OvidNaso

It's at least a little funny that the explanation for reasoning from first principles is an analogy to physics.

Your no different than the people this normally works well for. Being in the "zone" for most people is a very pleasurable activity. If one could sit down or start running and immediately be there, procrastination would be a much smaller problem. It is precisely this unproductive, introductory stage that this method is compelling you to complete in order to get past. By forcing 15 or however many minutes a day you are hoping that more times than not this period will transition into one of productivity in which you don't need to time or force yourself to do more. Some days this won't happen and you can quit after 15 minutes. But for some it equate to more long term productivity sessions per week than strictly scheduling each long term session.

I'm not familiar with the sport at all, but Red Bull's other sponsorship ventures would lead me to think that the money they would spend on a team is not tied to the direct profitability of it. It would help letting smaller teams have a bit more cash, but it wouldn't prevent the top teams from continuing to spend them out of competition. We actually have seen this as well in the Premier League. To really get balanced competition you need a host of financial regulations, not just caps and limited revenue sharing, with a monopoly on your sports leauge, ala the NFL.

The idea that nerds and engineers have not gotten involved in the drug trade is really wrong. Even if you have no insider knowledge, there is overwhelming evidence of a highly sophisticated, safe, abundant and financially diverse industry. Shoot, all we need to look at is purity and availability rates of narcotics to conclude that there must be more production and distribution than the handful of super massive manufacturing facilities that we associate with major cartels. The murder rate in totality is not high enough to associate a necessary massive physical risk with involvement in the drug trade. Even if SR was 10 times as large as they were, they would still be a small fraction of the overall drug marketplace.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the drug trade is inherently tied to the physical manufacturing and trading of product. DPR built something which he could almost completely trade his physical risk, but none of the actual vendors were able to do so. Everyone of them, barring some tiny personal labs, were involved in the exact same physical drug trade on a procurement basis that every other drug merchent is involved in.

All of your examples have to do with minor minutia of the day to day life of a musician, but you give no examples of how the actual landscape of music has changed. And I find it baffling if the point is that the focus and work required by an artist today is more different compared to one 10 years ago than it was for that artist compared to one 50 years ago. Television, music videos, global marketing, magazine specialization. These things didn't alter a musicians life more than the current decline in retail sales?

Please expand and explain, because Albums, 3 minute songs, radio play with commercial breaks and touring are all very very similar to 10 years ago from a consumer perspective despite the proliferation of other choices and the changing landscape.

How about the legion of animation programming that's commissioned every year?

Cocaine is a different story as it is illegal in and of itself. As far as I know there is no momentum to outlaw Bitcoin itself. Other seized forms of property are routinely auctioned off at public auctions which is presumably a possibly avenue for Bitcoins as well.

Wasn't Yahoo! Japan also a large ISP or major ISP partner? Concerning a canceled move many years ago, my limited searching found Yahoo branded internet was very prevalent and a darn good deal.

Despite the fact that raids were continuously happening, local governments were enacting bans (meaning immediate financial ruin) and certain dispensary owners were facing decades in prison...I'm not sure what the legality of the situation has to do with either of our points. The size and scope of alternatives is directly related to the success of the primary institution. The users will certainly not be happy about the situation, but barring major developments in the coming weeks, it is clear that operators and users have decided the risks are acceptable comparable to the service. Pointing to the landscape of alternative services at the present moment does not indicate how users will migrate and how site owners will propagate in the face of opportunity. The California industry is comparable as operators, while facing smaller penal punishment, faced the same financial risk and zero anonymity.

Nobody in California was happy when their favorite dispensery got raided 8 years ago and there weren't many alternatives. But there is 3 per block in Los Angeles these days.

Now you're thinking about the nominal definition of "better", but I think you underestimate the scope of and importance people give to aesthetics.

But none of that really matters because in the next ontological step we question the definition of definitions. [1] And if you look into it, the smartest people in history haven't really gotten any closer to putting debates like these to rest.

[1]http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/definitions/

Well, tin-foil-hattery traditionally refers not only to the paranoia associated with the probability of being watched but also with the malicious or manipulative intent of those people or groups. Schneier needs to protect himself from the possibility of either his data being used in a manner to prosecute or punish or action taken to stifle work he has so far kept private. It's more than reasonable for him to give credence to the threat of a self-interested government agency acting maliciously toward him.

However, Schneier was a target well before this due to the nature of his work. It is exactly the scope of the recent revelations that throws the conventional thinking on where the fuzzy line between an appropriate risk assessment based on position of interest and the general population. When the potential dragnet is widespread and permanent I no longer have to only consider how important I am now (which I'm not), but I also have to consider if I will ever be take on a role that IS important not just now, but then.

This adds a whole new dimension to a wet willy.

EVERTHING changing in London sure looks similar to not very much changing. I was in Bangkok 2 years ago and I must have had blinders on since EVERYTHING changed. I think the only thing that hasn't changed is bullshit hyperbole.

It's also about the humanization of others. Many who feel this come to realize that they have built up fantasy Übermensch and that the people who still qualify as geniuses and greats are fallible and carry with them many of the foibles that come with the human condition.

>the same process also makes it possible to create drugs, games, and services that are ever more addictive than before.

Not necessarily. There very well may be a limit to the propensity of the brain toward addiction, unless we delve into deep sci-fi territory of complete reward structure take over. Opiates have passed their 200th birthday and we certainly can't conclusively say that we have found anything more addictive than heroin (150 years old).

Cool implementation. Really going to be cool seeing what people experiment with when eye-tracking starts gaining traction.

>Why? Because I wanted to show the world that #GooglePlusIsNotAGhostTown

I'm more likely to be skeptical seeing as how there is a "Join Google+" banner following me across the entire page.

>Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

So you repeatably referring to those you disagree with as the thought police is different in what ways?

>The ability to make a book in service of own's argument is evidence of a great deal many things: at the very least, dedication and conviction to one's argument.

Or confidence in one's ability to fool the market.

Absolutely. Certainly not common, but I've seen a few in the desert.

Portland treats the homeless well and its definitely not due to fabulous wealth.

The homeless are not who we should focus on when talking about wealth inequality. Even though it makes a good visual, there are too many other factors at play such as mental illness.

It's the working poor and the rich that are the true divide.

Do you claim that 90% of proposals are not worthy of funding? Because it it was not an extremely high number, we could significantly increase spending and still only fund the best.

You stated: " It can be debated if grant reviewers are actually doing a good job (versus being a whitewashed version of cronyism)"

If they are already evaluating research and researchers the way the rest of profession does, I don't see how cutting funds would help. It would not drive better proposal writing. And if the cronies are already getting their money anyway, the added batch might have a higher percent of high quality.

I understand the desire to punish the undeserving of your profession, but when weighed against the advancement of science (even if artificially inefficient)...I don't care. And cutting funding won't make a significant dent in the problems you describe.

Here you go. http://www.sibelius.com

That's a pretty sweet app. Congrats!

Reviews are not solely for the developer. In fact, they are there mainly for the users. They absolutely should be there for a public beta to let other users know the status of the application.

What should change is the silly star rating system and they should not be calculated or even used in the review. There is way too much dependence on a 'good score' for the developer and hiding beneficial information is not a solution.

Analogy is probably not the right word for what you are describing. Analogy deals with subjects in separate domains. It's the application of information or a relationship from one domain to an unrelated one. Bitcoins applied the relationships that encrypted information share to monetary transactions. A perfect example of analogous thinking.

>You do realize that there are massive amounts of people who are part of our world that are living in worse conditions than this tribe is? How about we focus on them first before we decide that our way of life is so superior just because a minority of us have regular access to modern medicine...

Why should we focus on them? Your logic is that modern medicine is not an improvement or a factor in relieving suffering, but is only an illusion of our egotistical viewpoint. Why would it help those who are 'part of our world' that have insufficient access?

Almost no society needs any of that for the continued survival of the society. Modern hunter and gatherer tribes have been "fine" by this measure with murder rates as high as 50%, but that is a pretty ridiculous standard.

In most places in the US, a DUI is a felony if someone is injured.