sethrin

68 ms·

661.
by sethrin 14y ago
How many apps ship with OS X? 50, 500, or 5000? Let's just say they're dealing with a more restricted problem space, where they have a great deal more latitude to enforce technology use. That's kinda the point of their vertical monopoly, do
662.
by sethrin 14y ago
Yes and no. To the degree that capitalism is about efficiency by means of competitive markets, net neutrality is no more "anti-capitalist" than, e.g. requiring all drugs to be tested for efficacy. To the degree that capitalism is about blin
663.
by sethrin 14y ago
Sorry, you mean Alaska and Hawaii have some sort of connection to the rest of the grid, and Texas does not? Or do you mean that Alaska and Hawaii are not states in the union? Maybe you mean 'most of Texas' and 'only state in the contiguous
664.
by sethrin 14y ago
So, this time last year I was in a kind of a bad fix. I was completely broke, homeless, and living in a country where I didn't share a language with the majority of inhabitants. Also, at the time that I became unemployed and homeless I had
665.
by sethrin 14y ago
Okay, then we disagree. I don't believe that eugenics automatically follow from socialism --I think you should be more explicit here in step 2. Reproductive rights a problematic in your argument. Which is why we tend to solve the issue by c
666.
by sethrin 14y ago
You're ignoring what I'm saying about biology. Imagine a scenario where an action benefits one person to the exclusion of all others: one man survives as King of the Universe, and the rest of humanity shuffles off this mortal coil more or
667.
by sethrin 14y ago
I am in principle willing to concede that, but I don't think it necessary. I am not willing to put the rights of the individual over the rights of the collective. Individuals do not reproduce -- we are not bacteria. There is a point where
668.
by sethrin 14y ago
God isn't real. Neither is individual sovereignty. Just ask Napoleon, or Hitler, or any man ever executed. Individual sovereignty is not the same thing as free will. You don't require currency to be a market, but you do, in fact, pay taxes.
669.
by sethrin 14y ago
What is "individual sovereignty"? Rights are granted not by God, not by some internal edict. They come from the society you inhabit. The world of sovereign individuals is wonderful in objectivist fantasies. In reality, it results in anarchy
670.
by sethrin 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity_value "Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thi
671.
by sethrin 14y ago
It's strange how I can read an article in The Economist about Benoit Mandelbrot's "multidisiplinary" approach that makes almost no mention of his work on Economics. To be fair, most of the stuff that isn't pretty pictures goes past me. Ho
672.
by sethrin 14y ago
I. Software is mathematics. II. Mathematics are not patentable. >> Software is not patentable. Pick a premise and argue against it. Or, don't bother: you and the US legal system are in an argument against reality. It's not a winnabl
673.
by sethrin 14y ago
It could be argued that the Industrial Revolution was making the system of mass human labor obsolete. One moneyed elite against another does not a popular struggle make. A better example, one that was purely social, was when Prohibition was
674.
by sethrin 14y ago
The world of chess engines is the world of search algorithms. I've read that exploring a search tree is inherently serial, and while there have been large performance increases over the years (Houdini and other top engines are 3000+ ELO), i
675.
by sethrin 14y ago
My source was The Poisoner's Handbook , which suggests that deaths were not tracked well or at all in most of the US. The book gives statistics for New York City but a cursory examination of its sources does not seem to list where those st
676.
by sethrin 14y ago
Rates of alcoholism, arrests for public intoxication and deaths related to alcoholism under Prohibition in the United States were several times higher than either before or after. One factor in this, however, was the quality of alcohol bein
677.
by sethrin 14y ago
What precisely do you gain by having a narrow focus? What do you lose by having this story on the front page for half a day? What is essentially wrong with being off-topic? Honestly, I think this place would be awful if it only had the focu
678.
by sethrin 14y ago
As the wikipedia article notes, this is based off the movie, and not the comic. The comic didn't evolve a storyline per se for quite some time; there's very little continuity between pages. It is also, do note, a full-page comic. The artwor
679.
by sethrin 14y ago
I am using Crunchbang, which is based on Debian stable. It is trivial to download and install either Firefox or Chrome from the internet, and they automatically update themselves (FF since v12; the betas have had auto-update for longer). Fo
680.
by sethrin 14y ago
Your post advocates a (x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may ha
681.
by sethrin 14y ago
I admit to little knowledge of economics, but to me it seems as complex a system as weather, without the underlying physical certainties. My reading of Fama and Mandelbrot seems to indicate that markets are essentially random and unpredicta