dkimball

10 ms·

31.
by dkimball 16y ago
This is a very minor point, but could someone edit the title? "Afghani" means the currency; "Afghan" means the people of Afghanistan (Afghan-i Stan, "Land of the Afghans [originally another name for the Pashtuns]", in Persian). This is a pr
32.
by dkimball 16y ago
I think that this reveals the real villain of the previous video: the people who sent these men up to patrol a city in an Apache in the first place! Apaches are attack helicopters, "flying tanks," built to kill armored columns; they are not
33.
by dkimball 16y ago
I agree that the US has a long history of double standards (WWII was particularly shameful: the worst criminals in that war were the Communists, who got away scot-free; and the Western Allies' strategic bombings, especially the deliberate t
34.
by dkimball 16y ago
Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violence they began had been perpetrated by evil, aggressive foreigners against their
35.
by dkimball 16y ago
The use of the word "massacre" implies something like My Lai or the Katyn Forest, a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants, especially by infantry. Attacks by aircraft, like those in this video (as indicated in the article) an
36.
by dkimball 17y ago
I agree. When it was Lawrence Lessig saying this, there was a certain note of the crank about the idea (very much increased by the performance of Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg in the lead-up to _Eldred v. Ashcroft_). But when the world'
37.
by dkimball 17y ago
Suppose he had written a contract: would you support the use of "government bullies" to enforce it in that case? If not, and your tone suggests not, why do you suggest he learn how to write better contracts? On the subject of copyright: I t
38.
by dkimball 17y ago
You might be interested in _War and Peace and War_, a theory of history focusing on social capital as a driving force, and in _The Fourth Turning_ -- which looks at changes over four-generation intervals, and which, written in 1997, made so
39.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think the test should be whether the document has moral or just tactical significance. To give examples from the article: Guantanamo Bay interrogation manual? Moral significance; leak. Possible US use of chemical weapons? Moral significan
40.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think that popular causes with centralized leadership typically have a mix of grassroots and astroturf support; the question is how much support is of which type. For Slashdot, or the Tea Party movement, or the Daily Kos, my guess is that
41.
by dkimball 17y ago
With the SSL-subversion boxes mentioned in http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/packet-forensics/ , I don't think it matters who's on the list (though I'm sure China is). A small company selling devices to intercept SSL means that the
42.
by dkimball 17y ago
If that's so, why is Africa still a mess? We have no shortage of knowledge about the scale of corruption south of the Sahara (and north of it); the problem is that those who are prepared to fight in, let's say, Nigeria and those who want to
43.
by dkimball 17y ago
What he argues is that the 37signals paradigm is that of attacking a status quo for personal or aesthetic reasons, and not, at least not necessarily, because the attacker has a better idea.
44.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think the counterpart to telling your friends about a news service would be getting them to change operating systems and start contributing patches to the new one: both the "userbase" and the "development" of a submission-driven news site
45.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think there's another problem. Arab intelligence services tend to be brutal, so I'm not surprised that _they_ thought that their course of action was a good idea, but was "let's torture this Islamic-fundamentalist blogger into infiltratin
46.
by dkimball 17y ago
J.G. Ballard makes the same point, in the opposite direction: if we can't have both modern comforts and our hearts' desires, we may eventually give up on what we have in favor of what we want -- and may even be right to do so. There will al
47.
by dkimball 17y ago
I always thought that "it doesn't exist" means "we have a test which would prove that it does exist, and it has failed that test." If "it doesn't exist" means "I can't prove it either way and I don't think it matters," what category is left
48.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think the real explanation goes back to the Restoration. Charles II and his court wore 17th Century cavalry boots, which were high-heeled as a means of ensuring that the foot stayed in the stirrup, like the modern cowboy boot; this style
49.
by dkimball 17y ago
Modern United States clothing is a thin man's, or woman's, game, but this hasn't always been the case; it doesn't have to be the case that the fat are unfashionable. European clothing as late as the 18th century, and especially in the 15th-
50.
by dkimball 17y ago
The "Hacker Diet" is equivocating on the value of "in." What matters is not calories ingested, it's bioavailable calories ingested; see Gary Taubes' _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for details.
51.
by dkimball 17y ago
Oh, I'm a nut too, and humanity would be much worse off without its nuts, but what concerns me is that particular, Timecube-esque variety of nut -- not particularly creative or ambitious, but turgid and cramped. Why do people end up like th
52.
by dkimball 17y ago
I wouldn't doubt it; and I'd bet it would also work for apartment buildings. This is incredible -- where do the plants even get the energy to grow 347 cherry tomatoes in a year? This would be a heck of a lot better for the environment, too,
53.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think he has a point about the sloppiness and unresponsiveness of the government -- although the sloppiness and unresponsiveness of a large, bureaucratic organization hardly justifies carrying out his own miniature September 11th! Doubly
54.
by dkimball 17y ago
I like the idea, always provided that "personal and noncommercial use" is interpreted as "transfer to iPod, reading to one's children, burning CDs for personal use, writing fan fiction, etc." and not as "Napster." We have the problem that o
55.
by dkimball 17y ago
Unfortunately, I'm not a specialist in the subject -- I have an interest in it, but also an interest in everything from artificial intelligence to Indo-European linguistics -- so I will reluctantly say that I'm out of my league here; but I
56.
by dkimball 17y ago
On human evolution, human race, and Godwin's Law: My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia is reliable when you stay away from the politicized and widely-known subjects.) Fo
57.
by dkimball 17y ago
I'll try to answer objections here in two sets of comments, one on climate, the other on human evolution. On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" resea
58.
by dkimball 17y ago
This writer missed or is ignoring both the deliberate fraud known as Climategate, and the new discovery about the importance of sunspots; does he know or care about climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, t
59.
by dkimball 17y ago
How different are the experiencing and remembering selves from the Freudian id and ego respectively, though?
60.
by dkimball 17y ago
I'm coming late to commenting on this, but I have to ask whether the cultivation of a sense of place is really a good idea. An "idea economy" functions best as an urban economy, preferably one composed along the lines proposed by Jane Jacob

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