FBT

These things work out. Used car salesmen may be shady, sure, but somehow they are still in business. People tread carefully when dealing with them, but used car sales do go through in the end. A combination of regulation and reputation systems makes it all work out.

And I'd say that that is only a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. While SR was up, it function on purely on reputation, and it worked. No regulation needed.

All the more so, real business with actual real world presence (who are thus subject to regulation) will survive, but even the online ones that are not accountable to any government... well, it is a lot harder, but we have seen successful examples in the past.

>"Okay," said Harry, "let me put it this way. Do you want to die? Because if so, there's this Muggle thing called a suicide prevention hotline -"

I just want to weigh in that I am really glad that none of those falsely convicted by this faked evidence were sentenced to death. At least those falsely imprisoned by the "evidence" this scum planted can be set free, even though they lost years of their lives.

And that is the argument of why there should not be a death penalty, even for people who you are really sure that they really deserve it. It's a form of humility: To admit that there can be wrongs in the legal system, and so to be very sure not to do anything completely irreversible.

That's why people argue that the death penalty is unacceptable in any case whatsoever: the system has to be able to admit that sometimes it is wrong.

How does one serve multiple jail terms concurrently? The whole idea makes no sense.

>> "We built those roads, we gave you education". Yes, except you didn't.

>I'm not sure which country you're from, but I'm guessing there are schools and roads funded by the state.

And the state is funded by... you and me. I paid for that road, that school, and so did you. Not one dollar was generated by the government. Hey, I'm all for paying for roads and schools and stuff, and am, in fact, willing to pay for it with my own money. I am willing to pay taxes, so that there will be roads to drive on and schools to learn in. So I pay for it (not that I have much choice.) But it is our money that pays for the roads and schools, not "the government's".

You raise good points. In fact, that is the very problem of so-called "Friendly" AI. Note the capital F. It's a confusing term, I know, but the basic idea is an AI that "does what we want", in the most general sense. The idea behind FAi is the exact idea you present here.

The point is that it is a bad idea to just throw together an AI and hope that it is friendly (lower case f), but rather the big important problem of our time is to generate a mathematical model of Friendliness, so that we can explicitly define to the AI how we don't want all the bad things you mentioned or any other besides.

[Edit] Here are some relevant links:

http://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=14047

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/08/a-nic...

That's how these things are calculated. It's nonsense, but it's the best we can do, or something. It's the same with GDP figures. But no one seems to be able to find better metrics to use...

To be pedantic, MtGox doesn't actually stand for "`Magic the Gathering` online exchange" like mherdeg was suggesting, but rather for "`Magic the Gathering online` exchange". A subtle difference,perhaps, but MtGox was never intended for trading cards like these (Alpha Black Lotuses and suchlike). Rather, it was intended for trading MTGO cards.

In other words, not an online exchange for Magic: The Gathering cards, but rather an exchange for Magic: The Gathering Online cards.

One of the major problems with law enforcement today is that so long as they carefully skirt the edges of what is legally defined as "entrapment", they can bait people into crimes, and arrest them for it even if otherwise they would not have committed any crime at all.

This really isn't good, and that's what the anti-entrapment statutes are for, but law enforcement finds its way around them... That's one of the best ways to catch "criminals", and catching criminals is their job, right?

"Obstruction of justice". Yeah...

So, I don't get it. Doesn't Wikipedia have a system of redirects? Just set it up that going to either the "Chelsea Manning" page or the "Bradley Manning" gets you to her page. There, is everybody is happy? Can someone explain to me why this was not the solution chosen, or if it was, what the fuss is all about?

For all that the US government has done some really nasty stuff, I don't believe they are really evil people. They are doing what they think is best for their country, based on their ideas of what is best. No one is rubbing their hands together and cackling over the evil laws that they past.

Given this, congress has passed some pretty nasty stuff. But they were doing it for all the best reasons. They are honorable people, who likely wouldn't fold to blackmail, if they thought that they were being blackmailed into doing something bad for the US. I respect them that much, at least.

randrange is the fixed randint, which works just as you'd expect. It's far preferable to randint, for the aforementioned reason, and ever since I started using it all those annoying off by one errors that randint kept giving me vanished.

The one thing I still use randint for is rolling dice. randint(1,6) is the equivalent of a six-sided die, and is that bit more readable as such than the equivalent using randrange.

But for any other purpose, randrange beats randint hands down. Off-by-one errors, be gone!

The alternative to US control that we want of course isn't UN control. I would even go as far as to say that this article is attacking a strawman. What we object to is the "control" part of "the US controls the internet", not the "US" part.

If China, or Russia, or Australia, or France, or whatever other country was doing what the US is doing now, we'd object just as much. Or if the UN was in control. That's not the point. What we want when we object to US control isn't foreign control, it's no control.

Indeed. A very(unintentionally) misleading title. Perhaps unfortunately, the policy here is to keep the original title of an article... That policy has many upsides, but one of its biggest downsides is that there is no discretion allowed in fixing possibly confusing titles like this one.

I strongly oppose this view. Understanding how refraction works in no way diminishes the beauty of a rainbow. I would say it even enhances it's glory. Similarly, understanding the underpinnings of fiction does not ruin it at all, and if anything, enhances it.

This is just my personal view, of course, and to each his own. But I personally can say that having seen the inner clockwork of fiction, I would not go back and have it any other way. (And many other agree with me: There are many internet communities devoted to understanding and explaining literature's inner workings, the most well known of which is tvtropes. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in plumbing the full depth of literature's workings.)

The difference now, perhaps, is that there is no longer a frontier left. 300 years ago, the people who wanted change and freedom from oppressive governments could sail away over the horizon and set up their own county in a new land. (That's not to deny there were limits to that: You needed to afford a ship, and to gather a large enough mass of people to actually build a successful settlement in the new world, and not to mention the ethical implications of the effects on the natives. All these were real issues, but despite them many people made their way to a new life in the new world, with perhaps a bit more "liberty and justice for all" than there was before.)

I would like to contribute the point to back this up that the question isn't really e.g. "is it OK to wiretap murderers?" Actually, it's "is it OK to wiretap suspected murderers?" And the second one is a vastly greater burden. It means we need to trust the guys who decide who to suspect. This is far from a solved problem, of course, as most people agree that some justice system is necessary, and it's a hard line to draw, but the point is, one must be extremely wary of granting broad powers over arbitrary people without requiring an amount of evidence proportionate to the damage exercising those powers will do to them.

In short, if you just say "who cares about suspected murders, probably most of them are murderers", you are leaving a lot of discretion over your life and the life of those in society around you into the hands of those whose power it is to enforce the law. And while they might be the best people for the job, ultimately they are just people too.

That is a good question. I will first repeat the advice often given to startup founders: Get it working first, find a was to monetize it second.

Beyond that, I have had a few thoughts. Yes, I actually agree that this would be a harder endeavour to monetize than most startups, but if it really came to it, you could make a profit. I did not really go deep into these considerations, as (like I said) I don't actually have the resources at the moment to make it a reality, but my main idea was to integrate it somehow with the bitchain. AFter that, there are several ways you can profit. Say, have each post cost a fraction of a bitcoin to propagate it along. It would encourage others to catch the posts and pass them around in the same way bitcoin miners getting bitcoins for mining encourages bitcoin mining. And then I could charge a commision on that.

That is one example, of course I would have to way up all the pros and cons of each approach, and of course there is the drawback of any monetization system necessarily introducing some point of centralization, even in a otherwise entirely decentralised system.

Yep. I fully expect forums like that to become a dominant mode of communication in the near and medium-term future. All it really needs is for someone to make for it a slick and easy to use interface. If I was in a position at the moment to found a startup, this would absolutely be the field I would found it in.

Distributed services are the future, it seems. I predict (rather boldly, so I may be wrong) that the next wave in computer technology will be the move from centralized servers to a distributed framework. I foresee the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook being a company that brings this idea to reality. (Not specifically the Silk Road bit, but the general paradigm of distributed services.)

While you make a solid point, I will point out that the newest, hottest technology can make a difference, as in this very case. Silk Road was something new, and different from anything one could do with a telegraph or telephone. For the first time in history, (a part of) cyberspace was a effectivly a independent country, effectivly a country of it's own, not bound by any lawmakers whatsoever. It was true anarchy, the kind libertarians dream of, and it worked. The medium of the internet allowed it to run in that fashion, and still be a civil place. For the first time ever, Hobbes was wrong. In the state of nature as it is on the internet life is not nasty, brutish, and short. No one died in horrible fighting and murder on Silk Road, unlike in unregulated areas in real life. (Such as real-world drug dealers.)

At the moment it is weakened and vulnerable compared to how it was a few years ago. It has not been destroyed or dismantled by Snowden's revelations, far from it, but it is a definite factor the NSA cannot ignore. Five years ago, no one would even think of shutting the NSA down over their abominable deeds, because their abominable deeds were not widely known.

At the moment, there are many people shouting for them to be shut down. Will it happen? Probably not. But at the moment, that is something for the NSA to worry about and to try to do damage control over. In that sense, they are certainly in a quite worse position.