wissler

28 ms·

241.
by wissler 14y ago
So, what is to be done? At root this is a philosophical problem, coming down to what people believe is true or false, good or bad. Now, many people will instinctively react very negatively to this remark -- see my last paragraph. The US w
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by wissler 14y ago
I have a hard time seeing how the work was "eviscerated" -- last I checked I could still buy the actual work, i.e. Tolkien's books (which I'm sure got a bump in popularity from the movies).
243.
by wissler 14y ago
It sure is a mistake to label them that way, but that's how they are usually labelled, so making his point this way really makes the point best: it may cause some reflection by the masses who really mislabel. Emphasis on "may".
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by wissler 14y ago
If the Mountain Dew was not diet, I'd expect the sugar to make a huge impact on whether you could stay awake.
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by wissler 14y ago
Don't sanction the insanity. It would be better that the situation become so dire and painful that the populace wakes up than that software developers actually help make the software patent system appear as if it is reasonable and can "work
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by wissler 14y ago
It's not a market failure, it's a governmental failure, for this reason: if you spew poison into the atmosphere (it was known long before then that lead was poisonous), you should be expected to have to pay for the damages caused. But these
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by wissler 14y ago
Note: this article is about a substitute for flossing, not simply stopping flossing.
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by wissler 14y ago
Most laws are intellectually dishonest. Creating a legal code that is so big that it's impossible to know what it is and thus, to be able follow it, is intellectually dishonest. Really, the fundamental basis of our legal system is intellect
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by wissler 14y ago
I thought your statements were insightful and relevant. Some of the the time the HN community is right that somebody is being gratuitously critical or missing the point, but rest of the time they are just touchy and don't want to hear any g
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by wissler 14y ago
For heaven's sake, don't apologize for giving an honest opinion. If we had to apologize every time someone in the world found something to get offended by then half our speech would be apologies for the other half.
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by wissler 14y ago
In order to transcend the modern operating system we need to transcend the modern programming language paradigms.
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by wissler 14y ago
It's not that widely held bogus views turn out to be wrong by accident or from some congenital defect in human reasoning. Issac Newton's physics, while not applying to all possible contexts, still holds as correct over a vast range, and tha
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by wissler 14y ago
To save the environment, we need to use fuel that destroys cars prematurely. Makes sense.
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by wissler 14y ago
E.g., we can't even increase fish farming productivity without massive political interference: http://www.nature.com/news/transgenic-fish-wins-us-regulator...
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by wissler 14y ago
Those figures by "economists" are woefully, comically limited, they only consider natural resources as determined by current limits of politics and technology, but in fact the whole solar system is rich with natural resources, just waiting
256.
by wissler 14y ago
With so many people willing to contribute reviews, I see no reason to allow either anonymous reviews or reviews from people who have no direct familiarity with the product. Can there be some value from these two sources? Perhaps. But there'
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by wissler 14y ago
It's not useful to just say you disagree. You ought to say why. The fact is that matter is virtually unlimited, and it is not against the laws of physics that we can transform matter into more useful kinds, that we can deploy various means
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by wissler 14y ago
Natural resources are virtually unlimited, at least for the current size of the human race. We're only just scratching the surface of the resources available on Earth, and there's a whole solar system we have access to. The only issue is th
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by wissler 14y ago
The root problem is that instead of being able to appropriate resources from nature and produce what we need as individuals directly, we've been corralled into a setup where we have to get permission from government to appropriate and trans
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by wissler 14y ago
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."--Thomas Paine
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by wissler 14y ago
This is a subset of David Hume's analysis of causality, see his "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding."
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by wissler 14y ago
You can do a bit better than just trusting it by educating yourself and seeking second or third opinions on treatment. Medicine isn't a special case, it's just part of the human condition that we haven't fully crossed the threshold from act
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by wissler 14y ago
However real medicine has gotten a lot better. It hasn't gotten better enough. Homeopathy is, in a certain sense, propaganda for modern medicine, because instead of people contrasting modern medicine with what it could and should be, they
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by wissler 14y ago
Homeopathy has never kept anyone alive. I'm sure there are cases where it did, e.g. by virtue of offering something benign in place of something in the mainstream that might have killed. People are comforted by the thought that modern med
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by wissler 14y ago
I'm going to guess that you're not privy to their production scalability plans. The first one is the hardest.
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by wissler 14y ago
Almost everyone is distracted from the main point: "A declaration of rights is not a creation of them, nor a donation of them. It is a manifest of the principle by which they exist, followed by a detail of what the rights are; for every ci
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by wissler 14y ago
Insightful. ;) Yes, I was surprised by his responses, I thought his initial remark was great, but people mean quite different things by those lofty abstractions.
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by wissler 14y ago
I don't think the principles are common knowledge. Of course they matter.
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by wissler 14y ago
Insightful. I'm curious as to what you think are the basic human rights and the principles of the Enlightenment.
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by wissler 14y ago
Also, if you feel the best way to make your point is to Godwin the topic, it's time to take a step back. What pure unmitigated bullshit. Read this article: http://www.salon.com/2010/07/01/godwin I never said anonymous speech wasn't impo

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