Lorento

I know someone who uses this in China and apparently it's fantastic. Faster than commercial VPN services even for streaming video. Not sure how that'll work out in the long run if it gets more users than providers.

The concept sounds quite insecure but apparently it only allows HTTPS connections so it's delegating encryption to that instead of doing it itself.

If you live in the US or UK, your movements are already being tracked by license plate reading cameras.

Not entirely racism, but still discrimination.

Yea points sound nice in a way but I like to just replace the specified nationality with "black" and see if it still sounds OK. "There's a points system to allow the most successful blacks to work among regular citizens."

Yes, can you imagine if there was a "black visa"? We still discriminate hard but it's so entrenched that it seems obviously right.

I mean not allowing foreigners to work, even when they live in the country. Ironically, the public's distrust of the Irish and other foreigners has led to the law disallowing them at the border rather than individual employers at the job application. We don't allow Irish to freely enter the US and work today.

It's funny how blind people are to the same thing happening today. Most employers openly refuse people based on their nationality and we are perfectly accepting of that, even enforcing it with the law!

I wonder if people in another 100 years will think it's wrong to discriminate against people because of who their parents were.

It wasn't till after I graduated that I started to realize the enormous volume of books arts majors had to read. And I don't understand why their information is presented in such an inconvenient format.

If the book is making an argument with a lot of discrete points and interconnections. Why isn't it a diagram or some kind of interactive hyperlinking thing? Why don't the individual points at least have a box around them so you can separate them visually from the other stuff without having to actually read it all?

Arts text books and essays just don't make sense to me. I can understand text format if it gives the reader motivation to understand that a soul-less diagram might not, but it sounds like most of this writing doesn't do that either. So I guess my question is, is this information really too complex to structure in an obvious way, or are the authors too lazy to design such a structure, or is it simply an ingrained culture that nobody can break free of?

It's not easy to tell how smart someone is by meeting them. That tends to bias you towards social abilities. IQ tests help to level the field by testing abilities that we can't easily observe just by knowing someone. Not that IQ tests are accurate at all either. But I just mean to say that feeling that someone is smart can just mean they're smart at appearing smart and may not have the same abilities at a broad range of thinking skills as someone with a high IQ.

Seems to be very dated. Plenty on adjusting carburetors, in fact adjusting all sorts of no-longer-needing-adjusting parts.

I think the lesson here isn't that iCloud is unreliable, but that any data storage is unreliable. Syncing isn't backup so you still need a backup.

Don't dating sites have an 18 year age limit despite different states having different ages of consent, etc? It's just easier than making a fine grained filter.

American companies also support their own government's efforts to imprison people for visiting the wrong websites (gambling, piracy, child porn, etc). Isn't it a bit arbitrary to accept that in America but not other countries? You may think free political speech is important, but it can cost a lot of lives if it leads to a civil war or widespread riots. Not all countries are stable enough to cope with those risks.

Just wondering what value the singleton provided if you only obtain it once. Isn't the purpose so you can obtain it whenever you want? If you just use a regular object, you run the risk of accidentally making another instance somewhere else, but you always have that risk with any regular object anyway.

Covert agents are usually criminals in the countries they're spying on. So it's right that they should be exposed so they can be brought to justice, just the same as a Chinese spy caught working in America would.

It's not a good idea to manually create filters that 100% block. You can't think of all the special cases like this.

Perhaps the crime should be buying or selling it, not simply possessing it. Then there's no market if there's no money.

I agree. I think people hate pedophiles in much the same way they hate(d) gays. Because it's disgusting and perverted, not because it harms people. The fact that some children do actually get harmed and that many people have children themselves that they feel very protective of fuels the emotion of labeling all pedophiles as "evil".

If viewing an image of child abuse is wrong. Isn't viewing an image of ISIS beheading someone also wrong? In both cases the crimes were committed and the images produced to satisfy an audience. But one is illegal because it's perverted while the other is legal because presumably far more people have blood-lust than a minority sexuality.

In Australia it's especially bad, with somebody being convicted for possessing hand-drawn Simpsons porn. There might be a copyright case there, but it's hard to make the connection between that activity and actual harm to any children. The defense argued that they weren't humans because they had 4 fingers and misshapen faces. This kind of case is what happens when the "evil pedophile" mindset overwhelms people.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/simpsons-cartoon-ripoff-is-ch...

You could go a step further and ask what's the difference between a parent taking photos of their naked child playing in the bath, and somebody doing the same thing but then having a wank with the photo later? I think the difference is that one is "normal" and the other is "perverted", so we make one legal and the other illegal. I probably appear in some baby bath photos and I certainly wasn't scarred by it. If they got onto the internet and people got some pleasure from them, is that really going to scar me for life, assuming I even know about it?

According to the article though, this deceitfulness is actually good, not destructive. It puts us into a more productive Nash equilibrium than we'd be if we each individually assessed the risk of our single investment and said "na, too risky".

I think this is just a sign that there's healthy decision making going on. If what the CoC claims is true, that Jamaica's law was passed without following the proper process, then that is a problem and it should be challenged whether you want the law or not. You can't have a law-making process, trademark protections, etc and then just walk over them when you decide it's an important law. The whole point of the process is to decide if it's the correct law in the first place!

The CoC's purpose is to support the interests of it's members. So they absolutely should be doing this. What good is a chamber of commerce that arbitrarily decides to throw some of its members under the bus when new laws threaten their businesses? The real complaint people should be making is that it allows tobacco businesses as members, or even that the government allows tobacco businesses to exist at all.

What shocks me the most is that the CVS pharmacy was selling cigarettes 1 year ago! What?! Pharmacies sell cigarettes in America?!

If you kill one man, you're a murderer. If you kill thousands, you're a conqueror.

History really distorts things. Do we have to wait 200 years to see fights with ISIS in a similar "noble tragedy" kind of light, where there are no clear baddies and nobody's assigned blame for the killings?

Maybe some of those dead people were "baddies" fighting for something we don't believe in anymore? In that case, surely we should be celebrating the fact that they died. If not, then maybe we should be complaining about the violent people who killed them? It's not a natural disaster where nobody wants it to happen. Soldiers actively fought for some purpose or other that we presumably either accept or not today.

Instead of focussing on the abstract "state", why not recognize that almost every eligible voter in America decided what the state should do by voting either democrat, republican or nothing.

There's a powerful part of the "free software" ideology that's not explained well at all here - the GPL helps to force non-free software out of the market. Unlike, say MIT which can help non-free software get a leg up over free software. This part is kind of aggressive and can be seen as negative, which I imagine is why the FSF doesn't directly address it much.

Yes, it doesn't quite add up. For that money, you could hire the guy to turn things on and off by hand for 50 years.

A real life example of this type of trick happened with a large public sculpture in New Zealand recently. It looks innocent except from the right angle.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/65855907/Cloud-or-phallus-Sc...

I have a pdf scan of a text book that exibits this problem. It's a complex math book with a lot of superscripts, subscripts and combinations of them. Some are the wrong symbol - eg i instead of j, etc. It was very difficult to study from not being able to trust any symbol. I put it down to bad editing of the printed original until I found out about this story sometime ago.

Google for "Lisa Wilberg esc" (just like what a stalker might do to narrow it down to the correct uni) and you get the robots.txt file itself in 3rd place. The author isn't doing any more harm than Google already is. It's already easily searchable.

What do you think the feeling among contributors is? Are you happy to change yours?

Doesn't GPL effectively prohibit combining it with a closed source commercial product? That suggests you still won't be able to bundle all of MAME with a ROM.

What kind of information would we lose, besides information about the extinct species themselves? For example, are there unsolved questions in science that could be solved if we still had a specimen of a missing species? I don't see that it's interesting to study an extinct species for its own sake, since we would be lost in regret at not still having dinosaurs, etc. too.