surrealize

> It's plain that tech is the proximal cause

It's half of the proximal cause. Housing prices have increased because of the interaction of supply and demand. Blaming the tech boom focuses only on the demand side, but the supply constraints (height limits, zoning density limits, etc.) are just as important.

If SF was undergoing business-as-usual capitalist growth, a lot more housing would have been built, and fewer people would have been displaced.

If the robots are used for military logistics (moving stuff around, but not directly engaging in combat) would you consider them to be "robots that the government will use to kill or harm people"?

With google's machine learning brain trust, I think they could still do a pretty good job deduping. Maybe not perfect, but I'd bet on them to win an arms race.

Edit: ah, codeflo and EGreg are right. I was just thinking about the task of determining that the images serve the same role in each message (which I'm sure google could do a good job of). But (as they point out) in the "Dear <user>" case they'll still have to show the right image to the right user. Although, as Nacraile and jaxn say, if they load all those images eagerly they'll remove the value of those unique tracking images, and impose a cost on the sender.

Google could retrieve and cache a random sample of the images and hash them. Then they could note which image links go to the same images. And they could identify image links by noting that a bunch of emails have the same structure except for one image link that's different for every recipient.

So I think they actually could take a pretty good stab a deduping images with unique tracking URLs. It might not be perfect, but even if it works 95% of the time they could still kill the profitability of the unique tracking image technique.

We're not asking people to change themselves into seabirds. We're telling banks to shoulder the consequences of their own mistakes, through higher capital ratios.

The "heads I win, tails you lose" nature of highly leveraged firms increased the risk of systemic failure in the financial system. Those systemic risks are a socially-undesirable negative externality. And they're not inevitable! They're the result of lax regulation.

You're right that we don't control the laws of nature. But we do control the rules of our financial system!

We, as a polity, control the rules of the system in which all this stuff happens. If the system we've built exhibits behaviors that we find undesirable, then we can change the rules.

For example, pollution is an activity which is often commercially valuable (in that polluting can help a factory produce a given product without paying the costs of mitigating the pollution). But it's socially undesirable, and we restrict it. We don't just throw up our hands and say, "well, it's commercially valuable, that's how the free market works, I guess we just have to breathe brown air".

> No Texas district is even in the top 5 for win rates for patent plaintiffs. You'd think if they were "in the pockets" of patent trolls, the trolls would achieve better outcomes there.

Not necessarily. If all the plaintiffs with poor-quality patents sue in that district (and they mostly do), those losing cases will pull down the patent plaintiff win rate for the district.

So it could still be the most patent-plaintiff-friendly district, even if the win rate is lower there.

> There are actually other districts that have higher win rates for patent trolls.

This would be a good point if patent cases were randomly assigned to districts. But they're not, of course - EDT courts are stuffed full of BS patent troll cases. So of course the patent suit win rate is lower there. It's still famously friendly to patent plaintiffs.

THX1138, from 1971, depicting a dystopian future:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njfm7HKNSmM

Note the machine! You can't see exactly what it's doing, but you can see the way it's moving :)

Does this read like a red herring to anyone else? Some of the quoted text sounds like a google-joke:

> “The artistic structure combines innovative architecture with a bit of nautical whimsy,” says the proposal, “creating a surprising environment that inspires conversation, community and ‘a-ha’ moments.”

I can't believe people are taking this theory seriously. "Party deck"? Lol, nice work whoever planted this story!

The point is that in the linux world you're choosing between competing distributors. In your example, they're both from Apple.

In the linux world you get a combination of 1. low switching costs between competitors (because, as you point out, most of the software is the same), and 2. competition between distributors. With Microsoft and Apple, if you want to choose between competitors, the cost of switching between them is much higher.

Fair point. I think detecting and booting some fraction of those streams would have a deterrent effect on the rest, but who knows for sure unless it gets tried?

And yes, I'm assuming that robust-enough watermarking methodology is possible. I don't think it has to be bulletproof, I just think it has to be good enough to enable cancelling enough stream consumer accounts to deter casual mirror-ers. DRM isn't bulletproof either; watermarking is preferable for users because it doesn't require that the stream producer take control over your machine.

If the piracy is happening on a large scale, it should be easy to find the unauthorized stream. If the piracy is happening on a small scale, then it's not a big problem for the stream source.

That's the kind of situation that watermarking handles well. With no time to remove the watermark, it would be straightforward for the stream source to find the offending stream consumer and shut down their stream.

Live streaming sports are actually a perfect case for non-DRM web video. Video takes time to pirate; it has to be captured, transcoded, and distributed. So the pirated version will most likely come out after the end of the broadcast. If the rights really are worth so much less after the event, then the pirated version appearing afterward won't affect the rights value very much at all.

Silverlight is going away regardless--it's already deprecated by Microsoft. Just as Flash has been deprecated by Adobe. We don't need to do anything to ensure that they go away.

> Is this just a crusade agains DRM as a whole (good luck with that)

Like the crusade against DRM in mp3s? Which succeeded.

Or the crusade against DRM in ebooks? Which is making progress.

Or the crusade against DRM in broadcast TV (the broadcast flag)? Which succeeded.

The history of crusades against DRM is that they succeed. It's baffling why some people are giving up on fighting web DRM so easily.

I had a problem with it years ago when I couldn't watch DVDs on linux (until the DRM was cracked). More recently I had a problem with it when flash DRM broke on linux (if you didn't have HAL installed and tried to use amazon's video for certain DRMed shows).

And in the future I expect more pain with proprietary, closed-source, non-interoperable (and, almost certainly, non-linux-supporting) CDMs, which are where the meat of the DRM will be implemented under the W3C EME proposal but which themselves are not being proposed for standardization.

> I can imagine, for example, that “made (or served) by humans” could be the “organic” or “fair trade” of the future.

... or the "handmade" of the future?

After the "Linus flipping off Nvidia" thing, one of the Nvidia people asked what they could do better on a linux mailing list. Matthew Garrett responded, "Move your 3D driver to userspace and use nouveau for command submission." [1] I thought that would be a marked improvement over the status quo; keeping the proprietary stuff out of kernel-space would make things so much easier.

I hadn't seen any possibly-relevant follow-ups until now though. Here's hoping!

[1] http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-dis...

It's a cliche by now that oldsters always think that youngsters are spoiled by having it too easy. "In my day, we had to walk to school uphill two miles in the snow" etc. And, like so many other cliches, it's true!

Things used to really suck, and now they're a lot better. That happens every generation--mankind's physical culture does keep on improving in a lot of ways. Older people are proud of all the progress they've made. And young people take the new and improved stuff for granted and complain.

But that complaining is a good thing! Expectations keep increasing with every generation. If we didn't always have new people coming on scene and getting frustrated with the status quo, then we'd stagnate as a culture.

The kids are all right. It would be nice if they appreciated what they have more. On the other hand, they'll get old and have the same experience too.

I can get to google.com but not mail.google.com at the moment.

--edit: now I can't access google.com either.

Pond does something along those lines:

> Pond doesn't transmit messages as needed because that would disclose when messages were being sent. Instead it transmits messages at random, whether there's anything to be sent or not. When there's a real message pending, it has to wait until the next randomly timed slot, which could be many minutes.

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

> You may not know what advocate means

?

advocate, verb: publicly recommend or support.

In this thread, you've been publicly recommending and supporting the idea of giving up on fighting web DRM.

Web video and broadcast TV are the same in terms of the effect of piracy, and in terms of the need for DRM. A TV show pirated from a broadcast stream is almost exactly the same as a TV show pirated from a web stream. DRM isn't necessary over the air, therefore it isn't necessary on the web.

Requiring DRM for web content but not for broadcast content is like locking one door but leaving another open. The broadcast door has been open for years and Hollywood still hasn't imploded. Web DRM isn't necessary for their business; they're just trying to use it to get more control.

Content publishers tried to get DRM into broadcast television (the "broadcast flag"). They failed, and now they broadcast everything in the clear. In that case, there was a bunch of push-back against DRM. But Netflix and Microsoft aren't pushing back against web DRM; they're just rolling over and implementing it.

So digital broadcast television started with publishers demanding DRM, and then giving up on it (and realizing that it wasn't actually necessary). The exact same thing happened with music. And it's happening with ebooks too. But for some reason, you think that web video is different? And you advocate giving up on it without any real fight.

They charged him on his birthday? Damn, that's cold. After what the NSA did to Thomas Drake (dragging him through legal hell for four years, which in the end resulted in no jail time or fines), you have to wonder how personal some of the legal maneuvering is.

I hope so. Thinking about it some more: I suppose they don't provide an efficient online form for motions to quash, do they?

Protesting can be great. But if a protest only affects low-level paper handlers with no decision making power, then what are you really accomplishing?