zipwitch

You are right that "dictatorship" or "conspiracy" are the wrong ways to look at this sort of corrupting influence. The actuality is far more pernicious - it doesn't take Bond-villain plotting, just people making decisions that are shaded by their own social connections. They don't need to be doing it deliberately or conciously, but even indirect connections to, for example, the defense industry or certain players in the finance industry will lead to decisions that benefit those to whom the decider is biased.

Our species' collective intelligence isn't that simple.

It appears to me that we are processing substrate for a species-sized game of Core Wars. In turn, because the size of the playing field (aka total human population) has become so large, the outcomes of the game now can produce existential threats, something amplified by the speed at which everything runs.

When there were only 200 million humans, communicating by voice and using only muscle power, the ultimate impact of slow AIs running on Homo Sapiens hardware was bounded. Now, closing in on 8 billion of us with considerable upgrades in the form of industrial- and information-age technology, the output of the game can not just break the board, but flip the table.

Would the criticism go away if they called it a credit score?

The job of Amazon, or any corporation, is not to just "increase their bottom line" nor is the job of governments to "increase their tax bases". Both classes of entity are allowed to exist by communities of human beings in order to make our lives better than they would be otherwise. We're smart enough to know that we don't have all the answers, so we allow people to create different structures under different rules and with different incentives. But the root reason corporation (and governments) are allowed to exist is the public good. A corporation that exists only for itself is just a weak attempt at a gray goo scenario.

This is very much philosophy rather than practical rules, and perhaps you were speaking on a practical level rather than a philosophical one. But too many people seem to think that corporations (and governments) have some inherent right to exist and do what they chose, and forget that both exist only with our collective permission.

The pure white screen has a certain aesthetic appeal, but the total lack of content puts it considerably below the original. (I assume this must be an intended effect, given the complete absence of error messages.)

For much of the US the situation is something like this:

You have ISP #1, who have relatively modern infrastructure and bandwidth.

You may or may not have ISP #2, who have antiquated infrastructure they don't maintain that delivers bandwidth circa 2005.

You probably also have ISP #3, who use alternate delivery technologies (wimax, satellite, etc) to deliver low bandwidth at exorbitant prices.

The Okavango is Africa's 4th longest river. It flows into the Kalahari desert, becomes a swamp and dries out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okavango_River

Sometimes it's not about wanting to make money, about wanting to sell, or even about wanting to be useful. It's about having an idea and wanting to make it work. And if fame or fortune come your way as a result, great. But the real motivation is building it and seeing it work. (And maybe watching people go, "Wow! That's so awesome/amazing/elegant/etc!" But as long as you get to build it and it works, that's what's really important.)

The cost of getting everyone you wish to communicate with using the new system is non-trivial.

It's not true. The original source of the claim appears to be a misrepresentation on Fox News years ago of Congress' student loan repayment plan for staffers.

https://www.factcheck.org/2011/01/congress-not-exempt-from-s...

A few bucks either way on price (including shipping costs) don't matter much to me either way. What I do value is my time. And that is what missed delivery dates and time on the phone both cost me. "Spend time dealing with customer service" is another cost with no associated value to me.

A few years back, there was a story about how a different Matrix fan work, The ASCII Matrix, was the oldest torrent: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7wex/how-ascii-...

(And this all makes me feel old.)

Fines also need to be proportional to income, or you're (potentially) doing far more harm than intended or neccessary to the poorest violators, and failing to deter the wealthier ones.

The answer is obvious: time-travelers on a 'paleo hunting experience' trip.

"We'll just target 100,000 years before the earliest known human presence."

From the same time period come the manually operated and far less complex Napier's Bones. Still pretty neat, and more likely what the 'average' person needing a calculating device would have used.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier%27s_bones

This sort of discussion always puts me in mind of what J.R.R. Tolkien said (via Gandalf),

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement."

>This sort of adversarial judicial system is akin to Democracy, in that it's the worst system of its type, except for every other system we've tried.

Except that's not really true. Democracies are split between highly adversarial common law systems, and civil law systems where judges take a stronger role in the process. People living under civil law, with less adversarial systems and more inquisitorial judges, don't seem notably more or less happy with their justice systems than those with adversarial systems.

From the list: All the important years are four digits long

This left out the Long Now Foundation's advocacy for five-digit years to deal premptively with the Y10K bug. And, less tongue-in-cheek, to promote a view of time that is not conventional in this day and age.

In America this attitude (of seeing successful drug lords as talented entrepreneurs) has a long history, going back to early English colonization efforts. The English "settlers" in what is now Virginia were aspirational freebooters, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Cortez. When that failed hard, they eventually became what we would now call 'drug lords', with tobacco as their product of choice.

Well, Russians are completely unfamiliar with bad weather. The climate in Russia is always balmy, so their not used to dealing with chilly weather.

That is certainly how they are often used in the America and the West today, but always seems a gross exaggeration. For example, regulations against child labor.

I'd guess it's more that he doesn't want to test life support in PROD.

I feel that way myself, but I fear we aren't going to end up with any better choices.

Is it really a boondoggle though? I mean, it keeps the defense industry rolling, gives the military something to fly, politicians and the media something to talk about, and it's more or less capable of bombing third worlders who can't effectively shoot back. Did the people who green lit it, paid for it, and made it honestly expect anything more?

To save mass (and thus cost) they'll probably dehydrate the water before shipping it back to Earth. Their target market won't care.

Environmental familiarity can be a huge thing. It's something we don't really notice with our mix of technology and associated wide-ranging logistics.

I've got a little taste of it myself. I casually hiked and camped in the Northern Rockies for years. I didn't realize how many small bits of specific knowledge I'd picked up until recently moving to the midwest and doing some camping here. Different woods, that burn differerently. Damper conditions in general that make for all kinds of different prep. My knowledge of what is safe to eat (and what is not) went from fairly extensive to almost nothing. Different geography and climate that changes what you want in a campsite and what sort of site you are likely to find. A thousand little things that each make a difference. With only stone age kit and knowledge base, moving out of your "home range" would have doubtless been quite challenging.

It's a problem of scale. Say 0.0001% (number pulled from my rear pocket for illustration purposes) of the population want to engage in 'recreational terrorism' or 'orc-work'. If you have a population in the hundreds of thousands or low millions, there just aren't enough of them to have any direct impact on the big picture. But once you get the population high enough, once the absolute number of evil idiots is high enough to cause real systemic damage, even though they are a tiny percentage of the whole.

Oh, I agree that they cannot now be trusted. I was just trying to indirectly make the point that from our POV SpiderOak acknowledging they made a mistake, or them deliberately covering for a NSL look identical.

If, for the sake of argument, a hostile (to the security of SpiderOak users) government actor was able to arbitrarily manipulate SpiderOak's further statements for purposes of furthering said government agency's goals, what might they have it say and how would those government-sourced statements differ from what we're seeing?

Obviously the thieves weren't after them for any mundane value they possessed. <insert story about occult conspiracy theory here> (Back when I ran tabletop RPGs, this is exactly the sort of thing the PCs would have done.)

I suppose it's too much to hope that BitTorrent fights for the users now?