mpyne

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511.
by mpyne 11y ago
Being unable to afford the books and software needed to learn programming was actually why I had started contributing to open-source (after I did finally learn). I had learned just before Linux had started gaining prominence. If it wasn&#x2
512.
by mpyne 11y ago
Which given that PRISM just automated warrant/NSL compliance once the company's legal department agreed that the warrant/NSL was valid, means what exactly? Does FastMail get to ignore their country's own warrants if they
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by mpyne 11y ago
> Put succinctly, you advocate we shoot the messenger. That is not my claim, succinctly or otherwise. The fact that you believe my comment reduces to that claim means that you did not understand my comment. That may be my fault in making
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by mpyne 11y ago
China is actually a great example. They are today stronger than Russia, they are a target themselves of NSA spying, and like Russia they are resentful of the "U.S. led international order". So much as China thumbs its nose at the
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by mpyne 11y ago
Debates like these are why international law now tends to speak of 'armed conflict' instead of 'war'. Certainly the casualty count on both sides makes Vietnam count as a 'war'. And yet, Congress actually decla
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by mpyne 11y ago
> I don't believe that Snowden-like reveals put him in any more specific danger That's true only in the same way that sending half-rations to your soldiers on the front line instead of full rations doesn't put them in &quo
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by mpyne 11y ago
Why ban it? At 2.7 transactions per second all a government would need to do would be to flood the one and only centralized Bitcoin blockchain with meaningless transactions. It's hard to pay for your child porn if you can't ever b
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by mpyne 11y ago
There's a reason the Great Depression pre dates the things that were mentioned like FDIC. I'll leave alone for now the fact that it was the government boogeyman that implemented the changes that make things like bank crashes wip
519.
by mpyne 11y ago
And yet Bitcoin is inflating even as we speak, and there are core Bitcoin devs who suspect Bitcoin won't ever be able to switchover to an economy based on mining fees instead of inflation of the money supply, as was originally intend
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by mpyne 11y ago
> The arguments we hear about bitcoin are in similar vein as what was said about the WWW in 90s Is that supposed to mean something? You're posting on HN, surely you're smart enough to understand the difference between correlati
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by mpyne 11y ago
Might they make specific challenge coins for specific operations within whatever we're calling the 'war on terror' nowadays? Absolutely, and some of those coins might even be vaguely offensive. But unless these coins were act
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by mpyne 11y ago
> I don't know if your obsession with Catholic or military trinkets is simple misinterpretation or deliberate obfuscation. Hersh never made the claim which you put "in quotes". And it's disingenuous to claim he did. F
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by mpyne 11y ago
> He simply claimed a few high ranking generals were members. He also claimed that JSOC was passing around "crusade coins" as part of their religious "crusade". I don't know how he got 'crusade coins' f
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by mpyne 11y ago
> Well, the government and the military uses very often this "good outcomes" concept when they pardon individuals who committed "collateral damage" (aka civilian casualties). CIVCAS is simply not a crime by itself, &q
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by mpyne 11y ago
> Many people believe Snowden's tradeoff was right. Any my assertion is that the people who believe that do not understand the trades that Snowden made, but instead think that because Snowden punched the boogeyman, anything else Sno
526.
by mpyne 11y ago
Everything save the FSB HQ-sponsored interview was dead serious... and the snark on said FSB shout-out was why it was parenthetical. You can't simply argue that 1 good thing outweighs an arbitrary number of bad things from your decisio
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by mpyne 11y ago
The 'general warrants' referred to elsewhere were often used by British customs enforcement who were supposed to use those warrants to search for evidence of smugglers in colonial America. But since they had a general warrant th
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by mpyne 11y ago
> Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes. Why else is behavior even a concern, except for its outcomes? When people oppose surveillance, it's because they fear the possible outcom
529.
by mpyne 11y ago
I like this idea, my own outlandish suggestion has been to just drop it off at a subducting ocean trench and let it return to the mantle. It's only slightly more feasible though, and getting the casks to stay intact until they're
530.
by mpyne 11y ago
I actually don't think it's possible. If I remember my OPWACHEM course correctly, if the media you're thinking of did wash onto the yard worker he'd have been severely injured by radiation exposure, and not just quickly
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by mpyne 11y ago
> However, a drone flying a mile in the sky over the entire city does nothing to further that familiarity. I think this is where we actually start to diverge. Aerial surveillance (whether by drone or by manned aircraft) is an excellent w
532.
by mpyne 11y ago
How can you be completely against something that, by your own admission, you are unfamiliar with? Would you have been "completely against" North Korea and the U.N. signing an armistice in 1953 while it was still being negotiated
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by mpyne 11y ago
> Police aren't funded by taxpayer dollars so they can be curious about what's going on around town Actually, yes they are. That's what "patrols" are for in the first place. We expect police to be familiar with t
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by mpyne 11y ago
Same reason you'd use the similar rules for BRAC: By forcing politicians to take an up-or-down vote on measures of national importance you get the best chance at a vote on the merits of the bill in question, without parochial concerns
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by mpyne 11y ago
My understanding is that Fast Track prevents amending a bill endlessly, not that it simply prevents debate. Is that not the case?
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by mpyne 11y ago
I can see how TPP (when we find out what precise it is) could be claimed to affect human rights. But "fast track" is a parliamentary technique used for other types of bills, such as the BRAC bills that are used to close U.S. milit
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by mpyne 11y ago
One advantage is that it results in tons more carbon into the atmosphere (Bitcoin alone is estimated to require the electrical input of Ireland ). This is only really an advantage for the energy sector though...
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by mpyne 11y ago
> The blockchain, being independently held and cross-verified at every node of the network, is more reliable in this regard. Is it? That question is just as open as it is for Twitter, and given the order of magnitude differences in ineff
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by mpyne 11y ago
> The same cannot be said for aerial surveillance of the sort in the OP Which is nice, but aerial surveillance of that sort can be done by the local TV news station, or a local resident getting their general aviation training. Arguing
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by mpyne 11y ago
> The right to privacy, while not spelled out explicitly in the Constitution, is recognized by the Supreme Court The Supreme Court decision you speak of also makes very clear in its ruling that there is, legally speaking, no such thing

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