kefka

I would accept the accusation of defense of vigilantism, but I only highlighted the issue. I see it as a "Pot calls Kettle Black", but I do not advocate a response, other than that the courts handled it incorrectly.

I can have fault with both Google/Alphabet and Yelp. They each can have their own form of hypocrisy and potentially illegal behaviors. Me calling one out doesn't lessen the other's actions.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/13/restaurant-fights-yelps-alleged...

Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings, because good ratings are hidden since they didn't pay extortion.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f/yelp_is_blackma...

Yelp "makes 4-5 star reviews go away" when restaurant refuses to pay extortion.

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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-yelps-blackmail-lawsuit-c...

Stoppelman says that businesses want to control their reputation, and Yelp's position is to charge for that. Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion? Sure seems so.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2014/09/03/court-sa...

The courts said that "Pay to Play" isn't strictly extortion. And claims that Yelp themselves wrote bad reviews were unsubstantiated (no proof, server logs can be a 'tricksy' thing....).

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https://www.cnet.com/news/to-mock-yelp-restaurant-asks-custo...

This has gotten bad enough, that businesses are telling customers to seed YELP with good "Bad reviews".

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Seriously, when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need? There seems to be a misdirection by blaming 3rd party customers, but seriously. They're using blackmail as their market strategy.

Indeed, Google is too big and has a massive effect on the Internet across the whole world. A single capricious decision made by Google/Alphabet can cause dozens of businesses to shutter or fail. And that is a big problem, especially if we care about upstarts and new companies.

However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".

The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.

Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.

(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )

Honestly, I'd say longer than that. The Democrats have very little impetus to do them either, given their corporate funding record.

It's been about 30 years since the Democrats gave up on the working classes to cater to "Cause of the Week", "Big Media", and associated areas. Even Obama, with the ACA, set it up that we're required to pay for-profit companies for insurance. He even had a super-majority to enable Medicare for All... but didn't.

Republicans claim they're for the "Common Working Man", but time and again we see policies that ascribe to 'Socialism for the Rich, and Capitalism for the Poor'. And that's not discussing Trump, who has been criticized by both US parties for his actions. (I'm focusing on R-Congress and state governors.)

Something's got to give, and I don't see this going well at all. The fact that regulators and congress refuse to do anything is just a symptom.

I like the better question: "What is a measurement?"

What does the measurement actually entail? If a computer reads the contents, does that mean the computer is entwined with it? What does our consciousness do to the measurement?

What does the double-slit experiment show if only computers read its result? Does the result compare when we observe it?

Crazier yet, do different human observers see the same results? Has this even been tested?

There are a dozen different possibilities for what the photon has done - a dozen different universes, if you like. As long as the photon never interacts with anything else, this bundle of a dozen universes can act much the same as a single universe. Certainly if you're just looking at a telescope, all dozen versions of that telescope are behaving the same, so they behave like a single unified instance.

Well that's interesting you bring it up this way.

If what you said is possibly true, then light could be a carrier of things like multi-dimensional spin, or possibly where dark matter really comes from (inter-dimensional interference).

I know Greg Egan has discussed the possibility of infinite orthogonal dimensions that energy can leak into. And by energy conservation, the result would be things like dimensional rotation and other effects we cannot yet perceive.

One theory is that the EM-Drive uses a rudimentary version of this effect. We're all still awaiting the results.

Yeah, that may be true.. But Scihub is an onion site. That means there's not much in the way of "who", but in the way of last hop before hitting the onionsite.

And I would daresay that one should probably not trust logs when going through Tor.

Speaking of this, Utamaro's artwork is featured in one of the Freer Sackler Smithsonian Museum of Art on the Mall in Washington DC.

They have an extensive amount of his artwork on display, including 3 of his largest paintings.

I'm unsure when they're going to take it down. The exhibit was exquisitely done... But my own personal tastes - I dont like the artform. But there definitely is tremendous skill.

Well, I can see that's a factor, but not necessarily an overriding one. As someone who's taught at uni myself (not pure maths) we are not usually that cynical or fond of serving up "detritus". It's not as if we lack for valuable and interesting stuff to teach if we go through foundations too quickly, and we aren't paid just for teaching. Anyway, I think most do benefit from a quite painstakingly incrementalist approach to maths; me taking that too far and sometimes getting stuck is a personal failing.

Possibly so, but I never went in any of the grad programs. Most of the lower classes are taught by AI's and contract-based "instructors" paid by the uni on a per credit-hour basis. And much of the time, the department shovels the syllabus and required areas to them for the students.

And unfortunately, this avenue of teaching very much shows. You have instructors who have some semblance of caring, but not terribly much. They teach weeder classes with the intent of failing much of the class. Whomever is teaching isn't always able to explain what's going on in an area - they can do the process, but can't explain why their actions work.

Perhaps it is a jaded viewpoint. But after spending way too much money in "Higher Ed", along with working at an institution, I know the game. And I'm sure it's better if you're a post-doc with prestige or on that track. But the rest of us are spoon-fed bland crumbs these days, and pumped-and-dumped for excessive scholastic loans to get a job to pay the loans back with.

If you go to a good uni, at least by postgrad level you do have that kind of access, and, if you get along, you retain it for free after you leave.

Yep, and if you're not on that track, the access isn't there. I'd be willing to pay for it directly. Google had a program quite a while back, of paying experts for direct guidance in specific fields. Too bad they cancelled it.

My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Who actually runs a single DB server, with no replication, no slaves, no nothing other than the primary?

CA is the correct way to understand a single un-replicated DB instance. And it's really really wrong :)

What's that supposed to mean?

If one wants to learn anything in the sciences, we things like MIT Courseware, Arxiv, Libgen, SciHub, and "canihaspdf" on twitter. Yes, these are primarily pirate options - so what?

I can publicly see the course projections for any arbitrary degree, along with class titles. And many have book lists linked, so I can hunt for the books online using less legal methods. The only difficulty with some STEM learning paths is they require laboratories - those are hard/impossible to do at home and thusly necessitate academic environments. Computing, on the other hand, is easy to learn even at a Starbucks with a laptop and a phone.

What's stopping people from learning what they wish is primarily time and the will to (and the fact that school does a great job at beating the will to learn out).

That's not a valid criticism if you have intent and will to learn.

As for your monads example, getting into functional programming via things like CLisp, Erlang, Haskell, and the like will expose you to lambda calc pretty darn quick. And learning how monads work is near the beginning of that path.

And just being inquisitive leads to a whole lot of areas that give indications on what to learn. For example, doing computer vision enforces you to learn how linear algebra works. Machine learning teaches a great deal of how statistics works. Finite State Machines have their own really interesting niches to work with. Working a crummy operator job teaches how to do automation (on the sly!).

It really depends on how you approach learning. If you're just slowly grinding away because you have to, going through a 4 year BS degree is probably better.

My math profs always admonished us to ensure foundations are completely watertight before advancing to the next thing in tiny increments.

Of course someone who gets paid to teach would highly stress learning tidbits slowly and excruciatingly. That's their economic incentive. Schools also stress learning detritus for "learning's sake", even if the very people who teach it can't properly explain what it's actually for.

I also have learned compsci with his similar methods of finding interesting areas and digging in. I know my programming knowledge has holes, and I fill them in as I come to them. I like to know how things fit together, even if they are cross-domain and seemingly disparate. I come on in, and go "see these two areas are pretty similar, let me show you what can be done". And then I look like a miracle worker, because I see the generalities.

Frankly, professors would be more useful to me, if I could purchase their time by the hour over issues I don't understand. I can teach myself most things. Sometimes, a professional helps with the jump-start to get a good grasp.

Sure. CA fulfills that requirement. Of course, you throw away any semblance of partition tolerance.

Of course, a single machine guarantees there can be no partitioning, and really easy to obtain consensus. It might not be terribly fault-tolerant, however.

What you learned, is if you develop the automation, do NOT tell others that you did. And in your case, you should have implemented a time-delay from page-generation to page-creation, to make it look like you did it.

Ive automated a portion of my job. It does require me having to type my OTP token, but I can build more and more with my private stack. It also means I can do less and still do more.

Yep, that's what I was trying to get at, but failed in my explanation.

Everything's eventually consistent on an ever-present sphere around the incident expanding at the speed of light. No faster.

Even if the sun were to blink out of existence, we'd have 8 minutes that we wouldn't know. Gravity would still be there, holding Earth in place. The light would still warm us. Then 500 seconds later, darkness. We'd be flung out on a tangential course.

I don't think so. It's not hard to see the beginnings of a satellite communication platforms around the Moon and Mars. And once we start looking at the local solar system, we start dealing with C being a significant source of lag.

For example, communications to and from Mars can take upwards to 20 minutes, depending on where the Earth is in relation to Mars. If this doesn't call for eventual consistency, I'm not sure what would.

The more humans grow, C is a thing we'll have to take in consideration for our communications mediums. Planet-wise comms still feel instant, but that's still on our ball of rock.

Nope. Eventual Consistency seems to be the best policy.

The constant "C" isn't changing (or if it is, it's not much). that means there's a definite amount of time for a DB to be consistent to cover transit around the world. When the 3 DB machines are in the same rack, sure, we can approach 11.8"/nanosecond latencies, but the latencies are still there.

The larger and more global (and soon, interstellar), the more these C related lags become. And it is glaringly obvious to me, that "eventual consistency" is the big solution here.

The only case where it doesn't seem to be good, is transactional stuff like banking and investments. In those cases, seem to require CP and hardware like atomic clocks to verify every copy of the DB is on the same page.. Or perhaps an internal blockchain would be more appropriate, since it enforces consensus. But I digress on that one.

Perhaps you're right.

But the content is about if CloudFlare will kick off booters off their platform. And he defends them, EVEN after saying they don't even pay.

This isn't a "Should we let the KKK march in the streets?", or "Should $sexist group be able to spread propaganda?". This issue is directly about people who harm the fabric of the Internet, and the companies that knowingly allow it and continue to propagate it.

I get defending controversial things in terms of defending Free Speech. But these skiddies want to precisely use their "Free Speech" and actions to deprive others of it.

I was listening to the booing, shouts of disbelief and guffawing (and clapping) when he gave his zinger about journalists.

He was invited on stage, and continually berates Krebs. He could have did that graciously, but instead continually insults. He admits that when the Booters do pay, they're paid with stolen CCs. And then, finally attacks Krebs' standing as a Journalist.

Uh, no. Absolutely not. No way, no how.

I'll deal with Google, Amazon, Microsoft.. Whomever for a CDN. I'm not touching CloudFlare.

1. CEO is an ass.

2. Supports Booters, script kiddies, and pay-to-play blackhat hackers

3. Fucks over Tor any chance they can get.

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Proof for said allegations:

[Youtube video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW5vJyI_HcU

A: He continually berates because "he called and Brian Krebs never responded"

B: Cloudflare CEO states that the booters (ddos pay-as-you-go sites protected by cloudflare) don't even pay, or pay with stolen credit cards. And admits is "just a disaster".

C: Direct insult towards Krebs onstage "Well, who needs to actually ask questions as a journalist?" 48:08 [/Youtube Video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575047 look for user:eastdakota page text:"Yes, you can see Brian's critique of us here:"

Ok. So, how many of these are Facebook Ghost profile users?

https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr...

Oh yeah, you think you're safe because you don't have a Fb account, or closed it when it was popular to do so. Guess again... Your "friends" will keep posting you and they keep building a profile.

Better yet, I suggest people keep their Fb account, and pollute it and lock it down. Don't install the phone apps. Ban their emails with @facebook.com and @fbcdn.com . The long and short; ghost them and don't be the product.

Long and short, motors store power in magnetics when electricity is flowing. When its not, the coil loses its magnetization and turns back into electricity.

Now think of all the electricity as one big wave. Cause that's what it is. If you were running 12v , you can see upwards of 30v surge. This is bad.

The key is to equalize the power on the motor. And that's done by putting a diode in the reverse flow across the terminals. So that big flow of electrons can equalize itself BEFORE hitting other silicon (like the MOSFET or your RasPi).

Ideally, you want to do this for motors, electromagnets, solenoids, and inductors(well, unless you're doing an L-based filter , but aside the point). They all have this magnetic energy->electricity->surge thing going for them.

I fixed it. I thought when Firefox saved the Web Page complete, it was doing inline uuencoded binary as part of the the image tag. I was wrong.

There's still a few hits to the 2 sites I updated, but no real content. The text and images (what actually matters here) is all IPFSified.

Well, yeah. Shrooms and Weed are the two I could think of that would easily support hydroponic grow systems. Ideally, I could see them taking off in the Southwest, given intensity of the sun and win power. The only thing that would really cost is water, and that should be closed-loop as much as possible. I'd wonder if some of the new metal-organo-frameworks could efficiently get water from the air as they were reported to do.

But republicans are still moralizing christians that wish to force their ideals upon others. Because if anything's been shown, cannabis is one hell of a tax generator and mucho underutilized commerce. But aside this illegal usage in most jurisdictions, this could suffice growing in bad environments or to people with way too much money to spend.

There could be a different segment; people who want guaranteed food supply. And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee. I could also see this as a non-profit as well, with low income and homeless getting free access.

Well, it's now immortalized as a hash in IPFS. Good luck censoring that.

http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeLsfKxF4dhmyX2FSGotaDPmMEqe8p3...

UPDATED HASH: http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUayNU49TWHMid6pSEBSKPAHsxJkTnd...

There's still a few hits going to Tumblr and fonts.gstatic.com , but all the actual content is safely inside IPFS and being served from in there. I'll let someone else rip the external calls out.

Well..

I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.

Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.

The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.

To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.

This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.

My critique.... You can look me up as kefka in your system as well. I had a chance to play quite a bit over the weekend :D

1. The tutorial could use significant tightening up. compact it to 1/4 of the text/messages/popups. Think of this as a grind, get them through fast to start playing.

2. Allow undoing moves until the "End Turn" is done. More than a few times, I mis-clicked move on the same square a piece was, and effectively did a NO-OP. Even if it was a global-undo that reset the turn's condition would be better than nothing.

3. For early-mid game, mages seem vastly overpowered. I was expecting a rock-paper-scissors mechanic but Mages seem to blast anything under Centaur away... Even the knight hiding in the mountains gets slaughtered.

4. Let me hit my own units. Sometimes when a pile-on is going on, I want to off my 3hp horse to move in a Giant.

5. Too many catapult types. There is a difference between them, but not really. Perhaps the Fire-catapult could be a area-of-effect fire bomb, including hitting your own units?

6. Sound would be nice, but lower priority than these.

IPFS and blockchain are technologies that are built on top of the internet - they assume a network connection already exists.

I wont speak for blockchains. Call them by the boring name as "Append-only databases with a consensus mechanism on what to add, with a proof-of-something to affirm that work of some soft was done".

IPFS is different. They have already planned that IP4 isn't the next thing. Or IP6, or IP8, and on. They created what they call a MultiAddr that encodes the protocol definition to explain to peers and IPFS what protocol stack to use, and then lay IPFS on top of that.

Obviously when a new protocol comes into play, they add a new multiaddr type for the new protocol, and off you go.

I think you might be on to something, but the big problem here is that the Input is hundreds of GB or TB's . It's hard to understand what a feature is, or even why it's selected.

I can certainly observe what's being selected once the state machine is generated, but I have no clue how it was constructed to make the features. Do determine that, I have to watch the state of the machine as it "grows" to the final result.