sylver_dragon @ sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

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954

Joined

2 yr. ago

Can't wait for the details to come out. My money is on half the systems running operating systems which are old enough to drink, along with an understaffed, underpaid security team who spends all their time chasing people opening phishing emails. And that will be coupled with management which "cares about security". And by "care" they mean "don't have a clue and don't actually give a fuck".

Yes, but that is also going to require a ton of extra effort to track and assumes the nozzles themselves wear consistently. There would probably also need to be modifiers based on materials used, and even brands. For a professional print farm or a business trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the operation, this might be worth it. For a hobby where we expect a lot of waste? Eh, fuck it, just replace it when prints start going south.

Re-read what I wrote, but hop down off your high horse first, it's obvious you weren't able to read it clearly from up there. I'm neither promoting nor defending piracy. Quite the contrary, I'm praising the legitimate services (and Steam in particular) for understanding that competition with piracy isn't all about money, it's often about the quality of service. Funny enough, your own comments are actually a point in favor of this:

You ever wonder why these companies don’t operate in countries that don’t have strict piracy laws and can’t shut down sites with court orders? Because it’s still easier to pirate than face criminal charges.

Yet somehow, with a lot of time, money and effort put into shutting down piracy, the pirates were able to provide a better service. Seriously, step back from the whole "napster bad" for a moment and think about the dissonance of the situation. Large companies, pulling in millions of dollars a year, with no need to worry about law enforcement or monied interests coming after them, somehow failed to create anything resembling a functional digital marketplace. They were stuck in the physical distribution paradigm and fought tooth and nail to avoid digital distribution. At the same time, a few kids, with little money, and law enforcement trying to shut them down created a pretty good user experience. Sure, some of that is not having to worry about licensing. But, a large part of it is understanding what the users want and giving it to them.

It wasn't until Apple came along and basically created "Napster, but legitimate" that music piracy really fell off. Netflix pulled off something similar with video (though that is rebuilding some rough edges at the moment) and Steam did it for games. Sure, piracy still exists, and it will always be a problem. But, a lot of piracy can be tamped down by having a good service available.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. -- Gabe Newell, 2011

Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

And, so long as Steam continues to treat it's customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that's the problem with Pitchford's whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you'll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it's probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large "first mover" advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.

There may also be a (very weak) reason around bounds checking and avoiding buffer overflows. By rejecting anything longer that 20 characters, the developer can be sure that there will be nothing longer sent to the back end code. While they should still be doing bounds checking in the rest of the code, if the team making the UI is not the same as the team making the back end code, the UI team may see it as a reasonable restriction to prevent a screw up, further down the stack, from being exploited. Again, it's a very weak argument, but I can see such an argument being made in a large organization with lots of teams who don't talk to each other. Or worse yet, different contractors standing up the front end and back end.

I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.

Password reuse. Password reuse everywhere.

Ok, good luck with that! Can't wait for this guy to start whining that he can't find employees.

I would add the admittance of China to the WTO as another proximate cause. And one which probably had more of a material effect than NAFTA; but, NAFTA had already become a GOP talking point and it just stuck. China's entry to the WTO was also moved over the finish line by Bush II, though most of the ground work was laid by Clinton. So, it wouldn't have had the same clean narrative as NAFTA. US Employment in manufacturing went into freefall in late 2000 and early 2001. This was also during a recession, so that is intermixed with the effects of those changes in international trade. But, even as the recession receded and the US entered an economic boom, leading up to the 2008 crash, manufacturing employment in the US either held steady or decreased slightly. It's unsurprising that the same period saw a lot of offshoring of manufacturing to China. And this was also the period of Neoliberal economists pushing "comparative advantage" and how the US losing all those manufacturing jobs was a good thing.

So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
-- Barack Obama, 2008

Perhaps a bit on the campy side, the opening theme song of the original Highlander was always one of my favorites:
Princes of the Universe by Queen.

Growing up (I was a kid during Reagan's Presidency), I heard more than one conservative pundit saying "better dead than Red!" I guess Russia is technically not the USSR; but, it strikes me as funny to see conservative pundits now seemingly open to becoming Russian.

It probably comes down to the difficulty of of transport. We have a local fruit in the Eastern US, the Pawpaw. It's a fantastic fruit and has a history of cultivation in the area. But, it does not transport well and has to be eaten pretty quickly after they ripen. So, it's not a wide commercial success.

Also not mentioned in the article at all: the polling error.
While a 4% shift could be significant, I'd also bet that the error bars of the two polls overlap.

A few from my list:

• Darknet Diaries - Interviews with interesting people around hacking and cybersecurity. This includes a lot of the actual criminals themselves and you get to hear their motivations and how they did what they did. Really neat for understanding the minds of folks who do bad things.
• FiveThirtyEight Politics - This one is good for staying abreast of US politics, polling. While the political bias of the hosts is pretty obvious, this is less punditry and more about the numbers.
• Risky Business with Nate Silver Maria Konnikova - A neat podcast covering risk, poker and politics. Just a good listen for thinking about risk and probabilities in life.
• The Lawfare Podcast - Lawyers talking about the law, and how it shapes and is shaped by whats in the news. Great for getting a legalistic view of the world.

Sears Super Pong

How do you mandate lower grocery prices in that?

You don't. Price controls don't work and usually backfire in the long run.
Instead, you modify the incentives which exist around prices via taxation. As a simplified example, if you want to prioritize lower prices on staples such as milk, vegetables or beef, then businesses which can show that their margins on those products are within a defined range pay 1% less on corporate taxes. The numbers and ranges would need to be discovered via both study and experimentation. But, by tying a savings for those business to their behavior, said behavior can be influenced. The prices can then be further manipulated lower in the logistical chain, either by direct subsidy or via similar manipulation of incentives to growers and distributors.

We live in capitalism.

Yes, but functional capitalism requires regulation to prevent monopolies, collusion and other activities which distort markets. And there are plenty of areas where capitalism fails and government (read:socialism) needs to step in to provide something which society needs, but for which the incentives do not exist to provide it in an efficient manner. Or for which the efficient providing of that thing creates moral hazards. There is a reason we don't privatize the military.

Honor is a social construct which is used to promote "pro-social" behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, "pro-social" is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider "anti-social". Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it's grip on power in then face of a changing society.

Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It's no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn't really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it's just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it's a hollow shell.

The Holocaust was unique in the industrialization of genocide. The Nazi party organized the state around the process, using industrial technology to track, move and kill millions of people in an efficient manner. It was also very well documented and was publicized in a way, which made people really aware of what was occurring. As horrible as genocide is, at any scale, most are fairly limited in geography and organization. The Nazis showed us just how bad things can be, if we bend the resources of a modern, industrial state, to those ends. So, I'd tend to disagree with Walz's thesis that the Holocaust wasn't unique. Though, I would still agree that it should be taught in context with other genocides which have happened and which are happening today. It can become an example of just how bad a genocide can become. But, the goal should be to teach students about the causes, and processes of genocides. So that, we hopefully will try to stop them from occurring.

That said, that the modern Israeli State uses the horrible things, which happened to Jews in the early 20th century, to justify doing similarly horrible things to Palestinians today, is downright atrocious. It cheapens the horrors faced by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

You can’t convince me printer software/drivers/firmware doesn’t have an agenda.

Yes well, but they are coded by pure evil incarnate. Otherwise known as HP.

Software is not political, it's just code executing on a machine and doesn't care what you believe.
There is a lot of politics surrounding software.

Politics is the tool we use, as a society, to decide how we're going to run said society. There will be areas of politics where different factions will adopt different attitudes about different bits of software. So, some software will be politicized. But, the software itself is only political in so far as we are having political discussions around it, the software itself doesn't care.