avn2109

86 ms·

811.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "... why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do [piracy]?" Because in market societies, we have all been trained since birth to find the goods and services we want at the low
812.
by avn2109 12y ago
GP here. You're right about the relative unimportance of the side point. However, the main point is not a prescriptive argument that the product _should_ be free, but rather a descriptive argument that the product _is_ free. I claim th
813.
by avn2109 12y ago
You're missing the key fact in the piracy debate, which is that _the market value of a recorded film/music/whatever is ~zero._ It follows from the laws of supply and demand. As a thought experiment, imagine this this: tomorro
814.
by avn2109 12y ago
This is something I've been harping about for a long time. Apple is a _user experience_ company, not a hardware or software company (perhaps they're the only UX company out there). There's an old saw about the railroads getti
815.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "The current "tech bubble" is just one of multiple bubbles being driven by an even larger bubble in public equities..." This is interesting. Could you elaborate on some of the other sub-bubbles? Not being faceti
816.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "I'd like to say that I don't care one whit if a bunch of rich people suddenly loose their money, but if history has anything to show, it's that they'll somehow figure out a way to make the rest of us feel
817.
by avn2109 12y ago
The article's essential claim is that the workers do not own the means of production in any meaningful sense, despite the careful legal fictions to the contrary. The claim is that Uber et al have developed a way to own the upsides (aka
818.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "It's entirely possible that the NSA has hacked Apple, or that an Apple employee has been subverted by the NSA and inserted a back door into the encryption system." "Entirely possible" is the understatement
819.
by avn2109 12y ago
Do they only hire people at This American Life who sound like Ira Glass? This guy is like a carbon copy. It's uncanny.
820.
by avn2109 12y ago
Unfortunately that photo was on a spinning-platter hard drive and I knew nothing about backups. Of course it's still on one of Columbia's servers somewhere but liberating it would involve an unbelievable amount of red tape.
821.
by avn2109 12y ago
Well, I was a poor white kid from flyover country. I slacked off all through high school while hating the cruelty and boredom, and did my best to get terrible grades. I knew nothing about test-prep, and buying a Kaplan book would have been
822.
by avn2109 12y ago
It would be amazingly naive to think that the various alphabet agencies have not made it their business to penetrate a wide variety of business, government, and NGO organizations. If it makes you feel any better, the Russians have plants in
823.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "I have yet to see a practical implementation of the above, though." "Practical" is of course used here in the loosest possible sense :)
824.
by avn2109 12y ago
Geer is a pretty salient guy. There are several gems buried deep in the text here: >> "For me, trust is the availability of effective recourse." That's a tidy little definition, and quite pithy. And this next one might
825.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "Now about those winters..." Well, some Minnesotans consider the winters a feature, not a bug. They keep the Californians out. I accept my downvotes with dignity.
826.
by avn2109 12y ago
shhhhhhh... you are giving away my secrets.
827.
by avn2109 12y ago
However, the balance of power in our society has now shifted to the point where the NSA is trivially capable of securing the judges' cooperation. So the "help of the judge" will be granted anytime the NSA asks for it, and in
828.
by avn2109 12y ago
Intuitively this seems right, but I wouldn't mind hearing more about what exactly the general populace is misunderstanding there.
829.
by avn2109 12y ago
Time magazine doesn't mention much of a solution, but [0] was on HN a few days ago and might fit the bill. FWIW I was a bit of a skeptic before reading this, but now I'm pretty convinced that we've been Doing It Wrong for man
830.
by avn2109 12y ago
Well, there is a right way to interact with the police, and many wrong ways. E.g. pull over (waaaay over. Much farther than you think is plausible), hands visible at all times, very slow movements, eye contact, dome lights on, shoulder musc
831.
by avn2109 12y ago
Yeah, the startup costs of helicopters are large. A Marine quartermaster once told me that it costs $N,000 just to turn a military helicopter on, because after you turn it off you have to do a bunch of maintenance tasks no matter what. And
832.
by avn2109 12y ago
What about using "finally," which if IIRC is already a thing in Python and encapsulates this idea pretty neatly?
833.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "Experienced journalists aren't staying in the game because there's no money in it. The ones who do stay in it are one of three things: crazy, passionate about the job despite the compensation, or not dependent on th
834.
by avn2109 12y ago
That is exactly, precisely the spirit of the (all) law. Except instead of $media creation or distribution companies, we should probably say $entities. And maybe add an addendum that says "unless you are a larger, more powerful entity.&
835.
by avn2109 12y ago
>> "since they have to if flagged down" hahahahah. They don't; not even close.
836.
by avn2109 12y ago
Building a city from scratch and designing it primarily with private automobile traffic in mind is a textbook case of Doing It Wrong. The only sane approach would be to build a subway (or maybe streetcars that have right-of-way) and then st
837.
Ask HN: Best practices to harden your personal-finance security posture?
1 points by avn2109 12y ago|1 comments
838.
by avn2109 12y ago
If Joseph Heller somehow reads this, he is going to wish that he thought of that.
839.
by avn2109 12y ago
Of course you're right about that---the market value of a rare, non-torrentable opera recording ought not to be zero. But in practice the overwhelming majority of all content that anyone ever wants is eminently torrentable. I am not cl
840.
by avn2109 12y ago
And to play the devil's advocate here: The supply of all video and audio and text content is ~infinite because of torrents, so the laws of supply and demand dictate that its price fall to ~0 for any finite demand. As an example, if tom

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