Decade

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211.
by Decade 10y ago
Well, there was this last month: https://opensource.com/business/16/11/open-source-not-free-s...
212.
by Decade 10y ago
They are winning battles. Back when they started, nobody thought software deserved to be free. Bill Gates published a letter where he asserted that nobody should use Microsoft software without paying Microsoft, and only Microsoft had the pr
213.
by Decade 10y ago
You do not win the culture wars by using words defined by totalitarians. People who have no respect for others’ freedoms.
214.
by Decade 10y ago
That is a false dichotomy. I don’t agree with every definition that RMS provides, but I agree with the legitimacy of his effort. I think RMS updates the terms sporadically, and some of the definitions are now outdated. For the “hacker”&#x2F
215.
by Decade 10y ago
Trying to avoid the weeds that so many other people have argued, so: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Goo
216.
by Decade 10y ago
Then what alternative would you propose? The terms of the debate have been defined by totalitarians who themselves use Newspeak to get people to accept their systems. By disrupting the language, RMS makes dissent thinkable.
217.
by Decade 10y ago
I don’t see how you are disproving those points. Especially since I weasel-worded it with “most.” I had quickly fact-checked, and discovered that modern diesels can be quiet. So a 2017 diesel SUV is as quiet as the gasoline model. That real
218.
by Decade 10y ago
Instead of trickery of tax credits, you get trickery of rigged emissions tests. Because when you regard air quality, it is not just carbon dioxide, but various nitrous oxides. Also, most diesels are noisier, and diesel fueling stations are
219.
by Decade 10y ago
I used an overdraft line of credit once, accidentally. Then I turned it off. The bank salesman had sold it to me as “overdraft protection,” and at the time I didn’t know what “overdraft protection” meant, so sure, protection is good, right?
220.
by Decade 10y ago
Haber-Bosch is only a partial solution, and only for nitrogen. It is a relatively neat solution, because the entire planet is enveloped in nitrogen, and methane is readily available, for now. Phosphorus and potassium are still problems. The
221.
by Decade 10y ago
>> Is anything getting in the way? > Yes, developers. (Occasionally zoning/historical associations/local laws in places like San Francisco or NYC. But primarily, it's developers) No, it’s primarily zoning.[0][1] To n
222.
by Decade 10y ago
Hyper-local regulation has proven to be a disaster.[0] It’s not just about providing housing, but about having houses near jobs and having diverse communities. State-wide is a bit problematic for a state as large as California.[1] The probl
223.
by Decade 10y ago
The “historic construction boom” just seems historic because it followed a historic construction bust, so the first order derivative is pretty high. And it’s all concentrated in a few neighborhoods right outside reporters’ offices, so it se
224.
by Decade 10y ago
No, that seems about right. The “Progressives” (I consider them to be a peculiar West Coast form of conservative) have now made unprofitable subsidized housing an integral part of any large-scale housing project, which means housing can’t b
225.
by Decade 10y ago
Oil price may run into Jevons’s paradox, though. The prices are already depressed because new production outpaced demand back in 2014. I expect as oil production continues to outstrip demand, while all this production machinery is still ope
226.
by Decade 10y ago
Ride sharing could also mean fewer vehicles on the road and, crucially, taking parking spaces. Today, even if I had a car, I would not use it. Why? Because there is no place to park. The last couple times I tried driving a car at night, I s
227.
by Decade 10y ago
Haha, no. I support the YIMBY movement as a matter of infringed liberty, but we need it so successful software engineers (as well as everybody else) can afford to live near their jobs. http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/
228.
by Decade 10y ago
So much for the soul-searching and reform that the Democratic Party so desperately needs.
229.
by Decade 10y ago
> With self-driving cars on the horizon, I think the suburbs might go through some type of re-birth. Suburban sprawl. I have several concerns with that. In places like San Francisco, there is no space to sprawl. It’s healthier for kids t
230.
by Decade 10y ago
Why? So you can customize the paint? It’s not like you have access to the interesting control systems of a modern car, anyway. Donald Trump does bring up a legitimate point: The train can be operated by a corrupt entity. With a car, you hav
231.
by Decade 10y ago
The high prices are an artifact of misguided past policies, defended by NIMBYs, to encourage suburban sprawl. Some increase in per-square-foot prices are natural and expected, just due to right-sizing the environmental costs and benefits, b
232.
by Decade 10y ago
Yes, he did. As nsxwolf commented, the 2010 MacBook Pro had USB 2 ports that ran at different speeds. And I remember vaguely that that wasn’t the first time. It’s just not your problem because, really, how many people are going to be inconv
233.
by Decade 10y ago
I don’t keep my sources around, and actually a number of the stories that my parents used to tell, I’ve come to believe are distortions or fabrications. The tricky part is figuring out where are the inaccuracies. You cannot trust the popula
234.
by Decade 10y ago
I love this quote from Douglas Crockford: There’s something wrong with us. I used to think that everybody should learn programming. … I don’t think that anymore. I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this
235.
by Decade 10y ago
My feeling is firm pessimism. Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” As the WSJ says, we have “tenant organizations, unions and church groups” figh
236.
by Decade 10y ago
Because of historical accident, a lot of us come from families that distrust unions. I grew up on stories about how unions are greedy for money, which they use to fund liberal social causes, and also create wasteful regulations, and ultimat
237.
by Decade 10y ago
Most buses in San Francisco are diesel. Some of them are diesel-electric hybrid, but they still noisily rev up their diesel motors when accelerating. Especially uphill. Besides the noise right outside my window at midnight, from an empty bu
238.
by Decade 10y ago
I’m not running BIND. I got tired of that program. Right now I’m using PowerDNS. Quite a bit overkill, but that server is extremely lightly loaded. I’m not using CloudFlare, either. That’s the point. If I use CloudFlare CDN, then I depend o
239.
by Decade 10y ago
My own domain is hosted on two completely separate providers, with my own DNS server acting as a hidden master, with DNSSEC signing to minimize the possibility of shenanigans. I can have any number of replicas on any number of networks. The
240.
by Decade 10y ago
And if you actually looked into the issues, you’d know that tech companies don’t like it that costs are so high. Most of them are trying to become profitable before they run out of runway. Tech companies grow and raise the demand: True. Tec

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