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thegp

Re:The end of smartphone innovation on Saturday March 25, 2017 @02:35PM (#13956929)
Trust me, they won't for a while and you don't want them to. Do some research into bio-compatibility. After that, do some research into electrolysis. You can do a fun experiment by connecting a battery to your tongue for a while. Just google it before please to know what is happening.

Meanwhile, non invasive BCI are getting AWESOME...if you are a quadriplegic with no other options.

Now imagine we solve those problems, and the first BCI is on the market. It's safe, it's a little bit faster than typing/reading (hey, first generation right). Who is going to be the first early adopter to undergo massive brainsurgery? Turns out upgarding cochlear implants is so hard they are made to last 100 years (they get surrounded by bones and scar tissue...) so upgrading will be really hard. And who wouldn't want to have their blackberry implanted into their head right now...even worse, if we have proprietary technology in the first ones and now your brainberry can only talk to other brainberries...or we go full internet of shit and it needs a cloud server to do anything:)

True. Plus Clifford is an awesome guy:)
this is also called the fallacy fallacy

There is ample historic precedent for regimes and loud minorities implementing agendas by first going after the easiest targets (jews, kurds,hooligans,illegal immigrants) then slightly generalising (disabled, kurdish supporters, all "potentially violent", immigrants in general) in some steps until the end goal (political opponents, political opponents, political opponents and...political opponents). Hence in this case, the slippery slope is a given and justified.

Yes it is kinda."innocent until proven guilty". At least if you believe in rule of law.
No, thankfully not.

And yes, I understand that, the "immediately" was a bit knee jerk. But at least part of what you described is what I meant in another comment here: it should be part of both education and procedures to make immediate prosecution not only possible but a no brainer. Then we can avoid situations like this, which always reeks to me as "guilty until proven innocent"

Ok, I see your points there.

I just really dislike this situation where it boils down to "(s)he said/(s)he said" and the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" flies out the window

Another thing I don't get is why they wouldn't prosecute now that the community is already fractured.

So why not say something immediately at least?

Also, and this is where I probably sound like an as:

If you are an anarchist and don't believe in law enforcement OR in the ability of your community to replace them then tough shit if something happens and you have nobody to turn to. That is kinda the whole purpose od ordered society to provide a way to deal with that

So what should you do? Not apply scrutiny? Remember, in dubio pro reo
Contrast as in "here is a different opinion by people who also know him better than most of us". Truth will be found (hopefully) by a criminal investigation, not by by the court of public opinion.

You are right, victim blaming is horrible. That's why I didn't say "they should have said something immediately, now they have lost credibility"

I understand why they might not go immediately and don't blame them for it. I still think the right thing is immediate prosecution. If they don't feel like they will be helped by the authoritiesthat is a problem, which needs to be addressed both on the sides of the authorities (with proper training and procedures) and education (teaching people to prosecute immediately instead of shutting up)

As a contrast see https://mobile.twitter.com/cfarivar/status/74163457267311001....

If the allegations true, they should prosecute, and should have prosecuted immediately. As well as all the other people who knew of it. And we should continue to work towards a world where that is a no brainer.

Most people are nice. It's only a few people, mostly with unfortunate backgrounds or fates that are not. Let's work towards institutions which handle this efficiently, without the need for mobs

Re:Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @08:13AM (#11901474)
So who do you trust enough to be distrusting parties? This to me seems to be the same problem as making it proof of work: if the incentives are big enough, the scheme collapses. Look at the creativity that lead to caging and other forms of voter suppression
Re:Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @01:36AM (#11900004)
To be done sufficiently, you need to not only prove that your system is fair, reliable, scalable, tamperproof, anonymous etc., but also that you system actually runs. That combination is nigh impossible. That is the fundamental reason, bootstrapping that trust. Imagine you have a 100% open source system, cryptographically verified etc. How do I know that is actually what is running in the voting box?
As opposed to the helpful, precise and empirically corroborated statement that NOT everybody has a talent, no matter how hard they look?
Well, not quite. Spinnaker is OPTIMIZED for spiking neurons, but in theory you could run standard computations on it. It is just really messy (speaking form experience).

The main idea behind Spinnaker as far as I understood it is "cheap cores, lots of them, architecture for message passing and load distrubtion vaguely inspired by human brain". This rang similar on a first read

Wonder how similar to http://www.artificialbrains.com/spinnaker this is
Which things do you mean? And excited as in happy or as in rage?
Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 on Monday June 06, 2016 @07:29AM (#11845921)
Then if you believe in the rule of law (in germany we say "Rechtstaat") and the presumption of innocence, it is kind of a civic duty to follow these steps. If only to oppose this line of thinking. Or even better, bait those who would like to control us into openly acting. Especially if you are a lawyer, have enough money to pay a lawyer etc.

I will probably piss myself and cry if I ever really "become a target" as it happens in China, cartel controlled parts of south america, dictatorships etc. But I will be damned if I don't make some kind of token resistance to us going down that path if all it costs me is keeping my privacy and maybe having legal hassle+ cost of replacement if my stuff gets seized.

You are possibly misunderstanding his point. This is partially about nuances and partially about the fact that maybe everybody successful worked hard to get there, but exactly as many people did the same effort and sacrifice, just with a differentcontext and got nowhere. (Warning: slight rambling ahead, English second language)

Take X people,all the same (assume I have cloning start-up and really good sales guys. You just bought those). Make 10% of them "grit and hardworking". Are they going to do better in live than the others ? Sure,everything else is equal after all.

Now, you are probably a wonderful human being, but assume that your evil twin got a hold of the ordering form and decided, just for fun, to introduce some extra random differentiators.

Like color of skin, gender, giving some of them more starting capital, or Paul Graham's personal Rolodex. Also making some of them ignorant pricks.

Are the 10% "grit and hardwork" still gonna so bettereverything else being equal? Definitely. But is specimen 99, baseline, only grid and hardwork, do better that specimen 1, baseline, capital, Rolodex ? Maybe, maybe not.

In the real world, nothing is equal. One of the starting perks (that I share) is having a supportive family which can provide enough nutrition, protection and stimulus so your brain can mature. Another one is learning discipline and hard work. Some of us learnt them the hard way( if the mythos is legit, Musk is one of them). But we all had to learn, and if you never have the chance to learn (for example by being part of a social in which one is punished for being smart or "trying to hard") then at some point it is no longer reasonable to expect you to rise against the circumstances. The very fact that we celebrate people who do so implies we understand this on some level.

If I look on my life(reasonable amount of success), most good things came down to luck. Grant you, I worked hard on improving my luck surface and seizing opportunities once I realised this, but luck nonetheless. Hell the only reason I am not a depresssed, burnt out social outcast right now was a meeting during a train ride

I wonder if it is possible to get a full dump of that db
Re:A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @03:27AM (#11626778)
What specifically makes you perceive that?

And for your last question:

1. What is your working definition of liberal(positive vs. Negative freedoms)? 2. Income tax taxes... Income. Not labour. Ideally not discriminating between capital and labour income.

Re:Command line interface for Signal/TextSecure on Monday February 15, 2016 @08:38AM (#11103296)
I wonder why this didn't get more traction, for me this means Signal is finally approaching a full fledged WhatsApp alternative (with matrix and ring hot on its heels)
Re:Funding Django is not an act of charity, it's an investment on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @03:06AM (#11071348)
Piggybacking your comment:

In Germany, the legislative has created a way to handle this:

If you are a recognised nonprofit ("gemeinnützige Organisation ") you can give your donors donation receipts which count for tax purposes. It is literally an invoice for a donation, but importantly the transaction will not be taxed, the donors simply deduct it from their income and the recipients simply have more money, without accounting overhead.

If you are a nonprofit which works with international companies (we for example worked with them to organise events for students), this can be quite tricky to explain, since the concept seems a bit alien to their accountants, who are used to sponsorship deals or simple licences like op described

Re:Car Engines: The incredible shrinking machine on Friday December 11, 2015 @11:25AM (#10717977)
German here, what is this "speed limit" you talk about?:)

But yeah, kei style cars are redundant in Europe because bikes, scooters , minis, nowadays car sharing, public transport and more space exist.

Erm, aren't you contradicting yourself? With minimum wage , it either has to be high enough that local workers are interested, people come and bring their own goods, so money gets removed.But that also happens with the higher minimum wages, since it is even more attractive. Just more competition. And if the minimum wage gets to low, you still have the "problem" of guest workers. Without a minimum wage, but with basic income, companies can now lower the wages such that they no longer are attractivene to people living here and only to the guest workers. However, they are also free to lower them to almost match the guest workers home country, if their primary form of labour comes from their. So the companies benefit, the country with BI benefit from increased consumption, social stability and more people taking risks like entrepreneurship and extended education and the only ones shafted are the guest workers. Which still sucks, from a solidarity point of view.
Re:Income Inequality: Empirical View on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @12:31PM (#10501045)
Doesn't the qoute state that income inequality is supposed to enact accumulation and growth("give something to aspire to") but instead leads to concentration of political power among the wealthy, who then use that power to further secure their higher income, creating a feedback loop?

That directly implies that removing income inequality and adding feedback loops that avoids excessive capital concentration is the way to go.

And to your point about non-coerced transactions, where does coercion start? Monopolies? Excessive costs? Does Comcast coerce their customers, if they have only no internet as the alternative? Does uber coerce people with surge pricing? And that pharma guy, raising the price of the drug, did he coerce people ? I would tend to say yes in the case of the Comcast monopoly, no in the other cases.

But it's hard to define exactly where coercion starts.

A more fundamental examples, from my libertarian socialist perspective: advertising in public view. Is that coercion of a third party(the advertised to?) Microsoft windows/ apple and other walled gardens with no data export, but payed for upgrade path and end of support?

And even more fundamentally, sometimes any and all transactions you make can be under duress and make you inherently dependent on the partner: Getting a shitty job that barely feeds you, because your skills are obsolete and your country doesn't provide basic income?

Startint that shitty job early, due to not having the same resources, stability and growing opportunities because your father is working a shitty job just to make ends meet?

Re:Things men have actually said to me at tech events on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @03:03AM (#10378938)
I would argue that we as a society have become much more civil and the assholes stick out more as a consequence of that.

30 years ago nobody complained about stuff like this because a)no woman at these events and b)it was absolutely acceptable. And that's without the honey/darling/grope your coworkes time old media tells me about (was that real by the way? I'm from Europe and to young to have had any contact with that )

Re:Australians lead efforts to move space junk with lasers on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:32AM (#8561214)
not a physicist, but an electrical engineer.

At least 2 principles that I know allow a laser to push things:

1) photons do have impulse, given by its energy divides by the speed of light. This causes Radiation pressure (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure ) 2) if a laser vaporises part of a structure, the resultant gas will push against the structure, delivering momentum