ordinary

Western liberal democracy often forgets (or pretends to forget) that history is a thing, and that people have memoeries. There are many more instances where Western foreign policy (often initiated by the US, supported by Europe) was beneficial to us in the short term, while having negative long term consequences. The CIA calls it 'blowback'. The last century in the Middle East and South and Central America is riddled with it. And then people turn around and ask 'why do they hate us?'.

I despair.

That said, I can imagine that Minecraft has set dauntingly high expectations for him. He wouldn't be the first to suffer under that pressure. Albert Einstein famously said that his years at the patent office were the happiest of his life, because no one expected him to lay golden eggs.

Yes, it has been approved, but only very recently, in late 2012. It is also the first such drug that has been approved (and to date, the only one), and this happened under 'exceptional circumstances'. The usual standard of supporting evidence was forgone because the disease it treats is so rare. The company is explicitly required to supply further supporting evidence, and the rules for its use are very strict.[1]

[1] http://www.drugs.com/uk/glybera.html

Wikipedia has long had a principled policy of opposition to censorship. For some examples, see the Virgin Killer article, which touched a nerve in Western society, a petition to remove depictions of the prophet Muhammed that was signed hundreds of thousands of times, and the very recent attempts by French intelligence services to have an article on the French Wikipedia deleted.

I do not see this latest public stance as deviating from their previous ones.

This is exactly wrong. Cycling is common in the Netherlands but it's not a life style. I intentionally do not say 'popular' there. You just buy a bike and you're all set. You don't need a helmet or a special outfit. You don't have to spend a ton of money on a super light weight carbon fiber monster. When you want to go somewhere, you don't have to check if the roads are bike-friendly, and you don't have to check if you can park your bike there.

I'm Dutch. I am not a cyclist; I just have a bicycle. It's as natural to me as having three meals a day. Of course, that's only true on a personal level. As a nation, we very much designed for the conditions that are conducive to cycling. The article gets that right.

  HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

If that conclusion is indeed correct, then apparently our efforts to put a halt to it haven't worked. There are then two possible conclusions:

1) We haven't done enough yet. Doubling the available budget will improve the situation.

2) Our current methods are pointless. No amount of effort will do the trick, and going after child porn is indeed a wasted effort.

Personally, I think it's a combination of the two. The advent of the internet has made sharing illegal content orders of magnitude easier. Even if our efforts at curtailing child porn are effective, those efforts have largely been outpaced by technological development. In this it's similar to general internet piracy.

On the other hand, it is questionable whether going after child pornography is the right way to combat child sexual abuse at all. The jury is still out on the question whether watching porn increases one's likelihood of committing sexual assault, though recent studies seem to conclude this is not the case, even for violent porn, and that there might even be an inverse relation.[0]

If that is indeed the case, then child pornography is not a trigger for child sexual abuse, merely a result thereof. Then going after child porn is justified to prevent the abuse of the children involved, but no more important than preventing the abuse of children whose abuse is not recorded and distributed: we should be focusing on preventing child abuse altogether, and place less emphasis on whether there's a camera present or not.

[edit] In my comment, I implicitly assume that (violent) legal pornography is to sexual abuse as child porn is to child sexual abuse. That may not be entirely accurate. See derefr's post[1], which discusses some of the differences in economic incentives between the creation and distribution of normal porn and those of child porn.

_____

[0] http://www.tamiu.edu/~cferguson/pornography.pdf

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155015

JakeI: The ONE STARS reviews posted here are actually people who WORK for these TELECOM companies and want to keep making fortunes off of misguiding people. Ignore them, report them, and move on.

a reader: Just a note to the paid consultants who have been discovered due to the spike of one star reviews from brand new accounts, I'm buying the book thanks to you.

vge: Susan P. Crawford has written an excellent, 5-star quality book, don't listen to the 1-star telco astroturfers.

Sid Wright: An injustice has been done. This book was given 0 stars by fake reviewers when it actually deserves a real, honest score.

Of course, those 5 star "Astroturfing sucks" reviews are just as useless as the 1 star "I am a rural truck driver and..." reviews, but with the Techdirt article as a cause, at the very least we have an alternate explanation. I see no reason to assume we're dealing with a second astroturfing campaign.

I should add that even if those 46 comments are all legit-but-useless 5 star reviews, then there's still 53 left that were made before then, which I lack the time to look more deeply into. Your conclusion might be accurate for those.

There is no new information in this article.

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you've taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself... is that its purpose? No it's not. It's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

The full interview can be found here, though I think the above passage is sufficient: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-an... (The quote appears at the top of the fourth page. Presumably, the interview is paged to create more room for advertisements. That's irony for you.)

Which of the two is it?

The conclusions which can be drawn from that meta-data are far more solid than can be drawn from listening in to any or all of the phone calls.

You cannot derive more information from meta-data than you can from the data itself. That's why we call it meta-data. "Honey, I may have cancer, I'm making an appointment with Dr. O. N'conlogist as soon as possible." is more compact, just as complete, and is more tolerant to missing parts.

When I laugh at someone (who isn't a clown or comedian) falling on their own ass, it is not a last ditch attempt to stop them from falling on their ass. It's an expression of amusement at someone else's misery, or of gladness that it's not me being hurt, or of any of a thousand other emotions and reasons.

The point Sagan was making was that just because people are laughing at you doesn't make you a innovative or scientific genius. And just because someone tells you you're wrong doesn't make you right.

More recent examples abound in the music industry, in which you can be wildly successful, yet make less than what amounts to minimum wage.[2]

The importance of art to understanding human condition cannot be understated. Yet, for whatever reason, societies by and large does not reward the people who produce it financially. There's certainly a lot wrong with our education system, but blaming it for the starving artist syndrome is unfair.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_gogh

[2] http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17

I disagree. When you click a link on a page that you retrieved from example.org, one that leads to example.com, there is no communication between you and example.org, nor between example.com and example.org. The communication that takes place is between you (party 1, the initiator of the conversation) and example.com (party 2, the target). The HTTP request mentions example.org, but being a third party, it does not participate in it directly.

The only conversation in which example.org was a party was the one in which you requested the page that contained a link to example.com, which has already finished.

In that light, it seems strange to me that under HTML5 (assuming I understand the article correctly), example.org is given a mechanism to dictate how much information you give to example.com. Should that not be your choice, as the sender of said information?

Worse, the article is not just inaccurate, it's dishonest: it hides the data that contradicts it, despite being publicly available on a day-by-day basis. [1] is a wonderful resource.

The eye-catching table near the end stops at peak prices. The prices since that peak are more-or-less hidden in the second half of an otherwise fairly unremarkable paragraph. We've seen a downward tendency, with prices moving back to pre-patch prices. We can illustrate that by looking up more recent data for the same examples as listed in the article:

Radiant star amethyst: 20m before patch (april 29), high of 60m, 22m now.

Radiant square ruby: 200k before patch, high of 528k, 266k now.

Star emerald: 760k before patch, high of 1.6m, 770k now.

Flawless square topaz: 3k before patch, high of 16k, 4.5k now.

Tome of jewelcrafting: 1.2k before patch, high of 6.5k, 1.5k now.[1]

All these items have a downward price trend, with the exception of the (relatively inconsequential) tome of jewelcrafting, which is stable. I would not be surprised to see these and other (harder to track) items reach month's end at roughly pre-patch prices.

It's also worth mentioning at this point that the prices of each rank of gem is linked directly to the price of the rank below it. For example, a star gem costs 80k gold plus 3 radiant square gems of the same type to craft. This is an ingame feature. All gem prices are therefore functions of the price of flawless square gems, the highest rank that monsters can drop. The article mixes the prices of different gem ranks, which is either ignorance of the way the game's economy and mechanics works, or an intentionally and artificially pretense of diversity. It's a bad sign either way.

Finally, and most important of all: the European market has been fairly stable throughout this whole debacle. The only difference between the European and the North American markets is that the latter suffered the (disastrous) bug described by the article, while the European market did not: Europe gets its patches 6-9 hours after North America does and the bug that it introduced was fixed before the patch hit Europe.

This lends credit to the idea that all we're seeing here is the aftershocks of massive destabilization due to a simple bug. To me, the fact that prices seem to be returning to normal testifies to the relative stability of the Diablo 3 market, and long term price trends show the same. Huzzah, Blizzard!

All in all, while interesting in a general sense, the article is flawed when it comes to the specific case it uses to promote its message, the turbulence of Diablo 3's economy over the last few weeks. This is not hyperinflation.

[1] http://www.diablohub.com/price-tracker/