EdTsft
EdTsft on Hacker News
That interpretation of rights is not universal and in my experience seems to be a philosophy mainly coming from the US (presumably reinforced by the language in the American bill of rights). I view rights as describing the actual (implicit or explicit) contract between a people and their government, not as an absolute metaphysical or moral concept. In my view, a person in a developed nation has a stronger right to clean water than a person in an impoverished nation as statement of fact observable from the effort their government goes to to ensure they have clean water. I prefer this view of rights divorced from morals because it lets a population pressure their government for rights based on what they want rather than getting bogged down on whether it is morally right to e.g. have access to guns or silence in criminal proceedings.
"A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use." [1]
We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth).
[1]: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
I have a hard time believing this, are you suggesting that it is perfectly legal to run pirated software so long as you never entered a license agreement with the creator? Or that the existence of a license you've never interacted with and potentially have no knowledge of has an impact on the legality of you running pirated software? What if a company's internal software is leaked, surely they have the right to prevent other companies from using it?
As a Canadian, discussions like this threat make me slightly wishful of better options for national forums or censorship of foreign speech. Of all the comments decrying how horrible this is, how many of you are Canadian or at least familiar with the practice of limits to expression in Canada? At present I don't feel too strongly either way about this bill but I think by and large the judicial system has shown itself to be capable of reasonable enforcement of necessarily vaguely defined terms so I don't anticipate many/any outrageous enforcement actions. We are much less politically polarized than the US, especially the judicial system, so there is a smaller risk of the law being interpreted in extreme ways. That's not to say this is necessarily a good law, just that I don't find it as horrible as many of the comments are making out.
I feel like our culture and values are at risk of being overwhelmed by the US's since the media and online spaces are so dominated by American voices. Apart from a few Canadian themed subreddits (and who knows how many of the comments are actually from Canadians) and maybe friend groups on Facebook, there aren't many online spaces for Canadians to talk. I don't know how to deal with this problem. I love forums like Hacker News and and any nation-specific space would be unlikely to be as good. I don't want the great firewall of China either (I wonder how the Canadian Shield will turn out [0]). So I don't know what the solution should be but threads like this do feel like a small part of the problem.
[0]: https://www.cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/canadian-shield
YouTube is very convenient for hosting and sharing recordings of talks. You can't put a video recording in a mailing list or a paper journal, and journal/conference websites are generally not in the business of hosting video recordings.
Often it's much easier to understand another's research in the form of a presentation than a paper (papers give you the details but not necessarily the high level story), so, like it or not, YouTube is a significant scientific repository.
So all the more reason not to send data to the US to not make it easier for them
It's interesting how the US has such a different cultural view of rights than other English speaking commonwealth countries that you'd expect to be culturally similar. I can't speak for other countries but as a Canadian I view the idea of "inalienable" or "god-given" rights as preposterous. A right is a promise a government makes to a people. I have a much more expansive right to free speech than someone in North Korea does, that's just an objective reality since the North Korean government does not make the promise of free speech to their people. I have no right to be granted employment if I cannot find it myself, but that right has existed for others in various places and times. You can say that people should have certain rights, but to me it's wrong as a statement of fact to say that they already have them.
This view of rights also makes it easy to say that we should have the right to healthcare, or food and water, or housing. You don't have to debate about whether those are "inalienable human rights" to decide that it would be better for our government to make those promises to our citizens.
More of an aside, it is weird to me that you would include the right to not self-incriminate among the set of inalienable rights. That one seems like a much more arbitrary detail of your justice system than some more obvious right like access to food and clean water.
Only the US sanctioned Cuba and while it was pretty harmful, they were still able to trade with most other countries. North Korea has China right next door as a big trade partner, and can trade with many non-US countries as well. As for Iran, from what I can tell UN sanctions really only started to ramp up in the 2010s and those did have an effect in getting Iran to suspend its nuclear program.
Edit: But to be clear, I think the US sanctions on Cuba are gratuitous and cruel. Cuba is not some rogue state and there are many worse dictatorships that aren't sanctioned. However, I think it reinforces the point that "sanctions can be devastatingly effective applied by a significant majority of the world" because in the Cuba case the rest of the world didn't agree.
I'm not sure that it would. The Earth isn't perfectly spherical so the gravitational field will be different at different times in the orbit. Then because it is orbiting you'll also have to deal with tidal forces (bits slightly closer to the Earth will want to move slightly faster), not to mention possible acceleration from solar radiation or small amounts of atmospheric drag.
And during the time that takes you're suffering the consequences of a viral infection. Majormajor was replying to a comment suggesting that it might somehow have been possible to evolve the equivalent of a COVID-19 vaccine, which allows your immune system to adapt without experiencing a viral infection. What couldn't possibly work is for your body to already naturally be immune before experiencing the virus.
That sounds like an excellent way for the US to torpedo their relationship with Canada, as if the trade war and COVID response isn't doing enough already. Canada's stance on the arrest is based on its legitimacy and the impartiality of the judiciary. The public will be outraged if it comes out that we've had to suffer China's wrath for a political stunt by the US.
On mobile Firefox (at least for me) nothing appears below the intro message. The last line I see is "Made for you by ...".
I'm a Torontonian and I was looking forward to the project. I'm sad to see it cancelled. (It's a big city with many opinions, I don't think you can fairly claim that quote about "thousands of Torontonians" is "simply not true" from a sample size of dozens, the author is not even claiming all those people supported the Quayside project specifically).
Sure, some parts of the project looked like tech for tech's sake but I was excited about the urban design plans and architecture. And who knows, maybe some of the tech-y things would turn out to be good too. That's what experiments are for, and this wasn't a very large scale or risky one when compared to the size of the city so it's worth it to me to try new things even if many of the ideas don't work out. As for data issues, it seemed like the city and Waterfront Toronto were not afraid to exercise a lot of control on that front so Sidewalk Labs wasn't going to be able to do whatever they wanted, a lot of effort was going into ensuring it was in the public interest. This latest news supports the idea that the city was uncompromising in supporting what they see as the public interest - even to the extent that Sidewalk labs gives up entirely.
I find it surprising that anyone would disagree with this. What do you view as the purpose of government? Isn't any other role just instrumental to ultimately benefiting society?
Or are you just disagreeing with the part about contract enforcement in particular?
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the average consumer to research the worker quality of life (and the product safety history, and the environmental record, and the political donations, and the tax evasion tactics, and ...) of all of the hundreds or thousands of companies that they give money to. These aren't the kinds things we can expect to solve with consumer boycotts.
I think the Globe and Mail article referenced at the end [0] is a much better source. The BoingBoing article has less info and as far as I can tell their claims that these ideas are/were planned for the Toronto development is unsubstantiated. The globe and mail article quotes a spokesperson as stating:
"Many, if not most, of the ideas it contains were never under consideration for Toronto or discussed with Waterfront Toronto and governments."
It's definitely concerning that Sidewalk Labs ever had (or currently has) some of these ideas as part of their vision but it's not helpful to sensationalize or misrepresent the actual plans for Toronto.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalk-la...
As far as I can tell all that articles says is that there are languages that use a single term for green/blue, not that speakers of those languages are incapable of identifying the difference between the colour of a leaf and the color of the sky. I can distinguish between the colour of the sky and the colour of blueberries (and treat them as categories of colours) even if I use the same word "blue" for both.
Because Stellar is using that term in a document they're asking me to agree to and it seems likely that their intended meaning is similar to the IRS definition. But I'm not 100% sure that it's meant to exclude (almost) all non-Americans which is why I'm asking.
But what about people from countries other than the US that are are not sanctioned by OFAC? "further you agree you're not a non-resident alien of the United States"
Going by this [1] definition of nonresident alien, I am not a citizen of the USA so I'm an alien, and I don't live in the USA so I'm a non-resident alien.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/dete...
Am I correctly interpreting the clause as saying that pretty much only Americans are eligible? I'm confused because if that is the intent then the clause is really burying the lede when it starts out by excluding "users in certain countries".
I'm confused by the stellar sign-up terms.
"6. WE ARE UNABLE TO HELP DISTRIBUTE SDF LUMENS TO USERS IN CERTAIN COUNTRIES. By activating this wallet you agree you're not in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Crimea, or any other country or region subject to sanctions by OFAC; further you agree you're not a non-resident alien of the United States."
So this is only open to people living in the USA or people with some sort of non-alien legal status in the USA who are not currently residing in the list of banned countries? Seems odd to ban a specific list of countries, and then on top of that ban almost everyone who is not in the USA.
Why is half an orbit late? Admittedly, my knowledge of orbital dynamics mostly comes from kerbal space program but isn't half an orbit exactly when you'll have the most maneuverability relative to the collision point? 1/2+n orbits and you're just spending more time in the alternate orbit without increasing your ability to avoid the collision.