OvidNaso

There is a reason those who work in addiction medicine (and addicts themselves) call the 3-10 days of physical withdrawal the easy part. We can probably achieve 100% success with it. A few days of pain and discomfort and you're done with the physical part...forever. Real addiction, neurological addiction, is a totally different story. It's totally understandable that many people have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around this, because addiction is a bizarre brain disorder...like Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran case study bizarre. All your intuitive notions on the brain are forced to go out the window if you honestly investigate it acedemically.

Please though, blow your mind by reading about it...not experiencing it.

That user interface on the "gonkai" really looks like Rockbox(http://www.rockbox.org/).

"I think it is safe to say that most people, given the opportunity, will opt for this "lazy" style of life."

This seems to be the one "fact" that makes all the difference in the entire debate. My question is, how come all of history shows man's drive to explore, build, conquer, discover, organize, etc...yet you conclude the "safe" bet is the oppisite?

"Most Americans support either Republicans or Democrats."

Here are disapproval ratings[1]: Republicans: 62%. Democrats: 50%

1. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-views-of-obama-congres...

"There is a limit to the amount of computation that can be done by a given amount of matter that only new physics could change. Given that limit, at best you would need every particle in our universe just to simulate an identical one. It's more likely that the best possible simulation would have significantly reduced fidelity and/or size with respect to its host universe, thus the inevitability component of the simulation argument falls apart."

Or, potentially, one would only need to simulate the minds of any observesers in the simulation, not every particle in the simulated universe.

Your second question answers the rest. There is no way to accurately give numerical values in real world applications, so 40 and 70 are chossen as mental model approximations. The fallacy of drawing the line is making no choice or distinction because there is no method to determine the correct one.

That's a fairly large ethical gap between those two Gray Hat definitions.

As a, fairly well read, outsider, Black Hat, to me, always implied actualy damage, financial or otherwise.

Gray Hats, on the other hand, still might break in and exploit vulnerabilities, but made certain not to cause any damage.

I suppose this partitioned people based on primary motivation. Black Hat's were in it for personal gain or evil, White Hat's for protection, and Gray Hat's for intellectual pursuit. Much easier to categorize and rationalize the romanticism associated with the culture when your "team" is the Gray Hat's.

The zoom is much much faster than Google maps. Very nice.

"9 women can't make a baby in 9 months, for example."

Very true. However, 9 women and 1 man are more likely to give you a baby in 9 months that 1 women and 1 man.

The one that said all are incorrect.

The Free Software/Culture stuff is also about DRY, in a sense. Say I need a picture of a stream for a project. I get my camera and drive a couple hours to the woods. Batch process the set and finally decide on one picture to use. At the end of this, fairly expensive process, I actually have 10-15 pretty good, usable pictures that I no longer am going to use (at least not in the near future). The (modern) traditional ideology is to lock those away just in case I may need a picture like that in the future.

Makeing them free to others means they don't have to repeat the same process for basically the exact same thing. Now multiply this by the 100's or thousand's of other assets that could be used in a small project.

It's one of the few major societal problems that can completely fund itself to the full extent current science permits. Unfortunately, many states, such as Colorado, are already blowing it by using the tax revenue from marijuana sales as supplementary income. Looking at state lotteries shows us that this path leads straight to hell as government becomes reliable and dependent on this money so much so that they actively push, and twist to appear noble, clearly destructive activites.

Washington, on the other hand, appears to at least be funneling revenue soley into the health department.

Actually there is currently a strong push in many places for involuntary hospitalization. We're slipping back to a grim time of incarceration for the mentally ill by family members who disapprove of their lifestyle. While modern facilities are not the horror they once were, make no mistake that they are not places of adequate treatment. This is going to keep people from seeking treatment in the first place knowing that once you get that label, you can be taken by force for no reason, predicated on the idea that the mentally ill have a slightly higher chance of commiting a mass shooting. Pre-crime. It is so stupid and backwards and scary. Not so easy as "Please leave me alone."

http://online.wsj.com/articles/los-angeles-county-approves-i...

I'm sorry, but why would you compare revenue to minor league baseball? Collegiate basketball and football make significatly more money than collegiate or minor league baseball. America has clearly decided that they wI'ill spend just as much money on second tier leagues for these sports and any valuation would need to be based on this or be disingenuous.

This seems to be pretty close to what Popcorn Time does, and apparently does it very well. Their site says they already select individual files, so I imagine a 'sanctioned' Netflix style offering would be technically trivial to implement. This whole thing is just a reflection of the open internet/what went wrong debacle where all of this money that could be going to the content producers is instead spent on several layers of network, hardware and technical service providers that a small group from Buenos Aries has demonstrated is unnecessary if we could only, actually use, the network. But we can't.

"The nasty politics of social groups has rarely ever crept into my life sense."

Except for the rest of the world that doesn't live up to your, let's be honest, pretty high, political standers required to enter your social group.

"i was able to be friends with people that saw the world in interesting ways, and cared about things that made sense."

If someone wants to be friends with you, knew this is what you valued, and yet didn't 'qualify'; their ability to enter your social group becomes seriously vague and very hard to navigate.

"It gets better when you're able to choose your friends, your you're able to make friends on your own terms, not just pick from those around you."

Ever ponder the possibility that there were, or are, some people out there that just can't figure out your social politics and are maybe confused and lonely wondering what it is about them that you don't like?

Apparently, everything Aaron downloaded is available at theinfo.org. Nobody has really done anything (apparent) with it. The site is down now, so maybe that is an indication this doc has inspired something in someone.

Some of these suggestions appear not to coincide with the creator's 'slow web' philosophy, however.

http://theslowweb.com/

There are lots of laws that are not considered immoral on their own, but are enforced due to practical constraints on determining risk. Driving a car without a license is not an immoral act if someone posses the training and skill and carefully applies these. However, determining the individual case risk becomes practically impossible and thus we make driving without a license illegal. The same goes for construction permits, business and contractual law, etc.

Similarly, things with very high risk of long term negative effects to the society or the individual are made illegal due to the risk and not due to the immorality of the event itself, such as our drug laws.

It also appears to rely on your phone. It's certainly needs to be carried with an emergency card, but two cards as opposed to eight doesn't still preserves it's utility.

It may be different where you live, but at least in Southern California English, 'utilize' is quite commonly used and would sound conversational in tone to many an ear.

There are quite a few resources on Pinker's website about the work. The FAQ is probably a good place to start: http://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-abo...

Here is a direct answer to the question. There's a ton more info on the topic and a huge portion of his book is dedicated to it:

*Wasn’t the 20th century the most violent in history?

Probably not; see chapter 5, especially pp. 189–200. Historical data from past centuries are far less complete, but the existing estimates of death tolls, when calculated as a proportion of the world’s population at the time, show at least nine atrocities before the 20th century (that we know of) which may have been worse than World War II. They arose from collapsing empires, horse tribe invasions, the slave trade, and the annihilation of native peoples, with wars of religion close behind. World War I doesn’t even make the top ten.

Also, a century comprises a hundred years, not just fifty, and the second half of the 20th century was host to a Long Peace (chapter 5) and a New Peace (chapter 6) with unusually low rates of death in warfare.

There are two arguments that are presented in both of these comments. The first is that the historic and pre-historic data on violence is incomplete. For this, there is no doubt and Pinker spends a lot of time talking about this. This is true for a vast majority of topics and its unfortunate that there is just a whole host of things we will never be sure about due to the non-existence of preserved evidence.

The second takes issue with his use of per-capita comparisons and suggests that an absolute rate may be a better measure. This is extremely silly and Pinker spends very little time discussing it because it really is absurd to entertain. For one, it implies the only true solution to any violence is massive population control. And two, it negates any comparison to cultural or behavioral change by simply pointing to the population size of the planet. Think of the statement, "Modern medicine has not advanced from the hunter gather days because more people under the age of 40 die every year than did 5000 years ago."

Edit: The second comment brings up a third point that the lower rate of violence does not imply we are better off, and is therefore questioning what we should define as violence. Pinker again readily addresses this issue by explicitly defining the type of violence he is analyzing, physical, and repeatedly stating that these issues are outside the scope of his book.

Which is exactly what happens when poverty and disease go down and education up.

They're entire job is making a decision about an applicant where only a percentage is based on objective data. They read your personal statement and make a host of judgements, so I don't see how this would be any different.

But your analysis specifically excluded the source of all of this violence, the wholesale procurement of the drugs by the end user dealers. None of that is different with the Silk Road.

Violence amongst end user drug dealers is very rare and confined to specific, very poor, areas. Wholesale is the only place where you start to see significant amounts of cash, and hence most of the problems, and that has zero differences between offline and on. There is no 'political narcoterrorism' between the guys selling 8ths of coke in the neighborhood. You're also mischaracterizing the drug trade with regards to consumer habits. Drug users communicate about dealers and products the same way people communicate about every other local business. The internet has greatly expanded and enhanced this ability, but prior to the Internet, local businesses, just like local drug dealers, operated by word of mouth and competed in many facets of service. We know this as drug quality has gone up and up over the years.

Remember, the vast majority of offline drug deals do not consist of driving to the hood to pick up something from a gangster. I think this mis-perception clouds a lot of the analysis of operations like the Silk Road.

*- There are about 1 million households in LA (3M+ population but 3 people per household in LA County)[1]

What am I not seeing? The census link states population: 9,962,789, Housing units: 3,449,273.

Steam is now overloaded with "early access" game sales.

Did you read the questions that he answered n/a to? They specifically didn't apply to his situation, not incorporated, sole founder, never participated in another accelerator, and no one is only partially commited. What exactly would you want him to write in these sections?