Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
TFA mentions "roughly one million Bitcoin wallets". So, to a back-of-the-envelope level of accuracy, I would take that as a first estimation of the total number of site users.
I don't know how you infer that it was a small-fry operation, though. Those 337 could include most or all of the admin-level users and/or some of the bigger contributors.
"Lobbying" gets a lot of stick, but it's not inherently a bad thing. Lobbying is simply what happens when a government asks people what effects certain decisions or policies may have on them. That seems to me like a pretty good idea.
So, companies have to be allowed to express political views.
Once you concede that, I don't think there's any logically reputable way you can try to dictate or limit what those views may be. To say anything about what a company "should" do (on moral, as opposed to sheer utilitarian grounds) - is to assert an authority that you don't have, unless you're some kind of stakeholder in the company. To be sure you can disagree with them, and you can lobby them to change their position, but in the end you have to accept their right to determine their own view.
Ah, but what about webcams inside the fridge to show you the content? With, I presume, some sort of lighting, otherwise there's not much point?
See, killer app right there. Who has time to go opening their fridge for that sort of thing?
Seriously, though, if I could look at my phone and see the content of my fridge, that would actually be fairly useful. I can't count the number of times I've texted the Other Half from the supermarket, "do we need carrots?" (or whatever).
No, because he was the one who'd been giving them the false information, which they'd been submitting (as far as we know) in good faith. There's no way for Alban to spin that as him being better than his management.
Owning up would certainly have been embarrassing, and might have resulted in management casualties - but Alban would definitely have been first out of the door.
He was a great advocate of papal and church authority, which later came to be used as a strong pillar of the war against heretics of all kinds - Protestants, witches, you name it. But I think it's a bit harsh to tax him with everything that was done with his writings two centuries later. That's like blaming Napoleon for Brexit.
according to the disposition of divine providence, separated souls sometimes come forth from their abode and appear to men . . . It is also credible that this may occur sometimes to the damned, and that for man’s instruction and intimidation they be permitted to appear to the living.- St Thomas Aquinas.
The Bible itself gives us stories of ghosts (2 Macc 15:11-17, Matt 17:1-9). Human logic is not proof against divine providence.
Such low-tech approaches are too well known and easily countered. It's not hard to shake someone who's following you on foot or by car, unless they have an overwhelming advantage in resources (backup). And I imagine idols routinely take those measures on their way home from gigs. (They certainly would if I were managing them.)
This approach, being novel and non-obvious, bypassed the tried-and-tested obvious precautions. Chances are it'll never work again, now, as this story has got a good bit of publicity.
It's unfair because Everyone Knows that the Chinese only copy, they don't innovate, therefore their patents can't possibly be legit.
It'll be some time yet before any authority figure (in the USA particularly, although the EU is also not immune to this particular strain of nationalism/racism) is prepared to admit that this common wisdom is bullshit.
If that's really the problem, then the solution is obvious: a unified European immigration and asylum system. Is that what you're suggesting?
If not, then you're always going to have differences in the asylum rules between countries, and as long as that persists, there will always be valid reasons for asylum seekers to cross one country to get to another.
So make up your mind what you want. Do you want to let refugees apply at each country separately, or do you want your immigration policy absolutely (as opposed to just partly) dictated by foreigners? It's one or the other.
They want to catch bad guys. Statistically speaking, most of the bad guys they're interested in are US persons. They've got this huge database of information about US persons, what are they supposed to do - not use it, spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on gathering the same information again through other channels...?
If I had a choice between "trying to get approval to spend two weeks of time and tens of thousands of dollars to find out whether X is dirty" and "spending half an hour to get the same information from an existing database", I wouldn't hesitate. I wouldn't think I was doing anything wrong, either. Your privacy can be invaded by a team of half a dozen agents and a full dossier created specifically on you, or it can be invaded by one guy with some SQL. Which is worse, really? (Yes, I know the latter allows 100x more people to be intruded upon more of the time. But that's not much comfort if you're one of the 1% who gets the much more detailed attention of the old approach.)
Really what this story shows is that the regulatory system is broken, not because it's too lax (although it is), but because it's based on the assumption that "reasonable people" will ultimately agree on what's ethical and what isn't.
I don't know of anyone who has any objection to the Bidens being investigated. Investigate away. And by all means let the FBI co-operate with its sibling agencies in other countries to get information from them if it needs to.
But that's not the same as the president of the USA phoning a foreign leader and letting it be known that he wants a particular result to an investigation, as "a favor". It's not in the same ballpark. It's not even the same sport.
Can you see the difference?
Facade of democracy.
We're all talking as if "comments" were somehow equivalent to "votes", so what matters is how many you receive. That's a stupid idea on the face of it, it brings up all the problems we've always known about online voting, and with ZERO safeguards.
I have always treated comment periods as an opportunity to make points that hadn't already been answered in the official published reasoning, on the basis that they might have been overlooked. It follows that there is absolutely no point in sending the same message more than once. A point made by one person is just as valid as one made by a million.
So, while it's no doubt fun for Pai and his mates to troll their opponents like this, it's not necessary. It's just the "smoke" part of "smoke and mirrors". It's a distraction. All of it.
As I read it, I thought the only safe thing to do now is to avoid the use of singular pronouns entirely. Use names every time.
But apparently that's not acceptable either.
Now, normally I'd be bang alongside "avoiding unnecessary offence to anyone", but frankly at this point just "ditching Stack Exchange" looks like a comparatively reasonable option. This level of linguistic policing is beyond reasonable.
Let's get this straight - if the customers' name was changed, your system interpreted that as meaning that this must be a new customer?
Granted, it was a bloody stupid thing to do - but even so, that's also a bloody stupid way to configure a utility billing database. There's a reason for using a database, not a spreadsheet.
An election would solve nothing at this point.
The Tories would win (because Corbyn is just that frickin' hopeless, and the Remain vote would be split between Labour and Lib Dem). They'd accept this gleefully as a mandate for hard Brexit, and that would go through. (Step 1.)
Then the Tories would take their "mandate" and continue to misgovern the country for another five years, based on policies that no-one even noticed at the time because they were buried under the great steaming pile of ordure that is Brexit. Meanwhile, everything bad that happens will be blamed on some combination of (remainers/traitors/saboteurs/inevitable transient correction after Brexit).
Or, let's imagine that Labour and Lib Dem could do a deal (which seems improbable, given Labour's recent efforts to purify itself of all heretical liberal thought, but let's go with it), and put together a coalition government. Then it would be tasked with negotiating a New and Better Brexit, per Labour's policy, but doing so from a position of "no matter what happens we can't leave with no deal". This means the EU has even less reason than it's had to date to negotiate seriously - from its point of view, the whole problem can be solved by simply forcing the worst imaginable deal onto Britain, so that it will be rejected and the UK will remain. And then Corbyn, or his successor, will be in the position of trying to deliver on Labour's manifesto (which assumes Brexit) while still inside the EU, which would be mostly impossible, so they'll be epically punished for it at the next election. (And the Lib Dems would be even more screwed than they were with the Tories.)
OR, imagine that Corbyn could pull off - what he pretended to pull off in 2017, another massive swing to Labour, giving him an outright majority. (Spoiler, he can't. Lest we forget, he lost in 2017.) That leaves him - well, actually in the same position as if he'd done a deal with the Lib Dems but with one less scapegoat.
There's no happy ending to this story. Brexit is happening. If, three months later, you can still walk down the street without having to step over corpses, buy mange tout in Waitrose, turn on the lights - it will be called a howling success, because that's how low Remainers have dragged the bar.
Altavista was awesome in its day. Then it started trying to become a "portal" (remember those? - everyone wanted to be one in the mid-90s), and here we are.
Google, on the other hand - they've actually pulled off the "portal" transition without dying horribly. True that it's done horrible things to the quality of their service, but hats off to them - they've achieved what Altavista and others never did.
by conducting statistically rigorous post-election audits.
Yeah, that's totally going to happen, it's not as if anyone really had a strong vested interest in the outcome of an election. And statistics is so clear and simple to understand, every average Joe and Jill in the electorate can follow their working and be reassured in the outcome. Right...
Honestly, that clause looks like it was slipped in on purpose to provide cover for election authorities that, we all know, are going to carry on using these machines no matter what we say.
The statement "USCIS follows up with human translators as needed", if true - and no reason has been presented to doubt it - makes it clear what's going on here. Use Google Translate, in conjunction with Search tools, to scan for words/phrases that might suggest an issue exists, then use that information as a filter to determine which posts/feeds get attention from a human translator.
Seems eminently sensible to me.
Now, granted, I don't know if that's what the story means. But, unlike other interpretations, it's 100% consistent with all the stated facts.
I'm sure you can be removed for stating "scientific facts" that are neither scientific nor factual. If that's a fact at all, it's a linguistic one (hinging on the definition of "gender").
As a scientific hypothesis, it was disproven several thousands of years ago, when it was discovered that you could make men less... masculine by cutting their balls off.
I'm not buying "NDA" as a reason for his silence. I'm pretty sure you can't use an NDA like that.
If the company itself claims - or at least, refuses to correct the impression by others - that he's still with them, then if he is still working for them he can say so (because he's only confirming what they've already intimated), and if he isn't he can also say so (because they're defaming him otherwise).
Please double check your Faragist talking points, because they're bullshit.
EU law doesn't prevent nationalisation - it limits how nationalised industries can behave, but it doesn't stop you creating them. Fishing is limited by international treaties for all countries, whether they're EU members or not - the freedom to cast any net you like, wherever you like, whenever you like, and from any boat you like, isn't coming back. (Some of us remember the Cod Wars.) And control of what you eat - yeah, I personally quite like having a government that prevents poison being sold as food, and it's not clear that having such regulations set at EU level is any worse than having them set individually by each member state. (It's certainly much more efficient, and more transparent.)
As for "where you spend your money", that complaint would be more aptly addressed to the US State Department, which will quite literally prevent you from spending your own money in countries like Cuba or Iran. The EU's restrictions are tiny in comparison.
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