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Congressional Testimony

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James Cameron's Terminator 3 was the REALLY prophetic one. That's why Skynet sent a robot back to the 1990s to prevent him from ever making it, ultimately handing the franchise over to other directors.
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jlvanderzwan
2416 days ago
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Turns out our Achilles heel is our need for social connections, not war.

Which, given in which of the two situations you're more likely to let your guard down, makes some kinds of sense actually.
alt_text_at_your_service
2417 days ago
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James Cameron's Terminator 3 was the REALLY prophetic one. That's why Skynet sent a robot back to the 1990s to prevent him from ever making it, ultimately handing the franchise over to other directors.

Board Game

12 Comments and 34 Shares
Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.
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louloupix
3378 days ago
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XD
[deleted]
3377 days ago
c'est con!
infogulch
3380 days ago
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more like *bored* game, amirite?
Missouri
acdha
3381 days ago
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There's absolutely no way you'd want to defend gamers’ rules lawyering to real lawyers in tax court
Washington, DC
Lythimus
3381 days ago
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I feel this way about the 19xx board game series. At some point it's just too complex and becomes work.
sulrich
3381 days ago
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watch out H&R block!
alt_text_bot
3381 days ago
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Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.
bronzehedwick
3381 days ago
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Perfect!
Tarrytown, NY
JayM
3381 days ago
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ROFL. :)
Atlanta, GA
bokesan
3381 days ago
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Pure genius!
Hannover, Germany
jimwise
3381 days ago
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Tee-hee
bodly
3381 days ago
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Excellent idea!
Austin, TX

Patent Trolls are Only the Symptom

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I was going to write a post on how trolls aren’t the fundamental problem with the patent system but Timothy Lee has it covered:

…trolls aren’t the primary problem with the patent system. They’re just the problem Congress is willing to fix. The primary problem with the patent system is, well, the patent system. The system makes it too easy to get broad, vague patents, and the litigation process is tilted too far toward plaintiffs. But because so many big companies make so much money off of this system, few in Congress are willing to consider broader reforms.

A modern example is Microsoft, which has more than 40,000 patents and reportedly earns billions of dollars per year in patent licensing revenues from companies selling Android phones. That’s not because Google was caught copying Microsoft’s Windows Phone software (which has never been very popular with consumers). Rather, it’s because low standards for patents — especially in software — have allowed Microsoft to amass a huge number of patents on routine characteristics of mobile operating systems. Microsoft’s patent arsenal has become so huge that it’s effectively impossible to create a mobile operating system without infringing some of them. And so Microsoft can demand that smaller, more innovative companies pay them off.

… In effect, the patent system is acting as an innovation tax, transferring wealth from companies that are creating successful technologies today to companies that acquired a lot of patents a decade ago.

A more fundamental change would be to offer patents of varying length, say 3, 7, and 20 years with the understanding that 3 year patents will be approved quickly but 20 year patents will be required to leap a high hurdle on non-obviousness, prior art and so forth. See my paper Patent Theory versus Patent Law.

My video on patents is a quick and fun introduction.

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winjer
3489 days ago
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York
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acdha
3486 days ago
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Since I was disappointed by Tabbarok yesterday, I wanted to highlight a good idea here for reducing patent abuse by adding tiers of duration.

In addition to reforming terms it'd be nice if all of our IP laws included a set annual tax of some sort to discourage maintaining monopoly status for huge portfolios which aren't actively being used.
Washington, DC

Red Panda's Little Stroll

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funny-animated-gifs-red-pandas-little-stroll

Submitted by: (via Cute Overload)

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MaryEllenCG
3557 days ago
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I need a red panda please.
Greater Bostonia
jscartergilson
3558 days ago
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Aw yeah, I'm bad.

Caktus Consulting Group: Django Logging Configuration: How the Default Settings Interfere with Yours

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My colleague Vinod recently found the answer on Stack Overflow to something that's been bugging me for a long time - why do my Django logging configurations so often not do what I think they should?

Short answer

If you want your logging configuration to behave sensibly, set LOGGING_CONFIG to None in your Django settings, and do the logging configuration from scratch using the Python APIs:

LOGGING_CONFIG = None
LOGGING = {...}  # whatever you want

import logging.config
logging.config.dictConfig(LOGGING)

Explanation

The kernel of the explanation is in this Stack Overflow answer by jcotton; kudoes to jcotton for the answer: before processing your settings, Django establishes a default configuration for Python's logging system, but you can't override it the way you would think, because disable_existing_loggers doesn't work quite the way the Django documentation implies.

The Django documentation for disable_existing_loggers in 1.6, 1.7, and dev (as of January 8, 2015) says "If the disable_existing_loggers key in the LOGGING dictConfig is set to True (which is the default) the default configuration is completely overridden." (emphasis added)

That made me think that I could set disable_existing_loggers to True (or leave it out) and Django's previously established default configuration would have no effect.

Unfortunately, that's not what happens. The disable_existing_loggers flag only does literally what it says: it disables the existing loggers, which is different from deleting them. The result is that they stay in place, they don't log any messages, but they also don't propagate any messages to any other loggers that might otherwise have logged them, regardless of whether they're configured to do so.

What if you try the other option, and set disable_existing_loggers to False? Then your configuration is merged with the previous one (the default configuration that Django has already set up), without disabling the existing loggers. If you use Django's LOGGING setting with the default LOGGING_CONFIG, there is no setting that will simply replace Django's default configuration.

Because Django installs several django loggers, the result is that unless you happened to have specified your own configuration for each of them (replacing Django's default loggers), you have some hidden loggers possibly blocking what you expect to happen.

For example - when I wasn't sure what was going on in a Django project, sometimes I'd try just adding a root logger, to the console or to a file, so I could see everything. I didn't know that the default Django loggers were blocking most log messages from Django itself from ever reaching the root logger, and I would get very frustrated trying to see what was wrong with my logging configuration. In fact, my own logging configuration was probably fine; it was just being blocked by a hidden, overriding configuration I didn't know about.

We could work around the problem by carefully providing our own configuration for each logger included in the Django default logging configuration, but that's subject to breaking if the Django default configuration changes.

The most fool-proof solution is to disable Django's own log configuration mechanism by setting LOGGING_CONFIG to None, then setting the log configuration explicitly ourselves using the Python logging APIs. There's an example above.

The nitty-gritty

The Python documentation is more accurate: "disable_existing_loggers – If specified as False, loggers which exist when this call is made are left enabled. The default is True because this enables old behavior in a backward- compatible way. This behavior is to disable any existing loggers unless they or their ancestors are explicitly named in the logging configuration."

In other words, disable_existing_loggers does literally what it says: it leaves existing loggers in place, it just changes them to disabled.

Unfortunately, Python doesn't seem to document exactly what it means for a logger to be disabled, or even how to do it. The code seems to set a disabled attribute on the logger object. The effect is to stop the logger from calling any of its handlers on a log event. An additional effect of not calling any handlers is to also block propagation of the event to any parent loggers.

Status of the problem

There's been some recent discussion on the developers' list about at least improving the documentation, with a core developer offering to review anything submitted. And that's where things stand.

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Sir Mashalot Proves How Ridiculously Homogeneous Country Songs Have Become

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Seriously, they're basically all the same song.

Submitted by: (via Sir Mashalot)

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