"Marriage is for white people" - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500029.html <comment><USER3> > Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a > package deal that comes with marriage.

The American legal system right now is absolutely draconian and broken to men. A man can try to be a good father and husband, do nothing wrong except be a bit of a putz, then his wife divorces him, gets full custody of the kids, and 30-50% of his after-tax income. She receives more money if he doesn't get custody of the kids, so women who don't like a man often fight for that.

So people mention prenups as a way to make sure these things are understood. Unfortunately, prenuptial agreements "that weren't fair enough" routinely get thrown out of court. If the prenup was "under duress", it gets thrown out. That includes the man saying he won't get married without the prenup - <USER2> means it was under duress and coerced, toss that sucker, split everything up.

Now most guys give it a try anyway, and say, "Well, I'm different, I'm going to have a stronger relationship and do xyz and zyx and...." - and that's admirable. But a lot of people look at the courts and want nothing to do with it. Anyone who is familiar with how otherwise good and nice people act when they're given ridiculous leverage and power gets a little scared at the court system.

There's other factors. But black people know this. I had the radio on yesterday, and "celebrity news" came on. A rapper named Nas - black man who was married to a black woman - is now getting divorced. One child. He's got to pay $150,000 _per month_ in alimony and child support.

Some teenager hears that on the radio, thinks it's crazy, and decides he's rather uninterested in marriage. If the laws were made less brutal, I think you'd see more people marrying, marrying at an earlier age, having more children, and paradoxically - I think the divorce rate would go down. Certainly, it'd be hard to make something worse than the current state of affairs.

<comment><USER4> The American legal system has lots of things that are very hard to explain to foreigners. The sheer amount of case law and the jury system make for lots of income for lawyers and very little justice.

Child support should be limited to what it actually costs to rear a child, not some arbitrary multiple of that.

<comment><USER5> It varies from child to child. If someone's child is in some rich boarding school, I personally think they should be allowed to continue on at that school unless it is financially infeasible for both parents to live apart and still afford it.

If the 'bare minimum' of raising a child is $300/month, then I don't think they the child should necessarily be forced out of their school and into the public school system or something just _because_ that's the bare minimum. I think that these factor should be taken into account.

disclaimer: I am _not_ a rich person, nor do I have any children.

{edit} That said, if the monthly child-support is determined to be really high based on the child going to an expensive school, the child-support payment should be reduced if the custodial parent decides to pull the child out of that school for a cheaper one {/edit}

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the risk of stepping on a landmine, what if the issue isn't so much black people aren't marrying as (a large portion of) black men are unmarriagable? (Unemployed or underemployed, have drug problems, involved with the criminal justice system, etc. Pick any socioeconomic system you want to look at, young single black males do not come out looking great in aggregate.)

Combine that with a cultural norm in (a large portion of) the black community to not get married outside of one's race, and you'd expect to see this.

You could construct other situations where marriagable women outnumber marriagable men and see what that does to the marriage rates, too. Example: college practically anywhere in the United States in the 2000s, compared to college in past generations. When the population is about fifty-fifty male/female, the equilibrium favors a lot of pairings. When it is 60/40 F/M, at least 1/3 of women are structurally incapable of being in a traditional monogamous relationship. (Then add in the cultural change that happens once some portion of men realize this and act on it -- the "hookup culture".)

<comment><USER7> _Combine that with a cultural norm in (a large portion of) the black community to not get married outside of one's race, and you'd expect to see this._

You'll notice that the author never suggests that black women look to men in the other 78% of the US population for a potential husband. I guess that would be worse than never getting married.

<comment><USER7> Edit: should be other 87% of the US population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "How have we gotten here? What has shifted in African American customs, in our community, in our consciousness, that has made marriage seem unnecessary or unattainable?"

Well, for one thing: Welfare. Welfare was created at a time when most poor, single moms were "the deserving poor" -- ie widowed -- and having a child out of wedlock was a big taboo and hardly done. Welfare, while well-meaning, was (unfortunately) designed in a manner that rewards women for becoming poor, single moms -- and thus actively grew the population that fits this profile by changing the social contract. Although (iirc) most people on welfare are white, the small amount of money involved in getting food stamps and welfare is more alluring to people who are very poor and live in neighborhoods where the mentality is one of hopelessness, with no expectation that one can get ahead honestly. Add in the fact that blacks are "last hired, first fired" and the tendency for young black males to be the biggest victim of that reality, and you have a situation ripe for developing a culture where a woman has a baby by one man, gets on welfare, breaks up with him and then finds a different boyfriend -- in part because a father is expected to provide for his kids (and gets booted out the door when he cannot) but mom's new boyfriend is seen as generous for doing anything for the kids, even if he doesn't actually provide for them. "Gifts" are enough.

There are some books, articles and studies about such things. I've read a fair amount of stuff like that over the years.

On the upside, I've seen some stuff that indicates that black women tend to have more say in how the money is spent when they are part of a couple than white women do. The paychecks of black women are more needed for a black couple to make it at all. The paycheck of a married white woman who has kids is more likely to be seen as "fun money" -- something the family can spend on vacations and other extras but not really needed for basic necessities -- and this tends to carry with it less "voting" power when financial decisions are made.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is the American obsession with race? I'm sure there's a more useful explanation behind these rates (perhaps family tradition of marriage, income, place of living etc. etc.).

<comment><USER10> I'm not American, but Americans get a bad rap on race relations. Go to other westernized countries and racism is far more systemic. I mean for crying out loud, you have the gypsies all across Europe who are marginalized, Spanish fans taunting a black F1 driver with the "N" word, Japan is a completely xenophobic mess, etc. All otherwise comparable countries in terms of standard of living. Except the United States is in a state where most races live side- by-side and tolerate each other. No, things aren't perfect and people aren't fully accepting of each other. It's 2009, but interracial marriage is still bothersome to some folks. But honestly, the United States gets a really unfair reputation for having poor race relations. Say what you will, but at least Americans don't sweep their race relation problems under a rug like some other countries.

<comment><USER11> As an American with lots of time abroad, I can second this. Americans _are_ extremely uptight when it comes to race, but that might be a _good thing_. With all of the talk in America about race, you might start to expect, as I have caught myself doing several times, that the US must be a race relations disaster. Upon returning, I was shocked to rediscover that it wasn't any worse than the other places I'd been, and in many cases better.

The thing I really like about Americans, is they're just don't throw up their hands and say "oh well, that's the way its always been, can't do anything to change it now." (The gypsies definitely come to mind here) For better or worse, they try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Many of the conclusions drawn about marriage apply to many Americans...regardless of race.

</comment><comment><USER13> "He believes that his presence and example in the home is why both his sons decided to marry when their girlfriends became pregnant."

How about just not getting girls pregnant in the first place?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm really torn between whether this is about those crazy black kids that won't get off my lawn, or the future our society is heading in... ideas?

<comment><USER14> Maybe it'll be like europe some how where people seem to not get married in large numbers.

<comment><USER15> And they do not get a lot of kids either. (In most parts.) Though that does not seem to correlate. Fertility in Scandinavia is relatively high for European standards, and they do not care too much about wedlock any longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> don't get government sanctioned contracts involved in personal relationships. doubly so if you aren't even religious.

people used to get married out of necessity and social pressure. that necessity is disappearing.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wouldn't worry. Whites are going down the crapper pretty fast too. Take a look at this chart: <http://blog.american.com/?p=714>

Marriage is for wealth-preservers and wealth-creators. That's not the direction that society is trending.

</comment><comment><USER18> And how does this relate to hacker news?

<comment><USER19> From the HN guidelines:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

<comment><USER20> The HN-worthiness of this article aside, I continue to be amazed just how quickly and how far anyone who posits the question is down voted.

It's surprising how all the diverse interests here share such an extreme intolerance for this meta discussion. It's a fascinating dynamic.

<comment><USER21> pg says it's boring. I'm increasingly inclined to agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Blacks and their slavery shoulder chip, GET OVER IT

Newsflash : "more Irish were sold as slaves to the American colonies and plantations from 1651 to 1660 than the total existing "free" population of the Americas"

<http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT>

<http://www.scoilgaeilge.org/academics/slaves.htm>

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland's population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain's solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

[http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great- the-...](http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian- hercules/the-irish-slave-trade-forgotten-white-slaves/)

<comment><USER23> First - great collection of links. The history of slavery deserves a more thorough understanding than what's normally taught in high school.

And yet, it was not the Irish who couldn't vote as late as the 60s, nor were the Irish the ones in segregated schools through the 70s, nor were there Irish divisions of the armed forces in World War II sent on the most dangerous missions. There were not masses of Irishmen enslaved in the south (de jure, and then defacto) through the 1800s and 1900s.

Are black people the only people to be oppressed and discriminated against in history? Clearly not. But as late as 4 decades ago, well within the lifetime of people _still alive_ , black people have suffered a far greater weight of discrimination than any other ethnic group in America.

The after-effects of recent black slavery and segregation continue to be felt today. Saying "get over it" suggests a lack of understanding of the ways that those effects still persist.

<comment><USER24> The problem is that using the criteria of "well within the lifetime of people alive" is arbitrary. Nazis killed six million Jews -- an evil much worse than slavery -- well within the lifetime of people alive. All sorts of people having been doing all sorts of mean things to other people well within the lifetime of people alive.

I'm in my 40s, which means that I never knew a society that wouldn't allow blacks to vote. I certainly had nothing to do with slavery. I used to find this identity politics justified, then amusing (as I thought through it some more), and now it's just feeble.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those that start each day looking for opportunities and those that start each day looking to the past. I'd rather be the second kind of person. So I don't discriminate based on color, won't put up with others who do, and am finished with considering race an interesting or important issue.

As an aside, there's a serious issue with segregating population based on skin color (as opposed to any other random collection of genes)for purposes of commentary -- it actually reinforces the idea that somehow people of one color are different than another. Of course we all know that patterns appear in the genetic pool, but using skin color as a predominant discriminating factor is, as best, misguided. At worst, it can cause the exact types of behavior we all agree is so bad.

<comment><USER25> " those that start each day looking for opportunities and those that start each day looking to the past. I'd rather be the second kind of person."

Did you mean "I'd rather be the _first_ kind of person." ? The sentence seems to shift in meaning when you change that word, to one that fits the paragraph more.

<comment><USER24> Brain fart. Doh!

Yes. You're right.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Corduroy: A billing system for your startup (launched today) - <AUTHOR> http://corduroysite.com/

<comment><USER2> Very nicely done. It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up against Blinksale. The price is reasonable when compared with Blinksale and the like, but you'll probably want to make this $59/mo unlimited or a high number of invoices, and create sub-plans that, for example, with $10 a month, you can send out x invoices.

Just some thoughts.

By the way, I've always wondered this. How do you reroute subdomain.corduroysite.com? DNS things? In other words - how do you recognize that _subdomain_.corduroysite.com is the account name? I haven't been able to figure this out, but it's probably because I've been on shared hosting forever :)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. judging from the comments here already, i think a lower-priced restricted plan is needed. i'll work on that tonight...

for subdomains, a simple DNS wildcard is used to route (everything).corduroysite.com to the same ip. a wildcard SSL certificate is also needed, which is quite expensive unfortunately.

the application then checks the hostname that was passed from the web server, finds the matching company record, and does its magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is a need for this. I was looking at some other solutions and gave up and went with Zoho Invoice when it launched about a month ago. Using Excel has worked over the years but I needed something that was a bit more reliable at keeping all the info neat and tidy. The main factor for me was price, I would probably not have signed up but the 5 buck a month fee was something that I could take without feeling guilty or lazy. Anything over 20 bucks a month and I would of kept doing things the same way as i only have about 8-12 re- occurring invoices every month.

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool, I'm willing to take a look. I'm a very happy Freshbooks (<http://www.freshbooks.com>) customer now though, is this better?

</comment><comment><USER5> Another billing/invoice2.0 site? You picked a crowded market.

<http://mashable.com/2007/08/09/online-business/>

What is your competitive advantage? And from a customer perspective, what's unique about your app?

<comment><AUTHOR> i guess i should start by saying i didn't pick the market. i started writing this application years ago to run my own software development business because i was unhappy with quickbooks, and i've been using corduroy as my sole billing system ever since. i just recently added a few features and launched it as a hosted service because of some outside interest in it.

looking over that list of accounting packages, nearly all of them are just invoicing and/or project management applications. corduroy adds check writing, online banking integration and transaction history, as well as customer login support.

<comment><USER6> The customer login support is a big deal for me. I've been trying to get away from paper billing for a while, because it's slow and expensive and I'd rather just send an email with a link. I've been doing that the hard way lately and had been thinking about building something like your system. I'm glad you did it instead.

At $59, it's on the far side of what I'd want to pay for such a system. However, I would pay it.

One thing I'd like to see is a way to build custom invoices. I have a very specific, and fairly unique, invoice design, and would like to hang on to that. Switching to a generic invoice layout might be a dealbreaker. I know that's a lot of work though -- sorry for adding on to the "please do this!" pile.

<comment><AUTHOR> i will be supporting the custom invoice design as a one-time fee for turning your existing invoice design into code. i may also design some other basic templates that can be used instead of the default.

my company's invoices that are generated through corduroy have a neat faded background image and logo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A little pricy- push the cost down a tad and a lot more independent contractors would use it. Some I know already use the open source <http://www.bambooinvoice.com> ok their own servers.

</comment><comment><USER8> $59 a year would be reasonable.

<comment><USER9> That's hardly the case. Anything less than around $800 per year, which is what the average CPA charges to do a small corporation's 1120 or 1120S tax return, is reasonable. That equates to $66.67 per month. When you start to consider how much time and hassle a good accounting package can save, the price could even be higher while still providing value.

Accounting usually gets ignored in startup environments, but it's really crucial to have a grip on things. Otherwise, who knows...you might end up like Bear Stearns. Or Enron.

<comment><USER10> This won't do your tax returns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> update: in response to many suggestions, there are now 2 additional packages that are cheaper but limit certain features.

<http://corduroysite.com/pricing/>

</comment><comment><USER11> sql ledger is free. how does this stack up? I'd rather the product be open source so I could install on my own systems and keep my records. Just a security thing... financial data is important.

<comment><USER12> sql ledger is kind of gross.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting but - $59.00 per month for the service?

<comment><AUTHOR> a 1500-invoice package from blinksale (which only does invoicing) costs $49/month. harvest's business plan costs $90/month and is also geared towards projects and invoices only.

<comment><USER14> I think its more the fact that you don't have different level packages.. perhaps add a lower one with more limits?

<comment><USER15> Independent contractor version that is much cheaper could be useful, and would be necessary to compete with a spreadsheet.

In the past I have used spreadsheets that I export to pdf and send to the clients that look almost exactly like this format, and manually managed them.

<comment><USER16> I think simpler is better. A single price makes it easier to decide whether to use the system at all. Of course, it shouldn't be too high, but I don't think $59 is too high.

<comment><USER15> Simpler is better, but not for pricing. Look into variable pricing theory and price discrimination, it offers higher potential profits. If you do stick to fixed pricing, make sure you do at least a minimal amount of research to determine the optimal price. YOU don't think 59$ is too high, but whats the optimal price for profitability?

<comment><USER16> Why is it, then, that services seem to trend towards all-you-can-use at a flat rate? Even when there are lower levels of service (in whatever), they're usually ridiculously less service for a bit less price, which seems to just be a way to drive people to the One True Price that the provider really wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My company is charging $50 per month for 5-user licenses for Exponent. You can see what it offers at: <http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent>

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks really good.</comment>


Ask YC: Anyone using Google Gears or any other client-server sync solution for their startup webapp? - <AUTHOR>

If so, how has your experience been? <comment><USER2> Yes, sort of. I've been using Gears for a side project of mine (Django on the server side) and it's been pretty fun.

You'll have to decide whether to do modal or modeless syncing and modeless takes a lot more time to implement. It's probably a good idea to step back from coding and architecting how the syncing process will work.

Also, I feel like I'm writing PHP again because I'm not using an ORM. I'm just using a CRUD wrapper around Gears' database support.

The app I'm writing is a one-page application though, it loads once and uses AJAX for the rest of the user's session. I put all AJAX calls into a module and have an online/offline check to see whether to update the database locally or remotely.

At work, we sync between handhelds/desktop apps (VB) and a web app (Rails). We just send JSON back and forth. The down side is that we have two code bases and some parts are duplicated.</comment>


Congress ending privacy with CISPA? Fight back with TMI - <AUTHOR> http://congresstmi.org/ <comment><USER2> I wish people would stop legitimizing the idea that privacy is about hiding embarrassing things. Privacy is more important than the fear of your neighbors finding your copy of Maxim, but this strategy of sending Congress embarrassing details neglects that. It's vulnerable to the "but I have nothing to hide!" objection.

To quote something I have written elsewhere on the Internet:

Giving the government the power to read your email, tap your phone, and record your porn usage isn't bad simply because it's embarrassing. After all, the data will likely only be seen by a computer. But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions.

In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse.

There's a rather good paper I can recommend on the subject:

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565>

</comment><comment><USER3> _What is CISPA? A cybersecurity bill that lets any company share your info with all of government, with no limits. In short, CISPA is the end of meaningful privacy for anyone with personal data on US-based services._

No, it isn't. Your meaningful privacy was eliminated in 1986 with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which specifically allows service providers of all sorts to collect and share sensitive information without limit and disclose that information to anyone else, so long as it's done incident to an attempt to maintain their service. The ECPA specifically carves out the power for service providers to share information _without limit_ and _without a warrant_ to anyone acting under color of law in a criminal investigation.

CISPA is a crappy law, not least because it's pointless, but the amount of misinformation being spread about it dazzling. I recommend that you be especially suspicious of any organization trying to rile you up over this bill. They're just capitalizing on rageviews.

<comment><USER4> Tom, are you yourself in MV? Hackers & Founders is putting together a town hall at CNET on Thursday, we need panelists with a security background to tell was WTF the implications of this bill are, what the status quo is.

Declan McCullugh is moderating. Interested and able?

My expertise is Startup Visa and founder immigration issues, I don't know jack about this stuff, so if I'm getting misinformation, I want to know it and replace it. Tell me more!

<comment><USER5> that sounds interesting. is the event open to the public?

<comment><USER4> Yep! [http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/60972502/?a=ea1_grp...](http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/60972502/?a=ea1_grp&eventId=60972502&action=detail)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Soviet Armenian Observatory That Held First Conference on Alien Communication - <AUTHOR> https://armenianweekly.com/2017/12/18/armenian-observatory-transformed-into-art-space/ <comment><USER2> I worked at BAO 6 years ago, it was my first job as a software engineer. I was working on 1m Schmidt telescope and even though we had many problems (due to insufficient funding) we were excited and motivated. Nowadays, BAO is mainly about "art stuff". I'm not against using outdated equipments for artistic use, but it's a research center/observatory and not a museum.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting.

I see the HAYP art organization is mostly made up (at the top, i.e. the curators) of people who were brought up in Western Europe/North America. Whether what they are bringing is really valuable must be difficult to determine.

Entrepreneurial artworld thinking can be more about trendiness and superficial experience of insight/events, a coat of 'cool' paint on reality. It's definitely a very different activity from scientific research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the writings of Arthur & Marilouise Kroker I see references to an alleged secret pact between the United States and the Soviet Union that if aliens were to invade, the countries would agree to join forces to defend Earth. Is this true?

<comment><USER5> I got a kick from reading this comment! Some googling found this reference to a interview with Gorbachev (discussing conversations with Reagan) that claims it's true:

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/reagan-and- gorbach...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/reagan-and-gorbachev- agreed-pause-cold-war-case-alien-invasion-180957402/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even though it makes it sound more prestigious, Carl Sagan never was awarded a Nobel Prize.</comment>


Tell HN: HN is being censored, examples - <AUTHOR> Node.JS was forked to Ayo.JS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078995
LLVM developer leaves, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16980841
both flagged, censored, removed from view. Both giant storied, much great comments, yet remained flagged. <comment><USER2> Well, TBH the first story (Ayo.JS) was not a story at all. It was more like a SJW-PR stunt.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or.. maybe both repeats of other stories.</comment>


Ask HN: Rate my micro-app (testing Open Graph) - <AUTHOR> http://likeanything.heroku.com/hacker_news Change the url's to create new Like items. Use underscores to separate words.<p>Cooked it up with Sinatra in 23 lines and one template :) <comment><AUTHOR> Change the url's to create new Like items. Use underscores to separate words.

Cooked it up with Sinatra in 23 lines and one template :)

</comment><comment><USER2> adding a link to a likable would be nice. just a word is a bit boring.</comment>


Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/28/us/calendar-overhaul/ <comment><AUTHOR> From another point of view, a given date gradually occurring on every day of the week is a feature, not a bug. I see that the proposed calendar puts my birthday on a weekend, every year year after year, but I kind of like my birthday (and my wedding anniversary, and other important dates) occurring on a new day of the week each year, for variety.

I note too that the calendar would not "make it easy to plan annual activities" for any of the dates in the "extra week" proposed for the calendar, if by annual activities we mean activities that occur in every calendar year. The extra week occurs "at the end of December every five or six years," and the new memory load everyone would have to bear is remembering which years--2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, "et cetera" are the extra week years.

<comment><USER2> that "new memory load" is functionally zero, since no one would have to remember that. By the time the Extra week actually arrived, people would have been looking forward to it for an entire year, and it would not catch anyone by surprise. No memory required. Even subterranean cave trolls would be aware it is coming.

I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6 years

<comment><USER3> The corporate drone pessimist in me thinks that the extra week would just be another work week, with the best case being "Ah yes, you get an extra half-day worth of PTO this year."

<comment><USER4> Humans are slaves to traditions. If it's introduced as a world wide party week from the start then people will feel like "it's always been done that way" and be less likely to fight it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this idea. Unfortunately, it can't coexist with the Gregorian calendar in its current form; if a small fraction of the world switched to it, they'd always have to wonder which calendar someone writing "Jan 1" was referring to.

When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notations for dates, so that it will be unambiguous (and so that the old calendar will remain unambiguous). I propose doing this by giving each month a letter, A-L, and writing dates like this:

      2012-A01 = New calendar, first day of first month of 2012
      2012-L30 = New calendar, thirtieth day of twelfth month of 2012
      2012-01-01 = Gregorian calendar, first day of first month of 2012
      C30 = New calendar, thirtieth day of third month of whatever year this is

With the notations neatly separated, you could then print calendars with the two schemes side by side, and let people convert back and forth for awhile while the new system is adopted. We could give the months fanciful names, too, as long as they start with the right letters. But the important thing is, the two schemes _must_ be unambiguous and distinct.

<comment><USER6> Obviously, the calendar ambiguity can be resolved by some sort of calendar NAT.

<comment><USER7> You know, let's just use Unix timestamps when marking future dates. Removes all ambiguity from calendar types, time zones, etc.

<comment><USER8> I like your idea, let's get together and discuss it over drinks. Hows your 1325357149?

<comment><USER7> I retract my previous suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just pointed this out to a friend and she gladly brought up the Shire calendar from Tolkien's works, which according to her has 12 months, 30 days a month, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with the date of each month staying the same weekday due to the separation of the five other days as holidays that are separate from the months (including leap-day, which doesn't belong to any day of the week).

Which actually solves the exact same problem in a much cleaner fashion than this proposal.

<comment><USER10> No it doesn't. Making a day not be part of any week breaks the strict 7 day cycle, and will be rejected be the vast majority of the world.

<comment><USER9> But if its only for seasonal holidays (lets say the two equinoxes, the solstices, and leap day) they'd make for worldwide accepted celebration points that wouldn't disrupt the "working week"

It'd be a little strange, but its really not any worse than adding a day in February every four years.

<comment><USER10> No, it would not be accepted. The 7 day cycle is strict - you can not add or remove days from it. It might be fine for work, but it will not be fine for religious observance.

If you tried then those who observe religious days will keep their cycle, and will not go to work on the real weekend (even those who otherwise wouldn't care would make a point about it), which will be out of sync with the new calendar weekend. It won't take many people doing that for the calendar to fail to be accepted.

<comment><USER9> Dammit. This is why we can't have nice things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> All I can think of is xkcd 927 ( <http://xkcd.com/927/> )

There are already lots of calendars if one cares to look. Why bother with a 7 day week other than the biblical mandate? Why not use a lunar calendar? It would certainly simplify 'calculating' Easter. Having a leap day is a lot less intrusive than a leap week and does anyone actually bother to memorize the Metonic cycle? Is it because lunisolar calendars are uncommon or because they're a pain or both?

I think having timezones benefits us in the sense that we can say "It is lunch in city A when it is dinner in city B". Knowing when people are likely to be sleeping/working/playing in different places helps more than having One Timezone. Pilots use UTC because they're between timezones too much for them to follow a 'standard' schedule according to our approximations of the Sun's movements.

<comment><USER12> Compliance with biblical mandates is a popularity hack. You need popularity if you want a new calendar to be adopted (or you need massive power on the level of an emperor^Wdictator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So in a matter of a few thousand years we have gone from Emperors (Caesar) dictating calendars to scientists proposing new ones. :)

These type of reforms were quiet popular in the beginning of the 20th century. E.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Calendar>

Had this proposal been suggested a century ago. I would have a good feeling it would have been made a reality since it doesn't interfere with a 7 day work weak.

Today with computers, it isn't really necessary. Anyone is able to check when July 1st will be in 2500 without calculating. So it is not likely to gain to much interest except in by theorists.

This proposal introduces an artificial calendar that is neither solar or lunar but realigns every few years. It is quiet a novel idea.

The Jews did similar engineering in their calendar system. The rabbis did not want some holidays to fall out on certain days of the week because of varied reasons. So they engineered rules for the leap years and new months to happen in a pattern to prevent this.

The Jewish calendar is lunar but realigns itself with the solar calendar. It need to be certain Jewish holidays always accure in the same season.

<comment><USER14> The former calendars were proposed by scientists, but named after the ruler that forced them:

 __Julian:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar>

"The Julian calendar began in 45 BC (709 AUC) as a reform of the Roman calendar by Julius Caesar. It was chosen after consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and was probably designed to approximate the tropical year (known at least since Hipparchus)."

 __Gregorian:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar>

"The Gregorian calendar reform contained two parts, a reform of the Julian calendar as used up to Pope Gregory's time, [...]. The reform was a modification of a proposal made by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius (or Lilio)."

<comment><USER13> Interesting. :)

Any rulers out there want a calendar named after them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why preserve the seven-day week? The appropriate factorization of 365 is 73*5.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar>

Plus, the Discordian calendar has the advantage of already being implemented in Linux!

<comment><USER16> if you read the linked article, you see the explanation: the fourth commandment specifies resting on the seventh day. any proposed calendar that doesn't have a seven day week will never be adopted as long as religion still exists.

and even if it weren't for religion, everything is structured around a seven day week. changing that would mean a drastic lifestyle change for most people.

<comment><USER17> Then make the week 73 days long. You can rest on 7th day, and corporations would really like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Brought to you from a country that has not adopted SI units.

<comment><USER19> That depends on what you mean by adopted. The federal government/education establishment/etc. all use SI units. It's the general populace which couldn't care less.

Which means this proposal has the same probability of adoption as me winning the lottery. And I don't buy lottery tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's a revolutionary thought - the calendar is already fixed. Sporting events (etc.) don't _have to_ happen on the same weekday, they can just always happen on the same date. Voila, predictable time planning that doesn't have to be redone every year.

And I love the idea of eliminating timezones, especially the example that pilots already use UTC. Ever considered this might be because the concept of "day" doesn't really apply when you change 10 timezones in 10 hours?

Personally I think eliminating timezones would make relating to people internationally very difficult. It's already weird enough that Australians think of December as a summer month. Consider half the world thinking of 20:00 (8PM) as the morning. How does "everywhere is the same hour" even remotely fix the fact people sleep at night and work at day anyway?

And what do you do with an extra week "every five or six years"?

<comment><USER21> Removing time zones would break any kind of cultural joke and reference to time. _"omg, i woke up at 4am today!"..._ Especially in todays internet connected world.

Swatch tried to intruduce timezone-free time many many years ago called "swatch internet time", Ericsson even had it as default on some of their cell phones to promote it. Needless to say it didn't work. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time>

<comment><USER22> IRC time is pretty convenient: Greet with good morning when joining, good night when leaving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been using an independent calendar for my own records for over a decade now - it's the day-of-year, written base 7. It fits in with weeks; if we reset weeks every year (why not? we do worse things already with leap days and seconds) then dates become equivalent with weekdays. One number expresses the day-of-year, day-of-week, week-of-year, and month-of-year, using a 49-day month.

<http://tylerneylon.com/b/archives/122>

I don't really expect many other people to use this, despite being a better designed system. I think hardcore math/cs people would like it, though. I've written some small pieces of code that work with this system, if anyone's interested.

<comment><USER24> If everything is a 0-based index (e.g. first day being 0), why aren't the years?

<comment><USER23> The 7date doesn't say much about how we count years. It's all about how you count days and other sub-year units. You could combine it with any method of counting years that you like. I defaulted to using the year system I'm used to because it's convenient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow, after reading the comments it's amazing how difficult it is for most people to understand that eliminating time zones doesn't mean that anyone will change when they work. You will just have a different number for the time you do things than in than other parts of the world. In England you might start at 09:00, but on the other side of the world they would start at 20:00 which would be morning for them.

<comment><USER26> Why is this better though? When scheduling a meeting, I still have to figure out what "zone" another place is in so as to schedule an event during a normal workday.

<comment><USER27> I can imagine the faces of the staff (who are too scared to speak up) when the CEO from overseas calls to organise a meeting at 3.30am in the morning the next day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The scientific part is simple, its just a little maths.

The difficult part is to get 8 billion people to agree to pull in the same direction. And my guess is, that it will never happen, unfortunately.

<comment><USER29> I would tend to agree, but then we have things like DST shifting around all the time. The government just states they are making a change, and everyone does. Every software that isn't based on a network time server breaks, and is fixed, and we move on. The same could happen with this new calendar, the government simply mandates that by a certain year it has to be in place.

The largest burden will be on legacy software and getting that patched. That very well could be reason enough for the reversal of this calendar, as every government software breaks, and they find out how slow they are to keeping up with their own mandates.

<comment><USER28> I remember when I lived in Mexico some 12 years ago and the government introduced DST there. Some schools would actually start an hour later to sync their starting time with before-DST-time, people where complaing about being totally confused, etc. Don't know if there is still DST now or if they abandoned it because of the many (often totally irrational) protests. Its not easy to change people's habits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The whole "everybody should adopt UTC" business makes no sense to me. If a business needs to use UTC because of time zones or whatnot, they already are. It'd be weird having the day of the week change in the middle of the day in Japan, too.

<comment><USER31> That's an excellent point: "We'll need to be ready by Tuesday morning"... does morning mean 'sunrise' or does it mean 'time near where Tuesday 'starts'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Agreed with the general proposal: the only time periods that are important to preserve are the day (coz of morning/night), the week (coz of work-week and religious days), and the year (coz of seasons). The month is pretty arbitrary.

They propose a 364-day year with 8x 30-day months and 4x 31-day months. If they're okay with a 364-day year, wouldn't it be better to have 8x 28-day months and 4x 35-day months. Or you could have 13x 28-day months. That way the day-of-week would be even more predictable.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, except you lose the morning/night distinction, because they also suggest that the entire world use one timezone. This, in my humble opinion, seems to a very cumbersome and onerous system. Yes, there are obvious business advantages to having just one timezone, but it also completely robs us of heuristics that have been developed over centuries.

<comment><USER34> For any purposes which require clear unambiguous time values, we already have UTC. This is just not a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Interesting but it won't happen. It would have to be adopted throughout the world (especially where religious days are affected) and there would never be agreement on which holidays fall on which day (NYE on Friday or Saturday?).

I don't fully understand the other point in the article about ridding the world of time zones to improve business and trade. How would that work? Do they expect certain countries to agree to work while the sun is down?

<comment><USER35> I think you understood the point about timezones backwards. The point is for everybody to use, for instance, UTC time. So instead of working the proverbial 9am to 5pm, if you are in Japan you would work from 0am to 8am (UTC).

It makes sense to me, but I can see how lots of people would have a very hard time understanding and accepting this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Lovely, the Esperanto of calendars. It's bad enough my birthday falls on Christmas Eve, now it's forever to be on the Sabbath too? No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love this idea, but there are a few things that aren't covered in the comments that I want to know about.

1) How does this calendar align to the phases of the moon? How many moons are there per-year? Is this variable? This is important due to archaic calendar systems and dates that are based on solar-lunar calendars (e.g. China & Japan)

2) Is there a quick and easy algorithm for re-mapping dates? My birthday was on Mar 30, 1991 - for example. Would I simply keep the old date, or adopt a new one? I assume keep the old since its still on the calendar, but what about people born January 31st?

3) How do seasons align and fluctuate along these new datelines? And how does this floating week influence it?

</comment><comment><USER37> As long as my birthday is on a Saturday it works for me.

(seriously though, imagine how mad people will get when a particular event happens on the "wrong day" every year)

I like it though. I'd even take a Tuesday birthday to make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER38> In Malaysia, if holiday falls on Sunday, it'll be "carried forward" to Monday (you still celebrate on Sunday, but Monday will be extra holiday).

And in some companies, if holiday falls on Saturday, you get extra 1 day leave entitlement.

Now, you can see conflicting interest here, especially between employees and employers :)

<comment><USER39> This is not far from how most of Sweden operates. Most offices comply to the idea of "half-day before holiday" notion and as where fixing the dates wouldn't interfere with that too much, I doo believe that fixing Christmas to a Saturday would make a lot of Swedes angry.

For one, we celebrate the 24th, and having the 25th on a Saturday sure gives Friday and half of Thursday off. But the 26th is also a holiday, which would then be on a regular Sunday. New Years Eve is not a holiday, and having that on a constant Friday would open the days between Christmas and NYE as a work week. Where as now some years you can have a nice long (10-14 days) vacation with only a couple days of actual leave, because the rest are considered national holidays. (Example: 2012 I can get 14 days off with only 5 days of leave.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For people who are apparently enlightened enough to realize that no calendar, however rational and perfect, will be accepted if it violates a certain religious rule (the sabbath), they are apparently quite ignorant in their advocacy of UTC for all purposes.

It's all well and good to eliminate time zones as such and have each region operate on a fixed clock, but to suggest that people will simply stop paying attention to the sun is insane. If you want wide adoption you can't expect people to make radical change in their lives. Most people prefer to wake with the sun and sleep when it's dark; some studies suggest that we are biologically predisposed to want or need this. Whether it's 05:00 when I wake or 16:00 when I wake is immaterial to me (that's just a number, just what you call it) but whether it's daylight when I'm out and about just plain matters.

In effect you'll probably always need a way to divide the world by when the sun is up, even if the clock doesn't change.

<comment><USER40> I'm pretty sure they're not advocating screwing with the Circadian cycle. You still wake up and go to sleep with the sun; just now you wake up at 13h00 instead of 8:00 AM.

<comment><USER12> Read it again, they are.

Quote from the proposal: "For example, the adoption of Universal Time would give new flexibility to economic management in the vast East-West expanse of Russia: everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every moment. Opening and closing times of businesses could be specified for every class of business and activity. If thought desirable, banks and financial institutions throughout the country could be required to open and to close each day at the same hour by the world time. This would mean that bank employees in the far East of Russia would start work with the sun well up in the sky, while bank employees in the far west of Russia would be at their desks before the sun has risen. "

The article omits this in its summary.

<comment><USER41> A world in which the state mandates that your work day begins before the sun rises...

Where do I sign up??

 _sarcasm off_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _They would drop the quadrennial 366-day leap years entirely in favor of an extra week at the end of December every five or six years._

and

 _The two men also propose eliminating time zones and adopting a universal time around the world to streamline international business._

indicate that there are some fundamental things they don't understand about business.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd like to know how much extra complexity these leap weeks add to the calculations that would supposedly be easier... I would imagine that it is non-trivial.

Am I the only one that likes the fact that dates occur on different days? This way everyone's birthday will occur over a weekend every few years.

</comment><comment><USER43> Some people, groups, or governments could change over on a case-by-case basis to a week-based system, without a sudden change to the worldwide date system. Just label the weeks with numbers, e.g. 1-Wednesday, 27-Monday, or 52-Sunday for Christmas this year.

It seems Chinese people generally don't remember the time of week so much as the Month and date. Whenever someone in China tells me "this is happening on the 28 November", in my mind I have to work out what day of week it is before I can internalize it in my memory. Chinese seem to just remember the month and date. Schools often say "Monday's and Tuesday's timetable will be shifted to the previous Saturday and Sunday, respectively".

And of course their idea is Western-centric. Chinese and Muslims both have their own calendars for festivals.

<comment><USER44> I don't know how popular this is at other companies, but Intel (or at least my group) does use a week-based system for all dates. Today (December 28) would be "WW53.3". WW53 is the work week and .3 means Wednesday. Weeks start on Monday as ".1", whereas Sunday is ".0" and Saturday is ".6".

While this system should in theory make it easy to calculate the days need to complete a task, I still find myself converting to Month-Day every time. On the other hand, I don't have a clue what day of the week March 2nd is going to be, but if it's called WW9.5, then I immediately know that it's on a Friday 9 weeks from now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Have they come up with any estimate of the global cost of the switch, and compared that to the benefit of the new calendar? It seems to change a bunch of stuff, and add a complicated new "leap week", for no particularly good reason. Yeah, it might reduce the cost of printing calendars slightly, though a lot of people use new calendars yearly so they can write on them, and a lot more just use their computer.

The cost of the transition would not be insignificant. In the Western world, we've had two major calendar changes in the past 2200 years or so. The most recent one, the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, lasted for about 400 years, as different countries transitioned at different times, with, I'm sure, plenty of friction caused by the lack of synchronization. Is it really necessary to go through all of that again?

Also, while this proposal would make holidays based on the solar calendar fall on the same day every year, it would do nothing for the holidays based on the lunar calendar. They would still drift around.

Reading their proposal on cato.org linked to from the article, it seems that a large part of their motivation is the synchronization of calendars for various financial instruments. But that doesn't require changing everyone's calendar; you can fix just the financial instruments, which already don't follow the ordinary calendar, without wreaking havoc on every other use of the calendar.

And I'm not sure how this extra week in December ever few years is supposed to help solve the problems with financial instruments. Under the current system, you need to deal with the fact that months may differ in length by up to 3 days, and that needs to be dealt with every month; in the new system, months would regularly vary by 1 day, but suddenly vary by another 7 days once every 5 years or so.

I think one of the reasons we've gotten ourselves into this mess is that we keep on trying to fit together different cycles of arbitrary length such that they match up exactly, which is impossible, so we add hacks on top of hacks to try to fix the problem. We try to make the cycle of days match the cycles of years, we try to make the cycle of months match the cycle of days (and years), and this proposal tries to shoehorn the cycle of weeks into that too, with a hack that adds an extra week every 5 or 6 years seemingly at random (while there is a regular rule for it, it's not as easily remembered as the Gregorian "leap year every 4 years, except for years divisible by 100, but an exception to that exception for years divisible by 400").

Instead of trying to do hacks to get all of these cycles to line up, why not move in the other direction and take the approach of having regular cycles at different frequencies that do not line up? You can have a financial calendar of 30 solar days (or whatever period is most convenient for you), a lunar calendar of one lunar month, the 7 solar day week, the tropical year that aligns with the seasons, the sidereal year that aligns with the orbit of the earth around the sun (which differs from the tropical year due to precession of the earth's axis). We have computers that can keep track of how all of these things line up when we care these days; instead of trying to simplify everything to fit together discretely with hacks added to fix it up, just let the computers deal with the precise details and allow each cycle to be simple and independent.

Now, moving to a single worldwide time standard (just use UTC for everyone for everyday use) seems to make a little more sense. While I understand the desire to make the hours line up with the solar day in a reasonably uniform way around the world, timezones (and daylight savings time) are an ugly hack that add a lot of cost and give you only a very rough approximation of what you are trying to achieve.

<comment><USER46> Timezones are not an ugly hack.

When you travel to a different timezones you just have to adjust your clock and, without asking, you know that shops open at 8~10am until 4~8pm with or without a midday stop for lunch (12~3). You have dinner at 18~22, and breakfast at 8~10. All the divergences depend on the country you are in but you can get good aproximations that work for 90% of them (breakfast 9, open shops 10, lunch 13, close 17, dinner 20).

But, if you go for an universal timezone, you've got to learn the different times for the different activities again and again and again. You change a one step correction (change time on your watch) to a constant struggle.

With universal timezone: You wake up when travelling, it's 17:30 and you don't remember the country unless you do the mental effort to wake up, it's time to get up or not? You start to calculate and... too late to decide, you are already woken and could not get back to sleep even if you wanted.

With different timezones: You wake up when travelling, it's 2:30 and you don't remember the country unless you do the mental effort to wake up, it's time to get up or not? No, time to sleep some more.

<comment><USER47> I ran into a big problem with timezones when I was in the Navy.

I was in charge of a big supply database server on an aircraft carrier, and every time we changed timezones I had to update the timezone on the server. Heading from East to West was no problem, but when we went from West to East I had to shut the server down for an hour when changing timezones, to prevent timestamps from overlapping.

Admittedly, this was partially due to bad programming, but it's just a small real-world example of problems caused by the existence of timezones.

<comment><USER48> Best practice - whatever time zone the people are using, keep the internal time stamps on a single time zone (usually UTC). Then just convert the times from and to the local zone for input and display, respectively.

<comment><USER49> > keep the internal time stamps on a single time zone (usually UTC)

Or UNIX time. While not monotonically increasing (it has issues with UTC leap seconds), it's pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yuck. The solstices and equinoxes would be on different dates from year to year.

And as far as making time calculations simpler for financiers -- that extra week "every five or six years" will be just as hard to deal with as leap years are now.

</comment><comment><USER51> People can accomplish the same thing after learning a mental algorithm to calculate the day of the week. Doomsday rule, invented by Mathematician John Conway, is one of the easier ones to remember.

</comment><comment><USER52> I dont like this. All the people who have b'days on 29,30 and 31 are screwed. And its really hard to get whole of the world onto it. No country can force another country to follow something.

</comment><comment><USER53> I am still typing on a QWERTY keyboard, and that standard only a hundred years old. The modern calendar is two thousand years old. We will see the singularity before we see a new calendar.

<comment><USER54> The modern calendar is nearly 430 years old, but I agree with your broader point.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar>

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Seems unlikely, yet, Europe switched to the euro.

If we get better at software integration, different calendars might not be such a problem. We already convert between currencies, times and date formats.

Is this really that much different to a new date-format, just with deeper syntactic changes? (rhetorical)

<comment><USER56> Except Europe didn't simply switch to the Euro. _Some_ members of the EU (plus a few others who aren't in the EU) switched to it, over a twelve year period, with some others pegged to it (and maybe switching some day), some other countries adopting it 'unofficially' (i.e. it's their official currency, but they're not officially members of the Eurozone), and some countries who theoretically _must_ join, voting against it in a local referendum, and thus deliberately failing to meet the entry conditions on an ongoing basis so as they _can't_ join.

(And this is, of course, ignoring all the logistical hassles involved in switching, never mind the much bigger questions, now very pertinent, as to whether trying to do all this may have been a cause of the downfall of Western Society, etc.)

So I suspect this example gives more weight to the 'unlikely' side, than the 'yet...' side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > "You have a whole area in the mathematics of finance that could be cleared > up, and lots of confusion, lots of error, done away with by going to this > calendar," he said. People don't realize the time they're wasting simply > because of the variable calendar, Hanke said.

Most economic and political activity in Western countries is to give people something to do so they'll conform, be it accounting and tax rules, legal requirements, or ICT interfaces. The actual labor required to mine resources, manufacture things, and grow and distribute food is some small percentage of overall economic activity. Taking away this complexity would put people out of work, more likely to question governments or occupy Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER34> Classic academic waste-of-time project to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I hope they didn't have any federal grant funding for this (have skimmed half a dozen web postings about this and none really address this question).

</comment><comment><USER57> What would happen with birthdays that occur on days that were cut out of the new calendar? Jan 31, May 31, Jul 31, Aug 31, and Oct 31.

Also, that extra week business seems more confusing than leap years. "Every 5 or 6 years" seems indefinite.

</comment><comment><USER58> what if your birthday is on that leap week that occurs every 5-6 yrs?

<comment><USER59> You would probably do exactly what people who are born on February 29 do.

<comment><USER60> I wonder what these leap year babies (I am one of them) would do were we to adopt this new calendar, as presumably that date would no longer exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> And yet, the US still isnt on metric.

</comment><comment><USER62> I saw something along these lines recently: a calendar-clock. <http://clackcolander.tumblr.com/>

</comment><comment><USER63> This proposal doesn't have my vote.

The present system is good enough in that every one has an equal chance for special events in their lives to fall on a weekend.

</comment><comment><USER64> Imagine living on a space ark. Any calendar would work, since there would be no incentive to line up with the motion of any particular planetary body.

Now, imagine we stopped caring about that anyway. Ok, leave days, but the rest? Superfluous. How about decimal time? 100,000 seconds in a day, count days and be done with it. When is Xmas? In 300 days.

</comment><comment><USER65> Could someeone who is advocating for no time zones please explain how a normal work "day" that crossed actual days work in practice? So you want to wake up at 8 Utc and some else wakes up at 20 Utc. Ok, then they start work on Friday at 21 Utc and work until Sat 4:30. I'd imagine that you'd have to redefine weekend to mean Sun-Mon?

</comment><comment><USER66> Imagine the cost of changing all the software in the world to use a new calendar system. This will never happen.

</comment><comment><USER67> I never remember if we have 30 days or 31 in most months... nope, actually I got everything right except for May and March.

<http://www.calendarzone.org/calendar/2012-calendar-10.jpg>

<comment><USER68> Here's a trick for that (courtesy of Shari Lewis): hold your knuckles up in front of you, index fingers together, no thumbs. Each peak represents a month with 31 days. Each valley represents a month with 30 (or 28, for February) days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> My bday would always fall on a Monday on this calendar system and that is not fun

</comment><comment><USER70> Happy Thermidor!

<comment><USER71> My thoughts, exactly. Those magical ("happy") days of The Terror were indeed too short. And UTC -- practically a symbol of British Naval prowess and Empire -- is really a nice touch, specially for the "brown/yellow" ones who get to toil happily at "midnight".

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This is interesting but the leap weeks are kind of fussy, 5 or 6 years.

<comment><USER73> Yeah the week long adjustment every so often seems excessive

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I wonder if calendar companies would lobby against this. I imagine people would still buy a new calendar every year or so, since they get worn/written on.

</comment><comment><USER75> Will this be somehow comparable to the Y2K bug if we switch? a bunch of software broken?

</comment><comment><USER76> So the dates of the first "extra week" would be Dec 32-38, 2015?

</comment><comment><USER77> sounds like a typical startup idea

<comment><USER77> a typical _crazY_ startup idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Good luck convincing the rest of the world to convert to a scientifically optimized calender.

<comment><USER18> All those unscientific countries still haven't adopted rods and hogsheads. I guess it will just be the US, Burma and Liberia again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> No don't do this. My birthday is on 31st 0_o

</comment><comment><USER80> Whose in re-writing lot of software?

I am not :)

</comment><comment><USER81> A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so basically everything imaginable becomes considerably easier.

The only real problem is coming up with a name for a new 13th month and where to insert it.

<comment><USER82> Pretty nice! Too bad a non-trivial segment of the population won't be happy with 13. You might as well call the new month Deviluary. :D

<comment><USER83> Just skip 13 and make it the 14th month.

<comment><USER84> Or the zeroth month.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Argos email receipts contain your Card No. CCV, Name and Address - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/356077/argos-credit-card-scandal-worsens <comment><USER3> How can this possibly be within PCI DSS compliance rules ? - do they not apply to everyone taking Mastercard/visa ?

<comment><USER4> No, PCI/DSS is similar to the Better Business Bureau: many people think its an official (i.e., government mandated agency/law) but it's not. Many merchant account companies require it, but it's entirely possible to find a merchant account that does not require you to be PCI/DSS compliant.

Some people say PCI/DSS compliance is a scam, because you generally have to pay someone to say you're PCI/DSS compliant, officially, if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER5> It all depends on your transaction volume. If you don't run that many transactions then all you have to do is fill out a form saying you're complying.

If your transaction volume is high, for example let's say Walmart, then the level of scrutiny goes way up. There is the option of not complying with PCI, but Visa and MasterCard wouldn't authorize transactions for them anymore. In a case like that there's a pretty big monetary incentive to comply.

PCI isn't perfect, that's for sure, but its probably better than nothing.

<comment><USER4> Definitely. I also believe you get a discount per transaction if you're compliant.

We had to become compliant for the merchant we use, and because we don't do a lot of transactions, it was only $80 a year. Small price to pay, I think, to keep my ass covered somewhat.

I suppose I came off as not liking PCI/DSS. I do like it, just wanted to clarify some things about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Now it's emerged that those very same confirmation emails contain a web link - ironically intended to direct customers to Argos's security page - <USER2> contains the customer's full name, address and credit-card details in the URL itself."

I'm speechless... I may not understand PCI compliance fully but surely anyone with any brains could see that is a bad idea. I mean why would you reveal someone's credit card details in the URL. Not to mention emailing it. This beggars belief.

Edited for typos and readibility.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps there's a role for a site that names-and-shames poorly implemented ecommerce sites. I've recently been asked to enter my visa into a site without https.

There shouldn't be any excuse for this sort of thing now.

<comment><USER4> I really enjoy ecommerce development and have spent the last 4 years professionally doing something related to it.

It's flat out amazing the poor security standards in the industry.

"Hey just email me an Excel spreadsheet of customer's credit card numbers, I need to charge them all," is not unheard of.

I know there are places where security is of high importance, but I've seen some places where it's really poor.

One of the problems is ease of entrance. In an afternoon, you can get a website set up, sell products, and take credit cards (along with other personal information) with absolutely no knowledge of how to do anything properly. In all honesty, that barrier for entry needs to be much much higher.

<comment><USER7> What amazes me is that there are services like paypal, google checkout and others that can handle all this for the vendor. If someone wanted to set up in an afternoon they could: just use a pre-developed card and protect yourself from fraud too.

Even quick time-to-market is not an excuse any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some developer has clearly mis-understood the 'stateless' part of HTTP. The protocol is stateless, but the resources are NOT stateless. You don't have to and shouldn't send all of the information your service needs through the protocol; all you need to send is sufficient information to fully identify the resource you're working with. In this case, that would be the customer id number, which is your key into a database that has the real customer information.

Oh, and DON'T STORE UNENCRYPTED CC NUMBERS, AND NEVER STORE THE SECURITY CODE. That should be so obvious. If I were building a system like this, and I was required to store the CC number at all (which I'd prefer not too but many retailers do it) I'd encrypt it using the security code, and I'd modify my http logs to filter those codes out of the log. That way I couldn't decrypt the CC number without asking for the code, and I'd never have the code stored anyplace on my system.

<comment><USER9> > filter those codes out of the log

Why would there be creditcard data in you HTTP log?

<comment><USER8> At some point the user has to fill out a form and provide the CCV. I happen to log form fields in addition to GET urls, so the CCV would wind up in my log if I didn't filter it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the US, isn't this exactly the sort of data that, when a bank or other entity exposes it in a "breach" (lost employee laptop), is required to be reported to the government? My understanding of this law is common knowledge, not lawyerly and knowledgeable.

Maybe if you dribble it out, on purpose, it's not considered a breach.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wrr, websites that do this irritate the living hell out of me. It's only after you've ordered or signed up that you discover that they've decided to pollute your inbox and history like this, leaving you with the job of cleaning up properly.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Argos said that it "takes the security of its customers' data extremely > seriously

The straightness of face or otherwise was not reported</comment>


Where should I continue learning? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I need some advise.
I started learning programming a few months back. I know commands, how functions, data types and all that stuff works. I've worked with Javascript, Python, Ruby, CSS and HTML.
I created a couple games with simple algorithms on python on the promp so I think I know enough to make my way around to creating a program.
My goal is to learn to develop web apps which is where I get stuck. I don't know where to continue, for example how to use WAMP with Django, or HTML with Django or RoR, or if it even works like that...
Any website or book out there to get me started on this? <comment><USER2> I'm by no means an expert but here are a few thoughts.

Python or Ruby: pick one and focus on it.

Django: ignore it for now. It makes doing what should be relatively simple harder than it should be, in my opinion. Start with a micro framework like Flask or Bottle. For database interactions you'll also want to learn to use an ORM like SQLAlchemy.</comment>


Writeup of NYC Traffic Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://tumblebolt.com/speedy_writeup.html

<comment><USER2> I Really appreciate the view into the process to make a cool data visualization.

I look at [http://goo.gl/9T5510](http://goo.gl/9T5510) (world wind) every day out of curiosity of the movement of the wind and its apparent relation to shifting weather in the midwest of USA (Missouri).

Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Archimedes used cannons, not mirrors to burn Roman ships - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/history/archimedes-set-roman-ships-afire-with-cannons-100627.html

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see a reconstruction of a steam cannon. There's no mention in the article of anyone actually building one, and I'm at a loss to imagine how you'd use ancient metalworking technology to build the valve which holds back the pressure that's sufficient to fling a projectile any significant distance.

Also, if they were such a great weapon, able to set ships alight from the shore, why did nobody ever use them again?

<comment><USER3> >Also, if they were such a great weapon, able to set ships alight from the shore, why did nobody ever use them again?

Other advanced Greek technology was lost and unmatched again for centuries. Note the Corinthian connection in the origins of the Antikythera mechanism. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Origins>

However, whilst lost to the West, many of these traditions lived on in the Byzantine Empire and Arabic automatons and inventions (Al-Jazari), so there is some continuity. The migration of Greek scholars and texts from Byzantium to Italy at the behest of philhellenic sponsors then sets the stage for Da Vinci and others as the article notes. If anything it serves as a reminder that high technology and culture can be lost in the vicissitudes of human arrogance, conflict and oppression.

Although confined to the elites the Greeks knew the earth was round, and they had a theory of evolution and complex mechanical computation devices. Today we battle against people trying to insert creationism into schools and a massive and systemic attempt across the West to censor and control the Internet. The only thing we can be thankful for is that the flat-earth movement can't get any traction in the face of satellite imagery (although, the moon landing hoaxers are not too far off such a proposition and get quite a few people to believe them).

<comment><USER2> All of which is fine, but this wasn't lost in the dark ages, this was supposedly used once, never used again, and never even recorded or noticed by the invading Romans, who might have been very interested in the novel weapon which was setting their ships on fire.

Wikipedia has an article on steam cannons: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_cannon>

which notes that there were various attempts to make a viable steam cannon during the heyday of the steam engine, but nobody managed to make a viable one until World War 2.

Also, Mythbusters apparently did an episode about Archimedes and steam cannons. I can't find out much about it, but it doesn't look like it was an overwhelming success.

In conclusion, I don't see a helluva lot of advantage for the steam cannon over the catapult.

<comment><USER4> In order to launch fire at a distance of 150m the old bow & arrow looks more practical too. Even if this steam cannon seems more plausible than the mirror hypothesis it looks more like an engineer's gadget than the future (at this time) of warfare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now that's an intriguing weapon! Sounds more plausible than the parabolic mirror, too.</comment>


Quizé – WordPress Plugin That Triples Your Ad Revenue - <AUTHOR> http://quizeplugin.com <comment><AUTHOR> Quizé WordPress plugin is a tool for creating engaging Trivia and Personality quizzes for your website as a way of generating additional revenue through increasing page views, paid ad impressions, driving traffic, increasing time on site, and eliminating bounce rate.</comment>


Training for the End of the World as We Know It - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/welcome-to-prepper-camp/381351/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> It says a lot about a person, when disaster hits they run for the hills. I think we need more people prepping for rebuilding after disasters than ready to go hide in a bunker. I wish I knew a way to change their minds and remove the fear. What life is one in hiding?

</comment><comment><USER3>
      > swapping tips about purchasing things like German surplus military phones—
      > untraceable by the NSA

What is the basis for this belief?

<comment><USER4> I suspect it has more to do with a lack of backdoors in the phone. It's not entirely unreasonable to think that some of the more advanced countries would know that the US is backdooring just about every phone in firmware (not OS but code running on other, non OS chips) and do something to ensure that their phones are not backdoored.

Of course that COMPLETELY ignores the fact that a cell phone can't work AT ALL unless the phone company knows roughly where you are. And if the phone company HAS to know, and the phone company has been compromised by the NSA, then it stands to reason that the NSA can track you even without the firmware backdoors on the phone itself.

The most convincing lies have a bit of truth sprinkled in to disarm your "that's gotta be bullshit" meter.</comment></comment>


Films Are Disappearing from Disney Plus - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/disney-plus/2020/1/2/21046851/films-leaving-disney-plus-home-alone-pirates-of-the-caribbean-dr-dolittle <comment><USER2> .

<comment><USER3> We can't discuss it here?</comment></comment>


Salaries for thousands of companies - <AUTHOR> http://salarynumbers.com/ <comment><USER2> Very cool. I assume this pulls from H1B visa info?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that's correct</comment></comment>


Rethink the airline boarding pass (accepting limitations) - <AUTHOR> http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/

<comment><USER2> I think this redesign _looks_ very nice, and I'd love to have this on my next flight.

But the redesign ignores a lot of the reality of actually using boarding passes. For example:

\- These boarding passes contain a lot of info that the Airline doesn't actually know for many flights. (Terminal and Gate numbers aren't available for a lot of flights at the time the boarding pass is printed). Those fields will be blank, which won't help you "navigate the airport labyrinth".

\- The barcode on this boarding pass is very small, much smaller than the other passes photographed. This will likely make it harder to scan (especially since these gates are often re-used, the glass on the scanners is often dirty/scratched). Difficulty scanning these could slowly lead to increased frustration with flight attendants who have to scan a couple thousand of these, by hand, every single day.

\- Color. Your boarding pass has it. Normal ones (often) don't. Even the passes you photographed are missing color printing. So these nice weather icons aren't going to look nearly as nice if you are truly adding "no new printers", as the page describes.

Again, I love the idea. But I think the design would be better served by a more careful observation of airports and air travel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Again. It's like people have Photoshop/Illustrator and Helvetica and get an itch to either redesign boarding passes or Craigslist.

Pretty and some good thoughts (like the passport integration, though not relevant for domestic U.S. flights), but the same limitations always pop up (carrier independence, legacy printer hardware, etc.).

Apparently smartphone ticketing doesn't exist in the EU, yet, though. I can't remember the last time I had a paper ticket.</comment>


Russian scientist spent his whole career figuring out how to trigger quakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.ihed.ras.ru/mg/novikov.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Relevant Google Scholar link to what he did during the last 20 years:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=novikov+earthquake&hl=f...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=novikov+earthquake&hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=2000&as_yhi=2020)</comment>


Show HN: WebRTC implementation for Python using Asyncio - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jlaine/aiortc/ <comment><USER2> OMG this is a godsend! I've wanted to do webrtc outside of a browser in python for a while now but there was no available implementations (besides the native one, and I didn't want to go down the swig route).

Some questions:

Can it handle the signalling on its own?

Can it substitute any part of a webrtc session? That is, can I have either browser-aiortc, aiortc-browser or aiortc-aiortc?

Can it be used to build, say, a desktop application doing webrtc communication?

<comment><USER3> Naive question: what's cool about doing webrtc outside a browser?

<comment><USER4> If you are trying to build e.g. Twitch or Discord, you want to have a server backend to handle processing, hide user IPs from each other for privacy etc. (the term you are looking for is single forwarding unit). If you just want to get something up quickly, I recommend OpenVidu.

<comment><USER5> If you're hiding everything behind a server, couldn't you just use WebSockets? I thought the whole appeal of WebRTC is the whole peer to peer setup.

<comment><USER6> WebRTC provides audio and video streaming, as well as unreliable/unordered data transport through data channels, which is really great for games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice work! As a WebRTC implementer (both native and in Chrome), I applaud the work!

But I can only notice quite a bit of mismatch between your APIs and the current spec. Do you plan on updating your implementation to match it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any specific area you spotted which would need some love? Modern spec compliance is most definitely a goal (e.g. RTCRtpTransceiver has been there from the start, aiortc uses the "modern" SDP form for data-channels), so any pointers are greatly appreciated!

I've had some great interactions with the Mozilla crowd (hey Lennart, hey Nils) - looking forward to more of the same!

<comment><USER7> Anything related to RTCRtpSendParameters (previously RTCRtpEncodingParameters) really.

For example, RTCRtpSender.getParameters is missing and the setParameters seems to be missing (unless that's the send function). And as far as I can tell, you are not supposed to call setParameters without getParameters first, so that's not spec compliant ;)

And of course, the sendEncodings property of the init parameters in addTransceiver is missing. It is required to setup simulcast (and later SVC when we standardize it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Duly noted, I've opened an issue to track this:

[https://github.com/jlaine/aiortc/issues/76](https://github.com/jlaine/aiortc/issues/76)

aiortc's RTCPeerConnection indeed uses RTCRtpSender.send to apply parameters. This is directly inspired by ORTC:

[http://draft.ortc.org/#dom-rtcrtpsender-send](http://draft.ortc.org/#dom- rtcrtpsender-send)

<comment><USER7> Also, my take on this is that you should probably not mix WebRTC and ORTC APIs. Those are quite different (even if there are similarities).

If you want to implement ORTC, fine, but you should probably do it in another package and make sure you don't expose fields in WebRTC that aren't part of the standard. Some fields (like the SSRC field) is not exposed for good reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is super cool, great work! It's the second (mostly-)language-native implementation[1] outside of a browser that I'm aware of, both started this year despite the WebRTC spec being finalized about 5 years ago.

It's really important for libraries like this to exist so more people can build apps without binding to massive hard-to-compile browser codebases. Thank you for working on it!

Also kudos for going asyncio and Python 3 right from the gate.

\--

[1] At least semi-functioning with DataChannel support. Lots of started attempts that have never gotten this far. The other implementation is in Go: [https://github.com/pions/webrtc](https://github.com/pions/webrtc)

</comment><comment><USER6> Since a lot of WebRTC devs may be in this thread (and I personally didn't know of this project nor [https://github.com/pions/webrtc](https://github.com/pions/webrtc)) -- any erlang/elixir implementations out there?

<comment><USER9> The members of Slack's Calls team have written their own and they have spoken at SF HTML5 meet-up but nothing else publicised AFAIK.

Also somebody has forked erlyvideo to deal with WebRTC

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow! This is hard to do! I got most of an ICE implementation done in Node.js then got completely hung up on DTLS. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi can the author or someone point to a hello world code using end-to-end of the above code?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are several examples available from the project's github repo:

[https://github.com/jlaine/aiortc/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/jlaine/aiortc/tree/master/examples)

I personally like the "server" and "apprtc" demos as you can easily talk to a browser. They illustrate slightly different things:

\- "apprtc" relies on a third-party signaling service, and shows you how you can play media from a file / record it to a file, or generate video frame-by- frame.

\- "server" shows you how you can combine media and signaling into a single Python-based server, and how you can apply image processing on the fly to the received video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great work! I can really appreciate the effort you likely put into re- implementing SCTP, since I'm currently working on implementing SCTP in Rust for the same reasons (WebRTC support). :)

<comment><USER13> I'm really eager for a SCTP/WebRTC implementation in Rust! I took a stab at it, and re-implementing SCTP was the obstacle that stalled me.

Is your work on github/gitlab?

<comment><USER12> Yes [1], but it's incomplete, needs a lot of TODO resolution and cleanup, (insert other scary disclaimers here), etc. I also have some slides from a presentation [2].

[1] [https://github.com/simmons/webrtc- sctp](https://github.com/simmons/webrtc-sctp) [2] [https://cafbit.com/post/rust_webrtc_data_channels/](https://cafbit.com/post/rust_webrtc_data_channels/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really impressive! Seems like a great way to learn WebRTC and potentially is going to be much more portable than the reference C++ implementation.

<comment><USER14> Isn't C++ generally more portable than python? All you need is a sufficient compiler, as opposed to a correctly set up Python installation of the correct version.

<comment><USER15> Well, CPython is C89, that level of compatibility is hard to beat.

<comment><USER16> I suppose many readers of HN already know this, but CPython is the name of the original and most popular implementation of Python; it is the implementation found at python.org. It is written in C and hence is called CPython.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great work! Thanks for this. Scripting WebRTC is always a hassle. And the CV integration will make things easier ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, might as well enjoy the rich Python ecosystem!

Starting with aiortc 0.9.9, there is now also deep integration with PyAV for all your FFmpeg needs.

\- At the lowest level : aiortc uses PyAV's AudioFrame and VideoFrame class, and PyAV is soon to gain more ndarray converters: [https://github.com/mikeboers/PyAV/pull/415](https://github.com/mikeboers/PyAV/pull/415)

\- At a higher level : aiortc provides MediaPlayer and MediaRecorder classes to read or write audio/video

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Amazing stuff! Since I mainly do python, I'll definitely dig into this over the weekend.

Can this library in the current state record audio of both local and remote streams at the same time and could you mute a user for every participant on the call?

</comment><comment><USER19> Can you comment on any performance hotspots due to Python (are there any)? What wouldn't this library be suitable for?

<comment><AUTHOR> So far the main CPU hog is (unsurprisingly) media encoding, especially video. Luckily this occurs off the main thread, inside C function calls. Unless I'm mistaken the GIL is released, so there is no Python-specific downside on this specific point.

I've found heavy usage of asyncio.Queue to bridge consumers / producers does not lead to amazing performance, so I'm trying to cut down on that pattern in favour of.. callbacks (I know - not very asyncio-ish). A good testcase for testing performance without media encoding is transferring large amounts of data over datachannels (see datachannel-filexfer example). I usually hit ~ 70Mbps on the loopback interface, which is more than I've managed to get out of browsers.

I can't say I have experience with using aiortc at scale yet, so there are almost certainly so hotspots I haven't seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would have thought that using kernel SCTP would be much faster.

<comment><USER21> WebRTC afaik uses SCTP wrapped in UDP, not SCTP directly.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't have to wrap it in UDP. Seems to be just an expectation that firewalls can't handle SCTP directly so you will need to wrap it in something else. Extending a firewall to understand SCTP isn't particularly difficult.

In any case, the SCTP reference implementation in FreeBSD can do RFC 6951 encapsulation, someone could add it to Linux too.

<comment><USER21> It's specified as wrapping in DTLS/UDP, so implementations have to do that if they want to be interopable. The "just an expectation" is sadly a well-studied fact.

That FreeBSD can do that is neat, but just it doing that is pretty much the answer why a library wouldn't implement it, or at least not as a priority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is super cool. For what are you using it?

</comment><comment><USER23> Is ORTC used by something else than Skype?

<comment><AUTHOR> ORTC is what Microsoft has chosen to implement in Edge, so if you use WebRTC in Edge, you're most likely using the WebRTC-over-ORTC adaptor.

In short ORTC is: break WebRTC into objects you manipulate directly, instead of everything being instanciated via RTCPeerConnection. There is significant overlap between the two specs, for instance RTCRtpReceiver / RTCRtpSender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome work!</comment>