609 karma · joined June 16, 2017
I cannot find anything disingenous about choosing an official definition and mentioning that it is problematic in the first paragraph.
I'm currently living in Lisbon, which also has a very good living quality, but I'd say that the living quality in Copenhagen is unparalleled. I'd move there anytime if I had a good job opportunity there. I still work in Academia and Copenhagen University does not have many open positions, so no chance for me. Not that I complain about Lisbon's sunshine.
You can still have a car in Copenhagen, if you really want one, you know. It's not a matter of choices, it's a matter of nudging people in the right direction and tax them in a way that improves living quality and society as a whole. However, living in a low/no-traffic area can only be appreciated properly once you've experienced it. IMHO, it's one of those things that need to be experienced before forming an informed opinion. That's why it can be hard to sell politically.
Anyway, I'm glad the thread has been flagged.
Populism is pretty much what used to be called "proto-fascism" by Ecco, but communists can also have a strong populist agenda. Where I live, in Portugal, the communist party used slogans like "Leave Nato, away with the Euro" in general elections - simple recipes that couldn't possibly have beneficial effects and that in reality nobody would implement.
What you define as populism has nothing to do with real-world populism, it's just a construct.
We all know what the truth is. In reality the tough stance against Iran is and always has been all about access to oil, influencing the strategic balance in favour of the axis US-Saudi Arabia-Israel, and limiting Russian influence in the region. Everybody knows this and that's why nobody in his or her right mind buys the current sick Bolton nonsense.
Definitely. As far as I can see (public civilian sources only), the NSA's Tailored Access division can compromise any off-the-shelf PC. Or at least, given that we know that they've had the ability to install persistent viruses in the firmware of consumer hard drives 10+ years ago, it seems plausible to assume that standard PC hardware is not secure against targeted attacks.
> Does the NSA's endorsement of AES over 3DES mean that the NSA has had a backdoor in AES for decades? Does it make no sense to include actually-secure algorithms in Suite B?
Of course not. That would be a silly assumption, since we know from the Snowden revelations that the NSA is primarily targeting endpoint security. They might be able to break certain implementations of stream ciphers or maybe even have working (algebraic?) attacks against certain block ciphers - they seem to build and use a lot of ASICs, presumably not just for cryptocoin mining -, but even if these attacks exist, it would be very speculative to assume that they are used routinely.
If I wanted to break into any Linux system, I'd first create a Trojan horse and ask the administrator to kindly install it. If that didn't work, I might compromise the router and hijack the system update mechanism (maybe using stolen certificates). If that didn't work, I'd become a package maintainer or major contributor and sneak in some backdoors obfuscated as programming errors. Or I could intercept the hardware and install my own firmware on the machines. And so on and so forth. Heck, even civilian companies overtly advertise that they can break into any computer, so why should the NSA not be capable of doing it?
No need to break cryptography if endpoints are insecure.
You're a bit gullible if you think that the nice folks from the NSA you meet have any say in what their agency does with the technology and projects they are involved in. I'm sure this aspect of it is one of the more frustrating parts of working for the NSA, especially right now, but it's also fair to say that they probably know what they signed up for.
It makes no sense for the NSA to assist making PCs secure for non-military use and for use by non-US citizens against their own attacks, because it contradicts their mission statements. The only other (not totally implausible) explanation is that different departments within the NSA are so disconnected from each other that they have started to work against each other.
It seems hard to believe that many customers take into account some label that looks like paid advertisement.
Is there a way to transition my claws-mail folders to Emacs, or ideally use both programs at the same time for a while?
The article recommends notmuch-emacs. But I'm afraid of 2 things, (i) loosing existing mails in the transition (due to e.g. faulty conversion tools), and (ii) that after a complicated transition I'm not happy with the new setup. Any recommendations? Is it possible to use the claws-mail email inboxes directly in Emacs?
Another thing is org-mode. I never really managed to get deep enough into it to really see the benefits. I've even bought the printed org-mode manual, but the setup seems so complicated. Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for?
If the history of technology and cryptography teaches us anything, then quantum computers will break current encryption sooner than expected. If you're very paranoid, you may switch, in certain areas, to "quantum safe" symmetric encryption (higher key size, higher round numbers) with reasonably secure channel for key exchange instead of public key cryptography.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-computing-power-of-a-quan...
I understand that the typical use cases for these solvers are different. Still, I often wish there was a tool that I can just fire up, choose modal logic EMC from a menu and check whether a certain formula is a theorem. So far, it has always turned out easier for me to do this by hand than using a theorem prover.
Austin Meyer, the maker of the X-Plane flight simulator, was sued for millions of dollars because his app used an in-app purchase option made available by an existing 3rd part SDK.
There is a whole industry of inventing bogus software patents that take utterly trivial everyday business processes like giving someone money for a product, dress them up in fancy lawyer talk and general descriptions of non-existent, "systems" or "methods" without any example or prototype, and then sue people over it. In-app purchases? Better pay up! You have a fax machine or scanner? Pay! Storing business data on some electronic device for later retrieval? Better pay an arbitrarily high patent license fee!
It's absurd.
Heck, Siemens used to have a German patent on the Internet, except that it wasn't called Internet but something like "making available of structured textual data representations via long-range data transmission", etc.
Maybe with tools like LLVM it has become a bit less common to do all that on your own, but not everybody wants to use LLVM and spitting out your own machine code directly, without even having a bytecode interpreter, still seems like a rather bad idea. Besides loss of retargetability, the generated machine code will never be fast without an IR, because it will basically just allow for peephole optimizations. I know one or two ingenious people who compiled to x86 assembler, because it was considered the fastest option then, and now regret that choice.
I'm wondering whether there is any example of a medicament or artificial supplement that is recommended to be taken without indication. I've never heard of something like that. Vitamin supplements should be replaced by more healthy nutrition and maybe more fresh air, more sun, and doing some sport. If there is no diagnosed deficiency, then supplements have no benefits at all. Most of the "daily supplements" you can buy in a pharmacy can be replaced by occasionally drinking a glass of orange juice, eating a banana, or eating something with honey. I once went to the pharmacy when I had a cold and didn't check what they were giving to me very carefully. At home, I realized that I just bought some pills that contained traces of honey... at a price of 16 EUR!
Personally, I remain agnostic but find it fairly credible that Oswald personally met a group of conspirators from the CIA a few days before the shooting and these people encouraged him to do what he did, maybe even made him some false promises about what would happen afterwards. It's also not unlikely that the killing of Oswald himself followed a similar pattern.
That's all speculation, but overall reasonable speculation, because of the existing motives. Many conspiracy theories are weak, because they fail to lay out a credible motive. JFK is not one of those cases.
These kind of bans are not about doing favors or not, they are about maintaining a site that you can live with as a company or private forum owner. It has been like that online on every public forum since the dialup BBS system days.
If on the other they plan to commit crimes, then that's a matter for police and the public prosecutor's office, not for private companies, no matter where those groups go or meet.
> Apparently, this is a human right - which is insane.
It is one of the most fundamental human rights and not insane at all. Some scholars would even argue that autonomy is a defining characteristics of being a moral agent.
Every human has a right to make mistakes, too.
Generally, freedom can only be restricted when serious harm would be caused otherwise. There used to be a consensus about this in every capitalist democratic society, and I still think there is one. That's why your reply is kind of surprising to me.
> are you OK with enforcing laws on the books against those individuals
The laws are the same for everyone, whether they are homeless or not does not play any role. otherwise the law is unconstitutional. At least that's how it works where I live.
To answer your question: Of course, I'm not fine with any kind of laws that would be specifically bad for homeless. Imposing fines on people who cannot pay them is pointless and there is something wrong with a law that does it. Replacing fines by incarceration when a person could not possibly pay the fine is equally stupid, and btw in many countries this is not how it's done. Where I live you can declare personal bankrupcy in a similar way as companies can do it. You will still have to pay off your debts once you have a job, though.
If your laws would put homeless in more misery than putting them into mental institutions against their will, then there is something wrong with those laws. Besides, people don't set up tent cities because they prefer to live in tents. This is simply false and where I live such tent cities don't exist. Ghettos and tent cities hint at deeper problems in your country, problems that will likely not be solvable by reforming laws alone.
The situation of homeless is not as bad in countries with better systems as it is in the US, precisely because, as a tendency, their situation can be improved and less is done in the US than in other countries. The effectiveness of social welfare programs, health care, and so on, is a purely empirical question that can be measured effectively. Contrary to popular belief, these are not questions of political opinion. (What is a matter of political opinion, of course, is how much you want to spent and who is going to pay for it.)
You could e.g. start by helping the 70% of those homeless who, according to your own statistics, do not suffer from severe mental illness. That's already the vast majority.
As for the remaining 30%, the suggestion you're trying to make, that they are all hopeless cases, is outright bizarre. We know that schizophrenia can be treated with medicaments and that not all of the people diagnosed with schizophrenia refuse treatment. You could start by treating those who want to be treated, for example.
Finally, you still haven't bother to tell anyone what to do about the 30% you incorrectly portray as being untreatable, because they allegedly refuse treatment.
If your suggestion is to put them into mental institutions against their will, even when they pose no threat to the public or themselves, then my reply is that you need to check your moral compass. This is prohibited by law and by very basic moral considerations. If you have another suggestion, rather than stating the obvious truism that not every schizophrenic can fully adapt to society or be treated effectively, then I'm all ears, and so are myriads of medical professionals and street workers.
Right now, to me you merely come across as someone who doesn't really have anything to say about the topic. As I've said, it works better in many other countries, so your idea of not helping at all does not really seem to be very convincing to me.
You're just claiming this without providing any evidence and I believe this to be false (in tendency), unless by "solving the problem" you mean "perfectly solving all problem in each and every case". In general, adequate medical treatment and improved living conditions will improve the situation. With proper medication and treatment people can live with schizophrenia.
As for putting people who pose no threat to the public or to themselves into closed institutions against their will, this is obviously immoral and not even worth discussing. At the meantime, every country I know of already as laws for mandatory closed therapy of people who actually pose threats. That includes the US.
Overall, it's not clear to me what you were trying to say. Given that the obviously immoral solution is out of question, that there always remain some problem with the outliers for which the help doesn't work? Of course, these will always exist, just like there always will be criminals. But that's a truism.
They go to libraries, house entrances, metro stations, and so on because they have no other places to go. Putting them out of your sight will not make the problem go away.
The solutions are obvious and not mysterious at all. What do most of them need? Good social programs, free health care, job programs that work and are not just designed to "improve" statistics, personal mentoring, places to go where their few belongings are safe and they are not surrounded by criminals and troublemakers all the time, proper psychiatric care, drug help centres with medical professionals who are not allowed to cooperate with the police except in case of capital crimes, and so on and so on. What do they not need? Well, there are always hard cases and dangerous criminals can be mentally ill like anybody else, but generally speaking, as a rule of thumb, the last place you'd want to put them are US prisons, because the people who leave them are more likely to be mentally ill than the people who enter them.
The quality of a society can be measured directly by how they deal with their outcasts and troublemakers.
The funny thing is that the same bullshit the WP article talks about already existed in the past, in the form of etiquette books like the Knigge or Emily Post and schools for good manners and etiquette. I firmly believe we can do without that nonsense.
How exactly they evolve, what distinguishes social norms from conventions, and their relation to institutions, these are highly controversial topics. I'd personally recommend Cristina Bicchieri's taxonomy and approach, but there are other theories out there. In any case, it seemed clear to me that the WP article didn't talk about social norms - you cannot just decide what social norm is to be in place, these evolve independently and can be more or less stable -, and the WP article doesn't talk about laws only either. It seems to be based on the idea that written codes that are not laws should complement laws and replace actual social norms as kind of guidelines of how to behave, and I reject this idea for many reasons, including many moral ones.
To summarize my reasons very briefly: Everybody has a right to be an asshole and not every undesirable or unwanted behavior is also immoral. I'm very unhappy about the apparent trend (which seems to mostly exist in the US only) of not being able to distinguish between criminal behavior, immoral behavior, generally undesirable behavior, and personally unwanted behavior. These are all different things and mixing them up leads to a lot of confusion.