ColanR

To me, that comment and response looks like a microcosm of how economics does, or doesn't, understand its subject matter.

Hope it's opt-in. Otherwise I'm moving to graphine OS.

When there's a 40 (mars) or 80 (jupiter) minute delay that's guaranteed, it sounds like a unique form of a time lock. Put your private pgp key in a 24 hour time delay circuit and guarantee that no one can do a decryption in the interim (long as it's the only copy).

I wonder if 50 years from now there's going to be a blockchain based on that technology (as opposed to the computation or storage based blockchains we have now).

Wasn't that how it was designed? Even the term 'miner' was based on gold mining. I think the only difference is that gold used to be the currency itself, not just what backed the currency, and BTC tried to be both.

Summary:

> The CommonPass system, backed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), is designed to create a common international standard for passengers to demonstrate they do not have coronavirus.

> However, critics of similar schemes point to concerns over the sensitivity and specificity of the tests in various countries amid fears over greater monitoring over people’s movements.

Eh, it might. Would probably rejuvinate the field. There's a lot of advances in digital signal processing that could be applied to those bands. The limitation on encryption would have to be lifted first, and maybe the commercial limitation you mentioned, but that's likely the only thing that would have to be fixed. Overpowered transmissions aren't needed.

I don't get why you think I'm suggesting pirate transmissions.

As I mentioned, it's for multiple different gmail accounts. Same url, different containers.

Yup, that's exactly what I do right now as well.

Containers are awesome. Still waiting, though, for when I can set bookmarks to use a specific container. I have a few different gmail accounts and it would make accessing them a lot easier (having containers at all is already a huge improvement).

That's true. Didn't think that part through. Still, even in cases where there isn't overt jamming or filtering, it seems like the ability to set up direct, long-distance connections would make a big difference in how the internet is structured.

> Ham radio can't be used for commercial purposes nor can it carry encrypted content. Operators also have to be licensed which means all of their personal details are on file with the licensing government. If they're caught breaking the bounds of their license it will be revoked and they can personally face fines and even criminal charges.

I know that, it's what I was referring to when I was talking about the ability to use HAM radio. It's trivially easy to relay packets over HAM bands right now, given a transciever; the biggest thing preventing fairly wide-spread use is the legality.

> the ham bands aren't exactly brimming with available bandwidth

Even slow dialup speeds would be nice. I'm thinking of more-or-less direct internet connections between e.g. the US, Europe and Russia, or even just over a few hundred miles. Doesn't have to be fast; the ability to send anything at all over that distance in a direct connection would be an improvement. A wifi mesh can't do that.

Undersea cables get cut occasionally, fiber gets disconnected...s##t happens. I'm not even talking about anything intentional.

Edit. But to answer your question, some activists in the middle east have some stories to tell you. It doesn't have to be literally cut, state mandated filtering works too. Good luck jamming a HAM radio set.

I don't think they necessarily would be - but they're another option, and they're harder to block since there isn't a cable to physically cut.

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the Internet is decentralized, and in a far more fault-tolerant fashion than the meshnet-of-the-day. The fact that anyone can fire up a server and make it accessible to anyone else on the Internet should be indicative of that.

Maybe what we mean when we say we want a 'decentralized internet' is implicitly, that we want the popular nodes of the Internet Graph to be decentralized. That would be nice.

But I think we could realize that right now, the Internet is comprised of a ton of competing protocols, and as long as there's a translation interface that enables cross-communication, the internet will remain decentralized. That's impressive resillience. Kudos to the designers.

It seems to me that what would actually bring the most benefit to the structure of the Internet would be long-range wireless communication. Basically, the ability to use HAM radio to bypass ISPs. That would bring about a sea change in how the Internet is structured.

IIRC, snowboards are a counter-example to this article. The design was never patented, and the original company did pretty well on the principle that 'a rising tide floats all boats'.

Edit. The article makes me think of the different (extreme) failure modes of companies run by experts in different sub-departments. An accountant might run the company into the ground with bean-counting, a marketer might sell! sell! sell! what they've got without regard for quality, an engineer might forget to find customers, and apparently a lawyer might protect their idea so far as to prevent anyone else from helping popularize the idea. Everyone thinks their own tool is perfect for all the nails...

> There is still no reason in principle why English couldn't have chosen a more regular system of spelling, especially at a time where literacy was low anyway.

I mentioned that farther downthread. The original Webster's dictionary served exactly this purpose - in the early 1800s, his stated goal (IIRC) was to give the new USA a standardized language to help differentiate it from the country they'd split off from. Also mentioned downthread, he based his standardization on the languages the words were loaned from.

That's true. I guess what I didn't really say explicitly is that I don't think there is a 'local pronunciation' in the case of English. French and Saxon seem to have merged on equal terms, where neither was sufficiently dominant to determine how words were re-written, and neither vocabulary would be counted as loan words.

I think English would claim both as the original languages.

I, think, english, would, both = old english

claim, original, language = old french

I'm interested, but it seems like you'll need more than buzzfeed news as a source if you're claiming that Stanford scientists are unreliable.

> There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.)

I mean, yeah. The rules governing English are a combination of the rules governing a couple other languages. Divide up the vocabulary according to the applicable rules, and I'm pretty sure you end up with a fragment each of the French, Saxon, Norse, etc. languages, and within those fragments the rules make as much sense as they do in the full versions of the respective languages. E.g.: put "rendezvous" & "accomplice" in one pile, "loan" in another, and the rules of each pile would be internally consistent, and consistent with the rules of French and Norse respectively...accounting for language drift, of course.

A large fraction of English follows French rules - might as well ask the French language to fix their spellings to make phonetic sense. The work put into that would translate directly to fix a lot of English.

> Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because before the Normans it was just "-scr".

Personally, given the entymology of English, it makes a lot of sense to preserve the original, applicable, rules of the languages English is comprised of. Otherwise, it would be like rewriting either Norse or French to fit the other - as you mention, that's even worse than the combination of languages in the first place.

Edit for clarity.

> There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules...

Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse, "word" is old English). The combination happened when Britain spent a while under Norman rule. The commoners were largely Saxon & Norse, the rulers were French. Eventually the languages simply merged, with grammar rules and vocabulary taken from both sides.

I believe the first edition of the Webster dictionary in the 1800s was when the spelling was standardized. At that point, Webster looked at the original language of the words to both define them and figure out a correct spelling.

Edit: additional recollections, formatting.

Edit2: I'm being downvoted?

I wonder if the argument you've highlighted is a good idea, or a particularly dangerous one. Maybe we should discuss it and find out. Or maybe we should call what you're saying 'propaganda' and ban it outright, since it might call for 'radical' and 'potentially destabilizing' 'changes to our democracy'.

It would be too bad if you could only present it as an opinion, in limited arenas far away from anyone who might disagree. I wonder who the next 'protected minority' will be, and what, exactly, they will need to be 'protected' from.

Aren't you glad we have freedom of speech, so that you can make this thought of yours known?

Most of the methods listed there were listening for the EM of the TV being on, not the reciever antenna. Technically, it sounds like they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between pirated TV and watching a movie on the VCR.

I think the odds are pretty good. There's a lot of smart & motivated people who really like the internet, who would probably go a long way to replace it.

> Who the crap has a beef with Lincoln.

IKR? Doesn't make sense anymore. But I was talking about the parent topic, which was the theologically-motivated scratching out of the eyes of figures in mosaic images.

I never heard that it can actually increase IQ. I thought ADHD drugs just improved focus?

Except in this case, it's not mob manipulation, it's calculated theology.

I read blindsight in one sitting. Good stuff.

That novel looks amazing, and it's going on my reading list. Thanks!

It doesn't quote enough context to even clarify if he recommended damage, or whether he was mocking the people doing the damage.

EDIT: found a larger quotation. From the context, the use of the quote in TFA looks like a misrepresentation of what Augustine said, since it doesn't sound like he was offering an opinion on whether or not it should be done.

https://books.google.com/books?id=z5ufDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT91&lpg=P...

It doesn't justify the destruction of historical artifacts, though. :/