turbojerry

I enjoyed these books by Charles Stross, Accelerando, Halting State and the follow up, but not sequel, Rule 34, and of course The Rapture of the Nerds, co-written with Cory Doctorow. Also I've enjoyed his non cyberpunkish books especially The Laundry Files series. I also liked William Hertlings Singularity series, Avogadro Corp, A.I. Apocalypse and The Last Firewall, all about how AGI could accidentally arise.

Iran's Supreme Leader: "Using Nuclear Weapons is Un-Islamic" -

http://www.dw.de/irans-supreme-leader-using-nuclear-weapons-...

'Mr Bush expresses anger that US intelligence agencies played a role in removing the option of military action against Iran over its nuclear programme.

He describes the "eye-popping declaration" in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judging with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11722375

"To Arendt’s mind, Eichmann willingly did his part to organize the Holocaust — and an instrumental part it was — out of neither anti-semitism nor pure malice, but out of a non-ideological, entirely more prosaic combination of careerism and obedience."

http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/hannah_arendts_original_a...

And the original book,"Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" in PDF -

http://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/arendt_ei...

For those that may not get the joke the 555 is a timer chip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC

This reminds me of ELOP from Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling, except rather than being a single system we have a bunch of competing bots.

Gross inequality is not a feature of capitalism per se, it is the feature of our current implementation, specifically the current banking system. This is due to a number of factors, the main ones being bankers being the first in line to obtain newly created credit, central banks central planning of interest rates, bank fixing of market rates like LIBOR, massive fraud and government handouts to the banks. All of the above can be fixed without having to tax those that create real wealth in the economy, however that isn't going to happen as the banks have far too much influence in politics and even if they didn't changing the situation without collapsing the current system seems impossible at this stage.

This is already happening in Ukraine with the far-right having a lot of power now-

http://www.channel4.com/news/svoboda-ministers-ukraine-new-g...

In many of these cases politicians are engaging in unlawful activities that a non-politician would be prosecuted for. If we had a way to challenge these unlawful activities in court that might help. Also if convictions result then all the costs would be paid by the convicted and the state, that way a lawyer could make a good living by putting politicians who are guilty in the dock and at the same time cleaning up the government.

I really enjoyed Halting State, and Accelerando, and also the MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood as well as Philip K. Dicks works, Valis in particular.

Try Tsung for stress testing, it can use multiple IPs and therefore you can open up as many connections as you like -

http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

This is actually the opposite of the current circumstances.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

Benito Mussolini

So the merger of the State with investment banks, oil companies and others in the 1% that fund the rise to power of politicians is a corporatist state. Now while the politicians praise those that fund them to power, they wage wars on "the other" in this case Muslims overseas, which while helping oil companies, investment banks etc also gives them a boogie man to scare the public into submission and help consolidate their power to do whatever illegal activities they want, such as spying on everyone or kidnapping now renamed "rendition" etc. The fact that this article is so easily dismissed shows how bad things have gotten and how unlikely it is to end well for any of us.

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate is where the Iran information originated, nothing has changed in the subsequent years.

'Mr Bush expresses anger that US intelligence agencies played a role in removing the option of military action against Iran over its nuclear programme.

He describes the "eye-popping declaration" in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judging with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11722375

Comparing the factual analysis to the propaganda whether on Iraq WMD before the invasion or Irans nuclear programme now is certainly an interesting exercise.

My point was that there are things that are not worth arguing against as there is a prima facie against them. So those arguing for those positions are either ignorant of the prima facie case or are trying to deceive, sometimes themselves as well as you and me. If you want a more current example take Irans nuclear program, I have people try to tell me that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon, I used to point out that all 17 US intelligence agencies have said this is false, I have since stopped bothering and just avoid those people now.

I'll start with the articles bullet points -

1. We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right.

All humans are fallible, including "experts", such as Albert Einstein, who famously rejected Quantum Mechanics.

2. But an expert is far more likely to be right than you are. On a question of factual interpretation or evaluation, it shouldn’t engender insecurity or anxiety to think that an expert’s view is likely to be better-informed than yours. (Because, likely, it is.)

There are "experts" in things that have no basis in anything other than the expressions of other people which may have no or very limited evidence to support them, priests, Marxist historians, Freudian psychoanalysts etc. Is their "expertise" of any actual value to the rest of humanity? What about "experts" in subjects that we as a species do not have a good understanding of? Does the conflating of those subjects with those that we have much better understanding of, for example conflating public policy with engineering disciplines, help or hinder this discussion?

3. Experts come in many flavors. Education enables it, but practitioners in a field acquire expertise through experience; usually the combination of the two is the mark of a true expert in a field. But if you have neither education nor experience, you might want to consider exactly what it is you’re bringing to the argument.

If the "field" is nothing more than some ideology, not backed by evidence, then any "education" in it seems to be open to challenge.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

4. In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something.

Do I need to know the 12 Astrological Houses to reject astrology? Do I need to know the King James Bible to reject Christianity? Do I need to know Mein Kampf to reject Nazism? Do I need to know the Talmud to reject Zionism?

5. And yes, your political opinions have value. Of course they do: you’re a member of a democracy and what you want is as important as what any other voter wants. As a layman, however, your political analysis, has far less value, and probably isn’t — indeed, almost certainly isn’t — as good as you think it is.

So if someone wanted to bring about the destruction of humanity, that would be of equal value to someone who does not? Perhaps an Orwell quote would help here-

"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Okay, so how about trying to find out what is actually happening? I would posit the following-

1. The Internet has allowed the dissemination of both fact and fiction, evidence and opinion.

2. Critical thinking, the use of evidence and reasoning seems to be lacking from most educational systems. A population that can be swayed with propaganda rather than evidence and logic is more pliable to the will of the political class and therefore this state of affairs seems unlikely to change.

3. The rise of "Truthiness" as a consequence of 2.

4. The speed of scientific and technological progress is now so great that expertise in these fields has become much narrower and the ability to communicate this effectively to the non-experts in a timely fashion has gone down.

5. The lack of progress in understanding of the complex social, political and economic systems we inhabit while simultaneously an increase in that complexity.

6. The increasing perception of many people that the current political, economic and social systems are overly beneficial to an increasingly small number of people and those, like the author of this piece are no more than courtiers to the beneficiaries. As this idea becomes more prevalent, the courtiers must defend themselves and so they try to convince the rest of us that they are experts who have the same precise answers that engineers could give.

7. There is no ideological solution to 6.

8. People in forums like HN who do have the ability to think critically increasingly critique articles like this and hopefully spur some critical thinking in others, this is then twisted by some, like the author into an attack on all "experts".

I have been using Goldring NS1000 headphones for the last 3 years and would highly recommend them.

Technical Illusions might be interested-

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...

I would posit that the reason there is no debate in Parliament is that MPs are afraid of what GCHQ / NSA / etc. might leak about them. What I find more worrying is that there is absolutely no debate about a) the fact British intelligence services have been compromised in the past and are still most likely compromised, imagine what a Kim Philby could do with all this data and b) the possibility of inserting false information into these data stores thus making even completely innocent people vulnerable to being blackmailed.

It sounds excellent, like a cross between PKD and Charles Stross, please let us know when it's published.

The query language for RDF is called SPARQL[1] pronounced "sparkle" which might cause some confusion in conversation.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

US bombed al-Jazeera in Baghdad

http://rense.com/general36/camm.htm

US bombed al-Jazeera in Kabul

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/17/warinafghanista...

Market ticker forums-

http://tickerforum.org/

Zerohedge-

http://zerohedge.com

That would be... people, e.g. the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina memes, you could I suppose do a RL version, GGG t-shirts with individual QR codes for up voting people.

For those who don't know about Daisyworld-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gVERGAieng

Every security / defence researcher and consultant in the country will now be labeled a terrorist, making their work harder and the country less secure.

Libel and blackmail from an MP, why am I not surprised. Does anyone know if Kickstarter allows funding of legal actions? I would be willing to donate some money into putting her in the dock for this.

I have a trick too, ask about a worst case scenario, in the case of the NSA spying it might go as follows-

Given that throughout history every intelligence organization has been penetrated by those hostile to it, having a system like PRISM means that the hostile agencies would be able to do more damage to the USA that they would otherwise. A hypothetical case would be a hostile agency gaining information to blackmail a guard at a nuclear weapons storage facility, allowing the USA to be decimated from the inside with its own nuclear weapons stockpile.

Then allow them to contemplate it, be completely silent. There are really only two responses to this, either it starts to dawn on them that what they are doing could harm many innocent people or they will BS, not want to talk about "hypotheticals" and generally evade the possibility just laid out. The former means they are human, the second, probably a sociopath.

Zero Hedge is the HN of finance, from high level macro to Nanex graphs of HFT, also see the Zero Hedge Reads on the left hand side for other sites -

http://www.zerohedge.com/

Market Ticker, Karl also has a show on Blog Talk Radio -

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/

Sadly RTs excellent Capital Account is no more but they have a different, though not quite as good show called Prime Interest-

https://www.youtube.com/user/theprimeinterest

This is what I term "Professional Paranoia" and as long as you can be unemotional about it, it can be an exceptionally useful mindset. I have internalized the Moscow Rules[1] and I constantly remind myself of what Bruce Lee said, "Be like water".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_rules

Or they'd just buy Google outright.