Posts by veti

Re: for the add!

Sorry, I must be very slow - what precisely does "hyperspace into the space station" involve?

Re: I'm self-created I am

I can't accept anyone using "-person" as a substitute for "-man".

If they were serious, they'd say "-peroffspring".

Zeros are an Arabic invention, so it's cultural appropriation for us to use them at all. All languages, including binary, should be redefined to use Roman or, if you prefer, Greek numerals. That means, among other things, no zeros.

I agree. Even though I sympathise with the idea, many of these terms are not reasonable substitutions. And of those that are, it's far from clear that they're improvements.

A slave is not a peer, nor is a master a primary. Built in is not the same as native. Click, enter and tap are three very different things (none of which can safely be substituted for hit). Special characters is already an overloaded term, and using it as a synonym for illegal characters would not help anyone.

If you want to write a style guide, you need to define precisely what each term means and how to choose the correct one in each context. That's something that needs to be done by someone reasonably conversant with the subject matter. I don't think that's happened in this case.

Re: Hacked and whacked

Been doing that for years, I must have created scores of those databases, ranging from a few hundred "people" to 50,000 or more. They're called test or dev systems.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has raided any of them.

I suspect many companies do this routinely. And I also suspect hackers are aware of this, and have ways to tell the difference.

Re: All we need is ....

If them brainy scientists could do that, they could make a fortune without government help. There's a Nobel waiting for the first useful demo of room-temperature superconductors, for a start.

Re: What, exactly, is 'free speech'

Then the answer is even simpler, because the companies have no power to remove, promote or delete individual comments. All they could do would be to remove the whole platform.

If they can edit at the individual comment or thread level, then they have to do it.

This "platform" nonsense is precisely what S230 lets them get away with. They're having their cake and eating it too - they're policing (and promoting) comments according to whatever rules they feel like, but without accepting responsibility. That's what has to stop.

Re: What, exactly, is 'free speech'

To me it seems simple. Every company that dabbles in social media needs to ask itself: are we merely providing a platform here, or are we publishing these comments?

If comments are being "promoted" (or the opposite) - regardless of whether this is done by a single big team, or by crowdsourcing, or algorithm - then they are a publisher, and should be prepared to answer as a publisher for what they put out.

Re: Facebook and Twiter aren't the internet I know and love...

Which specific "many other sites" do you have in mind?

The cesspool that is YouTube? Yep, they can afford it (and they bloody well should). Wikis? Easy to monitor and police, at least until they come under concerted attack. Porn hubs? Already dealing successfully with much more onerous requirements in the name of consent and age verification.

Or are you thinking of the approximately 74,655,587 sites that solicit reader comments on absolutely everything, like Reddit or El Reg? El Reg, as a reminder, is already successfully operating under the tighter limitations of English law - like many of the better candidates in this group.

Or Usenet? Already quite neatly divided into moderated and unmoderated groups, which is the way everyone should have stayed. No problem there.

No, I'm all for ending the madness that is S230 right now.

Re: Yeah well

Remember, Covid only kills - at worst - less than 2% of its victims. Not enough to seriously thin the herd.

But anti-vaxxers are numerous enough to undermine the attempt to reach herd immunity. They can still screw it up for the rest of us, without paying a significantly worse price themselves.

This isn't over yet.

Re: Piggly Wiggly

Tesla at least has a business plan that creates the possibility it will grow into those sorts of earnings. Crucially, it also lacks the weight of historical liabilities that crushed GM - the unfunded pension promises, the long history of commitments and favours and expectations that basically every company accrues over time.

I presume it will acquire these, or similar liabilities, as it grows - but as yet it's relatively unencumbered by them.

It's also, of course, brutally defended by Elon Musk, who protects and nurtures the share price with a reality distortion field that rivals that of Steve Jobs in his prime. And who also, I notice, did his bit to pump Gamestop.

Re: Piggly Wiggly and the Perils of Good Smack and Great Crack

Shorting stock is not collusion. It only requires one party making the decision to take the risk.

And as discussed ad nauseam already, it's a bet. It can be won or lost. This idea that hedge funds have some kind of sorcery that makes them immune to losing such bets is sheer fantasy. They lose them all the time, it's just that they don't like to brag about it when it happens.

(It's true that they do win more than they lose. If they didn't, they'd be out of business. But that is not proof of cheating: it's evidence that, actually, they really are better at this game than Jo Random on Reddit.)

And they have every right to be angry. But piling good money into a pump and dump scheme is hardly a constructive way to channel that anger.

Let them vote out the politicians who stood against furlough. Let them impose new forms of taxes on Wall Street. Those would be useful and meaningful ways to respond. Throwing good money after bad into a pyramid scheme is not going to do anything except make the poor that much poorer.

Re: Piggly Wiggly

They don't "know full well" what will happen. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.

The stock price at a given moment is supposed to reflect a consensus on what the company is worth. If you think that consensus is wrong, one way or the other, you can place a bet on its changing in your predicted direction. That's what shorting is.

Like any bet, you can lose.

But if the answer was clear cut, so that you could be sure, then the consensus view would already have absorbed it, so the movement you're betting on wouldn't happen. To make money, you need to either have more information or be better at analysing it than most other people.

Re: Piggly Wiggly

Uh huh. So could you explain, why do you think Gamestop is fundamentally worth as much as IKEA?

That's the bottom line here. What is the company worth? What would you pay for its assets and its business?

There's not the slightest doubt that the answer to that is "way, way less than current valuation." Nobody even tries to argue about that. Which means the current valuation is clearly unrealistic and unsustainable. The key word being "clearly".

And no, that is not "a normal day on Wall St". Collusion to manipulate a stock price is illegal. And for good reason.

Once again:

When scientists say things like "we should do this", "we must do that", they are exceeding their remit. Their job is to say "If we do this, then based on the current data and models, the outcome will be this".

Ditto the economists. They too don't get to say what we should do, just what is likely to happen if we do it.

It's the politicians' jobs to look at these outcomes and decide which ones they would prefer to head for. That's what we elect them for.

Australia and New Zealand say hi.

There are no colluders. That would require mutual trust. I doubt that exists in this case.

There's just a race to sell, while trying to cover your tracks by pretending you're still holding.

Re: the misbegotten Section 230 gives Amazon the power to censor

I have a better idea than the lazy lawmakers who allowed themselves to be blagged into passing it.

It creates a whole new category of companies, which exists only online, which enjoy all the power of a publisher without the legal liability. And that's what has given us the present rotten state of misinformation.

I have no problem with people posting lies, porn, violent extremism or whatever. That's freedom. It's not always pretty, but it's necessary. The problem comes when an algorithm, owned and run by some company that hides behind a self-assigned designation like "platform", picks up the material and actively feeds it to people who weren't even aware of the originator, because moar clicks.

Re: Hypocrites

If the victims of such actions want to take their case to court, I for one will be happy to discuss the outcomes with you under those stories. But you don't get to just say that as if we all know what the outcome would be.

Twitter often acts, quickly, to take down material that crosses its lines. Parler made no discernable effort to do so,despite promising that it would. These things make all the difference between "viable business model" and "vanity wankfest".

Re: Not all countries are founded on socialist beliefs

Where is this "anti-conservatism" you speak of?

Is it anti-conservative to quote the ruling of a judge, now? Is it anti-conservative to believe that your country's long established process for changing its government should be allowed to work? Or that a private company should be allowed to make its own business decisions?

Words are supposed to have meanings. But I guess once you've admitted "alternative facts", it probably becomes a bit hard to remember what "conservative" really is.

Re: Censorship by Private Companies

Ah, but the content absolutely was their business. Because the misbegotten Section 230 gives Amazon the power to censor, they have no way to resist public and/or political pressure to do so, when it becomes overwhelming.

Freedom of speech has always had limits like this. The first amendment protects the press from the govt, but not from angry mobs.

Re: Picking sides

There is only one "version" of the election results. In all his phoned-in phoney "challenges", Trump never got around to articulating what he thought the true numbers were.

However, your underlying point is valid. Just because the RNC decisively lost, does not make it necessary (or prudent, or right) for other organisations to dogpile on them.

Re: So this is what we're going to have for the next 4 years

Can we please stop using the word terrorist here?

Terrorism is about causing terror. The clue is in the name. While I'm sure some of the people who assaulted the capitol had this in mind, I don't for a minute suppose that most of them were thinking anything so coherent. Because if they were, they would have been a lot scarier. And better coordinated.

Call it insurrection if you want. And yes, Trump is personally guilty of sedition by any reasonable standard. But terrorism it wasn't.

Re: George R.R. Martin, author of A Clash of Kings

You think disunity started with Trump?

If everyone, but most especially the DNC, had actually been listening to those people before 2016, maybe we'd never have had to put up with Trump.