EdHominem

There are many terms that 99% of people use incorrectly and they're still incorrect.

In this case, "begs the question" is what something else is called. By conflating two things you get sloppy thinking. Even may people think they know what they're saying or hearing but they don't because there are two distinct things they can't tell apart. Also, it's a less intuitive way to say "suggests" the question. Begs implies something about unequal power structures, and requests, etc.

I understand that I need to be aware of what people might mean, but I'm in tech - I already see that everywhere. Maybe it's a regionalism but many people here call an entire computer a hard drive. I need to know what they want even though they can't ask for it. But yet, they're wrong and there's a lot that could go wrong for them because of their sloppy language.

Rather than fighting for your right to be wrong, why not just be right?

Why not just say "Suggests the question" then? I've never understood why people will fight so hard to justify doing something incorrect when a easier, and better answer staring them in the face.

> Remember that 52% of the UK voted to leave the EU which leaves the other 48% hurt that you paint us with the same brush. Such a big decision should have been a two thirds majority.

Absolutely. This is an example of how unreasonable it is for politicians to make these sort of changes on the weak mandates that they have.

> If I recall correctly, all advisory referendums in the UK have been winnable by a simple majority.

If "advisory" meant opinion poll, then a 51% result would be meaningful. But as a binding referendum it's ridiculous. We'd never build a control system that flip-flopped wildly at the boundary point the way first-past-the-post elections work.

> The "Remain" camp were fairly sure they'd win the vote, and foolishly neglected to consider this.

It's always the sane people's fault for failing to realize how shitty the trumps and farages are willing to get.

In a practical sense, you're right. When people start racially scapegoating we need to watch out. But in a moral sense, no you aren't right. Their repulsive actions aren't our fault, especially not simply because we failed to stop them.

Let's even pretend that the pilots are totally blameless. The military covered this up. They don't get to cover things up, because that's how we get war crimes.

Had this been reviewed properly, yes. A "Mistakes Happen" stamp could probably be used. But by hiding it and lying about it, they turned it into something we can't ignore.

Also, I don't think the pilots are blameless. If they ever hit civilian court that transcript would hang them.

Your friend is full of shit. If they knew anything real they wouldn't be allowed to tell you.

The biggest clue that what your friend says is wrong that Snowden wouldn't have gone public and announced himself if he was spying for Russia.

> she also saw messed up stuff in military

Yes, like her supervisor being absolutely willing to go along with faking information against innocent Iraqis that got them jailed and killed.

> damaging, criminal decision to turn all of that over to Wikileaks rather than pure whistleblowing

Ummm, her commanders refused to listen to pure whistleblowing. Didn't you read about the case?

As someone required to report a crime, you aren't required to put in a show of effort and declare it done, you're required to do your best to stop it.

> Manning left the ethical decisions to that third party.

No, Manning made the ethical decision knowing what Wikileaks promised - to get the information seen. And she made the right one.

I'd call the cops on bank robbers even knowing they may get "damaged" during capture because I think the benefits to society outweighs the harm.

Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.

Yeah, focus your outrage on the leaker not the murderers or the cover-up.

Neither reason nor morality made our government listen to criticism from within but maybe the pain of suffering these leaks will.

> Manning did commit a crime.

Not actually. Manning was required by law to refuse and report illegal orders. And not just make a show of reporting it and then back to business as usual.

> didn't it also do things like give away the positions of some undercover agents?

No, but that'd be our fault anyways, for mixing legal and illegal.

> And harm US diplomatic relations with other countries?

The truth didn't harm relations, doing the things that the allies found out about in the first place was the problem.

> Look at it from the POV of the government: How could they not punish Manning?

Um, admitting fault and correcting it. But yeah, we know that'd never happen so what could they do but shoot the messenger?

> It would do a lot to encourage others to indiscriminately leak classified info.

Doubtful. The motivator in Manning's case wasn't the ease or difficulty of leaking, but the crimes that needed exposing.

I imagine they'd block it off and not let anyone drive on it.

Or you know, murder. Maybe you're right.

Yeah, and it's absolutely uncorrelated to what the company feels comfortable with.

Maybe 24h? If you can't respond and mitigate within that time frame you aren't operating on internet time.

> From policy quote in sibling post: "[...] currently known in-the-wild security bugs under active exploit."

Nonsense. Every bug you discover could have been discovered by an attacker, and attackers are constantly scanning. If the bug is in release software you have to assume it's known and being exploited.

btw, for the downvoters - I know I speak the truth because I've worked dev in an internet-security company, and in security in a major cloud company. We can turn patches (or mitigations) out in hours and have them canaried and live in 24h. This is absolutely doable and should be expected. This months nonsense is when the company doesn't want to fix the bug.

What it takes is the institutional will to disable a feature you bill for until you secure it. When a $millions/day loss is on the table you find that obstacles evaporate. If a company tries to keep their vulnerabilities under wraps there wouldn't be this cost, and thus no will to fix it, in an ever-worsening spiral.

> >Extremely unprofessional and irresponsible.

> Agreed

How ungrateful. Someone puts in free work to make the world safer by fixing someone else's problems and they're a jerk because they didn't pamper them enough in the process.

> considering the timing with Christmas and New Years holidays, they probably could not get the word down to their engineering team.

Then this serves as a notice that they need to be able to - in about 15m, 365 days a year. Reality calling. fwiw, fixing a problem like this is almost always trivial. Not making the product bullet-proof, but simply disabling logins or whatever is needed to keep it from being exploited until it can actually be fixed.

A change of mindset (and stopping blaming the researchers) is all it takes to go from a many-month patch cycle to shipping mitigations inside of 12h.

Can you imagine a real engineer complaining about warnings, for instance that their bridge supports were crumbling, and how the discoverer didn't go through the reporting process.

Supposedly Google now doesn't count these as negatives, they just disregard them. Specifically because of this vulnerability.

> Ignoring the results here, isn't the act of disassembling random Android APKs illegal? Theoretically, could one of the affected companies sue them?

It doesn't feel like you're curious for your own sake. Why are you asking?

Also, anything is illegal somewhere. Where do you want the answer to apply to?

That's a matter for a compiler. If it's possible and efficient, inline everything so "object" just becomes dispatch tables with data pointers.

The actor model is a great way to unify remote and local processes with identical syntax, and solves a ton of syntax related issues such as overriding the default '==' operator, etc.

The thing is, if taxation isn't theft then why shouldn't the government do as much of it as it wants? Why not just tax the people at 100%?

I think we actually get to a proper statist view by seeing taxation as theft, thus an inherent badness, which is only justified when the people are represented properly and the government respects their needs.

So I hear this language as a perfectly reasonable call to examine the balance and see if we're being heard and getting our needs met in exchange for the sacrifices in question.

> It does for me.

No, I really don't think so even in your case. You must have a limit where if a law was passed saying it was okay to .... something, that you'd object. Even if only such that you'd recognize it in a movie and say "Not in my America."

It really is the people who define justice. The state codifies and enforces that.

We try people (Nazis, Saddam Hussein, etc) for crimes that were legal by the laws of their state. The Italians try American CIA agents with kidnapping for extraordinary rendition. This is a widely held, almost universal view, that justice transcends law.

> It does in America.

We (my government and likely yours) recognize North Korea as a country, but we don't recognize it's actions as legitimate.

So pure minimalistic statehood - the ability to have and hold land - isn't enough for legitimacy.

What, beyond statehood, does America have that makes it legitimate. Can you put your finger on what parts matter to you?

> You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using

You're the steelman. I don't think that's compatible with definitional nitpicking.

> > So the government is not made of normal people? Is the USA run by lizards or something?

> you seem utterly incapable of understanding basic, well-known positions, and you imagine I am delusional when your comprehension fails you.

The Lizard comment was valid sarcasm. You're not only not steelmanning, you're playing the victim.

You're rightly being called on your use of the word 'normal' because you're hand-waving so much away with it, and being so dismissive with the article.

> If you don't like the [law], you can leave.

If the law is just. Otherwise it's literally a Crime Against Humanity to force that choice on someone.

We recognize that a person cannot be deprived of statehood. (Or, put in a situation where they must deprive themselves of their own statehood to escape, such as threatening them for their religion, sexual orientation, etc.)

They aren't implying there are massive losses. They implied that the losses from cash, whatever they are, would massively outnumber the losses from cryptocurrencies. (And thus that cryptocurrency-focused reforms are missing the point.)

Moreover the accused is being treated as guilty despite the lack of any corroborating evidence. And in fact, despite that all evidence points to explicit innocence.

It's abnormal from the beginning, by the end it's pretty clearly abusive.

I think we should start investigating the rest of this DA's cases. To see if everyone she dealt with was railroaded. And if evidence was disregarded in their cases too.

The logical complement is more reasonable: "If everyone is happy with you you're likely doing things wrong."

And the more general: "If idiots are happy with you, you're likely an idiot too - or just acting like one."

Of course, it's an entirely reasonable thing to think.

A good parent spends more time with their children than anything else.

And I've dropped the ball on work stuff when I had more important life stuff to handle.

And I'd skip using some contracting firm (or anyone/thing else) if I thought they'd take off for greener pastures as soon as they found a better client.

Combine those things and nobody reasonable will enter into a critical deal with a new/upcoming parent where that person is in the critical path. It's not PC to say this, but you'd be a fool to discount it. And If that person doesn't prioritize their children you probably don't want to deal with them simply because of that.

fwiw, the same logic applies to anyone with any non-business focus that outweighs their business focus. From cancer to marathon running. This is your life too and blowing your chances on misguided charity doesn't let you take the time to raise your children or nurture your sick spouse.

> Again, off-network exchanges still require the network to verify,

I'm referring to totally off-network exchanges. Most people (sadly) are happy to own bitcoin via an intermediary. They wouldn't notice this attack at all.

And the exchanges, settling 10,000+ bitcoins at once, could easily pay any plausible transaction fees, so nothing would even grind to a halt.

The attack would prevent me using the local Bitcoin vending machines for $4 purchases, but wouldn't impact the overall settlement of large amounts.

> I'm really not sure what you're getting at with "elements of surprise".

You say people would migrate off Bitcoin because of the attacks. But really, people would detect and analyze the attack and recognize the intent. They'd make informed decisions in how to respond, given that an adversary of this class wouldn't be likely to give up with only one currency destroyed.

> You do need to prove that pink unicorns exist by giving examples, rather than describing it.

The only reason to believe that all sidechains must scale badly is one unsourced claim of yours, based presumably on your examination of a subset of the ones that exist. If you care to present a broad proof that the entire concept is impossible, go for it.

> Which fallacy is that? The "fallacy" of substitute goods?

That your opponents won't notice this happening to the first currency. You're trying to starve the system with billions of dollars of transactions!

You're discussing taking on the coins in order, but you only get one element of surprise.

> Maybe in your haste to cry fallacy you just forgot to mention an actual Bitcoin side chain that would be competitive with Ethereum or Montero in that situation?

No, I did but you didn't notice. The off-network exchanges. They're already what 90% of coin holders think of bitcoin as, so they wouldn't notice or care that big transactions between exchanges took a long time to settle. Like I don't care where or when my physical bank trucks the paper money.

Also, the $1B / month you're injecting would fund a lot of work on the ecosystem.

> Burden of proof is on you at this point.

No, it doesn't swap back and forth every post. When I discount your vampire-bats plan by pointing out the sun, I don't suddenly have to prove the existence of the sun.

> "Most People" in the market for cryptocurrencies will just switch to ethereum or monero.

That's fallacy one - assuming nobody notices the attack and realizes that if one coin falls, the next could too. You can't assume an unaware population. This isn't politics, people are paying attention because their money is on the line.

Also, in this scenario you're dumping a ton of money into the coin to make it die ... that provides a tremendous pressure to make it live.

> Again, side chains do _not_ scale with users.

This is a blanket statement that may apply to one or more pathological sidechains, but does not generalize.

The scaling of sidechains depends on the structure of the chain, trust requirements, and other usage decisions. This is utterly independent of what it's linked to, and only partly related to how often you link to the upstream chain.

> On a side chain, 10,000,000 transactions between 2 people costs $72 and takes ten minutes, but 2 transactions between 10,000,000 people costs $72,000,000 and takes over a month.

lmftfy - "On X sidechain design ...."

> So it counts as evidence, but it's not really evidence?

No amount of eye-witnesses to recklessness amount to proof of intoxication. Let alone one uncorroborated, counter-factual, claim.

> Instead of projecting feelings on the officer,

If there was credible evidence of recklessness they'd have charged him with it. The fishing expedition is because the pretext is barely credible. It's possible that the officer alone witnessed this behavior, and there also isn't any corroborating evidence, but it's more likely just a false allegation.

How handy that an off-duty officer, whose camera wasn't running, noticed him instead of the myriad of on-duty officers on the same road.

> how about the driver was driving so erratically that the officer felt as though the lives of bystanders were in danger?

Right, and in other news the officer felt their life was in danger so they shot the person. We've seen how these are lies so I don't know why you would give the police witness any more credibility than anyone else's, which is to say essentially zero. But yes, it's not physically impossible just improbable.

> No. There is no test you can take to prove that you weren't intoxicated. He was not intoxicated on any of the substances he was tested on.

Right, but wrong. He was selected without knowledge of his state of intoxication, but because of suspicion, and with no prior association with the officer or other reason for being picked. If he's clean of all tested substances (which are of course the primary intoxicants which is why we test for them) he's likelier than a control person to actually be clean for all tested substances.

We've established that he's not in the group of drinkers, tokers, snorters, etc. He may be in the group of obscure tweakers on drug X that we can't detect, but he's much more likely just clean.

> The evidence in this case the the observation of the witness, an officer, which is evidence whether you see it that way or not. We're not talking about chemical tests here.

Right. But we gave the chemical tests weight, had they been positive he'd have been convicted on that evidence, because of the officer's testimony. He must have been on something... And now we dismiss the tests similarly because they contradict the officer's testimony. He must have been on something the tests don't catch... The test is being given undue weight based on its ability to prove or contest the officer's story.

For rigor, the test and the weight placed on it must be part of the proposition, not the conclusion. If the tests could provide evidence to convict for intoxication they must also provide substantial evidence of non-intoxication. (In randomly selected individuals. We could stack the deck by supplying just Drug X users, but he wasn't selected from a population likely to be high in Drug X usage.)

> It seems like you're saying the word of an officer is somehow less than the word of a non-officer.

Yes, absolutely. As long as an officer's word is given extra weight in court, I as a citizen and a logician must discount it and all evidence based on it proportionally.

> If anybody gives eyewitness testimony to erratic driving, that's evidence.

Some evidentiary weight, yes. Enough to get someone breathalyzed, maybe, but not enough for the charges to stick despite that. This example has the eyewitness testimony being proof enough for the DA who laments the failure of the tests, instead of recognizing the proper findings from them.

> I don't see why you're talking around that.

I'm not trying to talk around it, I'm addressing it directly.

Police testimony has an incredibly low bar and we've seen 1) a tremendous number of lies that contradict recorded fact, and 2) an almost total cover-up and complete defense of lying officers. It's an ad-hominem to say that someone is a liar and therefore dismiss their conclusion, but it's perfectly reasonable to say they're a known liar so it's likely they're lying, and discount appropriately.

> IDF (Israeli Military) was established by Israeli Terrorist groups.

Hamas is only a terrorist group, in the present day.

If this matters to you, why does it only apply in one direction?

Yeah, and the cost to do that in this scenario is $72. Comparatively expensive, but you're flooding the network with money...

Anchoring a sidechain just increases the resources needed to tamper with it, as if it itself had a higher proof of work. It doesn't need to happen every ten blocks or any set number. As often as possible is good enough. Sidechains can even have sidechains. If the $72 was too expensive that chain can support hundreds of other chains anchoring into it, spreading the costs.

But most people would still just use exchanges and as long as the exchanges settle often enough that their government-mandated floats cover the difference, what do they care if the underlying network itself is slow?

> There is no chemical test evidence. There is plenty of behavioural evidence, evidence that warrants a reckless driving test.

The only 'evidence' is the uncorroborated word of an officer. Yes, that counts, but no it's not evidence in any way. And more and more we're having officer testimony proved to be a lie on the evening news.

> That's a huge assumption to make. What are they "fishing" for?

Charges that will stick. The same as when they say they see erratic driving and demand to search your car. Something that will justify the cop-rage that resulted in the guy being pulled over.

> There is no chemical test evidence.

Oh no, in fact there's plenty of test evidence that he wasn't intoxicated. And all else being equal, a citizen who had a clean test is less likely to have been driving erratically than one who hasn't.

It's a logic error to assign weight to the accusation in absence of any positive evidence, and then use that weight to suggest that the negative evidence now doesn't apply.

> The system is very able to "prove" that he was driving poorly and he will be punished accordingly.

The system is able to punish him despite the lack of evidence. The word prove doesn't apply in any way. And in fact in proper terminology the system merely "finds" him guilty, it doesn't claim to prove guilt.