Hondor

Is it really law though, or just an option? Don't give your password and don't enter.

My comment was about things staying the way they were, not only immigration. China is unrecognizably different now because of growth. What if you didn't like high rise apartments spoiling your ocean view? Sorry, it's changed. What if you didn't like having no young people working on your farm and looking after you when you're old? Sorry, it's changed. What if you didn't like not knowing your neighbors because there are too many of them? Oh, and people in cities have even largely changed their dialect to be able to communicate with Chinese from other areas. Somebody who prefers to keep their same way of life wouldn't get on well there.

Locals don't have to learn immigrants' languages. They also don't have to integrate with them. But they can. If you value integrating and sharing a language, then you personally should go to the trouble of doing that, not complain that somebody else isn't doing what you want.

Expecting things to stay the way they are isn't compatible with economic growth. If you want a stagnant place, you should find one which has such restrictions written into its laws or bylaws so you can have more confidence that it'll stay how it is. What else don't you want to change? Young people looking at their smartphones all day instead of having conversations with you? No new slang words? Where are the boundaries of what you expect other people are obliged to do for the benefit of your feeling of familiarity?

Is it migrants that refuse to learn the local language, or locals who refuse to learn the migrants' languages? I don't see that either group is in a position to demand what the other group learns or how they conduct their private activities. If you want to be part of their community then learn their language. If you prefer to isolate yourself with your fellow locals, then do that. Both ways are OK and you have nothing to complain about.

The native Maoris were pressured into learning the immigrant's English language 100+ years ago. Perhaps you would be happier if that never happened?

It's ironic that you're in Singapore, an openly multi-lingual country. Which groups are using the "wrong" language there?

Stealing back your car can certainly cause problems if done privately by the owner. But here it's the product itself that already came with a bricking mechanism built in and activated it itself. The buyer trusted the seller not to provide a self-bricking phone, and got ripped off. It's never going to affect an innocent phone. It's also no physical items being taken or damaged. No baby is going to be trapped in it, etc.

Actually, there's a very analogous thing for cars - LoJack. Is that wrong too?

It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?

They company surely did lose something. Customers who wanted to buy their product ended up buying an illegal competitor's product instead. There might even be some customers who go back and buy a genuine phone now that they can't use their fake one.

They're enforcing their copyright. Why not? The police can also confiscate computers with pirated software on them. They even do that sometimes. It doesn't return the money to the IP owners but it's still a way to deter theft.

It sounds like a good idea to me. Even if it doesn't recover their lost sales, it should prevent future black market copies since customers will know to avoid unofficial sellers.

If you bought a car that turned out to be stolen, you might wake up one day to find it's gone because the police recovered it for the owner. It's similar here - buyers looking for a bargain that might be illegal are part of the problem of IP theft. They can seek recourse through the seller they got it from, and if that doesn't work, they shouldn't have trusted a dodgy overseas black market seller with their money.

> ... has access to your browsing history, your search history, your entire internet history ...

That's a bit over the top. They'll only have access to data that you already knew lots of people have access to anyway. Not HTTPS sites where they'll only have the domain name. So they won't have your Google search history but will for Bing which bizarrely defaults to HTTP.

Perhaps if a bike is unused for a long time, or repeatedly gets returned immediately after borrowing it, they assume it's broken and pull it out for servicing. Not having docks, they wouldn't need to put the replacement bikes back at the same location or time and that could be done in cheaper batches.

It does't matter how poor the poorest people are. They'll always be extremely poor. The important change is that their numbers are falling. If your job is to work with the poorest people, you won't see the ones who never became poor in the first place due to global improvements in quality of life.

That's sort of backwards. Over the past 30 years, poverty has fallen massively, democracy has spread to more people, child mortality has fallen, literacy and education have risen [1], and rate of war deaths has fallen [2]. Maybe the direct death-and-suffering problems have now mostly been solved and that causes us to look to more intangible problems like human rights, freedom of speech and inequality. It's a common misconception that the world is getting worse but it's actually getting better.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/

Maybe the great lengths they went to against Manning and Snowden were because they released massively more data than anyone in history? People selling secrets to the soviets were dealt with just as harshly despite releasing far less information.

There's not much to trust anyway. If you're using it for geoblocking, you probably don't care that some company knows you're watching some movie. HTTPS websites are still safe if the app isn't somehow hacking the browser. Non encrypted traffic was never hidden from much anyway. My ISP even injects ads into HTTP websites.

It might not be because they're republicans. It might be because their constituents are the beneficiaries of the local coal industry. The politicians are just doing what their voters want. They're puppets of the people who live there and want to keep their jobs at the expense of everyone else.

It's not forbidden, it just has a ~10% tariff (fine). $10 per MWh compared to the current price of $120 per MWh. If solar or wind ends up actually cheaper than coal, it'll probably be by more than that 10% so it'll still be economical to use them.

Furthermore, the fine doesn't apply to exported electricity, which is most of it: "Wyoming sends two-thirds of the electricity it generates to nearby states" [1]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.cfm?sid=WY

Interestingly, instead of a random password, it was leet-speak for "Ford the epic honky".

This is actually a good example. The password clearly isn't protecting anything. It's a tutorial on how to make a password field! Nobody is going to put a valuable password in there.

Perhaps it's testable the Sherlock Holmes way of eliminating everything else and being stuck with that as the only answer you can think of. Not a very convincing test of course, but better than saying "we can't think of any possible way this might work".

I agree. Furthermore, now that people are accustomed to not dieing all the time, even with no new technology, we would probably tolerate more serious measures to maintain this safety. Even if it came to draconian quarantine and hygene laws, or just wearing a face mask every day.

Remember how Ebola didn't cause an epidemic in any moderately developed country despite being one of the easiest diseases to transmit?

News is made to scare people, so however frightening it sounds, it's probably not going to be that bad. There's probably no value in taking any action besides going to work as usual and providing value to society in the way you're best at.

One possible reason not to worry is antibiotic cycling. Bacteria lose their resistance to individual antibiotics when we stop giving them exposure to them, so the idea is that we could breed out old resistance while breeding in new resistance and always have a drug available that they're defenseless against.

> If, just as a thought experiment, it was possible to treat a disease quickly with a cheap drug or intervention, for example a cheap herbal drug that is available patent-free and for mere cents per liter, there would be no business in it, so no company could viably pursue this.

At that level of cheapness, individual patients can buy it themselves. If it became popular enough, somebody would research it. That's already happened with many Traditional Chinese Medicine herbs. Of course, they turned out to be ineffective but one of them might have worked.

The idea that rich people got rich because they screwed other people over is quite common but also a made up generalization. It's an excuse that people who worry about their own socioeconomic status make to feel better about themselves. "I'm poor but at least I'm not evil like those rich people.". Instead of searching for reasons why rich people are evil, why not just be happy with your own life? You don't need to be rich. Stop worrying about status and get on with whatever you enjoy.

That's what money is for. So you can buy things you want. To do that you also have to give away your money to the person who used to own those things, so they win too. The reason he got so much money is because he gave a lot of other people things that they wanted and they gave him their money. There's nothing wrong with that - unless you think trade is wrong and we should all be self-sufficient hunter gatherers, or that people who work hard to serve others should not be rewarded for it.

Something I learnt from the Martin Shkreli drug price increase story is that if you're going to defend someone who's being abused, first see if they even exist. Even then, see if their culture and laws make this an actual horrible suffering or not. What this isn't is some poor low income native being forced out of his house that he inherited from his family on land that he grew up on.

Imagine back in 2000 if someone told you that in 2017 you would be able to pay 20 pounds for software that lets you upload photos to the internet (additional fees may apply) - and not only that, you can also crop and resize them and set a timer for when to do the upload. You'd think they'd never used a computer before!

How did this end up being a valuable thing that doesn't already exist on every phone and computer everywhere?

It's hard to believe that if it was really going to take over the world, it would have mattered at all how it was launched, what the initial design of it looked like, who got a meeting the "king of Singapore", etc. Those sound like elements of a fad, not a lasting and significant part of technology.

Democratic governments exist to serve the people who vote for them. I'd say they have succeeded in increasing property values for property owners who voted for them. Every single house in SF is owned by someone, and that someone benefits from this situation persisting, so there are quite a lot of winners.

The half life of U-235 is hundreds of millions of years, and U-238 even longer. So it's not decaying fast enough to be dangerous.

How far could it float away? Any chance of crashing into South America?

> hopefully that is spent in the US, instead of hoarded for a princely return to India.

Did you notice the anti-equality implications of what you said there? It's roughly equivalent to:

"I hope that when poor people get rich, they eventually give their money back to the rightfully rich people and don't keep it for themselves or use it to support their poor family or to develop their poor economy."

Do you apply that idea generally to any poor people or just Indians?

More trivia - LOTR SGI machines went to the railway afterwards and were used by the engineers for making CAD models of wagons and things.