polymatter

The time to stop a totalitarian police state is _before_ it becomes a totalitarian police state. It gets a lot harder to stop afterwards.

I just wanted to say I agree entirely with this. It gives me great confidence that this book was well thought out when the chapter by chapter snippets are so clear and concise. I like the drawings too that gives my imagination something to grab onto and breaks it up a little.

I suspect that she hasn't given it much thought at all and just lumped all internet media together. I suspect if you told her ISIS was spreading their messages by using paper leaflets she would brand the post office as a 'safe haven' for terrorists too.

The infamous crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich patent is the other silly one that springs to mind:

(http://www.google.com/patents/US6004596)

I don't think the swing patent was granted, but this one certainly was. And was only challenged in court when the multimillion dollar company thought it could stop other companies making crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In 2005.

paywalled WSJ article which I can't read (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB111298192348602162)

same for me

For your convenience, the section parent refers to (on page 22 of the aforementioned pdf) reads as follows:

---

Name of protagonist: “Maria”

Wakes up... grabs the remote and flips on alternative rock radio. She gets up, goes to the kitchen, grabs a bottle of water and goes to the third bedroom that doubles as the workout room. She runs on the treadmill for 30 minutes.

Spends the day... researching a big liability case for the law firm where she works as a paralegal. She calls her husband and reminds him that it’s his parents’ anniversary and that it is a good idea to at least offer to take them out to dinner that week or cook a dinner for them in their gourmet kitchen.

Talks about weekend plans to... go camping to get away from it all. The weather is supposed to be perfect for it, finally cooling down after that heat wave.

Has a meeting with... the group of attorneys that is working on the case to discuss the fact that they were not going to have any case based on precedents of two similar cases.

Spends the evening... driving to the athletic club and playing tennis with her group of friends. Meets her husband for a late dinner at Jay’s Pizza. She has soup and salad with a Corona Light beer. Later they spend time online shopping for a new TV, hopefully one of those nice flat screens with HDTV and a Blu-ray player.

Goes to bed at... 11:30 p.m. after a half hour of pilates, watching... Scrubs reruns

---

Consider just saying you are not open to discuss the idea, or that you hold it self-evidently true that things are better now.

The way you phrase it you are preemptively insulting people who hold different views (or more likely different ideas of 'worse'). To be clear, suggesting someone "isn't thinking" or doesn't have a brain, is still an insult. This can lower the whole tone of the conversation.

In real life, I have to do something similar to certain people on religious topics, people who I can't call mindless idiots to their faces without immediate repercussions. I find its a great way of letting people know politely, that I will not discus the topic.

> An actual designer will save you lots of time.

I think he covers this when he states immediately after your quote, "I bring in the big guns when needed as freelancers". He just advocates employing a designer for specific tasks that he can't do himself.

You can be liable for triple damages if the court decides you knew about the patent and infringed anyway. Normal damages if you did not. I believe independent invention is meant to be so rare as to be suspicious (despite many documented cases where this happened).

The (supposed) purpose is to give an incentive to inventors to freely broadcasting their inventions, by giving them a monopoly on it so they can recoup their investment. Without that incentive, inventors would keep their inventions trade secrets.

Unsolicited advice: Use the phrase "heavily influenced" rather than "controlled" and "religious extremists" rather than "Zionists and Masonics". They make you sound less like a conspiracy theorist but mean the same thing.

I'm 30. I have either been in full time education or full time job since I graduated. I am still trying to work out what I want to do. I'm led to believe this is normal.

That was a good story and quite interesting. But it didn't really give much perspective to the question "Can the Bloomberg Terminal be 'Toppled'?". Do you have any insight on that?

the software engineer is reviled for completely separate reasons outside the scope of this metaphor.

I can not agree more with this! Incredibly frustrating.

Kickstarter-like funding? Public money? Donations? Grants?

I don't believe that the law should be trying to protect the current business model of horse breeders/candlestick makers/cinema complexes simply because technology has made possible a cheaper and better equivalent.

1954 was 60 years ago and a completely different time when the government was fearful of nationalist counter-revolutionary attacks and suspicious of foreigners who for nearly a century had been taking turns on plundering China's riches. China has changed a lot since then and I'm not sure you can take their actions in 1954 as much evidence as what they would do today.

maybe this is part of the test?

/jk

I read Derpderpderp's comment to be referring to the existence of plans, not the specifics. The existence of the Normandy invasion plan was hardly a secret. It was unavoidable that the Germans would be able to tell a major offensive was being prepared. And one very clear candidate was for the Allies to take the more direct route and hop across the channel. The exact specifics (where paratroopers were being deployed and when, which beeches were to be hit etc) are important secrets and my reading of his comment is that they should remain secrets. But the actual existence of the plan was obvious and should not be secret.

The militarily valuable secret is that the Normandy plan was that that was the one the Allies were counting on. There were other plans, for example the plans for the invasion of Sicily surreptitiously delivered into German hands by Operation Mincemeat. Or plan to attack from Norway using Edinburgh as a staging post as part of Operation Fortitude was another candidate. But the existence of the plan is the

You do lose some military information. If the enemy knows you have the capability to track someones movements based on his phone number, they are likely to take mitigating measures. But without revealing this capability, its impossible to have a democratic debate on the appropriate safeguards necessary.

To expand on this, Haskell is excellent to make your own parser. Take special note of say Chapter 16 Parsec of Real World Haskell[1]. This is the sort of application where you would choose Haskell over Perl/Python/Ruby.

Of course parsing is something thats very important if you are making your own DSL. And this is another application where Haskell really shines. This is why the guys who do programming language research produce papers with code in Haskell. Its orders of magnitude easier to make your toy language for exploring evaluation order in Haskell than it is to do the same in Java.

Its easier to learn a language if you're building something you're interested in though. Personally, I learnt a lot of Haskell implementing a web app with Yesod[2].

Good luck.

[1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/using-parsec.html [2] http://www.yesodweb.com/

And if she is wrong?

Maybe he is the wrong guy. How is he going to prove he didn't invent Bitcoin? Especially if he has done classified work. He clearly doesn't want attention. He couldn't have made that more clear. And he still has a right to a private life. I don't agree with your suggestion that creators don't have rights.

I am not suggesting to stop journalists investigating who people are. But this is clearly someone who does not want attention. This could easily turn into a 4chan or reddit lynch mob. You only need a few Mtgox victims who want to enact revenge. Or criminals hoping of forcing him to pay hundreds of millions in blackmail. To a possibly innocent person.

To be clear, this story could have been done without printing his whole address, car number plate, unblurred pictures of himself and his family etc.

If I understand your comment, you believe you are ok with sounds posting that list of sensitive private information, but only if he "put the work in" to find it. I guess thats the only reason you don't post all of that information publically yourself. Your information is clearly interesting to the public, look a member of the public specifically asked for it.

How about if I compensate you, is that a reasonable substitute? How much would you charge in exchange for publishing every item on that list?

I suspect you will find that there is some information that you'd rather not divulge on the open internet, where there is no shortage of crazies. Some of that info would be useful for identity fraud as well.

And if she is wrong?

Maybe he doesn't have access to his million dollar fortune. Maybe he lost the keys. Maybe someone else used his name and he is the Satoshi but not the creator. He is certainly not living as someone with hundreds of millions in the bank. In what way did he lose any right to be protected from public scrutiny (assuming anyone does have that right - I'm not sure they do)?

Well, I can't see how its against HN rules to post it. Her email is lmcgrathgoodman (at) gmail (dot) com. Thats the email she posts on the contact section of her own website (http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/).

To be clear, I am not encouraging anyone send her abusive emails, or anything that might be illegal. I am simply posting her contact details in the context of people wanting to tell her what they felt about this article. She is an investigative journalist who is no stranger to courting trouble. She managed to get herself thrown out of the UK apparently for asking too many questions.

I very much doubt that will do anything though. If you really felt that this article needed to be pulled/modified, you're probably better off contacting someone from Newsweek. http://mediakit.newsweekdailybeast.com/contact.html

But this seems to be their lead story. And they are getting all this extra publicity and page views because of it. So unless Satoshi or his family brings a court case I don't see why they would.

Perhaps these sites should never have been setup. If they were valuable, someone would have noticed they had been attacked and would do something about it.

I agree. To clarify, its not that the reader gets confused between the gas constant and the set of real numbers. The issue is never actually explicitly stating "R represents the set of real numbers" or "n is a natural number".

At uni it once took me hours to work out that "." was used for function application in one particular paper. "." was also used for multiplication and (in some example code) had the usual object oriented meaning in the same paper. It was incredibly frustrating.

I'm UKian and I'm astonished. Having worked in the UK Civil Service, sounds to me the person making this decision didn't know what it meant and that it was an actual security issue. Probably they thought it was sort of idly interesting, like speculating how many office computers are still beige. Not that you were listing sites with trusted nhs.uk domains that appear to be easy to hack.

Only if you convince a jury of that. Anime girls can also typically display very child-like behaviour (to a European eye). I'm thinking of things like princess dresses, overly excited about simple things, still into teddy bears etc. And you can't very well tell a fictional characters age, especially if it is in a fictional universe.

It only needs to be an anime in which characters might have sex or be doing something sexual explicit enough for a jury to decide they are "indecent". Also it doesn't need to be pictographic or 'on screen'. Fantasy stories are also covered. So its not like its safe to read manga or where the anime isn't explicitly a porn either. Plus, in case that wasn't draconian enough, possession is criminal, regardless of intent.

Plus these are huge stakes here. The mere accusation can be life destroying. Taking it to jury and winning would still significantly affect your personal and professional relationships. Its not something you really want to risk. Especially not if you want to ever have children or work anywhere near them. Its not something you can really gamble on convincing a jury and everyone who ever hears that you took this to a jury trial whether you thought the character in the anime was 16 or 23.

Plus I believe the same thing applies to rape fantasy as well. So if a 23 year old fictional anime character was raped in a completely fictional anime, that could land you prosecuted as well. For possession. In theory. Of course they will probably use their discretion not to prosecute you.

You might get away with it if the manga was in the original japanese. I doubt they bother enforcing this draconian law to the extent of employing translators.

I think it is easier to make private information public, than it is to make public information private.

We can mitigate that sort of failure with things like medical bracelets (http://www.mediband.co.uk/). Paramedics check for medical bracelet, necklace and wallet information cards. One of the first words any medical staff will ask is about allergies.

I recognize that that is hardly ideal and indeed some lives are undoubtedly lost because of it. But I think going public with medical records is too far.

"a) it is an essential part of islam, to hunt down and execute people who criticize islam ... Christianity doesn't do so"

There are Five Pillars to Islam[1]. None of which explicitly call for genocide. The early history of Islam was violent. But so too was the early history of Christianity. The past was extraordinarily violent. That there are some people who profess to be advancing Islam by killing in no way makes it an essential part of Islam. In the same way, the people who profess to be advancing Christianity and choose to do so by killing too[2] hardly makes it an essential part of Christianity. Islam has Sharia law. Christianity has Leviticus. Christians are still debating how much crazy stuff from Leviticus they can foist into a modern society and I have no doubt Muslims try to do the same with Sharia.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Pillars_of_Islam [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism

TFA pointed to some reasons:

"Random scenario: a burglary gang gains access to the database and can thereby identify patients aged over 80 living alone in up-market neighbourhoods who have recently been admitted to hospital with conditions suggesting that they will be vulnerable but not supported by full-time carers. A religious organization targets men of a certain age who are HIV positive. Or women below a certain age who are single and pregnant. Or an insurance company notes that a patient made a mistake in their declaration of a pre-existing condition, and thereby invalidates their claim. An identity thief uses the postcode and date of birth, in conjunction with a copy of the public electoral register, to pick victims. The possibilities are endless"

I can add a few more. A wife beater looks up his wife's records to see if she has gone into hospital. A rape victim doesn't want her work colleagues to idly google her medical records and find out. A hopeful job candidate doesn't want her interviewer to know about her problems with self-harm 15 years ago.

Perhaps none of those situations are relevant to you. But they apply to some people and that's why we keep all records private.