bobbydavid

Someone did a calculation and decided that the business cost of supporting IE was worth the additional customers. It's not about balls, it's about cost benefit analysis. Us developers just hate IE because it's so different than all the other browsers.

also it sucks.

It's because the distribution of wealth affects what the economy produces. If money is more evenly distributed, you will see more economy cars, microwaves, middle income housing construction, etc. If only a few people are really wealthy, you will see luxury yachts, mansions, etc. So scarcity conditions are different -- there really are more toasters to go around because the people had the money to buy them.

But his claim, that it is disputable, is quite weak and therefore trvially proves itself. By disputing it, he proves it can be disputed. You are seeking to resolve said dispute, which is also important but not exactly the same thing.

Not to get too pedantic, but by inviting him to provide concrete evidence, are you not asking him to dispute it and thus proving his point?

Well, oversight might lead to a restriction of unchecked governmental power, which would reduce their ability to combat terrorism.

Incidentally, so is salt.

Lying may be too strong of a word. The users have pseudonyms; there was no reddit real names policy. It seems reasonable for multiple pseudonyms to be controlled by a single person.

Users may have been surprised to find out just how few other people actually existed. But I see this as legit. It would be like a big corporation hiring "Esprit Legal Firm" for their defense, winning in court, and hen finding out that the company was run by a single lawyer. Obviously businesses can't lie, but you're not required to list your own flaws either.

but they don't mention horses either. the method of travel is irrelevant.

sorry... high speed rail to nowhere?

Have you seen that d3 visualization of the US federal budget? It's pretty interesting. Social security, Defense, and Medicare make up the lion's share of spending. you probably don't use these (except defense, arguably indirectly, but I suspect your politics would disagree with the budget size)

I agree but in the same way that the original elite Facebook paved the way for today's Facebook behemoth, I imagine a successful elite e-stitution (c) will legitimize the concept, which will pave the way for something with more universal appeal.

my wild theory: what if the site in the study was HN!?

disclaimer: I have no idea and tldr

looks like that page was deleted

This has been discussed before, in the context of network security. You can read about efficacy/bandwidth constraints, but basically to provide any strong security you need to spend an overwhelming amount of bandwidth on noise. You must always operate at peak bandwidth to everyone. It becomes prohibitively slow and expensive.

Human trafficking. Yes, this actually happens, both around the world and in America.

The argument I've heard is that a frictionless child pornography market effects an increased financial incentive to traffic children.

access.

any citizen can go out and listen to public conversations, but we are not all invited to put our e-stethoscopes up to the internet backbone.

if you take as given that the NSA has prevented 300 9/11 attacks from occurring, you may feel it is justified.

surely you don't believe the premise, but as a thought experiment pretend it were true. would the NSA actions be justified?

oh god, how many billions did this program cost? I wonder what the dollar figure on cost per capture is, even assuming all 300 were legitimate. of course in reality they could just as easily have been thought crimes. no way to know.

Side note: does this mean xkcd's "Time" is un-internet?

I've noticed this too, to some extent. and I don't think its purely because of the President's party. TDS writers and Jon used to work hard to hold politicians feet to the fire no matter their party, and in the past few years I've seen them become increasingly outright liberal.

Sure, that change happened around the same time as Obama, but I argue that the Daily Show of old would have been less coddling to the current administration.

The extreme demographic subset you described doesn't even include the audience at HN. Surely you realize that the issue of internet privacy is talked about by more people.

And why mustn't acabal be a "born-here American" to suggest that Americans have never lived under a totalitarian state? That's an off topic remark designed to call acabal's expertise into question as a means of discrediting them without directly addressing the points they bring up.

I think acabal brings up a valid point. It's hard to whip people into action when they're not yet having direct negative consequences, even if we can clearly see the writing on the wall. People are resistant to change.

I don't know the details but its not necessarily gerrymandering. if urban areas are 100% democrat while rural areas are 60% republican, you'd see this sort of elections naturally, without any foul play. that's just a natural outcomes of having districts.

one thing about the western world, and America especially: we have no cultural memory of what it feels like to have another culture impose their value system upon you.

it's therefore easy to see other cultural views as falling into these categories: odd/silly, needlessly restrictive (possibly also immoral), or downright immoral [1].

that's a mental trap, though, much like believing yourself to live at the center of the universe.

once you remove the "superior culture" argument, it becomes quite hard to formulating a reason to touch this island.

for instance: we have medicine! but we only value it because we fear death, etc.

[1] examples come to mind: some cultures believe using birth control is like murder (silly). some cultures believe a woman should not exposition her shoulders in public (no rights). some cultures believe infanticide is acceptable, others find it natural for men to have romantic relationships with boys (immoral). these are all examples from a western perspective, of course.

for all we know, they view infant mortality as a perfectly acceptable form of birth control. this would be an example of culture shock.

on an only somewhat related note, I'm much more troubled by the fact that reporting these numbers is currently illegal, than by the fact it's occurring, and I'm surprised more people don't express a similar view.

that's because i can imagine situations (e.g., FBI identify a child trafficker) where i am okay with his privacy being compromised. but I can't for the life of me come up with a scenario where it benefits society to hide these statistics. for crying out loud, tell us how much data you're looking at!

something to consider, though: your job may not be the best opportunity for this hypothetical candidate we're musing about. for pure programming skill, there is no well-defined "value" for the business, which means you simply want to hire the best programmer for the least cost. in many markets today this is about $200k for an entry level programmer (employer costs). why pay more than that?

the point of marketing mumbo-jumbo is that it frames the value of the individual. if a candidate is capable of making you $10 million extra dollars, why not pay them $1m? you'd be a fool not to!

to play devil's advocate: consider the extreme absurdity of einstein's theory of relativity, the theory that time may speed up or slow down depending on your velocity.

Can someone summarize the video? I am curious to learn more but I don't have 45 minutes to spend on this... Thanks!

Practically speaking, context matters in privacy. For instance, if a person invades my privacy to learn my sexual orientation, I would feel violated. But if that person was my boss, I would feel much more violated.

For an American like myself, domestic spying is scary for the same reason. The US government is my local government. They run our children's schools. They make me send in reams of silly tax documents. They make me wait in line at the DMV. They patrol the streets of my neighborhood with guns. When I call 911 (the emergency number), it's the US government who answers. In short, the US government -- my government -- is in a great position to abuse the knowledge gained from spying. It's this immediacy that heightens fear of domestic spying.

Another thing to note is that there is a subtle but important distinction for Americans between the CIA and the FBI. The connotative equivalent of the FBI is the police and the connotative equivalent of the CIA is the army. Thus, watching the CIA spy on Americans feels ominous and sinister. It's the spying equivalent of martial law.

What Americans don't realize, I think, is that for foreigners it is an issue of respect. That is, the underlying context of domestic spying outrage is that US citizens were _not_ outraged by foreign spying; that it's perfectly acceptable to spy on the foreigners as long as we protect our own privacy.

In the end, privacy is about perception. To those who, like me, feel their privacy is being violated, please continue to make your feelings heard, both inside and outside the US. The more voices (especially tenacious ones) the better.

Hopefully the data was encrypted while you were moving, since they're listening on the wires too.