"Pravda" is Russian for "truth". Such things don't happen by accident. That there is what we in the business call a 'dog whistle'.

Problem is, it would make no sense to assume that there would be any uniformity across all of the counterfits. Unless we have reason to think that they are all made by a single source with consistent quality controls, they could be all over the dish. And I take it that this is part of the problem: the manufacturer(s) are not known.

I suppose it's been long enough now that nobody remembers the East India Company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Give a profit-seeking entity the right to collect taxes and organize services across a geographical area with people in it already? What could go wrong?

Banned from my classroom. And my home. And anywhere else I have a say.

If you want to help these people get out of poverty, you have to address the life and circumstance characteristics that predispose them to that poverty; Fatherlessness, drug and gang culture, and cultural aversion to career-success mindsets.

Well, sure. Of course. And also, unless you want to completely give up on the population raised in adverse conditions like the ones you describe, you have to provide some pathways for such people to better their life circumstances. Education is one such pathway. People who work in the field of education are increasingly aware that the kinds of people you describe tend not to flourish in educational environments that assume stable homes and suchlike. Higher education is changing to accommodate the needs of such populations, rather than just waiting for somebody else to change the conditions that produce them.

More here: [url] https://forums.oculus.com/comm... What matters most to me, from the referenced thread: blocking traffic on port 443 blocks the phoning home, and the hardware still works. I would love some confirmation of this. If the hardware refused to work without a live connection to Facebook, that would be a deal-breaker for me.

This will be interesting. I have been developing for VR with Unity. I suspect motion sickness will be a real problem here. The video shows the dev walking around and manipulating objects, i.e. moving around in-game via walking around in the real world. That's fine, but when you zoom out and zoom around in the world without your body moving, that's when the nausea starts. Maybe one develops an immunity to it with time; maybe such an immunity will become an important thing for game developers to have.

Nope-- just, nope. Never used it, never will, never missed it. And when FB finally closes shop, I will shed not a single tear.

Gosh... if I didn't know that what the Government Wants To Do is Take Away My Freedoms, and that Capitalists Always Have My Best Interests At Heart, I might actually be tempted to see this as an example of governmental interest in my well-being in defiance of the profit motive. Good thing I know better, for of course this is nothing but the deepest duplicity, showing the extent to which Government will go to deceive the people about their real agenda. Also a good thing the federal government is now even more fully under the control of the anti-government party. True freedom is just around the corner!

I remember back in the 1990s (I think) reading news stories about corporations pursuing 'increased productivity' per worker as a strategy for success, particularly in relation to international competition. Is there any other way to translate that language into plain English other than to say that what was desired was less wages for the same amount of work? I never saw it put in quite those terms, but it seems fairly obvious to me that that's what talk of productivity means. And if that's so, there's clearly a downside to increasing productivity. It means less income going to workers in direct proportion to their increasing profitability to the corporation (what some old ruddy-duddies used to refer to as the exploitation of labor, I believe). It also means fewer jobs, as a smaller number of people handle workloads that were previously distributed across a larger number. Am I just not thinking about this correctly?

This is probably the case for some. But I don't understand how it could be the case for very many. The mismatch between PhDs and available jobs has been in place for decades, and I don't know of anyone who is ignorant of it. If you so much as apply to a humanities PhD program in ignorance of the lay of the land, you have not done your homework. I teach at a liberal arts college. Every year I advise students who are considering graduate education. I give them the same advice I was given in the early 1990s, when I was in their position. That advice is: if you are not admitted to an absolutely top-tier institution for the PhD, DO NOT GO. Find something else to do. DO NOT enroll at a second-or lower-tier institution UNLESS you have a fallback career-- a family business, a trust fund, a talent for subsistence farming, whatever. The statistics regarding the number of PhDs in the humanities who find jobs are depressing; regarding those who get good jobs, apocalyptic. But if you confine your field of view to the top institutions, things look considerably better. Not great, but not as bad as the aggregated numbers suggest. From where I'm sitting, the causes of the mismatch between humanities PhDs and good jobs has two causes. First, strong supply: quite a few people would love to devote their lives to the study of the humanities, and they vote with their feet, and about nine years of their lives. And second, weak demand: the number of good jobs has shrunk because of the adjunctification of higher education generally. There may be other factors in play on the demand side, but I think everything else pales in comparison to the effect of the shift to contingent labor. In effect, most people who enroll in a PhD program in the humanities (and are not simply unaware of the supply/demand problem) are taking a calculated risk, and gambling that their decision will pay off. They are gambling against the odds, most of them. But it does pay off for some.

Microscopy: put cameras and microphones on a very small physical avatar (say, the size of a Lego minifig). Walk/drive it around in a real miniature environment-- say, a Lego city built on a tabletop, with real people also in the room. Enjoy. Refine. Make something cool. Macroscopy: place cameras and microphones widely spaced apart and high above the ground-- on the side of a skyscraper, a cell tower, or suspended from a blimp. Or on the ISS. Figure out how to incorporate something like looking-around movement to the rig. Pretend to be a giant, or a giant space creature. Have fun.

Personally, I look forward to the "Facebook rolls out incentives for users to supply the PayPal/credit card information of their friends"...

Anything by Roger Zelazny. His most extensive set of novellas were the Amber series-- five books, if I recall, eventually published in two volumes-- but he had a number of really lovely independent stories, including My Name is Legion, This Immortal, and Jack of Shadows. It's been a good twenty years since I went through my Zelazny phase, but few things would make me happier even now than discovering something else written by him.

Sigh... the effects of higher prices on ordinary people are not what it going to drive the conversation, so it's rather pointless to debate just what those effects are going to be. What is going to drive the conversation is Republican claims about those effects and the media's craven promulgation of those claims, absent anything regarding fact-checking, throughout info space. By the time anybody bothers to actually find out what the effects on ordinary people have been, the world will have moved on.