john_b

27 ms·

211.
by john_b 13y ago
If you are rich enough to drive a 9-11 around you are probably less price sensitive than the people buying the counterfit ones. For these people, the points on their license and the hassle caused by the ticket would probably be the main con
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by john_b 13y ago
This is something I've thought about, and as I see it a lot of the problems common to crypto software are manifest in this space as well. Specifically with regard to security vs useability/ease-of-adoption issues. This particular
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by john_b 13y ago
In my experience, aliasing numbers to words has never improved any code in any way whatsoever, and sometimes causes more headaches since numbers are easy and natural to reason about numerically (big surprise...), while values such as TWENTY
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by john_b 13y ago
I haven't read through all of the author's content yet, but there is a certain benefit to using magic numbers in introductory material. Numbers impose very little conceptual overhead on people, especially "familiar" numb
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by john_b 13y ago
This is hypocritical. Any other defendent found to have committed what amounts to gross professional negligence that deprived someone of a basic right (freedom to move about) would be looking at some combination of (1) a revoked license, (2
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by john_b 13y ago
My understanding of Box is that they focus on enterprise customers more heavily than their competitors. Given upgrade cycles in many large companies, a LTV > $5 is possible. The difficulty and expense of selling a new product to large co
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by john_b 13y ago
Except deposits are insured up to a cap that most people never exceed. MtGox offered nothing remotely comparable.
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by john_b 13y ago
Since the article was written prior to the invention of automatic spelling correction, these sorts of seemingly trivial errors could tarnish one's first impression significantly. If you know nearly nothing about someone but need to for
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by john_b 13y ago
I'm not sure, but if so I have doubts it would be admissible in a higher court. "Not an official record" and such.
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by john_b 13y ago
You've identified two classes of customer for this app but speculated, without evidence, that most of them fall into only one of those classes. Ironically my objection to this service is essentially the opposite of yours. I see this ap
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by john_b 13y ago
I agree that it's harder to have sympathy for him as a result. However, nobody deserves to have their rights violated* because they made a simple mistake. If you forget to lock your house or car, you don't deserve to have it broke
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by john_b 13y ago
How far would you take this? If such a person hid their identity better than Nakamoto and refused all contact (even contact initiated under a false pretense, as in the article), would it be justified to break into their house to learn about
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by john_b 13y ago
If the article is correct, Nakamoto only spoke to her in person at his house and with the police present. The photo would have to have been taken by a family member or some other person, and acquired by the author through someone else (prob
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by john_b 13y ago
> " Moral rights are what you want, legal rights are what you actually have." This sounds like a purely philosophical disagreement, so I won't pursue it much. From a practical perspective, I partially agree with you. A r
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by john_b 13y ago
I agree with you there. If that was all they included, it would offer the reader a meaningful context of his life without compromising his privacy and possibly safety.
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by john_b 13y ago
It's more than a polite social fiction. It's a moral requirement for many of the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution to have any meaning. E.g. try exercising your right to an attorney when the prosecution logs all your commun
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by john_b 13y ago
They could also simply be decent human beings and not post his address or a picture of his house at all, much less what kind of car he drives and its license plate. Right now there is nothing stopping any crook smart enough to set up a bitc
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by john_b 13y ago
> "Sure, publishing identifying information of people who did nothing special is unethical but that can hardly be said about Satoshi." This is wrong on so many levels. Here is a guy who created arguably the largest financial
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by john_b 13y ago
So a person loses their right to privacy when enough strangers take an interest in them? Nakamoto barely provided Newsweek with any information at all. The rest was obtained (possibly illegally?) by snatching his email from a website he had
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by john_b 13y ago
The love of the subject is a given. The article states as much. The whole point of the article is that the rewards of an academic life are not presently commensurate with the risks and sacrificies it entails. The pay "in a certain fiel
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by john_b 13y ago
The article may be awful, but the existence of other forms of imperialism doesn't detract from the reckless aggression Russia is displaying now. Your post is essentially ad hominem, except directed at an entire country instead of a sin
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by john_b 13y ago
Anonymity is a special case of privacy. Privacy is the ability to control how much you reveal about yourself to others and the circumstances of how you reveal that information. Anonymity is simply the choice to reveal no information about y
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by john_b 13y ago
You are conflating "illegal" with "immoral", which is perhaps the most dangerous and most common political fallacy today. Laws can be changed, sometimes arbitrarily or to serve corrupt interests. If your morality changes
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by john_b 13y ago
A) is true almost by definition. You could also object that criminals who plan on speeding away from the scene of a crime may forget to put enough gas in their tank and run out of gas before they get away. It's plausible, but crime is
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by john_b 13y ago
> "the bureaucratic hoops we'd have to jump through to successfully secede" My understanding of secession has always been that one does not ask for permission. Requests to pay taxes, for example, would fall on deaf ears.
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by john_b 13y ago
Anytime police have to use force they expose themselves to risk. This acts as a natural deterrent to some abuses that would otherwise happen. Chasing a speeding vehicle, pulling a large man out of the car, and subduing him is much more diff
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by john_b 13y ago
In order for this to work, there must be some means of communicating with the car at distance. The nature of this (radio, etc) doesn't really matter. There will be a receiver on the car that can and will be identified and removed by cr
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by john_b 13y ago
On the other hand, what the "technology will eliminate all jobs" crowd never seems to understand is that mere survival is only part of the motivation for having a job. It may be the base of Maslow's hierarchy, but a lot of pe
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by john_b 13y ago
Have you ever sued the police?
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by john_b 13y ago
> "Programming is a notion to extend human capability, by offloading humanly-infeasible work onto a machine. It is the promise of an amplified knowledge worker. This would be worthy to learn." With this (correct) notion the a

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