Pitarou

54 ms·

511.
by Pitarou 13y ago
Abe has bought Japan some breathing space. Now comes the hard part: structural reform. As a Japanese resident, I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. Japanese culture favours stability, consensus and precedent. Cronyism and powerful interest grou
512.
by Pitarou 14y ago
I'm speechless with admiration.
513.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> As for potential terrorists, I guess I still struggle with what their goals are. I think a lot of people are way off the mark. Hmm. You're right The grievances that drive terrorism are well understood. But beyond that I'm making confi
514.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Friends and family I've lost to: - vehicle accidents: 4 - terrorism: 0 But that's not really the issue. If you believe that this was a matter of community cohesion -- of a society being strengthened by the annealing blows of terrorists inci
515.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> Actually, I don't keep any gunpowder under my sink.... Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated my description of the bombs. > ... omitting the rather significant context ... That's kind of my point. The terrorists chose to plan
516.
by Pitarou 14y ago
From your first comment, I thought you were talking about public safety and deterring criminal acts. But it's clear now that what's really got your blood pumping is the sense of spectacle. I guess I should congratulate the terrorists for p
517.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Would you advocate shutting down the city every time there's a hit-and-run incident? Surely, discouraging reckless driving would save FAR more lives than discouraging terrorists.
518.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> Something to consider: it worked. Damn right it worked. INPUT: pressure cookers and gunpowder OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down That's pretty damn effective. And it's all thanks to the multiplyin
519.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Bullshit. One skill that is NOT correlated with IQ is the ability to reflect honestly on your own motivations. (If anything, the smarter people are, the better they get at rationalising.) So here's a mirror: - you have a problem with auth
520.
by Pitarou 14y ago
That was the first thing that occurred to me, too. As the earlier discussion about chess suggests, interactions with other intelligent agents complicate matters. An intelligent agent shouldn't just attempt to maximise the number of possibl
521.
by Pitarou 14y ago
I don't think they're proposing to block the PROTOCOL. (Is it even possible to reliably distinguish Tor traffic from other encrypted traffic?) Rather, I think they're proposing to block all packets being sent to known Tor end-nodes. Of co
522.
by Pitarou 14y ago
And it gets worse. At first, the Japanese police "interrogated" four of the people whose computers had been hijacked. THREE OF THEM CONFESSED. The only reason they're not behind bars now is because: 1. Even the Japanese police noticed tha
523.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> Why is the Japanese government so anachronistic and unreformed about Internet policy? Take a step back. Why is the Japanese government so anachronistic and unreformed?
524.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> This is how capitalism works. Companies (and individuals) try to maximise their own profits Please don't lecture me about capitalism. I had enough of that when I took a degree in economics.
525.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Yeah. My bad. I had a real need and Mendeley's software (which is awesome, by the way) came to my rescue; issues of who controls it and what they might want from me someday seemed very far away at the time.
526.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Now I'm going to have to e-mail all the friends I advocated Mendeley to, and tell them to consider switching. Serves me right for not looking more carefully at whose interests Mendeley was serving. :-(
527.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> What no one, the bitcoin community included, anticipates is hundreds and thousands of competing cryptocurrencies around the world. No one anticipates it because it makes no sense. Nobody _wants_ hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrenc
528.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn't need to convert to USD You're describing a situation in which the economy is split into two parts: a dollar economy and a Bitcoin economy. (I will assume that the Feds will come down hard
529.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Doesn't the car lock you out after too many failed attempts? If they don't, these keyless entry pads have just set back car security by about about 15 years.
530.
by Pitarou 14y ago
> Note: Getting sidetracked by comments on sentence structure may be the signal that I've successfully procrastinated other work long enough. Tell me about it. Anyway, how's this: > The rich have savings accounts and insurance; th
531.
by Pitarou 14y ago
You've just given me a horrible, horrible idea. patent trolls & viruses
532.
by Pitarou 14y ago
I'm an English teacher, so I'll bite. That sentence is bursting at the seams. There are too many words between "Poor people have clutter" and "they have it to reduce risk", so the reader loses track of the context. Maybe a really good write
533.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Irony = poetic injustice. I hope that helps. Now, please stop being a PJ (pedantic jackass). Thanks.
534.
by Pitarou 14y ago
While the sentence is technically ambiguous, we say ambiguous things all the time and still manage to understand one another. This is the domain of the study of Pragmatics. In natural communication, we START by assuming that the speaker had
535.
by Pitarou 14y ago
You're making the classic nerd error of assuming that natural languages should be as precisely defined as mathematics or computer languages. You're going to tell me that there's no such thing as deceleration next! (To be fair, "Buffalo buf
536.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Here's how it works: "buffalo" can function as a verb (bully) and a plural noun (bison). So we can write "Bison bully bison." as "Buffalo buffalo buffalo." I'm going to tag my groups of bison with numbers. > Bison(1) bully bison(0). &#6
537.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Now we're getting to the nub. I'm no expert on this matter, so apologies if this is a dumb question, but: has the perceptual quality measure used in CRF been subject to the same ITU BT.500 testing? If it hasn't, then I'm afraid your case re
538.
by Pitarou 14y ago
Failure is a life event, and it sucks. (Just like getting ditched, getting fired, getting sick, and so on.) Frankly, I'm glad I'm not in your shoes right now. But it's not the end. This thing you built will not take you down with it. Y
539.
by Pitarou 14y ago
The Japanese don't switch to electronic document systems because of their great respect for precedent and established procedure. A whole administrative and legal culture has grown up around the paper document, and the Japanese are too atta
540.
by Pitarou 14y ago
This sounds like the experience of a beginning programmer learning pretty-much any popular scripting language. > I found that regular expressions ... are a great way to isolate the string that one is looking for... Well I never! I'm n

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