william42

North Carolina teachers have no union.

GM was at least on the verge of bankruptcy a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure that can be attributed more to massively underestimating how much healthcare would cost in 2008 during a union negotiation several decades prior than to any sort of dirty tricks.

Being a non-profit does not make you decentralized.

I'm skeptical of the legitimacy of any business that advertises itself mostly through spam.

Wikipedia is exactly as centralized as StackOverflow, in that it's all in a single site but licensed under Creative Commons.

An Erlang crash is of an Erlang process, which is a tiny green-thread with shared-nothing. That's very different from a C program segfaulting.

The main thing is that you'd need a new set of abstractions for security, and then you'd need to implement HTML5 on it anyways to do all the things we can do on a computer now.

No original research is because otherwise Wikipedia would be infested with physics cranks.

The censorship doesn't really work when it's in the URL.

Well, the actual content and information is only one side of the coin. The other side is taking bad content off.

Link me to Something Awful actually supporting these laws.

No, but the image+caption is different from just the image.

Currency markets exist, but most currency trading is a lot more short-term.

Holding USD is rarely an investment. You put money in your checking account(as opposed to a savings account/CD, which is an investment in the bank) because you expect to spend it(you know, what money is for?) soon. Only banks hold large amounts of USD and they almost immediately loan it out.

And you're right, it's unfair to compare gold to Bitcoin. There are people actually using Bitcoin as a currency, whereas gold is almost exclusively exchanged for actual currencies, which are then exchanged for goods and services.

And the failure of the Zim dollar is the reason they recently returned to the gold standard. Oh wait, no, they switched to USD.

Didn't the Oakland A's stop being successful precisely because every other team picked up their methods?

There are index funds that swap out exactly the same way the Dow does.

Ew. Is there a version of that graph that's on a logarithmic scale?

When is the last time that you purchased a product or service using gold?

Hint: the value of USD isn't as an investment. In fact, if the value of USD goes up, that makes it less useful, because the point of having money is to spend it. For example, one of the many reasons of the utter trainwreck of Bitcoin is the fact that more people were holding it as speculation than actually using it to purchase anything.

And it's only 3% in the last year if you aren't trying to compare it to something mid-bubble. The USD is totally going down with respect to tech stocks, guys!

Aren't Bill Gates and Warren Buffett currently trying to spend as much of their money as possible on charity work, as well as lobbying to get the amount of taxes they have to pay increased?

"If you had bought and held the stocks that make up the Dow over 60 or 70 years, you'd have gotten demolished because the Dow constantly shuffles its index."

No, but if you put your money into an index fund, you'd be shuffling your money exactly when Dow did.

Yeah, the Prime Directive seems to be more "we don't want to completely fuck up a less developed culture by accident" than anything else.

I think he's claiming that plays are more popular in Europe.

And this doesn't apply to Holocaust deniers because...

The followup "Colour, social beings, and undecidability" http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/24 is also pretty good.

Actually, my first thought was "This reminds me of Enso", Enso being the predecessor to Ubiquity(by the same people before they were hired by Mozilla), but integrated into the desktop as a whole rather than the browser.

Unfortunately, my main complaint with Enso and Ubiquity was that both were unfortunately rather buggy. And given Ubuntu's track record with Unity, I suspect that it will be just as buggy.

"Here's one way to start: remove direct elections of senators. It makes lobbyists having to deal with 50 separate state legislatures rather than 100 individuals."

Lobbyists hear this and think "Oh boy! I get to deal with a set of elections that the average voter cares even less about than Congressional ones!"

Personally, I'd go the other way around, and switch to a Westminster system where you only have one vote for federal office, meaning that plans like Obama's small-donor system would be more feasible for the elections that really matter: legislative ones.

The former is what Megaupload was doing, though. They had software to download YT videos and upload them on Megavideo.

Two things that Megaupload didn't do. I think the moral of the Megaupload story is not to trust sites run by guys convicted of credit card fraud.

Honestly, this is the thing that annoys me the most about the Occupy Wall Street slogan of "the 99% vs the 1%"; income is a power distribution and there really isn't a threshold you can step over and become rich.

Not that it really matters, since what catches fire politically is only modestly correlated with what is actually true.

I think that when you use a magnet link it either includes the tracker (which is the part of BitTorrent that tracks the seeds) in the text of the link or uses a more sophisticated technology called a Distributed Hash Table.