arg01's comments

I too like the ads. But programs with "tip of the day"s in them have had this problem solved for a long time, just including a check box for never show me again. You could make the argument with some programs that it interferes with a minimalist design, but you'd have to admit this does not appear to be what steam is going for.

Well you can look at how the US has done in the middle east for an example of the economic cost of asymmetric warfare. Though I generally agree with your point that it's not going to work out well for the invaded country either unless another state actor comes to their aid. It's also worth noting that the French Resistance was considered important not just for the acts of sabotage and intelligence it gave the allies as they advanced but also in the rapid growth of the FFI after the allies invaded.

When you read it your also copying it into cache. We could argue the technicalities but really it's about copyright law not the colour of bits. Or if you prefer we can just say it's legal to copy the ebook to a new owner if you remove your own copies (which is one process the above poster refereed to by writing "bar some caveats").

Netflix did offer to have their client generate random upstream traffic to balance the load. Which netflix says was met with silence in the meeting where they proposed it. It has some amusing implications where netflix saturates verizon's network to pay less.

It's actually a historical issue. In the US cellphones orginaly used standard POTS numbers while in other countries cellphones often had an easily distinguishable format. This means that in the US granny wouldn't know she was calling a cellphone so charging her extra would be an unpleasant suprise, while in other countries she knew and was thus implicitly accepting to pay the charge.

Seems to me a government mandated program might seem more limitless and be less personal and thus you don't feel like your taking advantage of the kindness of caring people or stopping resources going to those who are possibly even more needy.

On a related note: One of the things I somewhat like about taxes for welfare rather than "rely on the largess of charitable billionaires/private entities" argument is that it helps ensure expenses from charitable acts wouldn't be a drain on a business competing. Thus 'asshole' private entities wouldn't have a concrete market advantage over 'nice' private entities.

One of the problems is they're natural monopolies. You only need the one data link and so it's (arguably) more cost effective to have a single regulated monopoly on the last mile side. You can create hybrid systems (like the UK) where other businesses buy capacity wholesale from the monopoly provider and compete over the same infrastructure.

Region locking fun. The worst part being they say in the eula that you can not use VPN services with the Origin shop. So the choices is between either play guess the interface with real money or having them be able to say we blocked your account you no longer have access to your games.

The fix isn't particularly ridiculous. Updating an exisiting databases value from an 8 bit to 32 bit integer would have required quite possibly rebuilding the entire database and any software that was bound to getting an 8 bit integer as a return value (For example messages split by length rather than coupled with a label). Which might have been made harder because the hardware costs involved (say for the extra 20 hardrives to store the 20GB of data) would have been much higher than now. Much easier just to create another table that includes century and a foreign key pointing back to the database entry. Not great but it does the job and you can patch over what look like minor visual or selection errors as they pop up rather than dealing with every custom form that relies on the database throwing exceptions that stop workflow altogether.

As embarrassing as this headline is you can at least say the people who were supposed to get the communications did.

To simplify: Bitcoin miners race to discover a code that gives them 50 bitcoins. This code gets harder to find each time it is found. This decision is pre-baked in using the bitcoin system (other e-currencies have different traits.)

If you join a mining pool then you split the 50 coins with everyone else in the pool (and they'll split with you) if you are the lucky machine than found the code.

The analogy is pretty direct: mining is the same as going and doing work to dig up gold, buying from the market is the same as buying gold in the market.

I don't think there's any particular outrage. Unless it's along the lines of not having the systems in place so that this doesn't occur. Whether this is outrageous (others in the thread have pointed out solutions) it's definitely a reason to be news worthy.

Somewhat ironically some countries have laws that make work-to-rule (usually phrased in law as malicious compliance) as illegal.

Plenty of civil disobedience is of the form of ignore bad laws and complain loudly when they are enforced.

This is without passing comment on whether copyright infringement is terrorism or freedom fighting.

The New Zealand treasury actually did a preliminary impact paper on BI several years ago and it was noted that many of the people currently on welfare would likely end up with less money. (They use the term GMI, but it seems to be framed as a BI based on my general understanding of the concepts)

http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...

There are multiple studies and meta studies presenting a link between inequality and crime. So even if it's not for basic subsistence it does appear that raising the lower end of society up could improve the crime rate. Though I admit that's not a comment on the reason for the crime.

http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/18/2/182.abstract

You are not volunteering to engage, you are an externality in someone else's transaction. It's comparable in the outcome to your life. Though admittedly there is a difference in that the single entity purports to obey rules that they claim are for your good while the other multiple actors aren't likely to have expressed any concern for you at all.

I don't think that's a given (possibly even after the leaks). If your giving up very real technical capabilities and increasing costs to protect your self from an ally it seems like a reasonable argument could be made either way. Of course after it's shown that that ally is no longer acting like an ally that changes the weighting of the argument significantly.

I'll also point out a lot of people expect the US would be able to compromise a system if they were actively targeting it even if it was reasonably hardened and in house. They also didn't expect (even if they should of) that the bulk collection was so widespread that it meant common practice implementations were compromised even without serious targeting. So the ROI for in house didn't look as good as it does today.

Depends on the type of redistribution. It's not hard to imagine inflation as an effect for a lot of them (though the inflation could have a net positive effect depending on the redistribution scheme). At the very least people may quit horrible jobs for low pay if they can feed themselves without doing them (you can at least nominally call that bad from one point of view).

I'd point out that your definition of slavery is just as applicable to any work were the person being employed needs to work to get the basics of survival (with corresponding parallels between changing jobs and changing countries, choosing not to eat and choosing not to work for income above the tax free limit, etc).

The only reason I point this out is because while there are plenty of rational arguments for different forms of tax (including whether or not income scales to labour and whether this means a tax on income (especially a tiered one) is actually comparable to a tax on labour) however comparing it to slavery is not productive as it re-frames the conversation to an area of extremes where quite reasonable tax systemss become either no slavery or everyone's a slave. Much like calling the other person either a libertarian if you believe "any type of free market is ok" or a communist if you believe "any taxation is ok" would not be productive.

Interesting to see that this does not include a similar declaration for someone with expertise in the field that the investment opportunity is in. Still I guess it could be argued that even if the business is successful you could be hard done by if you don't understand the financial instruments involved as well as you should.