setrofim_

Browsers are insecure. Fact of life. A lot of work is being done to rectify this; but in the near future, this will continue to be the case. Meanwhile, using ad blockers for security may seem bizarre, but it works.

For those confused by this: https://xkcd.com/303/

>Maturity: it certainly feels rushed that in less than four years systemd went from nothing to the default init system in most Linux distributions (if I'm not mistaken). For something so basic and important you'd think a good amount of testing and bugfixing should happen before that

Maturity should not be confused with age. There is certainly positive correlation between the two, but it's not necessarily that strong. A piece of software that has been around for four years and been used by everybody will be more mature than software that has been around for ten but was only used by a small community.

There is also a chicken-and-egg problem here: software needs get widely adopted _before_ it can become mature.

> One option would be to prevent any company from operating a last mile AND selling it to retail customers.

How would that help? As long as there is still the one company owning the one last mile line. Whether it's consumers buying it or intermediaries leasing it in order to re-sell, there is still no competiton. I suppose, an itermediary may have more pull then a consumer, but in the end it's the operator that the leverage as there are no alternatives in that area.

>In particular, defense ought to be expanded to "the legitimate use of physical force or threat of force in proportionate response to the initial use of physical force or threat of force against your person or property."

Why? You're arbitrarily narrowing down the definition of "defense" to suit your argument. Are you saying that anything short of physical violence or threat of physical violence is not a real threat that can be legitimately defended against (either through physical means or otherwise)? An if we're going down this route, an attacker may well choose physical violence to get me to divulge my knowledge just as they might use it to deprive me of a physical possession.

>The only reason why you're depriving me of some tangible benefit is because it's scarce. If you take some resource from me that isn't scarce, then no benefit is lost because I can immediately conjure up another resource of identical value. Therefore, there is no conflict.

True, but again, you're thinking of scarcity in purely physical terms. Say I run a food stand, and due to my grandma's secret sauce recipe, I have no shortage of customers. You, my competitor, acquire that recipe from me (you may have stolen a written copy, blackmailed me, or even simply beaten it out of me in a dark alley). You now start adding the same sauce to your product and take away some of my customers. Your knowledge of the recipe, has not diminished my knowledge of it, however it has diminished my competitive advantage (the scarce "resource" in this case) and so that knowledge no longer has the same value.

>Defining property in terms of tangible benefits is simply untenable because there is no bound to it. For example, I could claim that the person who lives next to me lowers the value of my house because they never cut their lawn. I could therefore claim that they are creating conflict because they are removing some tangible benefit that I have.

Yes, true, and certain councils and home owners associations do exactly that. It is a gradient. But that's the point -- the place where you choose to draw the "property" line on this gradient is necessarily arbitrary. You're claiming that your arbitrary point (physical exclusivity) is actually the right point, and any other point is "untenable". My argument is that this is not the case, and today, in a world of increasing automation of physical labor and freer, near-instantaneous communication, where an increasing portion of the population (in the West, at least) are engaging in what could be classified as "intellectual pursuits", physical boundaries are becoming increasingly inadequate.

>The paper does address them, you just didn't read those parts.

You're right, I've lost interest words the end of the paper, and didn't read it all the way through. My apologies. I have now.

>Trademarks are discussed starting on page 43 and it's quite clear that no validity is given to the concept of intellectual property rights.

Not in the case of trademarks. For trade secrets, the author, after wrangling with the legal notion of contract, does begrudgingly admit that trade secrets are a valid form of intellectual property (or at least, that they may form a valid grounds for legal recourse...).

The author's argument against trademarks is absurd. After establishing the concept of a trademark in the first paragraph, they dismiss it out of hand and with no justification or argument to back it up at the beginning of the second. The author then proceeds to construct and knock down the strawman of consumer rights (which is not what trademarks are about). Finally, they use their (entirely unsupported) conclusion about the notion of trademark ownership to dismiss the idea of trademark dilution.

>This isn't arbitrary at all because it's consistently applying the illegitimacy of owning ideas.

Except the author never justifies it. Instead, they assume illegitimacy of owning ideas, and then proceed to use that assumption to demonstrate how the (a priori) illegitimate laws are, in fact, illegitimate. The whole thing is an exercise in circular reasoning:

you can't own ideas --> laws that depend on owning ideas are illegitimate; there are no legitimate laws that support owning ideas --> idea ownership is illegitimate

Well, yes, indeed. It depends on the purpose of the abstraction. It may well be that Fly() should not be a method of Bird (maybe we need a FlyingBird subclass, or, even better, a Flying mix-in). My objection was to the "solution" of throwing InvalidOperation, not in support of the assumption that birds can necessarily fly (note the capitalization in may initial remark).

>Property rights over tangible things (whose use is physically exclusionary) do not require the defense of a coercive third party.

I would still claim that the distinction you're drawing is arbitrary. Yes physical objects and ideas are different and the ways one goes about defending them will, of course also be different. The defense of intellectual property does not, in principle, require enforcement by a coercive third party. I could defend it by keeping it a secrete, or announce to the word that I am in fact the inventor (ownership of an idea does not necessarily have to imply exclusive use of it).

You're claiming that the attribute of physical exclusivity is essential to the notion of "property"; I can argue that it is incidental. The import thing is that thorough appropriating your property, I am depriving you of some tangible benefit. In case of physical property, the benefit is the (necessarily) exclusive use of that property. In case of intellectual property, the benefit maybe competitive advantage (if I choose to keep my knowledge secret), or a revenue stream (if I choose to allow others to benefit from my knowledge in return for compensation), or reputation and status (in being acknowledged as the inventor).

That paper makes the same erroneous assumption:

"Only tangible, scarce resources are the possible object of interpersonal conflict, so it is only for them that property rules are appli­cable."

This obviously wrong. Reputation, influence (political religious, etc), honor, status, competitiveness -- all quality sources of "interpersonal conflict".

In fact, the paper conveniently avoids tackling some forms of intellectual property--trade secretes and trademarks-- by dismissing them as "less problematic" (thus tacitly acknowledging the validity of the concept of "intellectual property") and instead chooses to focus on copyrights and patents (both of which are indeed severely flawed -- today even more so then when the paper was originally published). It is thus drawing an arbitrary distinction between different forms of intellectual property -- something it goes on to condemn later. Note that the classification of physical property is also essentially arbitrary (e.g. the notion of "private property", as applied to physical objects, was far weaker in the Soviet Union, and still is elsewhere in the world, than it is in the US).

EDIT: grammar + clarity.

But now you can't assume that Birds can Fly. You have to catch InvalidOperationException on every invocation. And what's special about Fly? What above other Bird methods, surely the same can be done to all of them? Now you can't assume anything about a Bird. So what good is the Bird abstraction then, if you can't make any assumptions about it?

This is breaking the Liskov Substitution Principle[1]. By saying that Penguin is a subclass of Bird, you're implying that I should be able to stick a Penguin into any code that expects a Bird, that code will just work, without it having to care about the particularity of that Bird actually being a Penguin.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle

[edit: grammar]

>It is worth drawing a distinction between that which requires a coercive third party like government to enforce (e.g., intellectual property) and that which does not require such a thing (defending property).

I don't believe this distinction applies here. Not all IP requires the government to enforce it (e.g. trade secrets). Conversely, if someone were to move into my yard, or steal something from me, I would call Police (an agent of the government) to enforce my property rights.

Note: I'm not trying to defend or ague for property rights, merely pointing out that this particular distinction is in valid, as the poster above pointed out -- all property is, to an extent, government enforced.

It's accurate, but incomplete (it's a snippet not a complete quote -- note the // snip in there). If you look at the full commit linked in the post, there are code paths in the complete function that would make it return a 1.

Eric Fromm's essay "Fear of Feadom" (or "Escape from Freedom" in the US) describes this phenomenon in great detail. Well worth a read.

Nope:

http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/

Depending on which metric you chose, either iOS or Android is ahead. However, the data is not conclusive enough to warrant your statement. If anything, it seems to be leaning in the opposite direction.

The first claim -- that older programmers are more knowledgeable -- is obvious and is not unique to the software industry. This is true of pretty much any profession: the longer you do it, the better you get at it and the more you learn about it.

The fact that there are few older programmers is also not very surprising. This is still a pretty young industry and historically, the demand for programmers has been pretty low. Also, until very recently (the last 10-15 years), advancing in one's career meant moving away from technical into managerial roles.

> "The Psychopath Test" doesn't represent psychology.

I'm not claiming that it does. I only mentioned it because that's where I first read about the Rosenhan experiment. That experiment is not fictionalized (see the Wikipedia link), regardless of whether or not the rest of the book is.

EDIT: Thanks for the link to Hare's commentary; I haven't read that before.

> And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis.

That sounds like very interesting homework, and the results were certainly informative. Such experiments are not without risk though. IIRC there was a researcher that conducted a similar experiment -- got some volunteers with no history of mental illness go into some psychiatric institutions and fake some symptoms. The majority of them were able to get admitted with just that. The problem was getting them out afterwards. Apparently some institutions were reactant to discharge the "patients" even after they have been informed of the experiment. (I can't recall the name of the researcher unfortunately, but this experiment is described in Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test"). Once you're labeled as "crazy", proving that you're not can be difficult, even if your behavior does not differ from that of "normal" people.

> That's the problem with psychology or psychiatry [...] It's a complete and total joke.

Please don't group psychology and psychiatry together. The former is a legitimate field of study (whether psychology technically qualifies as a "science" is debatable), the latter, is, as you say, largely a joke (at least, in the US). Please also note that the appalling state of psychiatry today should not be taken to mean that all mental disorders are bull -- there definitely are very serious mental disorders, and people do need to seek help if they are suffering from them.

EDIT: Found the book.

The researcher was talking about is David Rosenham:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

Also, I was wrong when I said that the hospitals were told about the experiment -- it was a condition of the experiment that the patients needed to get out "on their own", though they didn't exhibit any of the symptoms after the initial interview, and were acting completely "normal" during their stay.

Both versions highlight the importance of a nurturing environment to the development of a child. However, the original version is about a child finally finding an environment in which his creativity can thrive; the alternative version is about a child's creativity being stifled during his early development to the point where it is unable to thrive even once he is in an environment that allows, and even encourages, it. Thus the alternative version also demonstrates the lasting damage that may result, and so is more effective at conveying the message of the poem.

> IRC safe?

Definitely not. It has always been a public communications channel. I don't think anyone ever had any privacy expectations regarding IRC.

That's a lot to put on a sticker -- people aren't going to read that. Maybe something a bit snappier, e.g. "Freelance coder: available for gigs" or something.

I would question, however, whether putting a sticker of any kind is gonna help you score gigs. I mean, if you were looking for a coder, would you really approach some random guy/gal in a coffee shop based solely on a sticker on their laptop and knowing nothing else about them?

Maybe having a sticker with a link to your github, as suggested by others, would be more useful (if your user id is memorable).

I was only half serious with that remark (hence the smilie). It was not intended to be an Ad Hominem attack to weaken wtvanhest's argument (though it could have that effect -- thanks for pointing that out). I am aware that "I could care less" is a wide-spread US idiom and understand the intended meaning it conveys; but it still makes me cringe whenever I see it.

jdietrich argues:

"I think nearly all of these 'social' startups are bad news" (emphasis added).

This allows that some "social startups" might be a good idea, and is not (at least, not as I interpret it) an argument against social media in general. Besides, Facebook has long stopped being a "startup" so this comment does not apply to it.

As I understand it, jdietrich argues against the recent trend of "socialising" every aspect of our lives through increasingly frivolous apps that provide instant gratification but lead to shallow and superficial interactions.

This does not mean that you can't have meaningful interactions through social media. Your example of using Facebook to keep in touch with people when moving to a new city is an illustration of that. However it does not invalidate jdietrich's argument in any away.

> Tobacco was invented in 5000 BC according to wikipedia. At that point in time it had basically none of the bad side effects you mention due to shorter life spans. It probably had numerous positive side effects.

Another reason that tobacco historically had "basically none of the bad side effects" is that people didn't smoke it nearly in the quantities they do today. Then a few startups (well, they weren't called that back then) came along and it "has made a small number of people incomprehensibly rich, to the great detriment of humanity".

> Now you don't like facebook??? Well, honestly, I do. I like it to keep in touch with people and it had real value to me when I moved to a city where I didn't know a single person as it made me feel less alone. I'm sure many others have benefited.

Strawman. Nowhere in his post jdietrich mentions Facebook.

> The companies mentioned are highly successful.

No one argues that these companies aren't successful. The argument is that the fact that they are highly successful does not mean that they are a good for society as a whole.

> I could care less about any of the companies mentioned

You mean, you couldn't care less, right? :P (Sorry, that particular Americanism is a pet peeve of mine.)

One could argue that "traditional" AI is also about creating the "illusion" of intelligence. That is what the Turing test is testing -- whether the illusion is sufficiently good to fool the tester into thinking that they're communicating with something intelligent.

The difference is in the degree to which the illusion has to hold up. Game "AI" exist in a limited, artificial world; so they can get away with "simple" algorithms without any learning elements. General AI needs to operate in the real world (even if constrained to a particular domain), where the "rules" are too numerous and complex to program in advance; thus learning is an essential part of "traditional" AI.

IIRC, there was a survival horror game that claimed to learn from and adapt to the player in order to provide a scarier experience (playing to the player's phobias and such). Not sure if that qualifies.

Reminds me of this passage from Douglas Hofstadter's GEB:

Loocas the Thinker comes across an unknown object--a woman. ... "Behold! I can look upon her face, which is something she cannot do--therefore women can never be like me!"

And thus he proves man's superiority over women, much to his relief ... The woman argues back: "Yes, you can see my face, which is something I can't do--but I can see your face, which is something you can't do! We're even."

"I'm sorry, you're deluded if you think you can see my face. What you women do is not the same as what we men do--it is, as I have already pointed out, of an inferior caliber, and does not deserve to be called by the same name. You may call it 'womanseeing'. Now the fact that you can womansee my face is of no import, because the situation is not symmetric. You see?"

"I woman-see," womanreplies the woman, and womanwalks away . . .

That's what "AI" usually means in the context of game development.

A very interesting post. However, it is making some strong claims without really backing them up. It would be nice to see some citations.

I'm sure we'll be fine: http://xkcd.com/1046/

Unless your server needs to handle comparable amounts of traffic, it's not the same thing.

This distinction only matters if the government can't subpoena private entities to hand over the footage whenever they want. (Note: I have no idea how easy it is for the government to obtain private CCTV footage in practice -- just pointing out that the fact that 92% of CCTV isn't operated by the government doesn't mean that it is not accessible to the government.)

>is there some sort of financial instrument a company could buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their own performance?

I think restricted stock is basically that.