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WorkingDead

128 karma · joined February 26, 2011

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WorkingDead··on [dead]
The full range of SSN's already leaked online. They start at 000-00-0000 and end at 999-99-9999.
WorkingDead··on The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
Our money is being depreciated at a rate of 3% per year and up to 25%-30% during the last inflationary cycle and is now to the point where coins are nearly useless. At the current trajectory, the one dollar note will also be obsolete in our lifetime.
WorkingDead··on YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
I would pay for a way to block YouTube entirely. Every smart tv, tablet, game system seems to have a non-removable YouTube app preloaded. I ended up setting up having to set up a piehole and blocked it there, but the kids will eventually figure out a work around.
WorkingDead··on New wind, solar are cheaper than costs to operate all but one US coal plant
So it's not actually cheaper once you account for the entire parallel infrastructure you need.
WorkingDead··on A Texas School District Banned My Book. Then Things Got Ugly
Those things are not equal. It's perfectly reasonable to take books with graphic depictions of sex and violence out of the children's section.
WorkingDead··on What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't happen again.
WorkingDead··on Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer
We need to take money from everyone so we can charge handling fees and pay people to send their own money back to them.
WorkingDead··on Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer
Dont move the goal post.
WorkingDead··on The next fleet of Breitbarts is already raking in ad dollars
You come back from that by honestly addressing their concerns and issues. What you dont want to do is purposefully misrepresent their perfectly valid concerns and then censor and banish them from the discussion because then they will just go create their own platform leaving both groups in their own echo chambers.
WorkingDead··on Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims
The go somewhere else thing doesnt end well. If half the country has to recreate their own social networks, web hosting, payment processing, banking, and even retail locations you end up with two separate societies competing for the same physical space and thats not going to end well for anyone. This is the very thing we should be trying the hardest to avoid but we are already moving down this road.
WorkingDead··on One-third of New York’s small businesses may be gone forever
They have a strong social conformity rate in Japan and their numbers are rising too. Masks are just kind of effective.
WorkingDead··on Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
Hobby specific communities were a big attraction point to reddit, but even those have devolved into heavy censorship. There isnt really a good draw to the site anymore.
WorkingDead··on Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit
BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.
WorkingDead··on Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit
Right, the healthy discussions over r/politics is what they should encourage. /s
WorkingDead··on Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
Maybe the could just not take the money out of my paycheck in the first place? Why do I need management fees and inefficiencies to get money that was already coming to me?
WorkingDead··on In Pursuit of PPE
The more likely scenario is that the government is inefficient and you have multiple agencies chasing the same issue and not talking to each other.
WorkingDead··on 3D printed door handle developed in effort to reduce spread of Coronavirus
Yeah, but it touches the part of the shirt sleave where people wipe their noses...
WorkingDead··on Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders
> ...digital repatriation of cultural heritage...

So basically the university is going to block access to a valuable publicly owned academic intellectual property due to some sort of social guilt from the research team and may even turn over partial ownership of that publicly owned property.

WorkingDead··on Serena Williams Joins SurveyMonkey's Board with Intuit's Smith
She did. It was tennis.
WorkingDead··on Serena Williams Joins SurveyMonkey's Board with Intuit's Smith
Reddit probably needs some way to process all the personal information they have gathered over the years into something they can sell. Survey monkey can probably do that maybe?
WorkingDead··on The Little-Known Firm Helping the FBI Crack iPhones
So basically the NSA/CIA develop the tech, license it to a contractor, who the FBI can then hire. Got it. I bet they know who to use it on before they even need to through Parallel Construction too. This is what the future looks like.
WorkingDead··on The Texas Biker Gang Shoot-Out
There are laws that deal with gangs and organized crime. The Banditos and Cossacks are both very much gangs and very into organized crime. Being present at a gang shoot out while wearing gang colors is association. Is that fair? probably not, but that's what happened.
WorkingDead··on The Texas Biker Gang Shoot-Out
There was also a shooting at a Twin Peaks in Webster a few months later. Maybe 'Bike Night' doesn't promote a family friendly crowd. If breasteraunts want to gather these gangs up and feed them alcohol, they should be held partially responsible.
WorkingDead··on Airline industry divided over passenger electronics
Remember that sound your computer speakers made when you put your old cell phone near them? Try landing a plane and listening to direction from the tower with that going on in your headset. Interference is a real thing and mitigating it is just a small inconvenience to the passenger who entrust their lives to their pilots.
WorkingDead··on There Are Giant Camera Resolution Test Charts Scattered Across the US
Can we derive the implied resolution of government satellites by the test charts?
WorkingDead··on Windows 8 is available for purchase now
Justify it any way you want to but MS is getting out competed in almost every area and that is just one more example. Apple gets a small sum every year form their customers and MS pisses theirs off with $140 price tags every 5 years.
WorkingDead··on Windows 8 is available for purchase now
Its on sale for $39.99. Just checked the Apple store and Mountain Lion is $19.99. Way to go MS.
WorkingDead··on Copyright wars heat up: US wins extradition of college kid from England
I think this is very telling of how fragile and insecure the institutions of the US economy and government are that they could be so threatened by nothing more than flickering lights on a computer screen.
WorkingDead··on When patents attack Android
I think there is a big difference between litigating your competition away and out competing them. I also see a big difference between the way Google approaches vendor lock in and their competitors do. I also can think of a big name brand competing service for just about everything Google does. Thusly,I disagree with your statement that Google is a monopoly or anti-competitive.
WorkingDead··on Piracy: are we being conned?
Both currency and 'intellectual property' only have value because they are backed by the government. Currency is very hard to reproduce without a substantial investment and has a lot less anonymity when being used. IP, on the other hand, can be redistributed in mass with a 5 year old computer you pull out of a dumpster almost completely anonymously. Piracy just isn't going to go away without public sympathy to the cause. Its like why everyone throws a fit when you violate an OSS license but actively encourages downloading a track from the latest pop artist. The public receives value from the one and has it extracted from them by the other. People are smart and can tell when they are getting screwed even if they cant sufficiently articulate how its being done.

In my opinion the only feasible way to fix the system is to bring copyright duration back to a reasonable time period, like maybe 10 years or so, with a way to extend that duration for high value properties. One way would be to declare value on that particular property, paying property tax on that value, and limiting the liability of infringement damages to that declared value.

I'm not saying that piracy would go away totally at that point, but certainly more legitimate business models would emerge and even illegitimate ones would make the transition to reduce risk. Cost of enforcement would also go down as the volume of infringements decreased and those resources could be concentrated and directed along with a greater public support and sympathy. If the public can actually see that they get value out of protecting copyrights they will. If not they wont. I have zero incentive to protect the latest pop artists music if it will never go out of copyright in my life time, but if see that I can do whatever I want with it in 10 years, then yeah, I'd stick up for them and so would a lot of others.

The big label/studio/publisher companies dug themselves into this mess with a money grab and pretty much lost all sympathy from everyone that they cant buy off. Their only way out of this is to either be more open with their content or go back to fair laws. Other wise, the rest of us will go on without them. It also comes down to culture. Like it or not, music, movies, books, games, software, or whatever are our culture. You just cant reasonably expect people to not not have access to their culture forever. Its fair to have to pay for the latest and greatest, but as it is now, there is pretty much zero free access to anything since 1927 and that system just doesn't work. Now with technology, people just circumvent the unfair system like they should.

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