5,614 karma · joined January 2, 2011
What are they doing with those statistics? What could they do with them in the future? What could they be forced to do with them?
If it's so harmless, why isn't it opt-in?
> Every single website in the world does it
Obviously not. Websites don't have access to hardware the way CM does.
Why isn't it opt-in?
More to the point, they sound hard, so people won't be so quick to claim they've solved them.
On the other hand, case-insensitive string matching sounds easy, even if it's actually somewhat difficult due to the language dependencies mentioned above, so people will claim to have a general solution that fails the first time it's faced with i up-casing to İ instead of I, or the fact the German 'ß' up-cases to 'SS' as opposed to any single character. (Unicode does contain 'ẞ', a single-character capital 'ß', which occurs in the real world but is vanishingly rare. As far as modern German speakers are concerned, the capital form of 'ß' is 'SS'.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E
http://opentype.info/blog/2013/11/18/capital-sharp-s-design-...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2009/07/28/9850675.a...
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/2008/07/a...
Bad example. Really bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single OS for the System/360.
The System/360 went through a few OS iterations before OS/360 came along: OS/360 was late, as recounted in The Mythical Man-Month, so DOS/360 came along, then BOS/360, then TOS/360, and even PCP, which didn't support multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still more OSes on top of that.
To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the System/360, including Linux.
This is the "Experts were wrong before" dodge, which conveniently ignores how often individuals are wrong.
Exactly. So, which other sources have you read from which confirm what Lustig said?
> phrenology was once accepted by "experts", as were electro-shocks for gay people. And don't get me started on economic "experts".
Oh, yes, the "Experts were wrong before" dodge, which is so beloved of quacks and alt-med nutballs in general. It so conveniently ignores the fact that lone people are wrong a lot more often.
> I'd only accept a consensus of lots of independent experts
So, where are all of the independent experts who agree with Lustig?
The problem with this is multi-fold:
Do you know what good information looks like, or are you going to be fed crap from a circle-jerk of sources which all repeat the same lies? This is a bootstrapping problem, ultimately: How do you know where to get the first info you use to tell crap from good information?
Experts largely agree with each other in most mature fields. This is part of what it means for a field to be mature. The problem is, a lot of the liars and scammers agree with each other as well, or at least the ones all selling the same scams do. How do you tell the difference?
Since I don't have time to become a Ph.D. in biology, medicine, or an allied field, I have to trust the experts. Nobody has time to be an expert in everything.
Also, 'make up your own mind' is predicated on the idea that you are making up your own mind, as opposed to baby-duck-like imprinting on someone who makes good-looking videos and can string words. The people who follow Alex Jones think they're thinking for themselves, too. Following a body of knowledge as opposed to a single charismatic guru is a hedge against this baby-duck effect.
And:
> without the need to appeal to expert consensus (which might as well be bogus and profit-driven?)
How do you know Lustig isn't bogus and ego-driven?
Of course they are.
To make it clearer for anyone who doesn't know: The Secret Service is the primary government agency charged with investigating the counterfeiting of American currency. Protecting the President and other dignitaries is minor compared to that. That's probably why they're testifying in the Senate now to begin with.
Which is why the war was started by plantation slave-holders: They knew that the only way to keep their slaves was to dissociate their economy and politics from that of the industrialized North. Even after they destroyed the concept of states' rights by passing the fugitive slave laws, they still weren't confident that slavery could endure when the North was going great guns without it. When the North proved that they could elect a President without pandering to Southern Slave Power interests by electing Lincoln in 1860 without a single Southern vote going to him, that was the last straw.
(The election of 1860 was, in effect, two elections going on in parallel: Bell v Breckinridge in the South, Lincoln v Douglas in the North. Except, of course, only one man could be President, and Lincoln won the Electoral College by a convincing majority.)
I never disagreed with this.
> You can choose to live each day to the fullest without embracing deathism.
I almost disagreed with this.
My point is that procrastination has its payoff as well, but, even if you don't die, the payoff from doing as much as you can is higher.
Synthehol. Synthetic alcohol.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Synthehol
(Not nearly as interesting to engineers as the real stuff, which is apparently at its best when it's green.)
GHB is new and unfamiliar, so it gets the worse rap, but alcohol has pretty much everything an date rape drug would have: It induces a loss of inhibition, a loss of motor control, a loss of language skills, and loss of consciousness with retrograde amnesia[0]. It also has one very important factor working in its favor: Social acceptance. Nobody gives it a second glance.
[0] Retrograde amnesia is a loss of memories formed before the event; in this case, the event is the point at which the person loses consciousness entirely.
Think about it game-theoretically:
If you live as if you'll die, and you don't, you'll have a much more interesting life, because you took advantage of it thinking you're living under the Sword of Damocles.
If you live as if life extension will keep you going, and it fails, you'll have a short, boring life, full of things you put off until it was too late.
Those are the extreme values of the matrix; if you work through the rest, I think you'll find that the most utility is always gained by living as if you'll die eventually.
(Living as if you'll die tomorrow is romantic and all, but it would prevent you from working towards any goal which takes more than less than a day to complete. It could also land you in prison, deported to a less-pleasant foreign country, or both.)
I'm guessing this is autocorrect, but an autocorrect that knows 'pneumonic' (the Firefox spell-checker doesn't!) but not 'mnemonic' seems even less likely than a person who knows the first word but not the second.
Anyway, 'previous' is perhaps less likely to spring to mind than 'back' or 'reverse' or even 'last', each of which would have different mnemonics. ('Last' has a particularly good mnemonic if you keep your hands to the Holy Home Row, which is why vi users, who are most likely to worship at the Altar of the Home Row, can't use it.)
Not in strict liability offenses, such as statutory rape. Which isn't entirely relevant to playing a game, until the legislature makes 'possession of child pornography' strict liability and includes drawings as being child pornography.
You can't. Once the estate's gone, the creditors can pound sand because the person they contracted with is gone and all their assets are gone, too. They can't come after anyone else.
> Luckily she was able to somehow get her name off of the inheritance after the fact.
I seriously doubt this is possible even in theory.