conanite

9 ms·

31.
by conanite 13y ago
> Punishment is a legitimate role for society; it is not juvenile. How so? Who benefits from punishment, and what do you mean by "legitimate"? Do you consider punishment ethical?
32.
by conanite 13y ago
Wow. See also "Tupac Shakur and the End of the World", a short story about a similar condition, caused by a latent virus and triggered by minor injuries. Everyone dies. I hadn't realised when I read it that there was a real-world equivalent
33.
by conanite 14y ago
I object to your analogy with test-driven development. "Test-driven" means we decide what it should do, then we write the corresponding code. A "test-driven" nation would decide first what the government ought to do, then proceed by writing
34.
by conanite 14y ago
> Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce many of the innovative companies. The article suggests that the available evidence does not support this conclusion. It seems that in historical technology fai
35.
by conanite 14y ago
Coming up next in Afghanistan: giant fly swatters.
36.
by conanite 14y ago
My guess is that if newspaper sites lose a big chunk of their traffic they might reconsider who should be paying whom. I'm also guessing that without support from newspapers, the law is less likely to get through.
37.
by conanite 14y ago
It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?
38.
by conanite 14y ago
Assuming it is correct to say that antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolve in response to the (over-/ab-)use of antibiotics - I wonder to what extent opposition to teaching evolution improves the chances of these kind of bacteria evolving. Dis
39.
by conanite 14y ago
The article ends with Mr Bezos would not be drawn on whether Amazon plans to release a smartphone of its own. Amazon's plans in the smartphone market may be influencing Jeff's argument.
40.
by conanite 14y ago
Scott Adams (of Dilbert), also inspired by Cialdini, found an excellent use for the consistency principle. See [0] (text possibly nsfw) [0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/toda...
41.
by conanite 14y ago
They're using T and G for a 1, and A and C for a 0; why not double the density and get two bits from each letter? T = 00 G = 01 A = 10 C = 11 for example.
42.
by conanite 14y ago
My interpretation of that sentence was that, with limited-time monopoly protection, it's in the producer's interest to sell as much of the stuff as possible before the monopoly ends, after which point it won't be possible to make significan
43.
by conanite 14y ago
The problem here is the oppression, not the computers. An "Access Control System" is a banal piece of software that decides who to let in and who to keep out. Hotels, banks, golf clubs ... and oppressive regimes, they all use one. You could
44.
by conanite 14y ago
An alternative in which direction? Like, a nice hotel ... or hanging? Insider trading is basically theft, only with no specific victim, and no broken windows; a very clean crime. Insider trading is stealing from other shareholders, which mi
45.
by conanite 14y ago
Wow - Godwin's Law, in reverse!
46.
by conanite 14y ago
The idea of a "defensive" patent is that you only ever assert it against another company asserting its patents against you. If you file a patent with the intention of preventing people from using an idea, I suppose you could call that an "a
47.
by conanite 14y ago
Aha, thanks for the clarification. The article stated RPX "promises to never use [its patent portfolio] offensively against its customers ". Never, ever, against anybody ... that's quite nice, actually :)
48.
by conanite 14y ago
Private, for-profit companies also provide various ways to navigate the patent system. For example, RPX allows companies to buy into its large patent portfolio, which it promises to never use offensively against its customers. So you give
49.
by conanite 14y ago
Using safari (5.1.5) on mac, I can't click on any of the place links (works ok in chrome)
50.
by conanite 14y ago
Hey, it has macros! But it doesn't compile to coffeescript ... yet ... http://haxe.org/manual/macros
51.
by conanite 14y ago
Yes, this is pretty radical. More info from the manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi... from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lex... - Such code is also much more friendly to conc
52.
by conanite 14y ago
Aha ... in the other (longer) linked document, the T-word is mentioned: National authorities are free to impose taxes on all telecommunications traffic, whether incoming or outgoing. I don't know how to interpret this document, particular
53.
by conanite 14y ago
From one of the linked documents: Operating Agencies shall endeavour to provide sufficient telecommunications facilities to meet requirements of and demand for international telecommunication services. For this purpose, and to ensure an ad
54.
by conanite 14y ago
Monsanto: the MAFIAA and patent trolls of agriculture. May the farmers win. And may your amaranth grow and prosper. [0] [0] http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Monsanto_defeated_by_herbicide_resis...
55.
by conanite 14y ago
The 60% accuracy is for a 50ms glimpse of a photo "mostly devoid of cultural cues". In real life you get much richer information for much more time, so it seems reasonable to conclude that 60% is a lower-bound for real-world gaydar accuracy
56.
by conanite 14y ago
There's a lot of greed in copyright, and there's a lot of stupidity, but this is an example of both combined in one place. What kind of colossal misunderstanding does it take to confuse linking and copying?
57.
by conanite 14y ago
The 6-metre distance between cars is probably to strongly discourage other drivers from attempting to cut in, which would banjax their laser finders and other stuff. With the lead truck sending instructions, this is a client-server setup, c
58.
by conanite 14y ago
See also http://musopen.org/ ... initally funded by kickstarter, they use donations to produce pro recordings of classical music which are then released to the public for free.
59.
by conanite 14y ago
The Court is the VM
60.
by conanite 14y ago
The article proposes that the ad-supported web will collapse along with FB after prices have dropped to beyond unsustainable ... what would the post-ad web look like? I'm looking forward to all the content farms, endless plagiarism, and con

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