DerpDerpDerp

I mean, I don't have an option to switch away from Comcast because their internet service is bad.

That's why they can refuse to upgrade their peering with Netflix in the first place, because they know I'm stuck with them, when I'd dump pretty much any ISP who didn't upgrade their peering with a major website that I visit (in like 3-4 months) if I had the option to.

Your comments on this post are a great demonstration of the attitude that is driving me off Google properties, as quickly as I can find viable replacements.

With more loaded questions:

"Alcohol destroys more lives than any of those drugs: are you saying we should return to the era of prohibition and mafia violence? Should our children die because people can't be responsible? That doesn't sound like small government or liberty to me."

Could you elaborate on why you think it's a dead technology?

In my terms, a bank vault would protect my valuables by fundamentally denying me access to them, except on terms dictated by some external trusted party. This is the case of DRM using entirely encrypted paths (which can be broken with the big guns, like in your analogy), not the case of it being "just for show".

> The goal of making Joe-Average choose between the official channels or some malware laden underground site is a perfectly pragmatic one on the parts of the licensors.

Uh... what? The problem with DRM from a practical standpoint is that the effective technical means serve as an impediment to Mr Joe Average using his computer for perfectly allowed purposes - including at times playing the game. (Look at any major game launch recently for thousands of upset players because the DRM servers are overloaded.)

Secondly, you presented a strawman, since there are lots of non-malware-laden copies available online.

I'm not really against DRM per se, if there were some magic solution. Nor am I arguing that partially effective security measures are meaningless. I'm arguing that having encryption protected computing channels which deny the user override (or inspection) access are dangerous (duh! they go on malware laden websites, as you point out), and that any DRM which doesn't use such hardware level (or even low-level software) is no more effective than just setting a metadata flag saying it's copyrighted.

I get why companies want DRM, but that doesn't mean that I think giving in to their wishes is a good idea, when it both creates worse computer security problems and fails to solve the problem at a technical level.

A lot of people pirate things precisely because DRM is such a hassle.

This is my real objection to DRM: it fundamentally either is just a show (turning over the unencrypted message to the browser, anyway) or requires that I be locked away from the computation happening (has direct access to hardware and security features to keep me out).

So either it doesn't work by design, or it's a rootkit's wetdream since all hardware is designed to be able to lock me out.

The only redeeming feature is that AT&T is giving a discount for the service. I suspect they'd run in to more lawsuits about their monopoly status if they forced that decision on all consumers.

However, the plugin companies aren't in an ambiguous situation at all: someone who requests the page is explicitly requesting it to use the content to run a program which renders an image from it, and is under no contractual obligation (from merely making an HTTP request) to view the entirety of the content. They can neither complain that it's being processed (the browser inherently does that, to make an image from the text), and they can't complain that the end-user is failing to uphold their end of an agreement.

Because it's a user chosen process, and because of how content on the internet is relayed, there's no reason that the plugins are on any kind of shaky ground. (One notable exception would be interacting with dynamic content to bypass a paywall. There likely are other exceptions, but these come down to bypassing some kind of mechanism, not merely failing to load or render a particular portion of the sent content.)

I actually think that AT&T would be in a weaker position than the browser plugins.

AT&T is a message relayer, while the browser plugin is a specific program installed by the user to modify the messages they receive.

There's no legal question I could hire a secretary to open my mail for me, and white-out the lines I told her I didn't want to see, but it would be a little strange for a mail carrier to open messages and insert ads.

> The victory was not quite a Deep Blue moment; Crazy Stone was given a small handicap, and Ishida is no longer in his prime.

As I heard the story, the computer received something like 4 stones (a moderate handicap), and was playing against someone who no longer was top-of-the-world, but was still a strong player.

This is very different than beating the world champion in a fair game.

I find the Haskell type system much easier than the Python type system.

I'd argue that Haskell actually has a pedagogy problem, because many of its proponents are academics or mathematicians, who are comfortable with that kind of language. Talking about monads, functors, and arrows is a very natural activity for them, and clarifies rather than complicates the subject. However, you don't really have to understand any of that to get started in Haskell, and much of the blogging community has (I think wrongly) focused on explaining advanced concepts rather than making easy introductions.

You don't have to deal with monads any more than you have to deal with Python's OO behavior - which is to say, for quite a while.

I'd also argue that once you take in to account the sometime strange OO implementation of Python, and that Haskell has type inference for most things, Haskell is easier to understand the high level concepts in. Typeclasses and higher order functions (functions which act on functions) provide a very neat way to substitute in different types to your algorithm without having to change the whole thing, and don't even delve in to the complicated world of functors and monads.

I mean, would you be okay with support that cost money?

That seems to be the model that Red Hat went with, for instance.

I mean, I hope things go well for them and their partnership brings nothing but good things. From what I've seen, they've put a lot of work in to their device and made significant gains.

But Facebook doesn't and won't have a device in my life, and I refuse to buy an Occulus product because I don't believe that Facebook won't get access to usage data (or be involved as a platform middleman).

There's a huge problem with the monopoly status of Comcast in this case: I'd dump an ISP for not quickly (ie, in a 3-4 month span) working something out with Netflix if I could.

Comcast's monopoly status is greatly impacting their negotiating position, and is core to this issue.

I mean, I'm trying to get a deal worked out with Netflix where they send me some information. For various technical reasons, this deal needs to go through a couple middlemen. Literally the only middleman I can hire is refusing to work out a deal with them that doesn't give an unusual benefit to that middleman (while Netflix's middleman is offering the standard package), and is screwing me in the process. I'd take literally any other middleman if I could, but this particular middleman has political connections, and stops that from being possible.

(This is of course wandering down the same meta path, but...)

I've always wondered if it would be possible to tag comments with tags like "tangent" or "meta" (or whatever else seems good), and then apply sorts based on that (probably in some user selectable way).

> By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing.

I disagree that the comment was a bikeshed debate: the article spends several paragraphs (and the first four!) talking about the relationship of the two communities, and the discussion of their relationship (both in the article and here) explained some of the ways that knowledge I knew about math intensive computing (and related technologies, such as GPUs) related to problems I hadn't previously worked on.

Exploring the relationships between subdisciplines, especially closely related ones like these, is a benefit both in the article and in the related discussion.

After dealing with YouTube for the past year, I'm very skeptical Google won't mangle a UI/platform for "the good of the common user".

The title was better before the edit, since "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a work of fiction, has been borrowed in many contexts, and the additional title material clarified that it was borrowing that title to talk about an experience in a particular field.

I'm always sad when titles get edited to "match the post" in a way that actually removes clarity as to what the linked material is.

The high dev salaries there make the Bay Area even more of a dead end than it would otherwise be for the people who are stuck in service jobs for life, such as making food when the devs eat out.

Can you still configure the plugin (manually) to not trust such sites?

I don't want it to be a negotiation between the EFF and a website as to the state of my privacy - I want the final say in who is going to be trusted.

I kept trying to write a reply to this, then I just gave up and upvoted your comment.

If only there was some way to offer you a beer over the internet.

There's no requirement that the Kickstarter complete the core project - just that they provide any promised reward.

Many projects, where the project is highly speculative, provide explicit rewards and then an offer to get the benefits of the main project that's conditional.

Also, in what way is it not like an experimental house design using, eg, 3d printed concrete (in some new manner)?

There's a well established body of contract law about how to handle that kind of contract to build a house with a new technology, and the liabilities involved.

How is Kickstarter any different than me paying an artist to write a song for me on my behalf or a carpenter to build me a house?

I'd certainly have ground to sue the artist or carpenter if they failed to eventually deliver a song or house (or indeed, didn't deliver one according to the terms of our agreement).

Their claim will be that any of Carmack's work on those topics, because he originally began his work under Zenimax, is recreating based on Zenimax's property, because Zenimax has a claim to the early prototype Carmack thought of when pitching the ideas and there's no good way to show that Carmack isn't using the knowledge of those topics created during that period for his current work.

It's essentially writing new code looking at your old source code, and hence directly derivative of work that Zenimax has a reasonable claim to.

Or Carmack pitched an early version of the technology to Zenimax and subsequently worked on parts of what was eventually used by Oculus during work hours. Both pitching it as a work product and working on it during work hours gives Zenimax some standing to talk about it being done by one of their employees.

It's not really impossible to conceive that they might actually have a valid claim.

You're really, really in to the strawmen, huh?

Shutting down many of the roads in cities, where the effects of cars are most pronounced, wouldn't remotely cause the "messy collapse of the existing civilization", and is a meaningful partial step.

At various times, books, e-books, and kindle fires.

Amazon actually shifted the pricing on books and e-books by selling them at below what they were buying them at for prolonged periods of times, and drove rival book sellers out of business by doing so... and then didn't raise their prices.

"Piracy" is a term used specifically to attach the implication of theft to copyright infringement, because actual pirates steal things.

The root of calling it "piracy" is no better than calling it "theft", even if it has become common to refer to it as such.

It's completely reasonable to make an appeal to talk about it accurately.

Amazon sells a number of things at a loss and still seems to be doing fine.

2, 3, and 4 have all been dismissed by the explanation of the tests offered to me in the past, particularly in pointing out that the person being tested has a great deal of influence on both the specific claim being tested and the way in which is is tested. The tests happen on a basis of consensus between the two as to what would be a reasonable test, rather than the testers simply dictating.

1 denies the history of psychics taking the test and speaking about it in relatively friendly terms, and 5 denies the history of major scientific upsets caused by evidence backed theories which contradicted the established school of thought.

Airgaps aren't perfect, but are you suggesting their network would have been more secure without the airgap?

Yes, the study found that on for death row inmates, but there are many reasons to suspect that it's likely not significantly lower in other populations.

I commented on this in my original comment, but ran the numbers to get a sense of the potential scale of the problem.

If there's even a potential for 100,000 innocent Americans to be subjected to prison, I think that justifies a serious inquiry in to the criminal justice system be made.