious consideration in the design, they would be doing this. So again, if they are successfully tracking users across servers when usernames don't match, then Discord's entire security architecture needs a major overhaul, because that would mean that Discord as a platform is severely flawed architecturally, and that privacy was not a serious consideration in its design.

So could someone from Discord please clarify what is happening here?

Comment Not purposeless (Score 3, Interesting) 24

These actually likely served a purpose. If some other company made an exact copy of their mask, they could go to court and immediately prove that it was a copy. It's the chip design equivalent of the "Stolen from Apple" art hidden inside the Mac ROM code so that if someone tried to sell a clone similar to what happened with the Franklin Ace, they would potentially have an easy way to prove in court that the code was copied.

Comment Re:finally! (Score 2) 48

How would this help exactly? Tickets are transferable now, that is how the resale market works. It wouldn't change anything for tickets at all.

Limits on transferring tickets creates the potential for people to be stuck with tickets and forced to go back to TicketMaster to resell them, where they make additional profit, which gives them a perverse incentive to allow bots to buy tickets, because they get to profit on the same sale more than once, raising the price each time the tickets get resold.

Without those limitations, you'd be able to legitimately resell tickets anywhere, and companies wouldn't be afraid of allowing resale. As a result, almost nobody would go through TicketMaster and pay their high fees, so TM would have more incentive to truly fix the problem.

Combine that with an exception to the transferability mandate if and only if the seller offers a 100% refund policy (with no fees), with tickets becoming transferrable after refunds become unavailable.

If you pass a law written like that, TM will have a strong incentive to lock things down a lot — specifically, they could:

  • Require all tickets to be transferred to an app on one or more specific people's phones.
  • For people who don't have smartphones, allow them to pick up physical tickets in person with a photo ID, but only within one week of the event.
  • Allow people to return tickets up to a week before the show for a refund.
  • Allow people to transfer tickets within the last week, either by converting an electronic ticket to a physical ticket in person or through their app.

That sort of policy should (I think) make scalping largely impractical, because most scalpers aren't going to want to risk buying tickets months ahead of time if they can't sell them anywhere until a few days before the show.

Comment Re:Why (Score 1) 115

And yet all the cool kids love Python and YAML these days, both of which break in fun and interesting ways if you get the indenting wrong.

But that's by design, and is very clearly spelled out. And if you can't deal with Python's formatting rules, maybe you should go back to BASIC. The rest of us are making great stuff with it.

Comment Re:Shooting Ourselves in the Foot (Score 1) 117

A tax on electricity or food s a tax on basic ,living expenses and included in the calculation of the poverty level. That is, if electric and food prices increase, the government's calculation of the poverty level and that "prebate" check that is sent to you every month will increase to pay that tax on them. That's just in case you don't have the ability to analyze that yourself, although I rather think that you are just playing dumb to have something to argue about.

What you're saying is that you consider living in a manner consistent with being above the poverty line to be a luxury, and people should be taxed on it. And that attitude justifies, at least in your mind, raising taxes on the middle class — even the lower middle class who often struggle to get by.

And because your tax proposal applies only to things that normal people buy, while mostly ignoring true luxuries, such as yachts bought overseas, and completely ignoring securities, butlers, maids, personal drivers, personal pilots, and other things that the wealthy tend to spend their money on, it shifting most of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, which is what pretty much every economist who has ever looked at this plan has concluded it will do, but you're okay with that, because apparently in your mind, not being dirt poor is a luxury that should only be allowed for those who can afford it.

Comment Re:finally! (Score 2) 48

Ban TicketMaster/Live Nation from the lucrative resale market and watch how quickly they conjure up an effective solution to solve the problem of bots snatching up all the tickets.

We purchased tickets for Alanis Morissette's tour this summer, within 60 seconds of sales opening, and magically all the first sale tickets were gone and we had to go to the resale market. From nosebleed to "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", literally, every single seat in a ~20k person arena sold within a minute? Who knew she was still that popular....

TM gets to collect their bullshit fees on every single sale, so what incentive do they have to do a damn thing about bots?

Start by passing a law that makes it unlawful to make anything non-transferrable, whether it is a concert ticket or a software license. That one law would do more to fix this problem than anything else.

Comment Re:And how do these numbers shift... (Score 1) 100

One chart shows how little box office returns come from original works. In the past 7 years, 74% of the top 10 grossing movies were sequels. 19% were based on existing IP and 7% were original works (although Oppenheimer was based on real events).

One of my friends once pointed out to me that 10 Things I Hate About You is basically Taming of the Shrew in a different setting, and my perspective on movies has never been the same since. So how many of those 7% were still retellings of existing stories, but with enough changes to make them not be flagrantly "based on existing IP"?

Comment Re: OK (Score 1) 167

Right, but we were talking about the peak capacity needed to address the surge caused by everyone coming home at 6 and plugging in. If the only people using public chargers during the day don't have a charger at home, then they do nothing to displace that 6pm surge.

If the people using public chargers during the day don't have a charger at home, then by definition, they're not part of that 6 P.M. surge, and are thus effectively reducing its magnitude compared with what it otherwise would be.

Remember that the 10x number that I was arguing against is a hypothetical future state in which everyone has an EV and charges at home, not a power deficit that currently exists and that we need to fix, so if a third of apartment dwellers are never able to move to home charging, it does reduce that number considerably.

And even if the apartment complex owners eventually tear down and rebuild the apartments and thus have to comply with the new building code requirements forcing them to put in charging infrastructure, it still potentially kicks the can down the road for several decades, thus reducing the urgency of dealing with that hypothetical load.

Comment Re: Hopefully common sense will prevail (Score 2) 135

At the least "buying" the software meant you can use it for as long as you could find a machine to run it on.

The big push of corporate america these days is to deepen the poverty cycle by turning everything into a rental.

Silly me, I thought "nobody owns anything" was part of the Communist plot.

Comment Re:And here I thought it was about dendrites (Score 1) 86

In LiIon batteries, IIRC, the dendrites only form to a significant degree when the battery is abused.

While technically true, that definition of "abuse" has to include things like fast charging, bringing the cell close to 100% state of charge, charging when it's too cold outside, allowing the battery to get too warm, and starting to drain the battery immediately after charging. With the exception of charging to 100%, all of those are things that many car owners can't really avoid. So you can't really just wave your hands and say "That's abuse," because such abuse is common enough for entire lines of products to have been recalled over it.

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