tszyn

Apparently, "Copy To" no longer works on Windows 7 and higher. The button is greyed out for all user profiles except the "Default" profile. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e4cd5a0c-b...

Already in 2015, Emily Taylor warned [1] that ICANN could become the Internet's FIFA -- a small organization with great power that doesn't answer to any government. Here we are. A private company run by former ICANN people will be given the right to collect massive rent from a locked-in client base on a public resource.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...

Sign a letter to Internet Society here: https://savedotorg.org/

Write to news outlets. If this blows up in the mainstream media, public pressure may be too high for them to go ahead with this deal.

For my small wiki, refusing all submissions with external links eliminated virtually all spam. Yes, it's drastic, but in my case external links were not essential. I still use ReCaptcha to cut down on spam account signups.

I guess so, but when you use energy instead of pressure, and a linear scale rather than logarithmic, it makes the results look more impressive.

Agreed – looks like a fantastic product! Seconding the question about MySQL support. I use MySQL for everything. I don't want to add extra gigs of RAM to my VPS just to run an instance of PostgreSQL for Commento. Postgres is much slower than MySQL in simple applications and uses a lot more memory per connection. MySQL is also more popular and more people know how to use it and tune it properly. Postgres is probably more stable, but I don't care about that in a commenting app.

There's economic research that shows it's more efficient to regulate (in some sense, "blame") the lenders, because borrowers are often desperate. When you're desperate, you have reduced capacity to objectively judge the consequences of borrowing and are also less sensitive to "blaming", potential penalties for overborrowing, etc. From this perspective, putting all the blame on borrowers while exonerating the banks is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing as a society, if we want to avoid another debt bubble.

In your experience, can a tick attach to you if you just brush against it while moving fast (running or cycling)? They're rather slow-moving, so I thought they can't latch onto you that quickly.

My mom's pension is $400 / month (Eastern Europe). She browses the Internet on an old hand-me-down Thinkpad. I suppose she should just get off the Internet if she cannot afford to buy website subscriptions. Anything to make the online experience of wealthy IT professionals better.

Nice, simple, intuitive proofs. Very cool.

The US had had ballistic missiles (Redstone) in European airbases since 1958 -- Kennedy simply continued the existing policy of the US. Kennedy's poor judgment, arguably, consisted in aggressively defending the "rule" that it is acceptable for the US to have nuclear missiles near the Soviet border, but it is not acceptable for the USSR to have nuclear missiles near the US border. While JFK was driven by the need to appear tough, one has to give him credit for not following the advice of the "hawks" (Curtis LeMay) who advocated a preemptive invasion of Cuba, a move that would have almost certainly led to a nuclear exchange, given that the USSR had already placed (unbeknownst to the US intelligence) tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba.

They also fixed the 6-key block (the one with Home, End, etc.). The older version had a nonstandard layout.

On the minus side, it has a non-detachable numpad, so you'll have to reach further to use your mouse.

FWIW, I've done in-home trials of several chairs. Many dealers of high-end chairs will let you do that (at least here in Poland). Sometimes I've had to leave a deposit.

I'm amazed how often a chair that feels great in the store turns out to be a complete dud once you place it in your workspace and sit on it for 2 days.

I agree that sticking it out can sometimes help. The Embody is very punishing if you slouch (the hard sacral part will just dig into your spine), so the first step would be to make an effort to maintain correct posture. But if you're sitting straight AND still feel discomfort, I'd say the Embody is not for you.

About the reclining, yeah -- Herman Miller would probably say that the chair isn't meant for active reclining, but that's no defense. Sometimes I like to recline at more than 120° to relieve the pressure on my spine (for example, when I'm not typing but for example, watching a YouTube video). I prefer chairs that allow me to do that (e.g. Steelcase Think/Leap/Please, Humanscale Liberty). The fact that the absence of this feature was a design choice by Herman Miller doesn't really change my appraisal of the product.

Funny you should say that the armests sit too far back. I had the opposite problem: they were always bumping on the edge of my desk, so I had to sit further from my desk than I would have liked. And I'm not the only person who had this complaint. I guess everybody is different.

I agree. The Embody is a great chair if you have pretty good posture. It is pretty rigid in the center (all the flexibility is on the sides), so that it forces your back into the 'proper' shape like a plastic mold. The problem is, it's a pretty hard chair, so if you have any 'irregularities', like, say, a bit of hunchback (thoracic hyperkyphosis), the hard plastic "pixels" will just dig into your back in all the places that stick out where they shouldn't.

There is a single adjustment knob for the back, but it adjusts the thoracic and the lumbar part at the same time. So if you have a rounded upper back, you'll adjust the knob to make the backrest a more deeply curved S shape to prevent the upper backrest from poking your shoulder blades. But then the lower part of the S gets deeper as well and it starts digging into your lumbar/sacral region. It's not easy to notice -- after 15 minutes in the store, I was in love with the Embody; after 1 hour at home, it felt like my lower back was covered in bruises from the hard plastic.

For this reason, I do not recommend the Embody to people with incorrect posture, or to people who don't like hard chairs.

Other things worth noting are the poor armrests (they have no back movement, so you can't move your chair close to your desk without lowering them) and the fact that you can't really recline very far in this chair because the back tension rises pretty fast after a certain point. Well, you can recline if you adjust the back tension, but it's a continuous knob, so it'll take you ages to go back your regular setting.

Depends on which is preferable to you:

- a smaller US economy that's 100% owned by Americans

- an economy that's larger (potentially more than 2x), but is 50% owned by foreigners

That's true, in his example he makes a point of stressing that the foreign value is consumed rather than invested. But it's not clear that that's what happens in real life. For example, if China sends an excess of resources to "the US", and in return "the US" gives China shares or bonds issued by US companies, then the extra resources are presumably used by these companies in a productive way. (When a company acquires capital on the market, it is usually to invest it.)

BTW, it seems to me that foreign investment is always caused by a trade deficit, not the other way around. If the Rest of the World (RoW) wants to invest in the US, it has to acquire dollars. The only way RoW can acquire dollars is to sell more stuff to the US than it buys from the US. In other words, it has to be in trade surplus with the US. So the US has to be in trade deficit.

That's a very well-written and clearly argued piece, but you could apply the same logic to argue that it's a business should not raise capital on the stock market because it amounts to "selling the farm to feed your family". But most businesspeople would say that it's quite OK if the money is invested productively. As the owner of the business, you probably shouldn't care if your equity shrinks to 10% of the company, as long as the outside financing helps you grow it to more than 10 x the original size. Similarly, it might not matter to Americans if eventually 90% of US-based assets are owned by foreigners, as long as the 10% that's owned by Americans is huge. So this whole "Our national wealth will soon be owned by foreigners" scenario is probably not as bad as it sounds.

The way Buffett phrases it also seems misleading on a language level. He talks about "foreign ownership of OUR assets". But how can you say they are YOUR assets if they were paid for by foreign investors? If a US company sells 50% of its shares to a German bank, and uses the money to build a plant, can you say "OMG, Germans own 50% of OUR plant"?

You seem to assume that there are only 2 kinds of software: "fun experiments" and made-to-order business software. What about mass-market software that's not so fun to write? Who's going to pay for the development effort if everyone can just download it from a torrent site? Or do you think that all mass-market software is inherently fun to write, be it an RDBMS, graphics editor, Web browser, backup software, etc.?

Making a work of art takes a lot of discipline and, often, drudgery. There are many tasks which are not enjoyable in the least bit. There's burnout, depression, writer's block. Many (most?) great works of art got completed only because their authors knew they had to complete them to make a living.

Furthermore, enjoyment that comes from creating art requires your more basic needs to be satisfied (food, shelter, sleep, health, etc.). We can't just pay artists nothing and expect them to enjoy their art they way they would if their basic needs were satisfied. How much art can you create if your stomach is empty, if you're worrying about being able to afford your child's healthcare, if you come back tired at 6 pm from your day job?

People do want new art. Just look at the most torrented works of art -- far more people download Game of Thrones than I Love Lucy. One major reason is that societies change and today's audiences are different from audiences of 30 years ago.

The reason people don't want to pay for art is not that they assign a value of zero to it; it's that they have figured out a way to get it without paying the artist.

You can use the arrow keys to go to the next page, though, which is pretty fast.

I've noticed that most examples of regulatory capture provided in the Wikipedia article involve regulatory agencies failing to enforce rules on selected companies (e.g. BP was allowed to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without doing the environmental legwork, Goldman Sachs was allowed to manipulate the commodities markets, etc.), which resulted in Very Bad Things happening. These cases don't show that "big government" regulation is bad. They show that failure to regulate is bad. Off the top of my head, I can't think of too many examples of companies using the government to their own ends. OTOH, I can think of many examples of government restricting the freedom of corporations in the name of some social good. For this reason, I think that if we scaled back the government, corporations would have more power, not less. (Not to mention other negative effects of government abdicating its responsibilities in particular areas.)

First, a pretty face, high IQ and physical strength do not translate into power the way, say, a hundred million dollars does. Sure you can hurt people if you're physically strong / attractive / smart, but not that many people.

Second, if you believe law should only punish us for actually hurting people and not potentially hurting them, then you are against speed limits.

Third, taxes are not punishment any more than piracy is theft and abortion is murder.

Yes, but the tax money goes to the poor, which increases their consumption. So you should end up with fewer jobs in luxury resorts and more jobs in industries which produce necessities. The problem is that luxury goods and services tend to be labor-intensive, so you might end up with a net loss in jobs. Which is better? 10 people serving daiquiris to rich people, or 5 people producing socially beneficial things and 5 people out of a job?

The rich don't need the government to exert influence and rig the game in their favor. For example, they can: - buy up their competitors to create monopolies - use one monopoly to build another one (e.g. "if you buy our competitor's coal, you can't use our railroad") - gain control over natural resources - collude with their competitors - abuse the legal system to kill competitors - hire marketers and fund NGOs for propaganda purposes - control the media etc.

Once they have gained control over an industry, let's say steelworking or railroads, they become like feudal lords in that industry, setting wages and prices however they wish.

Power is subject to a positive feedback loop, whether it's political power or economic power. Having power makes it easier to gain more power. That's why it will always tend to concentrate in the hands of the few.

Government power in a democracy comes from a game of "artificial equality": elections in which every person has one vote, regardless of their power "in real life". (This is different from the economy, where your power is proportional to your wealth.) For this reason, it can act against the natural tendency towards concentration of power.

Good points. A system with universal private health insurance and pharma companies that reinvest all their profits into research seems equivalent to a system with publicly funded research. (Of course, in private systems there are many uninsured people -- doubling the price of cancer treatments means, to some extent, funding future research from poor, sick people.)

Exactly. We could have a government program to develop nuclear weapons (I wonder if the director of that program made as much as the CEO of Novartis), but we can't have a government program to cure cancer.

There's something wrong with a system where the primary purpose of institutions who fight disease is to make money. Super-valuable research is treated in the same way as making widgets or developing Facebook games -- all that matters is how many dollars it generates for each $100 invested. I find it simultaneously outrageous and ludicrous that the yardstick against which the CEO of Novartis will be judged is how much money the company made, not whether it cured freaking cancer.

I am not saying researchers should live in poverty. However, the Forbes article is peppered with distasteful quotes from CEOs salivating over the billions they stand to make from cancer treatments. Imagine a real person saying "Sure, I could help you with your cancer... if you make me rich" -- they would be called a psychopath. But corporations somehow get a pass.

Why can an Internet store convince its investors to operate at a loss, while a pharmaceutical company cannot tell its investors: "Hey guys, we're working on a freaking cancer cure for humanity, this is way bigger than space travel, so we're not going to be profitable in the near future, a'ight?".

People need monetary incentives to fight against the worst disease on the planet? Helping millions of people is not motivation enough?