scotchmi_st

9 ms·

31.
by scotchmi_st 7y ago
Personally I find it really irritating that so many people, such as the humanities teacher, suggest that technology has made life on Earth worse recently like it’s a commonly-understood truth. Yes there are problems with a handful of compan
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
I did mention Defense and other science projects. 2 things that are mostly publically funded, although morally I don't see where the difference lies. If you believe in a kind of Peter Singer redistribution of wealth then why stop at pu
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
The thing that irritates me more than anything about the argument that sending people to space is a bad idea is the unique bias people have against space technologies. No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend i
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
I doubt there are many climate scientists on here, and I am certainly not one, but the problem as I see it is that the public and industry generally are resistant to subtractive solutions: driving less, going on fewer flights, carbon taxes
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
This is a fascinating story. It's funny though how, with compromised accounts at a highly reputable university and a 0-day exploit in one of the most-used pieces of software out there, they still managed to make basic grammatical error
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
This is exactly how I felt watching the video. It seems just like the same old 'wasn't everything better in the old days' nonsense. Not to mention the fact that in those days, a computer was something that you had in one room
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
> There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
Honestly I can't say if it's definitely the right course of action, although in the last few years there have been reports of millions of 16-35 year-old Americans leaving Facebook, only to move to Instagram. I do think the ability
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong. Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistak
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by scotchmi_st 7y ago
Well, there are solutions. One is to breed bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastic. Not to say this is a solved problem, or something we shouldn't be concerned about, but the response "There is absolutely zero chance
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
It wasn't dropped in the sense that the prosecutors dropped their charges. It was dropped in the sense that the case was put in a dormant state. It can be re-opened, until August 2020 I believe.
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
The second statement doesn't follow from the first. He was both wanted for questioning in a rape investigation _and_ wanted for extradition to the US. You can both want him to face charges for rape, and also not want him to be extradit
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
This seems like just another proof-of-stake currency, albeit with some niceties like sharding and the 'vaulting' mechanism. It'd have all of the issues with a proof-of-stake currency, such as leading to small clique with most
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
I think this falls under the principle of 'good design is as little design as possible'.
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
That assumes someone, at some point, takes a path other than the one of least resistance and faces down the Rees-Moggs. Given the concessions to the whitepaper produced last month, and the track-record of the government since 2015 or before
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
I get the style this article is going for, but Cambridge Science Park (and surrounding areas) have quietly been a major hub for tech for at least the last 2-3 decades. Lots of biotech research, but Microsoft Research has been there since as
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
You're referring to anecdotes. Maybe the sort of behaviour is widespread, but even if it is, you then need to prove it's having much of an impact on the environment, and even then it's a drop in the ocean compared with the da
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by scotchmi_st 8y ago
This is a really great point that deserves to be it's own comment, rather than a reply to another. The two greatest challenges facing us in the next few years are climate change and water usage. Plastic is an issue, but it's not a
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
> This study does not prove that too much sitting causes thinner brain structures, but instead that more hours spent sitting are associated with thinner regions, researchers said. This is a bit of a non-story. The article doesn't go
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
Since we're discussing nationalisation of drug development, one more less extreme idea that I think needs more air-time: The creation of government-issued prizes for drug discovery. Here's how it goes- Government X issues a prize
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
This is really nicely put. It should be hammered home in response to pieces like this. Particularly the bit about people in abusive relationships, and also children of abusive parents. Vulnerable people need privacy much more than the res
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
I really appreciate the fact you call yourself out as a hypocrite. A hypocrite can still be completely correct (we are all sinners, after all) and I think society would be more well right now if people understood that fact. I too have been
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
Unless you’re basing that on some extra information, you seem to have not read the article. “To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of ‘Get Free.’ ”
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
The bitcoin example is an especially clear one. You could generalise that even more, and say that the reason why companies exist is because you can make more money by working together with other people than to try to do everything yourself.
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
China's GDP per capita is still somewhere between #70 and #80 in the world[1]. It just happens to be a big country with lots of people. If the US or most other western countries had same number of people is China, they would be doing m
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by scotchmi_st 9y ago
I think that says more about the the US-based public services than it does about public services in general. From a european perspective, public services in the US seem really terrible. Whereas in the UK and Europe, the default mode of tran
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by scotchmi_st 10y ago
I believe it's in the afterword of Seveneves, that space debris was mentioned as one of Neal Stephenson's inspirations for the plot of that book.
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by scotchmi_st 10y ago
I would love for there to be a similarly thorough project with Clojure. It really bothers me there's no good native compiler. Apart from anything else, it means that Clojure lives and dies by the languages it compiles to, and while Jav
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by scotchmi_st 10y ago
> why bother? Email is just one of dozens of messaging systems available to Internet users. Better to move sensitive conversations to things like Signal, WhatsApp, or Wire --- the double ratchet construction is designed specifically to m
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by scotchmi_st 10y ago
The creator of this project published a website, took on volunteers to help build it, and held meet-ups to discuss it. In other words, they went well out of their way to publicise it. So yeah, at that point anyone has the right to say anyth

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