Re: The most amazing take away I have about this is...
it is freaking amazing that an email company has 9 years of metadata!
I have still readable backups that're twenty-eight years old. Data compression software tech is one of the highlights of the computer age. bzip2 + afio rocks!
this is the sort of thing that will break country after country and end up destroying the Planet!
You've got me thinking of Rodney's audacious plan on Stargate Atlantis: "Let's get all the Replicators into the same room. Their combined mass will create a space-time anomaly so heavy, it'll sink into the core of the planet!"
An ice pick in a Nazi Stormtrooper's back would leave a much easier to clean up mess, and it's much quieter than a Kalashnikov. Plus, they fit in a pocket. It's tough to hide the fact that you're armed with a pitchfork.
So, the company originally at the heart of all this was not Chevron, it was Texaco.
There's an old joke in the oil industry: "Whoever survives the current crash in the price of oil gets to buy up the others." I remember seeing a little electronic doohicky in Anadarko's server room that had seven overlapping Dymo labeler thingies: "Property of Blah-A" covered by "Property of Blah-B", and so on.
Exxon had a few good ones too. "The company name is Exxon-Mobil, but the Mobil is silent."
To be honest, I'm pretty damn skeptical of Ecuadorian governments in general, corruption has been a constant feature of every administration there for the past 5 decades.
Central and South America first had to survive the Conquistadors, then Nazi sympathizing in league with military juntas, then US jingoism and the CIA's fat fingering. There's no surprise that this mess occurred.
Re: Re: the ecuator and the surrounding hearing loss
H/T to Google Translate!
I have never understood why anyone wanted to use GT. I can't remember seeing an example where it actually did the correct thing. When you can screw it up just by spelling equator with a "c", what's the frigging point? "Damn you autocorrect!", on steroids.
Human languages and their correct usage are far more complex and mallable than computer languages that try to adhere to standards. It was hard enough trying to figure out how to auto-convert Assembly into C. Trying to auto-convert German or Russian into Swahili or Australian Aboriginal or Japanese is bound to fail miserably with hysterical consequences.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hey Time Warner / Hulu, here's a free clue!
The fact is the automobile is vastly superior to the horse and buggy in many ways.
Sure, but they're also vastly inferior in many ways. Just look at the price of fuel, and what burning it theoretically is doing to the ecosystem, and it makes jerks like the al-Saud family rich. It's also among the most dangerous things we can do over which we have an almost pitiful amount of control (think drunk drivers or falling asleep at the wheel).
I've always loved the smell of barns and it's pretty cool that horses can create more horses. They also know the way home so drunk, stoned, or asleep they'll get you there.
Automobiles are faster, but that's over-rated in lots of ways.
16% of consumers cut the cord last year, while 23% of consumers engaged in "cord-trimming" ...
Point of order, Mr. Speaker? Ah, statistics. Is that 16% of *all* potential consumers, or only of those signed up for cable? 16% of ca. 300 million potential consumers, or (eg.) 200 million signed up subscribers/customers?
Re: The spies already ONLY engage in Targeted surveillance
They specifically only collect information on persons whose data they are actually technically able to collect.
Worse, they only collect info on persons whose data could be collected by one of the five partners in the Five Eyes consortium. In practice, that's indistinguishable from all of it.
Until that thing gets flushed down the toilet, the NSA (or any of them) can happily rely on Britain or Canada or New Zealand or Japan (or is it Australia?) to sidestep any limitations we wave at them. It's absolutely correct to view this thing with a heavy dose of skepticism.
How about a law which requires phone companies to disable the ability to spoof phone numbers?
I don't know if it's still the case but I remember when if you called another phone then fail to hang up yours, you tie up their phone. The connection remained active. You'd think it would then be fairly trivial for the phone company to trace the call.
... if you write a program that has 99 features yourself, but you need a GPL library to make the 100th feature work, it "infects" your entire codebase and forces you to GPL the entire thing ...
That's silly because there's an easy solution. Don't use it. You're more than welcome to be as proprietary as you wish, but it's up to you to figure out how you do that without using my work. That's not my problem. It's yours, caused by you.
but then why not teach you to make your own clay, and they'll sell you the tools.
I can tell from that you've never been a potter. I have. Clay's just the raw material that a potter digs out of the ground, and possibly fiddles with in some way to get it to do whatever it is he wants. That may be introducing some other type of dirt/clay to give the raw material different properties than nature provided, or mixing in already fired, crushed pottery bits (grog) that gives it better heat handling characteristics. This stuff has to handle like about 1700 degrees fahrenheit in a kiln. Too little, and it won't vitrify. Too much, and it'll just melt like glass. Then there's the clays themselves and their properties. Rich iron red is way different from "fine bone china" porcelain.
I won't even bother to start on glaze technology (imagine baking or sucking the oxygen out of silver or copper oxide) or cool techniques like Raku. I could spend weeks going on about it. And then, there's the tech that lets a potter throw pottery. I love Shimpo wheels. Stick shift speed control, no foot power needed, variable/constant speed, gargle, gargle, gargle, ...
I wanted to spend my life as a potter, preferably doing Raku, but there wasn't a living in it, so I settled for programming and IT as a close second.
Perl or C can be pretty cool, but Raku's to die for, and pottery lasts way longer than any programmer's code will.
Is India the champion of net neutrality (a.k.a. fair business practices), or do Indian companies have their own horse(s) in the game that would have been blocked by this "zero rating"?
"Is India the champion of net neutrality" *I believe* means "The Indian gov't is protecting India's Internet citizen users", yes? It sounds like it to me. They're regulating a level playing field, I think.
"... or do Indian companies have their own horse(s) in the game that would have been blocked by this "zero rating"?"
I'm really not sure what you're talking about there. I do imagine Facebook has tried to build some very self-serving partnership deals with Indian companies to make this thing work financially for both Facebook and their Indian partners. Wouldn't anybody?
Really? Wow. Apparently marketing does still work. Who knew?
Or, perhaps I'm just way more jaded than I thought I was. I haven't been able to take anything he's done in at least a decade any more seriously than I can take anything Hillary Clinton's done ever.
"Helm, onto our net destination please. Riker, you have the bridge. I'll be in my ready-room. Computer, Earl Grey hot. Mr. Data, bring your violin, and Troy, I'll need your services as well. Wesley, try not to get yourself killed or start another war. Mr. Worf, I couldn't care less what you want to get up to. Have fun."
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Talk about the web going dark...
Talk about the web going dark! We will be back to the old days of trying to guess URLs and hoping you didn't land on a porn site.
Remember, that's what I was replying to.
I get what you're saying about what the story's about, but there's more than one thread going on here. I was just commenting on what they said/wrote. If silly French politicos want to tell us what we can do with URLs, they're really telling us all we can actually rely on is dotted quads, as in pre-DNS.
Yeah, these nitwit clueless French politicos want to break the web if they can't get the vig for their masters, but they're (obviously) not seeing the whole picture. Human readable links == DNS. If they're objecting to human readable links or what we do with them, I interpret that to mean going back to before the days DNS existed, leaving us with dotted quads, not human usable URLs. I could handle that, but my late mother wouldn't have been able to.
I think it would be very helpful for all of us to assume the average politician is just an idiot savant. They only know enough to be dangerous to others or themselves.
I hope that's clearer. Or, maybe I should concede defeat. You may have the high ground, I don't know. No biggie.
Sorry, but I love that line from Dan Ackroyd on SNL. It seemed apropos.
So his decision was to hide it. And now, it seems likely that plenty of politicians are basically doing the same -- hide the TPP until the public isn't looking or can't really do anything, and then shove it through.
Sort of sounds like SOPA. The mass of the DNC is gagging on TPP, so how the !@#$ is she the front runner for the nomination? Because "female president?" Damn, that's shallow. I've got nothing against females, but ffs, why Hillary? Because she's female?!? That's stupid. Grace Hopper I'd vote for. Hillary? Not even if the world was going to end if I didn't. No, by the way, I'm not a Fiorina fan either. Ick.
It sure would be lovely if, at the last minute, the whole world stood up on it's hind legs to shout out (a la "Network") "I'm mad as hell and am not going to take it anymore!"
What a cheesy witch that woman is. Damn, I despise pragmatism! "Whatever works" sounds a lot like "The ends justify the means" to me, and everybody knows that's evil.
Idealism is what we should all aspire to. "Things as they could, and should, be", to quote Aristotle.
They want to break the internet. They want to break people's ability to communicate, learn, organize and protest.
It's just entropy in action leading to the heat death of the Universe. They're just goin' with the flow, or the natural order of things. No, there will not be a Big Crunch and everything starts over. It'll all just keep on evaporating away and getting colder until universal equilibrium is reached at zero degrees Kelvin and *everything stops*.
On the bright side, it'll be a long time by human reckoning before it gets there. We'll be long extinct well before that, so not our problem.
I'm not sure I understand the question, but would you rather got to 104.25.104.28 or techdirt.com? They're the same thing of course, but one's in a much more human manageable form, obviously.
I think the point I'm trying to make is they wouldn't stop working, but they would become unusable for most people. The typical non-geek has likely never even heard the term "dotted quad."
I'm not sure either where you got "DNS stop working" from what I wrote. I meant it to mean a time before DNS was invented (didn't yet exist), and things like "techdirt.com" wasn't possible even if 104.25.104.28 was.
I hope I didn't completely screw the pooch on that. Sorry for the misunderstanding if so. It was a fairly busy long weekend (well, for me anyway), and I may be suffering from creeping senility, ya never know. :-)
On the post: The Incredible Corporate Sovereignty Saga Involving Ecuador And Chevron Continues
Re: The most amazing take away I have about this is...
I have still readable backups that're twenty-eight years old. Data compression software tech is one of the highlights of the computer age. bzip2 + afio rocks!
On the post: The Incredible Corporate Sovereignty Saga Involving Ecuador And Chevron Continues
Re:
You've got me thinking of Rodney's audacious plan on Stargate Atlantis: "Let's get all the Replicators into the same room. Their combined mass will create a space-time anomaly so heavy, it'll sink into the core of the planet!"
Fatten up your local lawyer. Bwa, ha, haaa.
On the post: The Incredible Corporate Sovereignty Saga Involving Ecuador And Chevron Continues
Re: Has anyone done the math?
What gains? Unless you're MafiAA or big Pharma, you'll be lucky to never see any gains. We'll be robbed blind once it's passed.
Gee, it sounds like you think everybody being up to their eyeballs in lawyers would be a bad thing. :-O
On the post: The Incredible Corporate Sovereignty Saga Involving Ecuador And Chevron Continues
Re: Re:
An ice pick in a Nazi Stormtrooper's back would leave a much easier to clean up mess, and it's much quieter than a Kalashnikov. Plus, they fit in a pocket. It's tough to hide the fact that you're armed with a pitchfork.
On the post: The Incredible Corporate Sovereignty Saga Involving Ecuador And Chevron Continues
Re: Long running saga
There's an old joke in the oil industry: "Whoever survives the current crash in the price of oil gets to buy up the others." I remember seeing a little electronic doohicky in Anadarko's server room that had seven overlapping Dymo labeler thingies: "Property of Blah-A" covered by "Property of Blah-B", and so on.
Exxon had a few good ones too. "The company name is Exxon-Mobil, but the Mobil is silent."
Central and South America first had to survive the Conquistadors, then Nazi sympathizing in league with military juntas, then US jingoism and the CIA's fat fingering. There's no surprise that this mess occurred.
On the post: The Incredible Corporate Sovereignty Saga Involving Ecuador And Chevron Continues
Re: Re: the ecuator and the surrounding hearing loss
I have never understood why anyone wanted to use GT. I can't remember seeing an example where it actually did the correct thing. When you can screw it up just by spelling equator with a "c", what's the frigging point? "Damn you autocorrect!", on steroids.
Human languages and their correct usage are far more complex and mallable than computer languages that try to adhere to standards. It was hard enough trying to figure out how to auto-convert Assembly into C. Trying to auto-convert German or Russian into Swahili or Australian Aboriginal or Japanese is bound to fail miserably with hysterical consequences.
On the post: Time Warner Eyes Hulu Stake, Wants Service To Remove Current Seasons Of Shows
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hey Time Warner / Hulu, here's a free clue!
Sure, but they're also vastly inferior in many ways. Just look at the price of fuel, and what burning it theoretically is doing to the ecosystem, and it makes jerks like the al-Saud family rich. It's also among the most dangerous things we can do over which we have an almost pitiful amount of control (think drunk drivers or falling asleep at the wheel).
I've always loved the smell of barns and it's pretty cool that horses can create more horses. They also know the way home so drunk, stoned, or asleep they'll get you there.
Automobiles are faster, but that's over-rated in lots of ways.
On the post: Time Warner Eyes Hulu Stake, Wants Service To Remove Current Seasons Of Shows
Fun with numbers.
Point of order, Mr. Speaker? Ah, statistics. Is that 16% of *all* potential consumers, or only of those signed up for cable? 16% of ca. 300 million potential consumers, or (eg.) 200 million signed up subscribers/customers?
Or, am I totally off-base here?
On the post: EU And US Come To 'Agreement' On Safe Harbor, But If It Doesn't Stop Mass Surveillance, It Won't Fly
Re: The spies already ONLY engage in Targeted surveillance
Worse, they only collect info on persons whose data could be collected by one of the five partners in the Five Eyes consortium. In practice, that's indistinguishable from all of it.
Until that thing gets flushed down the toilet, the NSA (or any of them) can happily rely on Britain or Canada or New Zealand or Japan (or is it Australia?) to sidestep any limitations we wave at them. It's absolutely correct to view this thing with a heavy dose of skepticism.
On the post: Congressional Rep Who Introduced Anti-Swatting Bill... Victim Of Attempted Swatting
Re: Here's an idea
I don't know if it's still the case but I remember when if you called another phone then fail to hang up yours, you tie up their phone. The connection remained active. You'd think it would then be fairly trivial for the phone company to trace the call.
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
Re:
That's silly because there's an easy solution. Don't use it. You're more than welcome to be as proprietary as you wish, but it's up to you to figure out how you do that without using my work. That's not my problem. It's yours, caused by you.
On the post: YouTube Wins This Round In Germany In The Stupid Neverending War With GEMA Over Streaming Rates
Re: Re: Re:
Ah! Yeah, I can see that, thanks. I forgot about how little G gets per ad, and that does make GEMA's price ridiculous.
G/YT would have to go to subscription based (a la Netflix) to have a chance of making that work.
On the post: India Set To Ban Zero Rating As Facebook's Misleading Lobbying Falls Flat
Re: Re:
I can tell from that you've never been a potter. I have. Clay's just the raw material that a potter digs out of the ground, and possibly fiddles with in some way to get it to do whatever it is he wants. That may be introducing some other type of dirt/clay to give the raw material different properties than nature provided, or mixing in already fired, crushed pottery bits (grog) that gives it better heat handling characteristics. This stuff has to handle like about 1700 degrees fahrenheit in a kiln. Too little, and it won't vitrify. Too much, and it'll just melt like glass. Then there's the clays themselves and their properties. Rich iron red is way different from "fine bone china" porcelain.
I won't even bother to start on glaze technology (imagine baking or sucking the oxygen out of silver or copper oxide) or cool techniques like Raku. I could spend weeks going on about it. And then, there's the tech that lets a potter throw pottery. I love Shimpo wheels. Stick shift speed control, no foot power needed, variable/constant speed, gargle, gargle, gargle, ...
I wanted to spend my life as a potter, preferably doing Raku, but there wasn't a living in it, so I settled for programming and IT as a close second.
Perl or C can be pretty cool, but Raku's to die for, and pottery lasts way longer than any programmer's code will.
On the post: India Set To Ban Zero Rating As Facebook's Misleading Lobbying Falls Flat
Re: motive?
"Is India the champion of net neutrality" *I believe* means "The Indian gov't is protecting India's Internet citizen users", yes? It sounds like it to me. They're regulating a level playing field, I think.
"... or do Indian companies have their own horse(s) in the game that would have been blocked by this "zero rating"?"
I'm really not sure what you're talking about there. I do imagine Facebook has tried to build some very self-serving partnership deals with Indian companies to make this thing work financially for both Facebook and their Indian partners. Wouldn't anybody?
On the post: India Set To Ban Zero Rating As Facebook's Misleading Lobbying Falls Flat
Re: Re: impotent rage
Really? Wow. Apparently marketing does still work. Who knew?
Or, perhaps I'm just way more jaded than I thought I was. I haven't been able to take anything he's done in at least a decade any more seriously than I can take anything Hillary Clinton's done ever.
On the post: India Set To Ban Zero Rating As Facebook's Misleading Lobbying Falls Flat
Re: Re: Re: impotent rage
"Mr. Spock, if you would please, a full spread of photon torpedos. Lets get rid of these silly "Force" religious fanatic twits."
"Gladly captain." Pew, pew, pew, ka-freakin' ka-Blammo!
"Helm, onto our net destination please. Riker, you have the bridge. I'll be in my ready-room. Computer, Earl Grey hot. Mr. Data, bring your violin, and Troy, I'll need your services as well. Wesley, try not to get yourself killed or start another war. Mr. Worf, I couldn't care less what you want to get up to. Have fun."
On the post: French Politicians Pushing To Ban Linking To Any Website Without Permission
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Talk about the web going dark...
Remember, that's what I was replying to.
I get what you're saying about what the story's about, but there's more than one thread going on here. I was just commenting on what they said/wrote. If silly French politicos want to tell us what we can do with URLs, they're really telling us all we can actually rely on is dotted quads, as in pre-DNS.
Yeah, these nitwit clueless French politicos want to break the web if they can't get the vig for their masters, but they're (obviously) not seeing the whole picture. Human readable links == DNS. If they're objecting to human readable links or what we do with them, I interpret that to mean going back to before the days DNS existed, leaving us with dotted quads, not human usable URLs. I could handle that, but my late mother wouldn't have been able to.
I think it would be very helpful for all of us to assume the average politician is just an idiot savant. They only know enough to be dangerous to others or themselves.
I hope that's clearer. Or, maybe I should concede defeat. You may have the high ground, I don't know. No biggie.
On the post: Hillary Clinton Flip Flopped On TPP Before, So Big Business Lobbyists Are Confident She'll Really Flip Back After Election
"Jane, you disgusting slut!"
Sort of sounds like SOPA. The mass of the DNC is gagging on TPP, so how the !@#$ is she the front runner for the nomination? Because "female president?" Damn, that's shallow. I've got nothing against females, but ffs, why Hillary? Because she's female?!? That's stupid. Grace Hopper I'd vote for. Hillary? Not even if the world was going to end if I didn't. No, by the way, I'm not a Fiorina fan either. Ick.
It sure would be lovely if, at the last minute, the whole world stood up on it's hind legs to shout out (a la "Network") "I'm mad as hell and am not going to take it anymore!"
What a cheesy witch that woman is. Damn, I despise pragmatism! "Whatever works" sounds a lot like "The ends justify the means" to me, and everybody knows that's evil.
Idealism is what we should all aspire to. "Things as they could, and should, be", to quote Aristotle.
On the post: French Politicians Pushing To Ban Linking To Any Website Without Permission
Re:
It's just entropy in action leading to the heat death of the Universe. They're just goin' with the flow, or the natural order of things. No, there will not be a Big Crunch and everything starts over. It'll all just keep on evaporating away and getting colder until universal equilibrium is reached at zero degrees Kelvin and *everything stops*.
On the bright side, it'll be a long time by human reckoning before it gets there. We'll be long extinct well before that, so not our problem.
Enjoy every sunrise you get! :-) Have fun.
On the post: French Politicians Pushing To Ban Linking To Any Website Without Permission
Re: Re: Re: Talk about the web going dark...
I'm not sure I understand the question, but would you rather got to 104.25.104.28 or techdirt.com? They're the same thing of course, but one's in a much more human manageable form, obviously.
I think the point I'm trying to make is they wouldn't stop working, but they would become unusable for most people. The typical non-geek has likely never even heard the term "dotted quad."
I'm not sure either where you got "DNS stop working" from what I wrote. I meant it to mean a time before DNS was invented (didn't yet exist), and things like "techdirt.com" wasn't possible even if 104.25.104.28 was.
I hope I didn't completely screw the pooch on that. Sorry for the misunderstanding if so. It was a fairly busy long weekend (well, for me anyway), and I may be suffering from creeping senility, ya never know. :-)
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