Oy. How do people not realize that what he said, while being interviewed by a comedian, was a freaking joke? I bet he's laughing his head off right about now, seeing so many people taking "Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars" seriously. Even a cursory look at the math shows that the idea simply doesn't work; give the guy some credit for being enough of an engineer to know that.
Say what you will about Comcast, but when I moved in to my new apartment, I went from 0 to fully-functional broadband in less than 2 days. If Verizon's got over 30,000 prospective customers who have been waiting longer than a week, much less an entire year, there's no way that counts as "not ... a delay in bringing service to that customer."
I haven't heard of Beezid either, but if it's what it sounds like from the context, it's nothing like eBay. There are sites out there that run scams that make them look like an auction, while in truth they're running something that just sucks money out of all the the participants' pockets. (In a real auction, the only one who pays is the person who makes the winning bid. In these sites... not so much.)
Fair enough, but it's important to keep in mind that not all innovation is necessarily good. Case in point: the iPhone. It's literally designed from beginning to end to limit users' freedom, reduce their ability to do useful things, strip them of their natural property rights in things that they legitimately purchased... and make them like it.
That's one set of innovations the world would be much better off without.
The truly weird thing is that, for all of its hard-science realism focus, the basic premise is completely invalid: the atmosphere of Mars is too thin for the intense sandstorm/windstorm that drove off most of the astronauts and left one of them behind to arise in the first place!
If she's not upholding the laws set by the Supreme Court
...then something is very wrong already, as the Supreme Court has no authority to "set" laws, only to interpret them. It was just as wrong now as when they laid down the Citizens United ruling, regardless of what you think of the details of either of those rulings.
He actually did a pretty good job of describing how the free market can keep bad actors in line. It really does work that way.
Trouble is, telecom isn't a free market. And when conditions of freedom don't exist in the marketplace, because the industry is dominated by anticompetitive actors, then free market principles break down and you need a completely different toolset--monopoly economic principles--to correctly analyze it.
Google: That's kind of surprising. When I first saw them, right from the very beginning, I recall thinking that they were going to completely disrupt and take over search and run Lycos, AltaVista, etc out of the market. Sure, I didn't expect them to branch out and become as huge as they have since, but I never thought they wouldn't be successful!
"Have you used Lycos lately? It's pretty good!" Wow. That made me laugh. That was specifically the reason I knew Google was going to take over: it was the first search engine ever that did not utterly suck. (And, as far as I've seen, the last as well. Unfortunate, but true.)
Bitcoin started out pretty sketchy... and has stayed there ever since. The huge run-up in its prices was due to out-and-out fraud at Mt. Gox, and now it's crashed. The ecosystem that remains is full of criminals and hackers. If you're smart, you'll avoid it altogether.
"There was a rap song about MySpace." Amusingly, in country star Brad Paisley's humorous hit "Online," (about an uber-nerd who pretends online to be so much cooler than he is IRL,) the song mentions his MySpace account. I saw him in concert last year, and he changed the relevant lyrics to mention "my Facebook page" instead.
"Perfect speech recognition": You've never written code in your life, have you? :P I shudder to think of trying to write something like values = myList.Where({item | item.SomeValue >= threshold})[1:] with speech recognition! (Yes, that's a realistic line of code in a modern programming language.)
"Nobody goes to Groupon anymore, how did that happen?" Because vendors realized that participating, more often than not, was harming them more than it was helping them, and so they withdrew quite a bit. And when they lose the content that makes them valuable, why would users want to go there anymore?
"Why would anyone want to buy a pair of shoes that wasn't custom-designed by me?" Because "me" is not a specialist with knowledge of shoe design. (Or shampoo design, for that matter.) That's how civilization's progress has worked for the past few centuries. You want to see some truly awesome shoes, look at SAS. (Shameless plug!) I've been wearing them for about 15 years now. They're expensive, but they tend to last for at least 4 years each pair unless you abuse them horribly, they're amazingly high quality, and they're about the most comfortable thing you'll ever wear on your feet that isn't house slippers. I'd trust them more than myself to create a good pair of shoes for me any day.
"What happened to Dell?" At work I have a Dell box with two Dell monitors, a Dell keyboard and a Dell mouse. So do pretty much all my coworkers. Our server room is full of racks of Dell servers. At home I have an Alienware laptop. (Guess who owns Alienware?) Dell's still around and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Re: You don't have a right to talk trash about anyone -- whether true or not -- as practical matter, they just can't stop you.
[Citation needed]
Leaving aside all the rest of the nonsense you managed to pack into three short sentence, give me one good reason why anyone should not have the right to say any thing that's true.
Certainly there are times and circumstances when it is impolite or unwise to voice certain truths, but unless the thing in question is a secret covered by a legal contract, which is not what you're talking about here, to say that someone does not have the right to say it is to advocate straight-up tyranny.
It's something we've seen again and again throughout history, and especially throughout modern history: the worst thing that can possibly happen to any X that's generally good is for someone, somewhere, to discover that there's lots of money to be made in X.
BTW if you want to see a system where democratic, community-focused moderation is a thing and mods are elected by the community, (and can be thrown out and replaced in a new election,) don't look at Reddit; look at the StackExchange network. (Disclosure: I'm an elected mod on one of the SE sites.)
A lot of people overestimate how much Facebook makes from them.
Maybe. Perhaps they only made $1 off your latest post. But multiply that by a few hundred million users and soon enough you're talking about real money. The "serf" metaphor really does apply pretty well here: each individual serf didn't create all that much revenue for his lord, but the feudal lords tended to have plenty of serfs working for them on their estates.
That 3D Xpoint thing looks very interesting, but a few points it doesn't mention. It's 1000x faster than flash memory, but how does it stack up on heat, power consumption, and price?
I dunno. Seems to me this is obviously a false advertising case: any claim that a critical article advising readers to avoid a certain product or service constitutes advertising is obviously false!
Wow. I really hope that's not the meaning of "integer". It means every computer program ever written would suddenly fail, as 0 and 1 are the most commonly used integer values ever.
On the post: DailyDirt: Making Mars More Like Earth
Re:
On the post: Close Only Counts In Horseshoes, Hand Grenades... And (Apparently) Verizon's Fiber Optic Installs
On the post: Health Canada Threatens To Sue Doctor If He Reveals Whether Clinical Trials Data Shows A Drug Is Safe Or Effective
Maybe Shakespeare got it right: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
On the post: Nevada Predictably Declares Daily Fantasy To Be Gambling
Re:
On the post: Apple's Patent Loss To University Of Wisconsin A Reminder That Universities Are Often The Worst Patent Trolls
Re: Re: But.. but.. innovation!
That's one set of innovations the world would be much better off without.
On the post: Sen. Grassley Asks DOJ To Get Back To Pushing James Comey's Mandatory Encryption Backdoors Plan
Re: Re: Re: Does anyone remember that some states passed laws ...
On the post: Sen. Grassley Asks DOJ To Get Back To Pushing James Comey's Mandatory Encryption Backdoors Plan
Re: Re: Does anyone remember that some states passed laws ...
So far you're 0 for 2. Care to try a third?
On the post: Sen. Grassley Asks DOJ To Get Back To Pushing James Comey's Mandatory Encryption Backdoors Plan
Re: Does anyone remember that some states passed laws ...
On the post: DailyDirt: Planning For A Mars Colony
Re:
On the post: Kim Davis's Approach To Email More Outdated Than Her Views On Marriage
Re: Re:
...then something is very wrong already, as the Supreme Court has no authority to "set" laws, only to interpret them. It was just as wrong now as when they laid down the Citizens United ruling, regardless of what you think of the details of either of those rulings.
On the post: Kim Davis's Approach To Email More Outdated Than Her Views On Marriage
Re: Seriously?
On the post: AOL CEO Promises 'The Market' Will Keep Verizon, AOL Honest About Sleazy New Stealth Cookies
Trouble is, telecom isn't a free market. And when conditions of freedom don't exist in the marketplace, because the industry is dominated by anticompetitive actors, then free market principles break down and you need a completely different toolset--monopoly economic principles--to correctly analyze it.
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 46: Things We Got Wrong
"Have you used Lycos lately? It's pretty good!" Wow. That made me laugh. That was specifically the reason I knew Google was going to take over: it was the first search engine ever that did not utterly suck. (And, as far as I've seen, the last as well. Unfortunate, but true.)
Bitcoin started out pretty sketchy... and has stayed there ever since. The huge run-up in its prices was due to out-and-out fraud at Mt. Gox, and now it's crashed. The ecosystem that remains is full of criminals and hackers. If you're smart, you'll avoid it altogether.
"There was a rap song about MySpace." Amusingly, in country star Brad Paisley's humorous hit "Online," (about an uber-nerd who pretends online to be so much cooler than he is IRL,) the song mentions his MySpace account. I saw him in concert last year, and he changed the relevant lyrics to mention "my Facebook page" instead.
"Perfect speech recognition": You've never written code in your life, have you? :P I shudder to think of trying to write something like values = myList.Where({item | item.SomeValue >= threshold})[1:] with speech recognition! (Yes, that's a realistic line of code in a modern programming language.)
"Nobody goes to Groupon anymore, how did that happen?" Because vendors realized that participating, more often than not, was harming them more than it was helping them, and so they withdrew quite a bit. And when they lose the content that makes them valuable, why would users want to go there anymore?
"Why would anyone want to buy a pair of shoes that wasn't custom-designed by me?" Because "me" is not a specialist with knowledge of shoe design. (Or shampoo design, for that matter.) That's how civilization's progress has worked for the past few centuries. You want to see some truly awesome shoes, look at SAS. (Shameless plug!) I've been wearing them for about 15 years now. They're expensive, but they tend to last for at least 4 years each pair unless you abuse them horribly, they're amazingly high quality, and they're about the most comfortable thing you'll ever wear on your feet that isn't house slippers. I'd trust them more than myself to create a good pair of shoes for me any day.
"What happened to Dell?" At work I have a Dell box with two Dell monitors, a Dell keyboard and a Dell mouse. So do pretty much all my coworkers. Our server room is full of racks of Dell servers. At home I have an Alienware laptop. (Guess who owns Alienware?) Dell's still around and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
On the post: Just About Everything About Twitter Suspending Deadspin And SBNation Accounts Is Ridiculous
And in this corner, we have media complicit in the entire system, working to promote it.
There's really no one to root for here.
On the post: The Coming Collision Between EU Privacy Regulation And American Free Speech
Re: You don't have a right to talk trash about anyone -- whether true or not -- as practical matter, they just can't stop you.
Leaving aside all the rest of the nonsense you managed to pack into three short sentence, give me one good reason why anyone should not have the right to say any thing that's true.
Certainly there are times and circumstances when it is impolite or unwise to voice certain truths, but unless the thing in question is a secret covered by a legal contract, which is not what you're talking about here, to say that someone does not have the right to say it is to advocate straight-up tyranny.
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 45: No, You're Not The Product
BTW if you want to see a system where democratic, community-focused moderation is a thing and mods are elected by the community, (and can be thrown out and replaced in a new election,) don't look at Reddit; look at the StackExchange network. (Disclosure: I'm an elected mod on one of the SE sites.)
Maybe. Perhaps they only made $1 off your latest post. But multiply that by a few hundred million users and soon enough you're talking about real money. The "serf" metaphor really does apply pretty well here: each individual serf didn't create all that much revenue for his lord, but the feudal lords tended to have plenty of serfs working for them on their estates.
On the post: NSA Screws Up Another Thing: EU Court Of Justice Throws The Internet For A Loop In Ending Safe Harbor
Re: Re: "There's a way to fix this mess and it's to stop mass surveillance" -- WHETHER BY GOVERNMENTS OR CORPORATIONS.
Really? Did you miss the whole thing about Facebook's keeping shadow profiles on people who wanted to opt out?
On the post: DailyDirt: Storing Digital Bits In More Ways
On the post: Court Hands Loss To Doctor Who Sued Over Blog Posts Criticizing His Questionable Alzheimer's Treatments
On the post: Patent Owner Insists 'Integers' Do Not Include The Number One
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