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really liking your second option there ... if only there were some way to convince lawyers that their jobs were unnecessary.

not sure if this is the interview OP is referring to, but the timeframe is right: https://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201301/

You've raised a really good point with this. Honestly, the whole "right to be forgotten" thing is utter BS. Might as well call it "the memory hole act". Or better yet, "the right to silence the opposition".

OK, but what the parent is suggesting is that someone might store someone's personally identifiable information on "the blockchain", thus making the entire bitcoin network in violation of GDPR. It's a fairly on-point criticism, IMO.

The word "irregardless" exists, whether you/I/we want it to or not.[0,1] All I can say is that it is indeed surprising how quickly confusing neologisms that should be chucked in the bin soon become sad facts of history.

It's not in the same category as "for all intensive purposes". But that's just the way language evolves. "Intensive" in that case should be "intents and", which, I believe has the same heritage as "clear and present danger", "crimes and misdemeanors", and "cease and desist". All these phrases are redundant lawyer-speak that came about when the law was being translated from Latin to English in the, what, 14th century in England?

So, yeah, there are people who want to _sound_ educated, thinking they'll use a high-falutin' phrase like "for all intents and purposes", they get it wrong and say "for all intensive purposes", and instantly reveal themselves as the uneducated person they actually are. (But only if their present company includes an actually educated person, of course.)

But rather than passing judgment on uneducated folks for using eggcorns[2], it would be more compassionate to reserve that judgment for the actual content and meaning of their speech, and not the superficial form it takes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/irregardless-real-word-regard... [2] http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

Thanks for sharing this. Drawing a connection between the superstition of superhero movies and ghost dancers is simply brilliant.

that's one of those gotcha words, though, like "inflammable" (contrast w/ "indestructible"), and "denuded".

Glad to know you're fighting; sad to hear we lost. But maybe the war is not yet over.

I think what we've really lost, and continue to lose, is respect. But that's just the respect from those above us in the mythical hierarchy. We can still respect ourselves, and choose to respect other people's privacy. Every day that I don't turn my binoculars on my neighbor's window is another victory, however small, for privacy.

Don't give up the fight!

I respect your opinion. But when Hillary Clinton gives a speech rolling up "foreign propaganda", "fake news", and "silicon valley" all in one sentence, and following directly in the wake of the shooting at Comet Ping Pong (4 days later), you can be pretty sure that some serious connections are being formed. (Even if only in your own brain.)

Nope, not coined by Trump. I did a bit of research. I found "fake news" in this link from 2005 on democracynow.org: https://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/14/state_propaganda_how_...

I'm not trying to say that people who use the term now are using it in place of "pizzagate", but that media outlets, during the months of December 2016 and early 2017, used the phrase to talk around "pizzagate"; and now "pizzagate" has faded, but "fake news" remains.

I think propaganda is a more appopriate word, and we should just use that. But because of the way associations work, whenever I see "fake news", I am reminded of "pizzagate". And I know I'm not the only one.

"Fake news" was in the lexicon well before pizzagate, which you can see in the link. The point I'm trying to make is that the phrase "fake news" was pushed in place of the phrase "pizzagate", and this was done by all the major media outlets when the phrase pizzagate came to prominence.

To my mind, if there had been no "pizzagate", there would have been no spike in "fake news", and we wouldn't even be talking about "fake news" today.

The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba (translated by Stevens).

I had an analogical vision while reading your comment. It looks like this: 1. Hard Science -- poking a rock with a stick. 2. Soft Science -- poking a random stranger on the bus with a stick. HTH

I'm pretty sure the "programmer ladder" you refer to looks like this:

  manager 
  |     |
 programmer

Smaller companies don't really have the budget for a team of programmers, so if you continually work for only those kinds of companies, you're going to be either the only programmer, or one of a few. If you're one of a few, then you have an opportunity to offer guidance.

On the other hand, you say that you're "not interested ... in doing another less technical role ...". But leadership is not technical. SOoOooo.... you're in a bit of a conundrum, but I think it's because of the way you've defined your terms.

Also, in your reply to jingnanzhou, you complain about being "out of the loop." Here's the thing: No one in a "superior" position to you is ever going to share financial information about their business with you, their lowly programmer. That's what they have accountants for. So you've got to stand up for yourself.

And I think that's really what your post is getting at. You're not being respected for your work, and you're feeling stifled. You've got to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and be willing to engage in some low-intensity conflict at your job to get your needs met.

In the immortal words of Jim Henson, "You've got to put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone."

Some of us are screaming outside as well.

I don't think it's the number of people that matter, but rather the behavior of those people.

It appears that humanity lived in balance (Lotka-Volterra style) with the rest of the inhabitants of the planet until the invention of agriculture, which is still relatively recent.

The transitions that led from agriculture to walled cities to city-states to modern nation-states all occurred within the past 10,000 years or so. Whereas the oldest known human fossil is something like a million years old. Divide that 10,000 by the million years our species has been on this planet, you get 1%. So for 99% of humanity's time on the planet we probably behaved a lot like most of the other land mammals.

Something happened that led to the changes in our behavior, and we are now facing the consequences of our collective actions for the past thousands of years. It looks like we'll need to change even more before it's too late.

I don't see how this will ever work. The needs of the defense sector are just fundamentally at odds with the needs of the commercial sector. On the hardware side you get things like Intel and AMD trying to hide "chips within chips", and on the software side you get things like foreign governments demanding to inspect proprietary software before they'll allow it to be imported.

The past and present are mired in "national interests"; but the real obstacle seems to be the idea that you can prevent other people from having what you have (an idea, a weapon, a key, etc.).

EDIT: I was responding to this quote from your link: "The goal of the ERI is to more constructively enmesh the technology needs and capabilities of the defense enterprise with the commercial and manufacturing realities of the electronics industry." I didn't mean to imply that what your company is working on won't work. Unless, of course, that is what your company is working on.

I think what you're missing is that the blockchains depend on network effects to function. They scale naturally with adoption, being decentralized. Facebook does not scale naturally with adoption, because it depends on its own private funds to purchase more servers and bandwidth to handle the scaling, whereas decentralized technologies do scale easily because each player pays for their own equipment.

So, no, they (blockchains) won't be "maintained by a single player". The code may be centrally maintained, but not the network, and it is the network that holds the value. The crowd is fickle, and bitcoin could turn to nothing tomorrow based on the whim of the crowd. Still, the internet has this same quality, and it's still going strong. It (the internet) is simply too useful to be discarded. It remains to be seen if bitcoin is that useful as well.

I would suggest you take a step back and think about PayPal. Do you think PayPal changed the world?

What PayPal did was reduce the "friction" of online transactions. Suddenly you no longer needed a merchant account at a bank to accept credit cards online. That was huge, right?

Similarly, a blockchain (Bitcoin's, as the premiere example) allows you to sidestep the credit card companies and banks entirely. This reduces the "friction" even more. Now, all you need is a string of alphanumeric characters, no account, no verifiable identity.

PayPal was a first step in the direction of reducing online transaction friction, blockchains are a second step.

In defense of your average rural dweller, things really do move a lot more slowly in rural areas in comparison to metropolises. There's less diversity as well. So, you know, please take it easy on us dumb hicks out in the sticks. We're less connected, sure, but we're getting there.

Think the parent might have meant "good cause."

I'm not sure if Aaron really took his own life or not, and I don't want to say anything insensitive, but I'll share a thought I remember having around the time of his death, which was that if he did kill himself, he was acting out of concern for the greater good -- in that by killing himself, he escaped being "made an example of" by the prosecution, and instead made the prosecution look extremely heavy-handed, and even guilty themselves. The hope would have been that for other folks facing similar circumstances in the future, his case would be remembered and other prosecutors would therefore choose not to go down that same road of trying to make an example out of someone with extreme punishment, for fear of creating another martyr.

>>“When developing laws, regulations, policies, and programs, policymakers should worry about whether people feel excluded by their enactment,” Coman said. “Otherwise, we may create societies that are prone to spreading inaccurate and superstitious beliefs.”

I know, right! How many times do I have to keep hearing about the so-called "moon landing"!?

I believe you're right about that looking back. One of the safest developments in car culture has been the round-a-bout. Of course that works so well because it physically prevents the collisions that would otherwise happen in the centers of intersections. My hope is that we will extend that idea to all roads everywhere, and that future generations will physically separate roads intended for cars from roads intended for cyclists and pedestrians. Burying them underground but w/ ventilation for the exhaust, for example.

>Is there another communication system that is decentralized (...), and is also widely used?

XMPP, maybe?

Come now, it wasn't the "populum" that wanted Galileo to shut up, it was the "Pope-ulum".

Compelling article, but marred by the click-baity title. It would be more respectful of the bereaved to reserve "Epic Fail" for things less tragic than the loss of a child. "Tragic Failure" might be more appropriate.

I couldn't agree more. When it comes time to sum up this administration with one word, "sad" will be it.

Better headline: "Rumors on Reddit lead tech journalist to assume that AMD has done something right"

>>It's not normal for someone known by everyone around them to be a harasser to be able to continue their acts.

I recommend reading "The missing stair"[0] for an account of how normal this actually is.

[0] http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html

I guess the second step is acknowledging that the other half are also irrational? And anyone campaigning for reform is also clearly irrational... It reminds me of the quote at the end of WarGames: "The only winning move is not to play."