scotchmi_st

> Does it matter more that there's no duplicate particles (ie. no changes of a copy being made)?

Yes, it does matter. No copy being introduced means it's just a translation of displacement. That's an entirely different operation.

Quantum tunnelling is fun to think about, but at the scale of atoms it starts to lose any relevance, and at the scale of neurons has no meaning at all.

We're chasing our tails here. The definition of the copy function requires both an original and a copy. There is //always// an original and a copy. Thus, exact clones and copies made in teleport machines are always copies, separate from the original. There can be no copy function without an original and a copy. You can think of as many elaborate cloning thought experiments as you like; if they can be reduced to a copy function then the answer is simple.

I know I'm not the first person in this thread to declare the answer simple, but the author appears to be reaching the obvious if somewhat occluded correct conclusion.

Or you could, you know, use Celsius like the rest of the world... ;)

"Those very politicians, advertisers, media moguls, corporates and journalists who thought the internet a passing fad have moved in and grabbed the land. They have all the reach, scope, power and ‘social bandwidth’ there is. Everyone else is squeezed out — given little hutches, plastic megaphones and a pretence of autonomy and connectivity. No wonder so many have become so rude, resentful, threatening and unkind.

The radical alternative now must be to jack out of the matrix, to go off the grid."

This is awfully regressive, but not only that; it's also foolish. If his point is that by going 'Off The Grid' you can escape these people, he's out of luck- these people are AFK as well as online. Try walking through a major city without seeing a single advert.

If you want to get away from all the shit on the internet, the only way is forwards, not backwards.

> With that info, a terrorist can buy a SIM card for my name, use it to proxy-blow up a goddamn bomb aaaaand I'm in jail.

Or, you know, dead. It's a bit optimistic in the current climate to assume they'd arrest you peacefully.

I think you're misreading what he says. "...replacing it with Rust /or pretty much anything else/" (emphasis own). The point is we should be replacing C with /pretty much anything else/. Rust looks like the most obvious (but not necessary correct) candidate.

Also performance is not such a big deal as dictate security considerations. One's fancy medical web app is worthless if it leaves the potential for theft of medical data.

Surely it's `import twentyfour`?

2 x 3 = 6 => 2 x 3 x 4 = 24

;)

> ...now that the low hanging fruit has long gone.

That begs the question of what we determine to be low-hanging fruit. An engineer in 2030 may look back on the time now and see the 2016 advancements as 'low-hanging fruit' relative to their time. Unless you think there's not much of a future in chip fabrication (in which case, you may want to tell Intel).

As I see it, Moore's Law is a rough metric coined by someone almost half a century ago. Just because the metric is no longer relevant, that doesn't mean the increase in complexity is slowing.

> If you drive the engine with parameters tuned for low emissions, you'll get less efficiency etc.

Can you explain that further? Given a specific power output, lower emission levels would to me indicate that the engine is doing more with a smaller amount of fuel, indicating better efficiency.

There are plenty of confounding factors with your own "easy test", some of which you admit yourself- the stress of the life in general. Who's to say that living a neolithic existence isn't stressful? Indeed, it probably is far more stressful. This has nothing to do with electric lights and computers. This is just life in general. At least you can take a break every so often.

> Code is written with two kinds of readers in mind: the computer and other humans. Prose is written just for humans.

I don't think the fact that code is also meant to be read by a computer is relevant in this context. But let's take another example if that doesn't work for you: the novel Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. It's written in a phonetic Edinburgh style. By 'normal' english standards, it doesn't make any sense. If someone was to write in the same style way without any knowledge of English grammar and spelling, you would just assume they couldn't spell. But that's why, in the context of a novel written by a talented author, it's actually a great bit of prose. I could give thousands of other examples.

I would say that unless you know the rules (imaginary or real), it's not possible to break them in a way that is interesting. A programming example: PEP 8 makes no difference to whether or not your Python code will run. You can quite happily code all day without knowing anything about it. There are also plenty of times when you shouldn't follow it religiously. But without reading it and taking on board what it means, people will find reading your code more tiresome, and you won't know when to break the rules in a way that's helpful or interesting for the reader. The same, I believe, applies to English grammar.

Then again, no-one ever said that you could learn a trade at 20, and that trade would still be relevant when you're 40. If capitalism is something you agree with, then you must also accept the transitory nature of your work. Although personally I do agree we should try to make it easier for people in that position.

No, you seem to be talking about whether certain behaviour involving cars should be allowed. That's not the issue in the article, or being discussed here. The issue is whether it's a good idea to design computers to allow certain actions in the first place. Since fundamentally we can't design computers to detect 'bad' search queries, any attempt would likely be like other forms of DRM: futile against the sort of people you want to stop, and debilitating for everyone else.

Cory Doctorow goes on to discuss that as well in the next paragraph after the one I initially posted, when talking about banning hands-free kits in cars:

"We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special-purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. There's a heuristic for this: special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility."

Computers and software such as Google and MegaUpload are not special-purpose enough that you can make legislation about their design without "doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility".

He had me until the bit comparing illegal movie downloads to terrorism and drugs, and how MegaUpload and Google are 'enablers' by allowing users to upload/search for copyright-infringing content. It's quite clear that he doesn't understand the nature of computers. Cory Doctorow has a great rebuttal of that argument in his talk on the coming war on general computationhttp://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html-

"The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be “No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems."

Computers have no notion of what is 'good' content and what is 'bad' content, and we aren't yet able to teach them accurately the difference (even humans aren't able to tell 100% of the time).

That broadly speaking comes under point 1, and in my opinion, that's very unlikely, given that at the point Snowden stopped contracting for the NSA, PGP was still considered uncrackable by them.

I can see 3 possible scenarios here.

1. Russia/China have got hold of the files, and know how to decrypt PGP (Very unlikely).

2. A journalist with access to the files and the encryption keys has left them lying around, or was cooerced into decrypting them. (Unlikely but possible).

3. Intelligence services are lying, possibly for political gain ahead of new legislation (specifically in the UK), and/or have fallen for a bluff by China and Russia. (Most likely).

It's the same old problem of trying to build a peer-to-peer social network. How do you ensure that large files are distributed correctly and quickly with minimal security implications in an environment where nodes are constantly joining and leaving the network? Perhaps it's possible, but if it were an easy way of doing it, there would be more of that sort of thing around.

Sure (although I'm not a musician).

But it's possible to get better at something with practice and to think or say otherwise is toxic. If you think it's possible for someone to rethink their attitude then you already agree with me.

> Some people are tone-deaf too, and will never sing nor play an instrument.

That's quite a telling statement. Actually, there are very, very few people who are _truly_ tone deaf. Since intonation is used extensively in nearly all human languages, anyone who truly is 'tone deaf' will have quite an issue in communication. Nearly all the time (and tbh I think it probably is just all the time), they actually just have an 'untrained ear'. Like most people in that kind of position, part of the reason they are in it may well be because they were told when they were young that they weren't any good, and decided to put their efforts elsewhere. And like all people in that position, you can get better. Will they be the next Miles Davis? Probably not. Will they be able to play in a band with their mates? Yes.

A century or two ago, around the time literacy started to become a thing most people could attain, people must have had a similar attitude to yours with learning to read. Some people can read, others will just never learn. Their brains aren't designed for it.

This is how stigmas form. Coding is not that much different to other human endeavours.

All I'm saying is, if you plan on becoming a teacher ever (in the widest possible sense), you're really going to have to re-think your attitude there.

I've seen things similar to this before, but they tended to be unreliable. Has anyone actually used this yet? Does it work reliably?

Also, how does the authentication work exactly? What's to stop someone from blasting out the same signal that your phone emits, preventing it from sleeping as you walk away?

> "The astonishing thing is, you'd think it would bump into a million other waves that are coming at it from every direction; that it would pass through other storms, spreading, bumping, traveling, that all this travel would sap its momentum. But, as Walter Munk would discover, that's not what happens."

Kinda weird that the article spends so long explaining high-school physics, and in such astonished terms. Zomg! Waves pass through each other! The Superposition principle! If they think that's cool, they should see some of the stuff you can do with light and sound.

Assuming you're referring to Karl Marx, much of what he said of capitalism is very much true- it's a game of winners and losers. What he didn't give is what many historians would refer to as a 'viable alternative'.

With due respect for you as someone trying to make money as a musician, your problem is that no-one knows your music, not that people are 'stealing' it.

Basic Job will likely leave you little time to train in an area where you could be more productive for society. Basic Pay is designed to provide you the time to do that. Sure there has to be a bit of trust that you're going to not just sit on your arse, but very few people actually want to do that (despite what a lot of people think), and it's psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life.

A lot of the comments here also ignore a lot of the factors that Basic Pay would provide which aren't directly measurable- increases to areas such as science and the arts which, while not tied to anything concrete like GDP or a country's economy, are indisputedly important to society.

Addiction is quite a vague word, and gets mistreated. It isn't a good word when we're considering whether continue with a particular behaviour. Instead, we should just be looking at whether something has a negative impact on the individual. Smoking is generally thought to have a overall negative impact on a person, and those around them, mostly as it significantly increases their chance of death. To some degree it's possible that someone who spends their whole day on Facebook wouldn't have time for more important activities, and would see some bad outcomes there. But those people aside, using facebook has a lot of very beneficial social effects, such as allowing friends who don't see each other very often to stay in contact. I think the effects of using Facebook are a net positive.

I'm not sure I understand: surely we can just say that one kilo is a certain number of carbon 12 atoms, and have done? Would seem sensible to me.

While I agree that is a tad fishy, your stance also appears fairly cynical. Maybe he just changed his mind. I don't think we give our politicians enough slack for them to get better, which in turn means that they learn to bloody-mindedly hold onto their stupid opinions, against the facts and reality.

To the author of the article I say, "can't we have better legislation /and/ tech hacks?"

I don't think anyone would disagree with the idea that we can't solve the surveillance problems just through technology alone (apart from maybe some of the more naive HN members). But since we are partly in this mess because of technology, I don't think it's too radical to suggest that we can in part help get ourselves out of it using technology as well. To suggest that the tech community are a bunch of introverts, unconcerned with "the plight of the majority" sounds kinda dull to me, and certainly unoriginal.