john_b

81 ms·

391.
by john_b 13y ago
A number of people have pointed out that this method probably wouldn't hold up in courts because you are, in effect, communicating the existence of a NSL by ceasing to update the canary. And when courts consider the legal rights of a g
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by john_b 13y ago
In a way, I think he is looking at the economics via this analogy. In Feudal Europe, the greatest economic resource was land. If you controlled lots of land, you had lots of power. But land was expensive to maintain and make productive. The
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by john_b 13y ago
In principle, yes. In practice, probably not. There is a certain amount of overhead involved in the creation of the dataset. Hiring people to call and collect answers, filtering the data, formatting it, fielding questions about it, etc. The
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by john_b 13y ago
In this case, a PhD education in science or engineering is only "wasted" because our existing laws don't allow the student to make use of it domestically. Thus it is all cost and no benefit (at least not to the U.S. -- other
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by john_b 13y ago
Your taxes also pay--though usually not completely--for the aimless four year party that constitutes many college students' experience in higher education. Given the ratio of undergraduates to science & engineering PhD students, I&
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by john_b 13y ago
While I agree with you on principle, the number of anti-immigration xenophobes is much greater than "a few ignorant morons". A few ignorant morons would not be able to elect so many congressmen over such a long period of time to s
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by john_b 13y ago
If you ever wanted a case study in bare faced propaganda, this is it. You'll rarely see a hit piece this brazen. "But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive sp
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by john_b 13y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted. One of the main problems with privacy today is that your rights to privacy are typically enumerated in lengthy terms of service or user agreements that can and do change without notice. If these doc
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by john_b 13y ago
The right to privacy falls under the "human rights" part of my comment. You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right, but the very fact that so many other rights (both legal and human) are ea
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by john_b 13y ago
Even if you accept the idea that your vote has some tiny marginal effect on the outcome (which, in the electoral college, is usually not the case), you still have to weigh the opportunity cost of voting (and of the time spent deciding who t
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by john_b 13y ago
> Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority? From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their m
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by john_b 13y ago
In some ways the prison system in the U.S. seems to be worse precisely because it is supported by a democratic society. If prisoners are tortured under a king, their barbaric treatment can easily be associated with the cruelty of the king.
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by john_b 13y ago
The main problem with the analogy is that it presumes its own conclusions. This isn't usually a big problem for analogies since they're not supposed to be the core of an argument, but in this case the full post is one big analogy, so it doe
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by john_b 13y ago
This is perhaps a tangential issue, but I don't think the author addressed the question she posed. I was looking forward to seeing the author thoroughly dissect the ignorance inherent in the title, so I followed along with the methaphor as
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by john_b 13y ago
> And we WONT write on your wall under any circumstances. Being able to trust strangers is nice, but not needing to is even better.
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by john_b 13y ago
Conflating libertarians with Republicans doesn't make sense anywhere. The simplified definition I give people who ask me what a libertarian is is "someone who is economically conservative but socially liberal." The conventional "Republican
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by john_b 13y ago
My recollection is that the prizes, once you adjust for the number of tickets required to get them and the difficulty and time involved in getting enough tickets, are severely marked up. There are undoubtedly more efficient ways to launder
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by john_b 13y ago
It seems like these people represent exceptions to the rule more often than what is achievable by ordinary people within an ordinary time period. If I had as my goal to bench press 400 lbs within 2-3 years I wouldn't rely on body weight exe
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by john_b 13y ago
If this were Wikipedia there would be a [citation needed] at the end of this claim. Care to offer evidence?
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by john_b 13y ago
You're both right. He never said that gym time wouldn't help you lose weight, just that, if it's the only reason you're going to the gym, you're doing it wrong. You can have the best of both worlds. If you just spend 3 or so hours/week at
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by john_b 13y ago
> The idea that lottery winners are suddenly Subject Matter Experts on other things just because they have money, eyeballs, connections, or whatever is silly. Out here in the diaspora, we pay little attention to the opinions of powerba
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by john_b 13y ago
As someone originally from MS, let me clarify that the state is not what most people imagine it is based on various movies or their U.S. history class. Mississippians take "the hospitality state" seriously.
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by john_b 13y ago
> What's more, people who "can do math" should be taking the blame for those who say "I can't do math" rather than using pointless semantics to wag a finger at them. You're invoking a false dichotomy here by assuming that one of the t
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by john_b 13y ago
The degree of is/ought fallacy and outright naivete in your statements is truly astonishing. > "Why do people have to adjust to the economy? Shouldn't it be the other way around in an ideal world?" As Darwin said, "It is not the stron
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by john_b 13y ago
Doesn't the entropy just measure the difficulty of brute forcing a password though? From an entropy perspective, "password" may be more secure than "r&E2pX@", but I doubt anyone attempting to crack passwords in a practical manner is goi
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by john_b 13y ago
The only reason this story is news is because, based on the info we have so far, it's appears to be a grand hypocritical overreaction. A kid mishandling a BB gun is arguably just as dangerous, or more so, than a kid playing with small amoun
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by john_b 13y ago
> Really? I mean, it would've been OK if she did this in the middle of a cafeteria during lunch? And, yes, much of chemistry is highly dangerous and that's the reason it is done in a lab with fume hoods and safety equipment. When I wa
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by john_b 13y ago
I have a number of Iranian friends who are now finishing up their PhDs. Having a hostile and suspicious government to go back to adds a qualitatively different level of stress to the process. With CISPA/SOPA and all the concern over the gra
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by john_b 13y ago
The lesson: making spyware, violating copyrights & trademarks is bad except when you do it for one or more governments who've got your back. I doubt a mere cease and desist letter is going to accomplish much here. I hope Mozilla is able
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by john_b 13y ago
It depends who you work for and where you work. I work for a large aerospace company in the Midwest, and people still routinely work here for life. Many of those who don't stay in the same area, in the same industry, and work for contractor

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