There is a very, very good chance that relative to Bret Victor, you are the one too stupid to tie shoes. You might want to have a look at worrydream.com, if you want to learn something about interactive visualizations.

It's great that you work on dumb-fuck simple problems, such that you know what everything "is going to do". In the face of concurrency, user variation, systems failure...you know what it's going to do? We should all bow down.

So, genius -- you are creating an L-System simulation of an oak tree. What's the system, and what are the constants involved? No cheating. You've already told us you know what your code is going to do, which means that in your magic, magic head-space, you already have the answers.

I've got a 14 month old boy. I need to warm up my fart joke capacity, so it'll be ready when I need it. I wonder if a positively-charged fart would be different from a negatively-charged fart.

Here's the thing. It doesn't matter if it was a rogue agent or a mistake. What matters is whether it materially affected the outcome of the election.

Racknine apparently keeps pretty good logs of all the information, so we should be able to find out how many calls were done and in what districts. Elections Canada should _assume_ that each robocall results in one less vote. Is that an accurate assumption? No. But it will certainly make people think twice about robocalls in the future.

Take that number, and figure out if it (along with any other crap found) would have changed the outcome. If so -- call a new election in that riding, and fine the party for each robocall.

Also -- jail time and fines for the originator of the calls as well. So if you robocall to help a party, you're going to jail and you'll pay a fine, and so will the party you're "helping".

Require that all robocalling firms accurately log ALL outgoing mass messages and payments during election seasons. There doesn't have to be any censorship, but there does have to be accurate sourcing.

And is Racknine saying that they can't be bothered to listen to the messages that they're sending out by the thousands? I mean, two minutes of listening is just impossible? Someone from Racknine should have checked the outbound messages and said -- hey, we're not going to send out something that moves a polling location without checking with Elections Canada first.

So this is a plane that might get, you know, shot at? In a war or something? And it can't handle two little holes, or be repaired? Sounds like a design flaw to me.

You can't sell your Steam games, can you? Why do you buy them?

Sanctioned: Give official permission or approval for (an action). Impose a sanction or penalty on.

Conspiracy: A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. The action of plotting or conspiring.

I just read the cable, and nowhere in there is there any "sanctioning" going on. Conspiracy? Guess that depends on your point of view.

Let's say that you get into an argument with the IRS. To make double-triple sure that they're figuring out the whole situation, they decide to use social media searches to determine everyone who is or might be a business partner of yours, and investigate them as well. After being investigated, one of your business partners notes on FB that because YOU were being investigated, HE got investigated. And that's on your wall, or whatever.

Good luck running your business now!!

I wonder who will construct the crazy mobius loop of running Linux in Chrome's native mode? It'll be google-colored turtles all the way down.

Dumb. Pirates can't play multiplayer, as a rule. You call that no effect? Maybe game developers need to *interleave* the single and multiplayer parts of the game, so proceeding in the single player means performing some tasks in multiplayer to "unlock" progress. Since multiplayer is less vulnerable to piracy (depending on architecture, of course), it might provide a DRM-without-DRM effect.

What taint? Sorry. Confused.

Haier is a former State-owned corporation, with very tight links to the top levels of government. It would be very unwise for another manufacturer to copy Haier's products and logos, within China. Some well-connected Chinese brands will enjoy western-style IP protection, within Chinese borders. Of course, the Chinese government will expect protection for its brands overseas, as well.

Quality Fade is a concept that Westerners need to understand thoroughly.

Right in Beijing you've the got (in)famous Silk Market, which is packed full of every fake leather good you can possibly imagine. You can buy Hermes for a few hundred bucks, or Chanel fakes, or whatever you want. Some of the fakes are of high quality; most are crap.

Will the Silk Market disappear?

The problem gets distinctly worse when Chinabolt sells Superbolt look-alikes, but decides that the product is just too expensive to make. They cut the quality, but leave the packaging intact.

Never underestimate how pervasive fake stuff is in Chinese culture. I suspect that part of the reason for this crackdown is that Chinese people themselves can't figure out what is real and what is fake. For example: "Deslon Germany" cookware. Looks like pretty good quality, claims to be a German product. The Chinese people who bought it think it's German, and paid high prices for it. Except -- there is no Deslon Germany. And why are their Chinese characters stamped into the metal?

It's probably a knock-off of a real german design; the quality seemed high to me. But -- deliberately deceptive to the domestic Chinese customer.

The quickest way to find a list of decent books in the SF category is to filter Amazon's results by hardcover format only. There you'll find works that publishers believe are worthy of the hardcover format.

Couldn't agree with you more. I find it almost impossible to buy e-books by going through the Kindle storefront. The lists of books in some categories are dominated by cheap, self-published works with hundreds of glowing reviews. Amazon cheerfully publishes these, of course. Most of them definitely wouldn't make it through a traditional publishing process; the quality isn't there, and they're badly edited.

I find it much more useful to work through the print bookstore instead. What I find there has been through the "middlemen", and as a result is usually of substantially higher quality. Since Amazon lists the various editions of a book, I can flip over to the Kindle version and purchase that, if I want to.

I understand the economics of the situation, and that an author can often earn more money by selling direct. What I'm getting at is that for me, as a reader, I wish Amazon had the ability to simply filter out any content that hasn't been through a publisher. I don't want to see it. I've bought at least ten of them based on the reviews, and haven't read a good one yet.

Of course I'm not saying that good self published works don't exist; they do. Most of them aren't good, though, and they are crowding out works of vastly superior quality. There are parallels to cheap imported goods.

For me, the Kindle store will be useful the day it allows me to filter based on publisher. If you hit the Kindle bookstore as of this writing and select the SF/High Tech category, positions 1 through 9 of the first ten books listed by popularity are self-published. Number 10 is Snow Crash. Sort by average customer review, and all ten top books are self-published.

I guess I could keep hitting "next page" over and over again, trying to wade through piles of chaff.

In short, a publisher's imprint has commercial value, and value to consumers as a mark of quality. I hope they can adapt and not be discarded in the name of middleman elimination.