alexqgb

27 ms·

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by alexqgb 12y ago
What they actually said was "Promise not to pursue this case any further or pay us $1 million."
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Bingo. There were precisely zero content providers (outside NBC) who were looking forward to dealing with a monopsony that also owned a direct competitor.
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by alexqgb 12y ago
"We're going to have a conservative majority for decades." Not necessarily. On average, the last 10 justices to retire have done so around age 80, and that's with Stevens (who retired at 90) pushing the average up. Ass
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by alexqgb 12y ago
How is this blackmailing? Strictly speaking, blackmailing involves using knowledge of someone else's transgressions against them (e.g. "Pay me $1,000 if you don't want me to show your wife these pictures of you having an affa
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by alexqgb 12y ago
No, of course that's not what I'm saying, and I'm not sure why you'd think otherwise. After all, the development of powerful and severely punitive systems of censorship is a fairly clear indication that not everything
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by alexqgb 12y ago
The problems caused by transients are hardly limited to "disrepair". Noise and disregard for building security are also real issues, as is the degradation of trust. I can be sure that my landlord will perform extensive background
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by alexqgb 12y ago
No, I am not "conflating creation with publishing/marketing." I am making the point that creating work of any consequence is a time and cash intensive prospect, and that absent the IP protections that gave artists access to f
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by alexqgb 12y ago
It is absurd to compare university professorship - which revolves around concept of academic freedom and is backed up by the tenure system - with the arbitrary whims of patronage as it existed under, say, the Medici. Indeed, the whole point
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by alexqgb 12y ago
"I'd wager that the vast majority of music, art, and technological process and creation for our species has not been for pay in service of the groups you described." You'd win, but not for the reasons you imagine. You&
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by alexqgb 12y ago
"Look at the patron model, or commission based production, used for centuries." Here's a better idea: look at the actual work produced under this model. With a few notable exceptions, it's an endless parade of flattering
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Are you trolling again, yummy? Or are you honestly too thoughtless to recognize that a stream of people who have no long-term stake in a building do not conduct themselves in the same community-oriented way that's normal among those wh
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by alexqgb 12y ago
This is an absurdly oversimplified scenario that in no way accounts for the broad set of options available to governments faced with other governments operating like this. Let's just say your "Screw it, why bother?" approach
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by alexqgb 12y ago
As the Times recently reported, burning all known reserves - and dumping the resulting carbon emissions into the atmosphere - would raise the average surface temperature by more than 16 degrees. That's more than enough to trigger a the
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Rounded corners are a defining element of virtually every product made by Apple since they set their design trajectory with the Cube. As as aside, for a product commonly chalked up as a misfire, the Cube has got to be the single most succes
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Both of your examples relate to the state, not the maker, and the state (in theory) is involving itself for the sake of the common good. Indeed, both of the problems behind these restrictions (criminal fraud and air pollution) are the kinds
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Aeon recently published a piece on luck, which - as it turns out - is a real and measurable thing. http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/does-lacky-luck-exist-or-... As the investigation notes, luck - good or bad - s
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by alexqgb 12y ago
"Any significant org is going to have have some process that sounded good at the time, but is now ridiculous." And yet, it's still there. Understanding why that's the case is a pretty important part of ensuring that it a
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Worth noting: the FCC also struck down laws in two states that had barred municipalities from setting up their own broadband networks. The widely covered ruling (Title II) stops the major ISPs from getting worse. The less noticed ruling is
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by alexqgb 12y ago
That's my pattern exactly, which I settled into very quickly. From what I understand from others, they had the same experience.
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by alexqgb 12y ago
"These circumstances have been happening since the creation of the United States." No dude. Just...no. Gerrymandering has existed for ages but only in recent years - with the advent of seriously high-powered data mining - has it h
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by alexqgb 12y ago
"Why not let our elected representatives take care of this?" Uh, because they can't be trusted farther than they can be thrown? Seriously, between the gerrymandering, the closed primaries, and the unlimited private election f
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Because this is about keeping the power of ISPs in check, which is far easier to do when they only have one set of customers. Give them two (i.e., upstream and downstream) and they're in a position to play one off the other in classi
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by alexqgb 12y ago
It is extraordinarily unlikely that private investment would have backed the development and deployment of GPS. The effort spanned decades, cost fantastic sums, and was justified only on the basis that it could prevent nuclear annihilation.
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Why shouldn't humanity aspire to that? Because 7 billion people trekking to Everest would transform the character of the place so thoroughly that the reason people started doing en masse in the first place would be lost to history. T
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Also, cars.
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by alexqgb 12y ago
Weirdly enough, none of these guys has set up shop in Lagos. Or Moscow.
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by alexqgb 12y ago
The premise of Uber is that there were tremendous and ill-gotten gains being nefariously produced by taxi cartels. By busting them up, they could provide people with better service at an equal or lower price - all while ridding cities of a
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by alexqgb 12y ago
I'd be willing to bet you've never built a successful business that handles everything done by Apple in-house. If you had, you'd already be doing everything yourself (and doing it better that Apple) and happily collecting mor
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by alexqgb 12y ago
One of the most notable differences between the Industrial and Information revolutions is that wealth from the former was underwritten by a surge in energy. Wealth from the latter depends on extracting greater value from (more or less) exis
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by alexqgb 12y ago
This is really super information. Many thanks. And yes, 7-9 years isn't close to 100. But if you think in terms of salary, and what it would mean to squander nearly all of what you make in a decade in a single year, you realize how com

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