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planetguy

1,725 karma · joined May 3, 2012

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planetguy··on Hate Mail and the New Religious Wars in Tech
Good article. I'm trying to think of other products which inspire this sort of pointless religious war. Cars are the big one; try reading the comments section on autoblog one of these days.

Typical Ford POS. Glad to see they haven't changed at all...same irrelevant company with the same irrelevant, mediocre products.

Gm is just not good at making decent cars.i cannot think of a single GM car that i would ever consider purchasing..

Given that cars are so expensive and visible I can kinda see how people get their identity so caught up in them (though I strongly suspect that most of the people with the sorts of opinions expressed above are probably too young to drive). Phones, however, are a mystery to me.

planetguy··on US armed drones found infected with computer virus
The US most definitively does not want cyber warfare, which is why a bunch of military types have been going around for years warning about the possibility and the need to harden systems against it. Cyber warfare is bad news for the US because it's one of the areas of warfare in which the US doesn't have an obvious dominance.
planetguy··on Alan Turing's Suicide in Doubt
We're well into speculative territory here. Are we suggesting that the coroner was aware of his homosexuality but not of the fact he was a brilliant mathematician?

I mean, the coroner must at least have known that he had a chemistry lab, working with dangerous chemicals, in the house. That's way more unusual than gaying it up.

planetguy··on Where has all the money in the world gone?
I've been reading large chunks of that and it's both good and bad. The good parts are where he sticks to his core strength of anthropology -- it's filled with fascinating descriptions of how commerce and law worked in various societies, ancient and modern, from the Irish monks who sat down and figured out the precise compensation that you need to pay if one of your bee stings another man [the regular price of the sting minus the cost of the bee] to the spear/cloth bartering festival slash orgies of some Aboriginal tribe. Lots of fascinating stuff there.

He is on much shakier territory when he starts to enter into the economists' domain. He's probably correct when he declares that the inefficient pre-money "barter economy" has never actually existed, but then he breaks his arm patting himself on the back to say he's smarter than all the economists who always use this as an example when explaining why we have money.

When it comes time to actually try to explain debt itself, he's really lost. He starts the book by posing a question: how is it that the language of debt got so wound up in the language of morality; by extension, why do we think it's immoral to not pay our debts? He never seems to come around to the obvious answer: that a debt is a promise, a promise of money later in exchange for money now, and that breaking your promises is seen as immoral because it breaks the reciprocity that underlies almost all human interactions. He seems to have a mental image of "debt" as something that a loan shark puts you in so that he can break your legs afterwards, rather than the vast majority of the world's responsible debt arrangements which wind up beneficial to both parties.

Anyway, I'd say Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" has some interesting bits but a bunch of flaws. And this comment is only this long because I don't have an account on Amazon.

planetguy··on How We Die
Actually I think a 50% drop in accidents is pretty good, especially given how many new dangerous things we've invented since then.

Actually there was an article the other day about accidental death rates: death due to drug overdose has overtaken death due to car accident, due to a dramatic drop in one and rise in the other.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Drugs/drug-deaths-exceed-traffi...

The extent to which drug overdoses can be called "accidental" is, of course, debatable, but I guess they're classified as accidental at least in cases where it's not obviously suicide.

planetguy··on How We Die
Note that Alzheimer's wasn't even "invented" as a diagnosis in 1900, though. I'm guessing that most of the folks dying of Alzheimer's in 1900 wound up getting classified into the "senility" box.
planetguy··on Quadcopter drone group held in London airport on suspicion of terrorism
It was two hours. I've spent pretty much that trying to get through customs at Gatwick without suspicious items in my luggage. At least these guys probably had somewhere to sit while they were waiting.
planetguy··on Code for America Apps for Detroit challenge
> undeveloped real estate is owned by aggressive squatters

Is this some unusual use of the word "squatter" of which I'm not aware, or are you using it wrong? Squatters tend not to be owners.

planetguy··on Code for America Apps for Detroit challenge
How much would it cost to buy up the whole blighted area and declare it a giant national park?
planetguy··on Quadcopter drone group held in London airport on suspicion of terrorism
Honestly, there are people at the border whose entire job is to look for suspicious items. (It's not like the threat of a bomb attack in London is a purely hypothetical one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_... ). If you're gonna carry a suitcase full of weird-looking homemade electronics across the border, then yeah, you're probably gonna wind up answering some questions about 'em. In the end, they were correctly determined to be no threat and free to go with their drones.
planetguy··on Eric Schmidt's thoughts about Pakistan
I'd hoped to see more discussion on the specifics in HN rather than sweeping statements with an undercurrent of racism.

It's a sweeping statement but it clearly has nothing to do with race. For instance, this dude would be happy in Singapore or Thailand but not in the bit of Malaysia that lies between 'em. I doubt it's because of the marginally different racial mixes you're likely to find as you cross the borders.

planetguy··on Eric Schmidt's thoughts about Pakistan
Fifteen years ago I thought of Pakistan as "that other India". Now I think of it as "that other Afghanistan". This doesn't seem like progress.
planetguy··on Why do you think people are poor?
It makes all the difference in the world. If people are poor because that's the best they're genetically equipped to do, then there's not much we can do about it.

Look at pigeons. They eat out of garbage cans. They die within a few years. They get run over by cars rather a lot. But we don't really worry about this, because they're just fucking pigeons.

planetguy··on Why do you think people are poor?
That is indeed true, and I thought about putting in a note about that in my original comment, but... c'mon folks, I don't think there can be any serious doubt about the idea that some people are born stupid, and that stupid people are more likely to be poor. Can there? Is this a concept which people genuinely doubt?
planetguy··on Why do you think people are poor?
This shouldn't be in the least bit controversial; it's well known that a great many human characteristics are extremely heritable, and it would be absolutely shocking if none of these characteristics turned out to be helpful or harmful in becoming rich or poor.

But since you want sources, here we go:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21826061 "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic."

The other half, that intelligence is correlated with income, should be fairly obvious from everyday experience, but nonetheless here's a nice graph

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzQUAtWS_U4/TZYCh68KW8I/AAAAAAAAAd...

Next up I will provide citations for the fact that the sky is blue, since we seem to be on a prove-the-bloody-obvious kick today:

"Human color vision and the unsaturated blue color of the daytime sky", Glenn S. Smith, American Journal of Physics, Volume 73, Issue 7, pp. 590-597 (2005).

planetguy··on Why do you think people are poor?
Surely genetics plays a huge role, one that's ignored in this article.
planetguy··on Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million
Can we get a version of this story with a less editorialistic headline?

This is clearly a "fits the narrative" type headline, hardy individual versus big bad bank; and I don't trust stories when they fit popular narratives.

Tell me the facts of the case, Bloomberg, I'll make up my own mind how I want to feel about it.

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
Perhaps, but he wouldn't have had a chance to protest about the stupid ongoing attempt to incorporate a pointless, one-use extra character into the English language.

The Hawaiian language has never had a written form apart from the English alphabet, so why they think they can go round sticking new characters into it is beyond me. I already know how to pronounce "Hawaii", you don't need a freaking apostrophe in there to remind me.

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
The fact that there isn't enough to go round is why we do have land ownership. See also: Tragedy of the Commons, et bloody cetera.
planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
A 141 square mile golf course? What's it gonna be, par three thousand?
planetguy··on Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum
>Next up: "4chan flame comments are a terrible way to incrementally advance the state-of-the-art in a narrow academic field, presenting theorems, experimental data, and citations to closely-related work."

Now I'm tempted to test that, by submitting my next paper as a 4chan comment and seeing what kind of response it gets.

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
There is no legal process for starting a country, because laws are made by countries, and once you're starting your own there's no legal framework to operate under.

The practical process for starting a country is to control a piece of land militarily, declare yourself independent, and then persuade other countries to recognize your claim. They're incredibly unlikely to do so, unless you can really back that claim up with something. Even countries which are large, have functioning governments and reasonably powerful militaries can't be guaranteed universal acceptance, e.g. Taiwan.

Nobody will sell you land on which to start your own country. Your best bet for land not currently subject to any territorial claims would be Marie Byrd Land:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Byrd_Land

a Mongolia-sized slice of unclaimed land in Antarctica. You'd still have a tough time getting anyone to accept your claim, though. Also, it's cold.

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
Another article says that the asking price had been previously reported as between 0.5 and 0.6 billion.

Let's keep this in perspective. It may have a nice view, but it's only ninety thousand acres. That wouldn't even put him in the top hundred landholders in the US.

Fun fact: Nicole Kidman's family owns twenty-two million acres of land.

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
He just owns some land. The fact that the land happens to be on an island doesn't make it any different to the position of any other landholder.

He doesn't even have his own county -- the land is in Maui County.

planetguy··on We're Not Censoring You, Just Your Computer
Concrete examples here would make this whole debate a lot clearer.

It's important to realize that the choice isn't between "Computers have free speech" vs "The government can censor anything a computer does". The choice is between "existing free-speech precedent applies to computers" vs "computer program output falls into some other legal framework which we might not have figured out yet".

The only legal case which seems to be mentioned in either article is a nine-year-old suit against Google by someone unhappy with Google's ranking of search results. In that case, the court bought Google's argument that "Hey, our ranking can say whatever we like, free speech". But as to how far that argument goes, it hasn't yet been tested.

US free speech law means that it's very hard to be held legally liable for any consequences of your speech. On the other hand, if you build a machine, you can in many circumstances be held liable for what that machine does. Now, is a computer program more like speech, or is it more like a machine?

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
Richard Branson, Elon Musk. Even Larry, Sergey and Eric recently acquired a fighter jet.

Then you've got Silvio Berlusconi, who bought himself the Prime Ministership of Italy and spent the whole time having what he called "Bunga Bunga Parties", which is closer to my fantasy at sixteen than my fantasy at nine, but it'll do.

planetguy··on Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
If that's a legal question then no, no more than I can secede along with my backyard. The fact that your land happens to be surrounded by water doesn't give it any special legal status, the law of the United States does not allow landowners to secede.

If that's a practical question, then all he has to do is to declare independence and then be prepared to win a war against the United States when it chooses to militarily dispute that claim. As Larry Ellison is unlikely to be able to win a war against the United States, I'd say the answer here is also no.

planetguy··on Do computers have a constitutional right to free speech?
>First prove that a computer is capable of 'free speech' and forming opinions

Alright, let's try some plausible examples with present-day technology. Let's suppose I think people who use prostitutes are filthy perverts. I can say "People who use prostitutes are filthy perverts" with no fear. On the other hand, if I accuse a particular individual of being a filthy pervert, I may be liable for slander. Suppose I set up a computer outside a brothel using face-identification technology to determine who is going in and out of the brothel, and then program my computer to automatically publish a list of pronouncements: "Phil is a filthy pervert, James is a filthy pervert", and so on. Are those my slanderous opinions, or those of the computer?

Similarly I can imagine all sorts of fun you could have with a computer programmed to automatically look through all available data for the correlation between race and IQ, identify whatever the lowest-IQ race may be, and then start sending racist letters to the editor of every major newspaper, saying "Man, [RACE P] is so stupid".

A computer may not have opinions, but potentially objectionable speech can be algorithmically generated.

planetguy··on Do computers have a constitutional right to free speech?
Obviously the corporation is responsible for the acts or speeches of its tools. The question is, to what extent does a corporation have a right to free speech?

Is it? Or is the programmer responsible for the speeches of the computer, and hence does the computer's right to free speech extend from the unquestionable free speech rights of its programmer rather than the more questionable free speech rights of the company?

planetguy··on Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad
I have bad news for you: it's made from the corpses of dead cows.
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