brmj

From what we've seen in the movies, the entire planet seems to have landing pads and such throughout the upper levels. If they've got a sizable fraction of the planet's surface area usable as a spaceport, distributed throughout essentially the entire planet, any logistical problems would not come from getting things between the spaceports and where they are needed.

This strikes me as extraordinarily foolish. It's not that hard to have a hard shutdown mode in which most of those parasitic loads are gone and trigger it if the battery charge drops bellow a certain level. We've had that technology in laptops for quite a while. This is not a hard problem to solve, and it is obvious enough that it should have occurred to someone. Also, monitoring the current it is getting for charging and displaying a warning if it is insufficient and perhaps a projected charging time would be a good feature.

I suspect that any truly adequate automated essay grader would imply strong AI or at the very least some optimization process good enough that it might as well be strong AI.

I doubt it. Very little annoys users more than taking away something they are used to and trying to sell it back to them.

No, armed cops were called over a prank call. That's different.

Can we please get a link to the actual thread, rather than an article in the Daily Fail reporting on it without even linking to it?

Is that a real photo? The atmosphere is thicker than I'd expect and something about it looks subtly wrong.

Yeah, but there are plenty of cases where that isn't feasible. Imagine one of these being used to collect passwords, credit card numbers and so on at a coffee shop's wifi network, for example. Also, people are stupid and leave networks unsecured or use WEP when they really ought not to.

Perhaps it's because most people aren't purely self interested.

Here's a heuristic: Questions of the form "I'm 17. Should I drop school for X?" should be answered in the negative for essentially all plausible values of X.

On the surface, this appears profoundly stupid. We don't need a unified interdisciplinary theory of life, beyond the one inherent in a proper understanding of physics since life exists within and is made of physics. We need postulate nothing new to explain this. Instead, he attempts to solve the problem by essentially replacing known, fairly well understood science with an all-encompassing phlogiston theory of the universe that can be fit to anything because it is complex, non-mathematical and semi-informally specified. I encourage any one with an afternoon to spare to try and read the paper, perhaps with frequent trips to lesswrong when something seems confusing or otherwise suspect. I don't have the time to read 100 pages of this. I've skimmed parts of it, but it all looks very crankish.

respect_for_case--;

There's been a class war here for a long time. The difference is that it isn't one-sided any more.

I see nothing wrong with this. If desktop 3D printing, 3D scanners, amateur friendly CAD software and so on get good enough that this can "destroy capitalism" (at least as it pertains to certain kinds of manufactured goods), then I find it hard to comprehend how anyone would find preventing that morally justifiable. Why artificially limit how awesome the world is, just to preserve one more avenue by which the haves can further enrich themselves at the expense of the have-nots?

At the risk of being blatantly trollish, let me state for the benefit of the commenters apparently still caught up in it that Ayn Rand's works are to Philosophy what Twilight is to literature.

I take issue with the viewpoint that behavior is best understood by treating all involved minds as if they were perfect Bayesian reasoners motivated only by increasing the frequency of their alleles in the gene pool. Evolution doesn't work like that. Evolved minds are just a pile of kludges that were good enough.

Instead of the way you've been thinking about this, suppose instead that empathy is a straightforward consequence of mirror neurons, which essentially try to model the mental state of others based on their behavior. That might be most useful when dealing with the others in the ancestral social group, but it might also be useful to figure out that that bear over there is probably just protecting her cub, while the tiger last week was probably just hungry, for example. Of course, it would have to be possible to override empathy fairly easily, even in the context of one's own social group, but in the absence of any particular reason to do so empathy might in large part guide one's behavior. Stick people in an environment where food comes from the store, nothing wants to kill and eat you and the animals you encounter most are domesticated or mostly acclimated to humans and one can see how empathy might be applied to all kinds of things it wouldn't be under other circumstances.

This is just a half-baked hypothesis by an amateur, but you get the idea. Brains end up just being good enough, not optimal. If anything, it's a wonder that ours aren't even worse than they are at general purpose computation.

I reject as false the idea that copyright is desirable.

Assuming that it is desirable, I reject as false the idea that copyright infringement on the internet is a special problem in need of an individual solution.

Assuming that copyright infringement on the internet is a special problem in need of an individual solution, I reject as false the idea that the DMCA is insufficient.

From where I'm standing, this looks like the entertainment industry trying to get congress to prop up their obsolete business model, not a flawed attempt at solving a legitimate problem.

Wait, when did DVI become obsolete?

I'm of the opinion that asking that question is almost akin to asking what technological solution should be used to give Russian organized crime your credit card numbers, if malware with a keylogger in it is bad. I don't think the problem SOPA purports to address is a legitimate problem, and to the extent that it might be, plausible solutions to it that don't involve setting more reasonable priorities would be bigger problems.

This may inspire massive overreaction, not just /b/tards calling their congresspeople. Back when AT&T blocked access to 4chan for a few hours due to a DDoS attack, some of them assumed it was censorship and started crafting plans to retaliate with fiber seeking backhoes.

This is stupid. High quality, memorable passwords are easy once you throw away the conventional wisdom that they ought to look like 10 characters of line noise and move to a non-obvious phrase. Also, I suspect technology of this sort would be problematic if the user was distracted, for example.

As far as I can tell K&R is still the best. Its reputation is entirely deserved.

In other news, drywall isn't particularly nutritious, water is wet and ferrets engage in comical antics.

Well, in all fairness the claim that we can't have either would also be consistent with his statement, sort of.

"tormenting"? I suspect auto-correct had something to do with this.

Here's a thought I've had in the past after encountering a document of this type: Stealth in space is trivial is what you are trying to keep hidden doesn't need to accelerate, support human life or do anything much that generates significant heat, especially if it can stay far away from what it is hiding from. Space is big and hard to hide things in, but it is full of all kinds of smallish debris in the vicinity of a solar system. If you have something of about the right size, orbit, albedo, radar reflectivity and temperature, it ought to be hard to distinguish it from a stray bit of rock or ice too small for anyone to have paid attention to it in the past.

Bearing this in mind, suppose that you built a small, camouflaged satellite which would just sit there at ambient temperature until it received instructions, upon which it would point itself at a given patch of sky, do the finest bits of the aiming using its own passive sensors and then fire a nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser at whatever has the misfortune to be there. With something like this, one could probably swat any reasonable craft out of the sky before it had time to respond. You could perhaps also use such things offensively by putting them on orbits that will take them within their effective range of whatever you want them to shoot, though they would stand out a bit more that way.

The only real countermeasure to these I can think of would be to move your spacecraft rapidly back and forth at all times, which is probably infeasible given the amount of reaction mass it would take.

I'm not sure what the implications of all of this are, but I suspect they would be interesting.

Not really. At this point unions don't have enough money or membership to do much more than try to maintain their own existence.

Presumably the plan is to keep breading them in captivity and releasing them, such that those genes are constantly being reintroduced.

I'm actually pretty excited about this. This will make my life less miserable any time I am forced to solve certain types of problems in Java.

X should be exempted from the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA for all values of X.

He consistently states that he views this as a moral imperative. He's not exactly telling everyone that they have to, but he is saying it is fundamentally morally wrong not to.