dogorman

Obviously your comment is sarcastic, but this is worth correcting: Chess is a Eurocentric

Chess came from Persia, or maybe India, and spread both east and west along the silk road trade routes.

Games where you role-play as a feudal lord? You're either making his point for him, or missing it.

If they did this right it could be more lucrative for lazy revenue seeking cops than hiding behind overpasses waiting for speeders.

I'm sure chess board manufacturers would love this. Think of how many new sets they could sell if everybody decided they had to replace their old black and white sets.

Google's pursuit of profit is responsible these and innumerable more injustices. Those who would defend Google often claim that automated moderation is necessary at Google's scale, but does anybody really doubt that Google would still make more than enough money to stay in business if they hired more humans? Automated moderation is not necessary.

> breaks down trust in institutions.

This is why avoiding the appearance of impropriety is almost as important as avoiding impropriety itself. When you do things that people might reasonably mistake for unethical, it contributes to the perception that such unethical behavior is commonplace. That, in turn, might inspire others to actually behave unethically, or alternatively to despair that they live in such a society. Either is socially harmful.

The Soviet system injured a number of people quite seriously. It gave Sigmund Jahn a permanent spinal injury in 1978, and in 1969 it broke Boris Voylnov's teeth. Water landings weren't without incident, but I don't think there were ever any injuries as severe as those.

>it's not that they don't have a lot of capacity

How can you say that any number of anything is 'a lot' when you're specifically not considering demand? What does it even mean for there to be 'a lot of capacity' in a sense divorced from relative demand? 'A lot' only has meaning in relative terms.

> I’ve checked a few other papers and think I’m tentatively confident in this line of reasoning: certain bugs take more time to fix (and cause more damage) than others, and said bugs tend to be issues in the design. I haven’t vetted these papers to see if they don’t make major mistakes, though. It’s more time-consuming to do that when you’re trying to synthesize an stance based on lots of indirect pieces of evidence. You’re using a lot more papers but doing a lot less with each one, so the cost gets higher.

Empiricism and quantitative metrics have indispensable value, that much should be clear to everybody I hope. But too often people forget (or have active contempt for) the value of qualitative metrics which can only be judged subjectively. Such considerations are naturally harder to deal with than cold hard data, so it doesn't surprise me that people want to avoid it. But when you blind yourself to the qualitative and subjective, you do yourself a huge disservice. Just ask McNamara; he thought he could win the Vietnam War with quantitative metrics and utterly neglected difficult to quantify metrics like public sentiment, both in Vietnam and America. I see echos of this in our industry today; we love to talk about empirical measures like the number of bugs, but subjective metrics, like the severity of those bugs, receive less attention.

Many university programs are set up to address this, by making engineering students earn credits in the humanities as well. But I fear the value of this is often inadequately explained. Contempt for the humanities and scientism go hand-in-hand, and are a worrying trend particularly in the tech industry.

This is an excellent idea. The guards are doubtlessly more in touch with the culture of the common people of Baltimore than the professional curators could hope to be.

> Hungary aside, most of Israel's allies in the region are dictatorships

Not just in the region. In the 1970s, Israel worked with apartheid South Africa to develop nuclear weapons. South Africa has subsequently been disarmed, but Israel has not been.

Incidentally, in 1963 JFK was trying to stop Israel's nuclear weapons program because American intelligence had failed to turn up any evidence that other countries in the region were pursuing the same. In a letter to Ben-Gurion, JFK wrote:

> "I can well appreciate your concern for developments in the UAR. But I see no present or imminent nuclear threat to Israel from there. I am assured that our intelligence on this question is good and that the Egyptians do not presently have any installation comparable to Dimona, nor any facilities potentially capable of nuclear weapons production. But, of course, if you have information that would support a contrary conclusion, I should like to receive it from you through Ambassador Barbour. We have the capacity to check it."

Egypt never developed nuclear weapons.

> I expect many will claim that they were groomed and forced to do it.

Many of them might well be. How can you really tell what kind of situation is going on behind the camera? Abusive relationships can hide in plain sight for years.

> Democratic institutions [...] NGOs"

What is it that makes non-government organizations so democratic? Do they let the general public vote for their leaders?

The new headline is perfectly acceptable and means the same thing as the old. This has been my position in this conversation since the start.

> I guess somebody else thought they were different enough words to warrant changing it back again.

Or dang thought to cut this fruitless tangent off at the knees. I am perfectly happy with the new headline, because it means the same thing as the old. If I were dang I'd change it too, for that reason. The new headline is still a damning indictment of US media.

Journalists and editors swap out words all the time, particularly when they aren't explicitly quoting somebody. People who write for a living tend to like words and pick words form sets of synonyms that suit their personal preferences. Any story that has been written about by more than one writer/editor will almost certainly have headlines that mean the same thing using different words.

A current example grabbed from google news:

"Two dams in Inner Mongolia collapse after heavy rain"

"Two dams in China's Inner Mongolia collapse after torrential rain"

"Heavy rain" and "torrential rain" mean basically the same thing. Why does one headline use one phrase, and the other another? Is this some sort of malicious attempt to propagandize at us? Or is it just an editor/writer who fancies the word 'torrential'? I think it's the second.

> "Important, salient"

A keystone is that. Keystones are key, take the keystone out of an arch and the arch collapses. Doesn't that make a keystone "important, salient"? I think it does. Both of those definitions support these words being synonyms. I quoted both definitions because I believe both support my point. (And I quoted both for 'keystone' because if I didn't, I figured you'd disingenuously attribute that omission to malfeasance.)

> As another poster has asked, why would you choose to change a shorter, more common word for a longer, less common one if they mean exactly the same?

My response to him applies to you as well. You would not be nitpicking such word choices if you were not looking for a crack to gain leverage in the conversation.

I think that is disingenuous; I don't think you would demand that people abstain from using synonyms in a less political context.

If a "key witness" is can be lost without sinking the case, then they are not "Indispensable, supremely important" and were not actually key. If an indispensable, or supremely important witness is lost, then your case has been lost. That's what indispensable means to me.

What does indispensable mean to you? Do you think something that is indispensable can be dispensed?

Did Assange believe it? If he believed it, he may have been motivated by it.

> Even the headline here has been massaged - originally this was a "key" witness but by the time it gets to HN, he's a "keystone" witness.

key: 1. Indispensable, supremely important. 2. Important, salient.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/key#Adjective

keystone: 1. (architecture) The top stone of an arch. 2. Something on which other things depend for support.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keystone

I grew up in the "keystone state". As far as I am concerned these words mean precisely the same thing in this context, and neither has stronger implications than the other. Are you sure you're not the one spinning here?

1. Helping people murder journalists is a crime.

2. You say 'adware', while Wikipedia says: "These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware."

3. I provided two examples of countries that operate like this, not a comprehensive list. I gave the second example to make clear that I was not claiming only one country operates like this. I already clarified this for you.

I don't think you are commenting in good faith. I will not respond to you again, even this response was doubtlessly a waste of my time.

The weird part is being the only guy bringing it up half a dozen times in one conversation.

Russia has been mentioned 7 times in this discussion now, every time by you. I don't have any stake in this fight; I don't use or recommend any of these applications. But you do seem to have a bone to pick.

> "doesn't seem to give a damn when criminal enterprises operating in their borders victimize people in other countries."

I think you mean reuse, not recycle. The first step in most recycling processes is a shredder.

I brought up Russia to make the point that Israel isn't the only country that operates like this. But they are one of the countries that does and their reputation for it spans decades.

> Aren't these private hacking companies breaking the law though?

Like Russia, Israel doesn't seem to give a damn when criminal enterprises operating in their borders victimize people in other countries. This shit has been going on for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley

They're doing that too... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...

These firms are helping authoritarian regimes kill and imprison journalists. The journalists who survive by being paranoid will be made less effective by having to use less effective methods of communication, which likely aren't understood by the people journalists talk to (whistleblowers, witnesses, etc.)

If these hacking firms succeed in chasing journalists off digital communication, I think the totalitarian regimes they serve will consider that "a win."