elblanco

I honestly don't understand where most tax dollars go in the U.S. I'm in Korea at the moment and the tax burden is overall very light when compared to the States, but the level of service you receive is absolutely tremendous for the most part.

Example, if you make over around $85,000 USD, you fall into the maximum tax bracket, which is 35%. Most people pay around 25%. As a foreigner, I can also pay an alternative 17.5% instead.

There's also a 10% surtax at all income levels. So I can really get by with about 18.5% income tax (and there's all kinds of easy deductions).

That's a bit hyperbolic, rude and unfair. It's a stupid example, but it's not advocating violence. Maybe a little property destruction. But nothing that would harm a person.

I get his point though. There are expectations you have in using all kinds of things. And it's really not fair for somebody else to usurp that use and then complain when it's not perfectly suited for their unintended use-case.

It's like complaining that bikes don't make good airplanes even though I've jumped my bike thousands of times. When I ride, I'm aware that I'm also not a particularly good automobile and try to plan my route to not end up in circumstances where I might get hurt from a careless driver. It would be the same if I was on a moped or small dirt bike or something.

I used to have this amazingly beat up old van when I was a teenager, and I don't think it could even make 100kph (about 60mph) downhill with a tailwind. So I knew I also shouldn't be bringing it on fast roads because I'd be a menace to everybody else on the road. It just seems like common sense to me.

At least where I grew up, bikes were not supposed to ride on roads without sufficient shoulder for them to pull out of the way of vehicles. The flip side is that there's a big lobby that tries to ensure that most roads have such a shoulder. Lots of rural roads don't have them, but I've found that it's better for me as both a driver and a cyclist to have such shoulders in the case I need to pull off or out of the way with either kind of transport mode.

Correct, where I grew up, we were taught in school to get out of intersections as quickly as possible, or dismount and walk across the crosswalk if it was available.

You know for a fact that there are historic roads all over the U.S. that date back to before the car. Even old farm roads have been turned into highways, but that doesn't mean they weren't originally purposed for things on foot.

I feel like there's lots of space for b2b disruption in banking. Banks really shouldn't be in the business of building secure and robust software. They don't manufacture their own vaults either.

It seems to me that it's obvious the Euro-way is the better one. Get cyclists off the roads and safe. I agree with the OP, sharing space with unprotected humans wearing nothing but a few grams of styrofoam on their head for protection is not a great place to be when operating any kind of motor vehicle.

It might just be the complexity of the language almost lends itself to complex approaches for relatively simple tasks.

No I think he's right. At least around where I live (well, used to live, I'm in Korea at the moment), cyclists are not supposed to ride on roads that disrupt traffic or don't have a sufficient shoulder to pull off onto to let vehicles pass.

By contrast in Korea, they're not supposed to use roads at all and you'll find everything from bikes to scooters sharing sidewalks with people on foot. But bikes aren't real common here anyways with the small apartments and all.

edit actually I was curious and looked it up for Korea. Turns out according to Article 2(17)(a) of the 도로교통법 (road laws), bikes are classified as motor vehicles and have all the same rights and responsibilities as a motor vehicle.

Weird because I almost never see them out in traffic, but usually up on sidewalks or on "bike-only" roads.

I'm with you on your main points. But this kind of talk doesn't help your argument.

At risk of coming out of HN retirement, a friend forwarded this topic to me. I wrote an extensive commentary before signing-off:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059012

(now back to peaceful slumber)

Thanks for reminding me how far down HN has come in the last six months or so. Engineering, science, logic and rational thought is no longer a valuable concepts here. This site is now firmly rooted in constant appeals to emotion. It's not about right or wrong anymore, or even best, it's about feelings.

As of 1/1/2011, I quit.

Oh, I agree. Even the original bid price seems outrageous to me. However, one thing to keep in mind is that the city government of NYC is massive. Something like a bit over a quarter of a million employees working in everything from teaching to subway track maintenance, with a budget of $50 billion/yr. Just stopping the fraud issue with the time and attendance system would have saved the original cost of the system!

One side-issue that's caused some of the bloat was the various city-employee unions fighting against biometric scanners for time-in/time-out logging.

Here's some of the sources I used in my study (note the great discussion here on the same topic a while ago):

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/03/26/2010-03-26_city_...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/nyregion/23scanning.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221068

http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/26/juan_gonzalez_ny_pays_...

http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.62e273bb0ef1f...

I did a research case-study on this project and the FBI system as part of a study on enterprise architecture failures. The principal purpose of the CityTime system was to prevent city employees from filling out and signing time cards for their coworkers. In other words, reduce fraud in the time keeping system and thereby lower city costs (payroll is one of, if not the, biggest expense for the city government).

Outside of the fantastic irony of the situation, that requirement was interpreted to mean a fairly high level of security and auditing over the city employees' time keeping activities. This meant system integrated biometric scanners, one-time keys, end-to-end encryption etc...making for a fantastically complicated architecture.

> it claims that it is consistent with the university's character to publish the work.

that is not an appeal to authority.

The statement alone is sufficient for the argument, bringing in notable and revered historical figures does not improve the merit of his premise. He's saying, "it's in our character because of these notable authority figures". By definition it's an appeal to authority.

Why is this so hard to understand?

(meta-comment, seriously, what's with all the fucking downvotes? has nobody here ever seen a formal argument or a logical fallacy? I don't care if I burn karma for being wrong, but I'm not so what's the deal? If you downvoted and actually typed a response, please disregard my bitching (and yes I know the guidelines say I shouldn't say this kind of thing, but pg's going to have to establish some up/down mod guidelines one of these days, because clearly getting downvoted for making factual statements doesn't make any sense and it appears that this site is slipping again down the HN->reddit->digg->4chan slope again as recent posts about non-hackerish things are demonstrating))

Funny thing to say on a site dedicated to building businesses using computers.

(and to the people here who've downvoted me such that I've just burned up 8 points of karma for simply pointing out there was a logical fallacy in the letter and who clearly don't understand what a logical fallacy looks like if it smacked them in the face, have a happy new year and I weep for you)

This was a really great presentation. I love how he ate his own dogfood and did the entire presentation with his tool.

I disagree that the original response was not an argument. I'd ask that you review Anderson's letter again. I'm also unsure why you are attempting to connect epideictic rhetoric (used in several places in the letter) to the logical flaw in question since the rhetoric you are raising occurs after the flaw in paragraph.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/ukca.pdf

It's presented as an argument, it lists flaws in the UK Card Association's reasoning asking for censorship of the research. It presents a clear conclusion ~"we will not censor the thesis" supported by clearly labeled premises, specifically:

1) The Card Association incorrectly addressed the complaint so they are asking the wrong people to censor the thesis

2) Because powerful groups are against a research area is not reason to censor the work. I can see how one might find this premise confusing since he only dwells on it for the first sentence of the paragraph. The rest of the paragraph is composed of the logical flaw in question, and then epideictic rhetoric about the noble business of Universities followed by an FU statement that they are also going to ensure the thesis spreads far and wide in direct opposition to the complaint. In other words, the second paragraph is a mess.

The argument of the premise is simple and is in fact an admonition against the logical flaw the complainant is using "we are strong so you must do as we say", but Anderson blends and conflates it with rhetoric and the flaw, concluding "thus we have no choice but to back him, that would hold even if we did not agree with the material!"

3) The thesis is not new information anyways, so to ask for its censor makes no sense.

4) The source was not made available, so to the consumer of the thesis, they only have knowledge that the vulnerability exists, ergo they are asking to censor something that does not harm

5) The test of the thesis was not fraud, as the complainants claim, therefore asking for censorship under that claim makes no sense.

6) That the thesis exposes a vulnerability that undermines public confidence in the security of the system, but since the flaw has been apparently fixed, there is no reason to censor the thesis.

Conclusion) We will not censor the thesis because the logic of the premises hold true that the thesis should not be censored.

I do agree with you that the original response is not a formal logical argument in the strictest sense, and has elements of rhetoric (particularly in the 2nd premise), but it's clearly framed as at the very least a rational argument.

The letter in it's entirety are certainly not epideictic by any of my understandings of the term nor by your link. However, both the second and sixth premises contain elements of epideictic rhetoric. (btw, the presence of the logical flaw doesn't necessarily invalidate the 2nd premise since the passage is non-sequitur to the premise anyways!)

I think that's what you are trying to say here And not everything you say, even in the course of an argument, is itself argument. And I would agree with that sentiment. However, in this case, the sentence in question is clearly part of a logical argument and is a classic usage of a logical flaw.

I fully understand how Anderson would have written such a thing, impassioned as he must be over the issue. I actually found his argument persuasive and much milder in tone than I would have managed.

>I don't see the reason for downvoting parent.

Who knows...people tend to get offended when their reasoning is held to measure against rational thought for some reason.

Given that his argument is supposed to be "we are Cambridge, we have a tradition of logical and rational thinking we are proud of, this research is representative of that tradition, we think that it should not be censored" I found this errant line to really jump out at me.

In my experience with several lawyers, many of them argue almost entirely from a position of logical fallacies -- better to win via confusion of the argument than win via logical argument.

Actually, appeal to tradition and appeal to precedent are subtly different things. "We must continue doing a thing because we have always done it" vs "In the past, the reasoning was sound to do a thing, perhaps it is still sound to continue doing that thing".

One absolutely fascinating debate I read online between a non-lawyer and a top-15 US law school dean more or less ended up with the non-lawyer demolishing the lawyer's arguments by assigning every argument to a list of logical fallacies. It was quite poetic. However, the dean kept arguing that the non-lawyer wasn't making legal arguments. Which gives me serious doubts that the legal system is based on logical or even just rational thought.

(if you are interested the debate is here between somebody called "Red County Bound" and "sandersmj", during the recent legal challenges over same-sex marriage, I found it to be one of the most illuminating arguments I could find online http://www.brambletonian.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=1650... )

> On the other hand, it's only a logical fallacy if it fouls an argument. ... > It's part of an explanation for why he won't do something

ergo it's an appeal to authority or at the very least an appeal to tradition/precedent (or I suppose even lesser a non sequitur)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

either way, it's a fascinatingly shoddy, and unnecessary, argument that severely detracts from the otherwise fine argument. A simple, "this paper represents basic security research. We believe censoring basic research is wrong and harmful. Therefore we will not censor this research." would have done.

It's also a surprising appeal to authority logical fallacy. Those people don't work there anymore.

(not that I disagree with them that they shouldn't censor the findings)

Weird http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050168

You should see the unreadable mess in his blog.

http://thedutras.blogspot.com/

When did English drop those letters? 400 years ago? If he really wants to use those letters, he should also use the grammar and vocabulary constructs.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8102/pg8102.html

(all that being said, I would mind a few more letters to use in English, particularly the schwa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa would make everybody's life easier w/r to spelling).

Maybe what you mean is that there's no GNU in their Linux?

It's actually very interesting. Anecdotally, as somebody who grew up in a "Foundry" area...when I think of moving to another city, other Foundry cities come up first in my mind as places I want to live. I never really attributed it to regionalism but I suppose it makes a kind of sense. Even regions geographically close to mine don't have the same kind of draw as those close to mine.

Travel, then startup. I'm kinda doing it backwards at the moment, but I did a fair amount of traveling before going to work at this place and it was some of the most valuable life experience I've ever had.

I think that if I can sum it up in a thought it's this: there is a remarkable difference between reading and thinking and reasoning about a subject, and actually experiencing it. Even if I don't use many of the facts I learned while traveling (i.e. the odds and ends of the Knights of St. John's defense of Rhodes against the Turks and their subsequent move to Malta), I learned that it's one thing to read about the layered defense of Rhodes, and another to actually walk among it.

In other words, I can read and reason all I want about the situation of my customers, and their problems and solutions to those problems, but until I actually get about working with them, in their space, on their problem set, with their data, and within their constraints, I'll never really get their issues and thus never really provide a 1-1 solution for those issues.

It might seem like a simple concept, one I thought I understood before I set about traveling far and wide, but I really grokked it much better after seeing the world and trying to understand.

(oh, and the never ending different national interpretations of historic world events I find endlessly fascinating and very perspective setting -- very helpful when understanding how to think like your customers)

May I humbly suggest you use either a better OS or browser or some combination of said components. It takes 0% CPU on my netbook running XP and Chrome latest version.

Appreciate it, I'll send an email off in a bit, not sure if I have the kind of time I need to be a solid contributor anymore, but I can always take a stab.

(btw, some of my biggest long distance bills ever came from calling Starport years ago to get the latest releases)

I just checked and my user pages don't even exist anymore. :(

As an 30 year-old underground-ish art movement rooted deeply if not almost entirely online, the demoscene is not exactly one with much printed source material or reporting (I've managed to be interviewed on TV once though at an event in Quebec)

   http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/10-of-the-coolest-demoscene-creations-715166

but has had a relatively profound impact on the tech industry

e.g. the game industry in particular is stuffed full of demosceners

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedy_Entertainment
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games
   http://www.spore.com/ftl
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopCap_Games

etc.

(as well as a few others like the music biz)

   http://www.pelulamu.net/timbaland/
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunz
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sega
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lynne
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothomstates

nearly every soft-mp3 player supports scene music formats (.mod, .s3m, .mtm, .669, .xm, .it, etc.) or have extensions to support them

The recent resurgence in pixel art I find amusing since the demoscene has been carrying that torch for decades:

   http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/frames.html

I've been part of the scene for over 20 years myself and my sources are pretty much all primary, personal contacts, etc. Influence-wise, tons of tech industry folks got their start hacking away on 'scene projects and bring a particular style and set of associated concepts with them.

Print e-Sources though may include some of the scene-zines, a handful of books, Wired has run a few articles from time-to-time, but most of the scene exists either as web sites or chat logs to be honest.

   http://www.scene.org/
   http://www.demoscene.us/
   http://www.pouet.net/
   http://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/
   http://datunnel.blogspot.com/

As a movement, the scene has a pretty cohesive culture, style, ethos, language, etc. One way to think of it is that it's the Liberal Arts alternative to the Open Source movement (if you consider the Open Source movement as the Hard Engineering/Science alternative to the Artsy Demoscene). It has its sub-cultures and there are various geographic differences -- dialects -- if you will to the scene. Not entirely unlike the difference between say, Korean Hip-Hop and North American Hip-Hop.

Thousands of people attend the events (called parties) which are loosely organized as competitions but are really just a chance to show off your creations to loads of like-minded folks.

   http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4143/4868635967_19ec3ddc7c_z.jpg

Like most art movements, the work ranges from amateurish to sublime

   http://www.demoscene.tv/page.php?id=172&lang=uk&vsmaction=view_prod&id_prod=13947

(keep in mind this is realtime, one of the core foundations of the demoscene is for productions to run real-time)

...is often abstract and at times quite evocative. videos of tons of productions here:

   http://www.demoscene.tv/

So when I sit there, on wikipedia, and see this page

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Tracker_musicians

I really really want to provide some content, but I know from past experience it's not worth the effort or time. Which is a shame since I believe I would have a lot to offer in fleshing out this quite vibrant art scene.