bumholio

12 ms·

91.
by bumholio 8y ago
The successful phase out of CFCs, despite the fact that no comparable refrigerents were available at the time, shows that political solutions can work, even in the face of adverse economics. The success of Europe in reducing emissions shows
92.
by bumholio 8y ago
People are easy to scare. We will begin taking climate change seriously when we will see wide scale effects that threaten our own future. By that time, the impact on the natural world will be ireversibile and dramatic.
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by bumholio 8y ago
But the behavior of any data dependent algorithm depends on any behavior change in the upstream data source. If you pipe Seti@home data into the array, the behavior of the program might depend on what some distant alien intelligence did tho
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by bumholio 8y ago
> "Forget trying to understand this issue, let us explain how you should feel about it!" Well... yeah. Because you stand no chance of understanding the issue, and there is a very high risk that you will develop irrational feeli
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by bumholio 8y ago
> can the behaviour of the following bit of C code depend > on a modern computer, a pointer dereference could very lead to the execution of Python code. So the BEHAVIOR of the C code does not change. The dereference of the pointer t
96.
by bumholio 8y ago
> Technology is not power. It enables power. If you engineer the technology to enable only a specific kind of power, then you the engineer and the technology you made can be called evil. That's a clear contradiction. One one hand yo
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by bumholio 8y ago
> Has the smith made a political move by making the hammer available to everyone? It depends. Is the "hammer" a set of instructions to build an airborne pathogen starting from the HIV genome? Technology is power and power is al
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by bumholio 8y ago
I certainly did not say that official state propaganda is better than online propaganda by other political actors (including foreign states). It's that modern society has developed institutions to deal with the innate tendency of polit
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by bumholio 8y ago
> It's a general-purpose tool. The politics is in what you use it for. That's exactly the view they are arguing against. There is no hard border between tool and decision to use it, the infrastructure will always shift the con
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by bumholio 8y ago
There is no inconsistency, just a missing set of quotes around "right" - I hold there is no right or wrong in this matter. I don't reject the right of the people living in the area to try to influence the concensus - they mig
101.
by bumholio 8y ago
> named his new publishing start-up Fishkorn this year after seeing the name on Google Maps. “It rolls off the tongue,” he said And there you have it, the exact same process that gave rise to all toponyms. It's debatable if Google h
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by bumholio 8y ago
If the credit companies have their way, no, they ban different cash/card prices in their take it or leave it terms. Some regulators have disagreed, but in most places the card lobby won out because cards impose tax transparency, so the
103.
by bumholio 8y ago
Investors love them, consumers pay for them and regulators should prevent their abuse. Sounds like oligopolies alright.
104.
by bumholio 8y ago
The cake is a lie. I can't eat it, that's the point.
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by bumholio 8y ago
> baked tiered cakes for weddings are stale Here's a radical idea then: let's stop deceiving guests they are eating such a cake.
106.
by bumholio 8y ago
SD Card is legacy. Legacy: (noun) a useful, established technology that Apple's designers feel it makes their computers less pretty.
107.
by bumholio 8y ago
By the same token, maybe the automobile and oil industry really care a lot about the environment, but the only way to produce a safe, affordable and performing car is their tech savvy way refined for a century. Or maybe they just don't
108.
by bumholio 8y ago
90% of that can be accomplished with server-side stats. Do you really need to track mouse movements and follow readers with super-cookies across the web to find out what articles people find engaging on your site? > The idea that trackin
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by bumholio 8y ago
> Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. You hasten to generalizations. It's entirely possible that the economic success of the Western societies had historic roots in the industrial revolution and the me
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by bumholio 8y ago
> I don't want Trump to have the power to accidentally the whole world because he couldn't keep his short, fat fingers from a big red button he couldn't read the label for. I do not, however, believe their removal would po
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by bumholio 8y ago
> any somewhat-functional state can build a nuke if they really really want to. We are already in such a world, what prevents proliferation are not technical reasons, but the strong international pressure - both by nuclear and non-nuclea
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by bumholio 8y ago
It's very hard to break that cycle when the only way to become a legitimate world power is to obtain nuclear weapons. There are many examples: Pakistan vs Iran, Israel, North Korea, they all prove how obtaining nuclear weapons is the r
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by bumholio 8y ago
The original copyright is with the paper for anything published after the second world war (the exact date depends on the country). They have the sole right to decide how and when their archives are published online. Determining copyright s
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by bumholio 8y ago
That's a bullshit made-up rule, designed by corporate lawyers who want to remove any possibility of a lawsuit. There's nothing immoral about dating an employee; it's a risky situation because the employee can feel pressured a
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by bumholio 8y ago
What we need next is a widely adopted standard of end-to-end opportunistic encryption, similar to Signal. PKI and PGP are too complex for end users. The problem that prevents such a standard from ever taking off is that, unlike TLS, there i
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by bumholio 8y ago
Of course, it's electric propulsion so most likey solar. But the unlimited propellant mass allows for a much higher thrust than typical for satellites and quick (days, weeks) orbital hops.
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by bumholio 8y ago
Sorry, here's a cached copy: http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Space/Spacecraft/Debris%... Regardless of any redaction errors, the basic idea is sound. While the particle engine is not able to produce
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by bumholio 8y ago
Once the proof of concept is demonstrated, an interesting development is to use a robotic arm to disassemble the junk and grind it into fine dust that can be used as propellant for an electrostatic engine: https://arxiv.org/
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by bumholio 8y ago
The money quote: 60 percent [of Uber, Lyft trips] either replace transit, biking, and walking, or would not have been made
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by bumholio 8y ago
> an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'. If Facebook is willing to pay substantial amounts of money for a restaurant, while at the same time guara

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