john_b

38 ms·

301.
by john_b 13y ago
This sacrifices a number of portability bonuses that laptops usually bring. Try finding a place to put a USB laptop on a flight, or finding space to put it on one of those small student desks that has less surface area than the laptop itsel
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by john_b 13y ago
> "Blacks weren't seen as equals and without harassment just because slavery became illegal and they could vote. Homosexuality is legal, but again, individuals don't harass based on legal status." When blacks became
303.
by john_b 13y ago
Many of the "legal ramifications" are legal priveleges. Your spouse can visit you in the hospital and be listed on your insurance policy. If your spouse is not legally recognized as your spouse then those benefits will be prohibit
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by john_b 13y ago
The same argument applies equally to authoritarian regimes. Maybe sneak doesn't want to live in a society that enforces these rules, but simply has no other alternatives. Telling someone who criticizes their society to either take it
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by john_b 13y ago
Beta is one of many measures of volatility. Since it's a normalized correlation between the stock's rate of return and that of the market, it only really has meaning in the context of a stock's performance over a long time or
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by john_b 13y ago
+/-3% is a common benchmark for the market's definition of "big swing". There's nothing really formal about it, and it's a more accurate measure when applied to the market as a whole rather than individual stoc
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by john_b 13y ago
Don't take it personally, it seems to be a fundamental feature of mathematics and human behavior that when a competitive and healthy market exists for a quality which is normally distributed, the resulting price curve follows a power l
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by john_b 13y ago
While interesting, the whole article really only applies to men and women who want children. I wonder if the trends would still hold if people who didn't want or couldn't have children were studied.
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by john_b 13y ago
Very well said. This post almost makes me wonder if some sociologist or psychologist somewhere has developed a model of this kind of behavior.
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by john_b 13y ago
> "Professional women often still carry with them some of this 1960's mentality and refuse to "date down." As the demographics change and women being overrepresented among the college-educated, this puts them at the
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by john_b 13y ago
Large companies in well established industries sometimes operate with near monopoly power and are only threatened when the entire industry undergoes a long term, permanent change. Most people don't consider such a situation a functioni
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by john_b 13y ago
Stereotypical judging of others and self-promotion does not equal a cheat sheet for reinventing yourself.
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by john_b 13y ago
For the really paranoid, to the extent that your data can be represented as a text file, you can print it on paper from your internet connected machine and OCR it into your air gapped machine, and vice versa. In this case, you only have t
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by john_b 13y ago
I think he was referring to the fact that so much of the case remained, and still does remain, secret for long after the warrant was served.
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by john_b 13y ago
> "They had a (presumably lawfully obtained) warrant against a specific user; it's not they who designed lavabit such that it was impossible to execute this without obtaining access to every other user." This is what the
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by john_b 13y ago
I wonder what the size of the combined Colorado+Washington marijuana marketplace is. Maybe not $1.2 billion, but I'd bet it's pretty sizable, and the DoJ decided not to enforce federal law there. The main difference in my eyes is
317.
by john_b 13y ago
> "We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous." Using "natural states of being", however defined, to articulate rights in unnatural states of be
318.
by john_b 13y ago
> "I think most libertarians would agree there is no intrinsic right to anonymity." As a libertarian, I disagree. The ability to converse, trade, and move about privately is intrinsically necessary to support other fundamenta
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by john_b 13y ago
> "People aren't good and presented with opportunity, they act quickly to aggrandize themselves using whatever means are necessary." I largely agree with your statement [1], but I do wish to point out that the usual libe
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by john_b 13y ago
> "Instead of living life according to a rigid bible, why don't we simply Do The Right Thing™ and then adjust what ends up being broken?" The point of political philosophies is to make and support assertions as to what t
321.
by john_b 13y ago
The assertions in the article are not "speculative horseshit". In 2011, Netflix+Youtube+BitTorrent alone were over 50% of internet traffic [1], and all three have likely grown since then. The NSA has no interest in the vast majori
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by john_b 13y ago
Is this effectively a fee for having a US embassy process paperwork on your behalf, or are they actually trying to charge a fee for individuals to renounce their citizenship? It seems to me that the whole idea of renouncing one's citiz
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by john_b 13y ago
In my experience it's much easier to strike up a conversation with a random person in a college town, regardless of what they're doing at the time, than outside of one. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's a very distinct
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by john_b 13y ago
Charging their laptop at a library intended for use by the public (which they are a part of) burns less energy than someone who leaves their air conditioner running while they go get groceries. Most homeless people go out of their way to no
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by john_b 13y ago
I don't think the author would have any objection to your points. But malnutrition is, to a large extent, an economic problem stemming from the fact that, in most Western countries, healthy foods are generally more expensive than unhea
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by john_b 13y ago
To be precise, a house is a depreciating asset, but the land it sits on is (almost alwasys) an appreciating one. Most homes are built well enough that their rate of depreciation is slow. And since the purchase price is high compared to a ca
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by john_b 13y ago
Brains developed naturally, so I'd imagine evolution would be capable of developing a natural analogue to a microprocessor if there was sufficient and sustained evolutionary pressure for such an adaptation.
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by john_b 13y ago
Maybe it doesn't. The last paragraph of the article implies that wear eventually would compromise the gears, but that the insect molting and replacing the old gears with new ones (frequently?) prevents it from being a problem.
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by john_b 13y ago
Four. A gear is just a piece of geometry that happens to be useful for a number of practical purposes. Same with rods, rings, and so on. People apply labels to it according to how they perceive it.
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by john_b 13y ago
> "Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight." The internet predates internet advertising. Many sites use different business models and are profitab

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