donbright

one interesting thing is that the BBS would have been impossible if the government hadn't forced AT&T to allow people to hook their own chosen devices into the telephone network.

In other words, in the old days, phones did not have a jack in the wall - AT&T came to your house and wired their network directly into your telephone. They did not want the RJ-45 jack which made consumer Modems possible. The government forced them to open up their network to other device makers, to competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

I really wonder if the modern techno giants would be able to be regulated by the government if they became stagnant monopolies.

i find that fascinating... this is the kind of thing certain builder philosophy would say "no user would ever notice", but users do notice and it bugs them.

meanwhile, we can also get an insight into the internal social dynamics of a corporation by looking at it's products. the people who cared about this type of 'little detail' have lost influence inside the organization - they are not being hired, not being promoted, not being retained, and not being listened to. but those kind of people did used to be there. so what happened to them?

its kind of fascinating, like some kind of corporate sociology based solely on research of artefacts left behind by the corporate culture.

my favorite example of this is Outlook showing the attachments to an incoming email in a tiny little window that is kind of invisible, with a scroll bar that is also kind of invisible, so its hard to tell if you have one attachment, or two, or three, or whatever. just by glancing, you would not know.

if you work in a job where you go through 500 emails a day, this can be a problem.

especially since alot of fast food spots are not owned by the fast food company, they are owned by the franchisee who in all senses of the word, except for meeting xyz standards of the brand, operates an independent business entity.

next thing they will do is say that employees of one franchise of a conglomerate brand cannot leave and go work for another franchise of the same conglomerate brand (which happens to own 5 different brands, including ChickenLicious, BuildaBurger, SteakMachine, FreshCrunchy, and SugarCoffee)

70s conservatives: "If you don't like your job, get an education"

80s conservatives: "If you don't like your job, quit and get another one"

90s conservatives: "If you don't like your job, start your own business"

Neo conservatives: "If you don't like your job, I need to see compelling evidence that you are being harmed"

That is no problem. We had our comments scattered out into separate pieces, each doing their own thing in a non-standard comment idiom. In order to simplify and organize things better, I have created commentd which will combine them all into one comment. To save valuable disk space I have also compressed them and put them in binary format.

begin 644 - M0F%S:6PZ($QI<W1E;BP@9&]N)W0@;65N=&EO;B!T:&4@=V%R(2!)(&UE;G1I M;VYE9"!I="!O;F-E+"!B=70@22!T:&EN:R!)(&=O="!A=V%Y('=I=&@@:70@ )86QR:6=H="X* ` end

i spent a lot of time trying to make nix the 'standard build environment' for an open source project. it was going really really well, even on top of standard distros like ubunutu, redhat, etc.

the problem is OpenGL and Nvidia. NiX doesnt want to deal with NVidia's closed source drivers, and i can't blame them, i got so depressed working on the issue, that i gave up looking into it. there is no good solution. there are only kludges and kludges of kludges.

"Because the Portable Service concepts introduces zero new metadata and just builds on existing security and resource bundling features of systemd it's implemented in a set of distinct tools, relatively disconnected from the rest of systemd. "

clearly, this is a messy situation. lots of different pieces doing different things in different ways. in order to harmonize this, and simplify it, I believe we need to have systemdd, a daemon for systemd, so that all of it's various pieces can be in one, neat, centralized location.

im glad modern civilizations never sacrifice young people for insane belief systems.

I've lived in many a city in "flyover country" and I think it's long overdue.

The result of plunging sales tax revenue due to online shopping, for a lot of places, is bridges falling apart, underfunded police agencies, teachers leaving the profession because they don't want to live in poverty, schools without supplies, without music programs, without art programs, let alone STEM programs, colleges shrinking, faculty not being hired, roads going unrepaired, homeless population growing, libraries being gutted, social programs and social service agencies facing layoffs and shortages, and on and on.

that was interesting however at the end he says all their papers are at ctlab.org, which is now a parked domain...

Does it also mean you should try your hardest to obey stupid rules? Since you may not realize whether it's stupid or not until you have more experience than the person who made it?

Does it really matter if you know you operate in an environment where deviance is normalized? To me, it seems like realizing that you are in a cult. You aren't going to change the cult behavior because you aren't going to change human nature.

Q "But don't we sell the same kind of data to our paying customers?"

X "Yes, but when we do it, it's not doxxing"

Q "Why not?"

X "Because we would never do it for any nefarious reason"

Q "What about that time we scraped the data of those groups that were linked to that reporter, so that one company could do oppo research and prepare a PR counterattack, targeting specific journalists"

X "That wasn't nefarious. We made a lot of money doing that"

you know what would be interesting... is if there was some kind of equivalent for dtrace or strace or gdb.. but instead of collecting statistics on performance or call trees of functions, it could instead tell you statistics on who wrote the code that your machine is running, line by line.

This actually happened to Theranos itself. In the book (Bad Blood by Caryiyou), there is this old genius medical guy who is in a family fued with Elizabeth's family, he hears about Theranos early on in their development, thinks his way through the machine they are probably building, and decides to file a patent on sending remote diagnostic information to doctors. The entire point of his patent was so that Theranos would have to pay him - and he did it purely because he didn't like Elizabeth's family. He never built anything, never made a single swipe of a soldering iron.

She was able to defeat him by getting better lawyers. The book says she was paranoid, but also shows that this is kind of the environment she was in. This kind of abuse of the patent system is normalized within those vaunted halls of power and wealth. Big companies all have their portfolios of questionable patents and the lawyers sort it out in court. She wanted to build her portfolio just like anyone else in that situation. She was obsessed with Steve Jobs... people forget all the crazy patent lawsuits he was involved in, going back to the 80s.

no, it is the stereotypes that are inaccurate. not the article.

it would be more accurate if people stopped believing in stereotypes.

Anyone who was accepted to Stanford in the early 1970s was, by definition, not an average person. That's the whole point of being accepted at Stanford.

I'm not saying it means Ivy League students are more likely to be psychopaths, but I am saying it's not scientifically valid to take a study of a population from a hyper-elite American college during a draft war and apply the results of that study to the average person, especially if the study is supposed to remark on factors regarding social pressure and social expectations.

"We knew [the guards] couldn’t hurt us, they couldn’t hit us. They were white college kids just like us, so it was a very safe situation. "

The Wall Street Journal is the only reason the company was outed.

This same journal was also one of her early boosters.

We already have a framework that preserves independence of the media, the First Amendment. All of the NDAs and Boies style intimidation and legal abuse and harrasment of the whistleblowers and journalists was only stopped by the First Amendment.

We already have a framework that punishes journalists - it's people like Peter Thiel suing them out of existence because he doesn't like what they say. It's big funders buying a newspaper and destroying it like the Denver Post. It's the government putting sources on trial and in prison like happened with the NSA stories. Journalists are murdered constantly for reporting stories. And the industry itself is dying because of changing business models. They dont need a framework to punish them any more.

Yes, if I am interested in European history, and after reading the novels of Sofi Oksanen, I feel as if the past is illuminated by the stories like Estonia's. It is hard for me to truly understand the massive shift in 'way of life' and worldview that occured in the early 1900s. The death of the aristocratic, monarchical, peasant-and-master way of life, which these manors represented, transformed within a few decades to the idea that more democratic style of life was normal and everyone should have it. Watching the crumbled manors is a literal embodiment of a shift in human consciousness, where the way things were for hundreds of years suddenly ceased to exist and simply rotted away. Estonians were essentially ruled by a German overclass, and its history is intertwined the Nazi history and it's obsession with restoring the "old ways". What do we have now that is considered normal that will fall away in 500 years? or 50? Will people say 'such and such building represented the old society, where poor people were not allowed to go to the doctor'