A note to all of my friends or those who would friend me
Could you also please friend ext-12344 by clicking here: ( Read more... )

Someone I know pointed me at an interesting article about 'russophobia' and the long and conflicted history of US public opinion of Russia. One of the points being made was that complaining about Trump being under Russian influence is pretty rich given that we essentially placed Yeltsin in power in Russia in the 90s. Either that article, or a ( Read more... )

I have an excellent a clear-cut example of the market can fail both workers and consumers in the service of owners.

Target is currently facing a fairly large petition to not open until a reasonable hour on Black Friday so its employees can actually spend Thanksgiving with family. You might think this is just a workers issue, but it isn't. Many ( Read more... )

One interesting phenomena I've noticed recently is a tendency to categorize something (and often dismiss it) based on plot mechanic. "The Hunger Games" has been compared to numerous other 'many enter, one leaves, and everybody watches' stories, especially ones involving children. "Limitless" gets compared to any other story involving medical ( Read more... )

This problem exists in many more contexts than people might otherwise think of. I came to this realization recently while talking with someone about why I really did think her choice to shop around based on price was an admirable one even if I, personally didn't do it.

In that context, I'm a free rider. I reap the benefits of the people who do shop ( Read more... )

I went to watch the much hyped movie today. I was prepared to be revolted, and I was. Not by the movie, or the story. It was well-told, powerful and moving.

I heard people chat idly about the theme appearing in other movies. I saw them smiling as they exited the theater, talking about the finer points of the plot. I saw them wearing nice clothes ( Read more... )

IPv6 is supposed to solve all of the peer connectivity issues introduced by NAT. And, on the surface, it seems to do just that by making it possible to assign a unique, globally routable IP address to every conceivable device that could possibly want one.

But this doesn't really solve the problem of peer connectivity.

My cell phone, for example, ( Read more... )

Today, a comment I got really rankled me. My affection and desire for technologies that are not freedom hostile was called a 'religious issue'. This trivializes my desire, and makes it seem like someone has to 'drink the kool-aid' to think the issue is real. And that's insulting.

I find this particularly upsetting given how many people rallied to ( Read more... )

I'm working on a small library to express computations in terms of composable trees of dependencies. These dependencies can cross thread boundaries allowing one thread to depend on a result generated in another thread. This is sort of a riff on the whole promise and future concept, but the idea is that you have chains of these with a potential ( Read more... )

I used to have a really good idea of what the architecture of a system that had to respond to multiple different possible sources of input or other reasons to do things (such as some interval of time expiring). My idea was basically to make everything purely event-driven and have big event loops at the heart of the program that dispatched events ( Read more... )