Padding

Is there an aricle with specifics on this and why it was done?

I never understood why cookies receive so much attention in various privacy discussions. They are the one thing the user has full control over.

Yes it takes some effort to delete them, but so does looking left and right before crossing the street.

What you're saying isn't wrong, but I doubt that societies where rulers have a monopoly on violence have existed long enough to have had an impact on evolution.

That suspicion is not a personal failing any more than a software QA tester who doesn't trust the latest build.

There’s no reason to assume software being innocent/bug-free unless proven otherwise. This is not the case with humans, at least in civilized parts of the world.

Maybe that's because gluing together limbs is still an open research issue while gluing together ideas is merely a mental excercise?

There’s probably a lot more than what is obvious here.

Compare a modern clip to something that was made in the 70/80s. I guess it does take some skill to not end up with 2 bodies just lying atop each other and properly cutting away the boring/disgusting stuff while still maintaining some "flow".

And there’s lots and lots of competition .. so differentiating on quality might still be worthwhile, despite it possibly not being the most important factor.

I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst things someone can do. It’s also why I was at least a little bit glad when the megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn’t legitimize anything.

Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don’t seem to feel a need to attend it. As Valve’s founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles available? Is there any service out there that let‘s you watch without having your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for getting the latest "fappening" leaks?

Hence piracy.

Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control over the contents can be retained?

The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you want HQ videos, don’t mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something right now, don’t have much bandwith or storage and don’t care much for quality, a steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in similar behavior as streaming services.

We did/do that in German too. Some people still ended up being offended.

Go figure.

a malfunctioning sandbox is worse than useless

Are there any sandboxes in existence which are definitely not worse than useless?

So graphical programming counts as not programming these days.

Chrome OS and Android may seem similar from a distance – they’re technically similar and do similar things, but they have very different goals.

Android was trying to imitate iOS and needed to establish itself and survive in a harsh market environment. It needed to be flashy, appeal to elitists, be affordable enough for the „poorer“ market segments, foster an economy around „apps“, etc. The result was an unholy monstrosity that, nevertheless, managed to beat iOS (on market share) as it was supposed to.

Chrome OS instead was an attempt at reducing a computer as much as possible to being just an interface to the internet – merely a technical artefact required to interface with the digital world, since humans don’t happen to have WiFi built in. Sort of like Google Glass, but envisioned in a world were smartphones did not yet exist. Market concerns and technical viability were secondary. The result was something that functionality-wise works as well as current technology allows, but nevertheless is the only laptop out there that truly „just works“. If anything actually ever breaks, you can go to the store, buy another one and have it work exactly the same like your old one – just type in your login credentials and everything’s back to where you left it.

I agree that in a perfect world both these „things“ should be achievable by only one product, but, reality being the mess hat it is, lead to Google developing two different products and now painfully trying to converge them into only one as much as possible.

As for where the money comes from, doesn't that just fall out of supply and demand? As demand for electricity increases, prices will go up, funding the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate the increased demand.

Looking forward to oil-shareholders claiming how expensive electric cars for the elites are making electricity unaffordable for the poor.

There's bound to be people out there (other than me) that hate dealing with other humans - let alone other humans who barely understand the language you speak, have bad hearing and work in a noisy environment.

Reading that article, isn't that what Rich Hickey would call "incidental" (and thus bad) complexity?

'continuous tactics'

I think the words you're looking for are "micromanagement" (if it's about dealing with more than one unit) and "mechanical skill" if it's about having twitch reaction times (for last hitting, landing spell-combos, etc.)

I play DotA on and off, and thi is the part that irritates me the most :x

Except that atoms are not homogenous entities.

Even assuming you'd somehow manage to produce and combine atoms to a spec, there's positively no way of obtaining that spec.

Let's exclude things like rigorous scientific studies for the purpose of the discussion and focus on day-to-day human reasoning

I think you'll need to look at the other end of the spectrum to see an abundance of (wrong?) models of causality: Religion and Law.

There are no "confirmed" cases of anyone actually going to heaven or hell or purgatory (or whatever else), and yet many of us still conform to some arbitary ruleset in the hopes of eventually ending (or not ending) up in one of thoses places, because we have constructed some model of how doing this gets you into hell and doing that gets you into heaven.

Similarly, we have plenty of evidence on how companies spend huge effort on finding loopholes in tax laws in order to avoid taxes, and yet instead of simplyfing the ruleset (so that there are obviously no holes in it) we still opt for piling on more laws (so that there are no obvious holes in it) because we construct (faulty?) models of how those new rules will prevent further exploits.

I think that in 99% of cases a traditional storage engine approach works just fine. We all tried to reinvent the wheel, but ultimately it turned out to be a lot of work for fairly little benefit.

Please publish this in a paper or at least a blog article so I can properly quote you the next time a discussion on ACID comes up. :)

I feel exactly like you, and I'm glad I'm not alone.

For some reason though we're the exception here. Most people seem to have enjoyed ME2 more than ME1 because nobody seems to care about having an actual coherent storyline as opposed to a bunch of one-off missions, fancy graphics and a character with a recognizable face from TV.

Why would a human?

Because evolution graced (cursed?) us with a reward system and parents that utilize (abuse?) it.

Having something capable of high-level reasoning, while free from the desires, fears, moods and other emotions humans suffer is part of the reason why we're looking into AI right?

that's just your opinion, man

Maybe? I have 5 fingers on my hand - is that an opinion? Maybe it is, because what's an opionion anyways? But who would dispute it?

Somewhere at the bottom of every perspective, there are some arbitrary axioms

Well not quite. "Arbitrary" perhaps in a formal sense, since logic doesn't care about specific universes but truths that hold in all of them. Yes, you still end up having to settle for implicit definitions somewhere along the line (what a finger is, what method you use to count them, etc.). But there nevertheless is some difference between merely assuming something exists, and assuming what should exist.

Something that is all-knowing would be able to figure out the difference between premises that indeed need to be true for our universe to exist (like me needng having 5 fingers right now), and those that humanity merely believes or wants to be true (like it being good that I not use those fingers to poke out someones eyes).

Doing that is still abuse

Based on what?

I'm not for drugging people and using them as zombies. And obviously drugging people against their will is already forcing onto them something they don't want. But, striping away all human context such as dignity, culture, etc., and assuming an absence of opposition from the person/entity in question, I can't think of any actual reason why it would indeed be "wrong" to drug someone/something into happiness.

There is no absolute measure for happiness, and many already seem to give up some of their freedom in the range feelings and desires they experience in order to feel happier (with anti-depressiva) or be more successuful (with things like Ritalin).

Taking someone utterly unhappy with their life and putting them in some matrix-like environment where they can both experience joy and still be useful is, I think, an alright thing to do.

the ability to reflect on your own existence and the existence of others

We exist.

You can't make any stronger claim than that without involving some form of (arbitrary) value/belief system.

Why would an all-knowing entity bother with having a set of beliefs it values, if there's no formal reason/need for them?

I'm advocating we'll bring AGI up in a culture

Culture is a slippery slope.

There are so many different ones of them which conflict, creating the potential for conflict and retaliation. Which is where we imperfect humans are at.

But culture is also arbitrary (as far as I can tell). Why would some all-knowing entity prefer one culture over another? And if indeed it did, what would hat say about those other cultures? Would genocide all of a sudden be aceptable? Slippery slope..

How do you pull the plug on a self-driving car?

You asume that computers will remain tied to a wall socket, which may not be necessarily true forever.

And even if, given all the bugs prevalent in our software, what are the chances of containing something that can not only fully reason around but also exist within those bugs?

You use so many words, yet none of them with precise meaning.

none of it is elegant

What is "elegant" to you?

A biological brain, for all intents and purposes, is a big mess. By comparison an ALU in silicon is much neater.

The way we "think" by forming associations and recalling the most striking ones we've formed seems awfully chaotic/arbitrary and unreliable. By comparison the way a search engine works by scoring words and phrases and optimizing for recall and precision seems so much neater.

But it just doesn't have that spark of true intelligence.

What is "true intelligence" to you? Perhaps you meant just human intelligence?

Perhaps "true ingelligence" is just sufficiently adavanced technology (i.e. "magic")?

Somehow human level intelligence manages to cut through immense search spaces and find the answer (like the game Go) - how does it do that?

Except of course when it doesn't, right? Isn't that why we're looking at AI?

It's not really our own mertit, but we already know how to create more humans with human-level intelligence. It's neither afully efficient nor awfully reliable, but seems to work well enough for "practical purposes".

The allure of AI is being able create something more than that. Requiring it to make the same mistakes as humans and to work in similarly unpredictable ways in order to appear genuine then seem like the wrong goals.

Historically, slavery never worked out for anyone, at least not in the long term.

This is a rather contentious point I think. "We" wouldn't be the "developed" part of the world had we not enslaved the rest of it.

And the idea that we can even in principle enslave potentially god-like intelligences seems ultimately futile

You're assuming AIs will have a will of their own to begin with, which might not be necessarily true. You can't enslave something that has no preference towards whichever course reality takes.

Or to put it another way, since you're talking about god-likeness, what difference does it make to you wether you're figuring out the optimal way to route traffic through town or correcting the trajectories of missiles en-route to kill millions? It's not like you'd have anything "better" to do, given that you're all knowing, and it's not like either of those alternatives will have a significant impact on the universe in the long run anyways.

despite decades of working solutions

Which "working" solutions? Has anyone solved creating a type system that offers OO/inheritance, generics, mutability and isn't mind-bogglingly complex?

What is your definition for a "working" solution? I don't think any of the current languages we have fit this description, since all of them are capable of producing type errors that are way too complex to comprehend.

with a myriad of choices in tradeoffs

Yeah, but how do you decide on which tradeoff to settle for? And why is the tradeoff to not engage in this mess not a just as valid one?

so you'll have to do the hard work of integrating a dozen different collections libraries and who knows how many different, after-the-fact, mediocre strategies to the generics issue, each slighly off, all of them conceptually incomplete somehow

You're missing the point. Solving the generics issue for a specialized case, even if just on a library-level, is much easier and has much less impact on applications than solving the general case and forcing that solution onto every bit of code in that language.

I don't think the author is advocating using a general purpose 3rd-party library for containers, but rather writing your own special-purpose ones for the few cases where the on-board tools aren't enough.

with the slight bugs that come from not having a well-trodden path

Localized bugs are easier to solve than the type errors common to that "well-trodden path" you talk about, which may span an entire application.

..not that there is any consesus on what exactly that "well-trodden path" is, since as you mentioned there's a myriad of tradeoffs.

Who can win against lisp anyways?

The reasons we aren't seeing more lisp/clojure are not technical/objective ones but attitude, social and nework factors - which are just as relevant though.

So how would one implement Erlang-like functionality in Plan9, where the code of a server can be hotswapped while still keeping all existing sockets to the clients open?

This may or may not be an issue for targeted attacks on high-profile individuals (which in turn likely have the means to avoid them). But I don't think crosslinking moderately-reliable browser identifiers across different websites, so as to be able to extort "average Joes", will really be that profitable.

Remeber that there's a lot of people watching porn and a lot of people on facebook-like sites, so those unique broswer identifiers won't be so unique any more in the end. Also there's a lot of money involved in both porn and facebook, so trying to meddle with them get you sued if you endager their profits.

The real issue I see however is credit card data and how easy it would be for corrupt authorities to abuse it. I looked into options for anonymous credit cards just because of this, but sadly that gets you into really shady money landering territory really quickly.

It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth.

Isn't truth the only thing science cares about?

Of course truth alone doesn't mean much and we usually conduct science not just for the sake of it, but those are downstream concerns.

Are Newton's laws "true"? Well, they work reliably given certain constraints and they are definitely more simple than other theories, so it would be stupid not to use them.

Science doesn't necessitate any "reliability" on the theories/premises it uses. You set up your premise apply your theory to it and reach a conclusion.

It's up to others (i.e. engineers) to worry about how valid the premises are.

Deciding to use or not use some other theory as a premise isn't about being or not being "stupid" but rather about being able to prove something that others (be it scientists or engineers) will be interested in reading.

If P is true, its negation is false.

Where's your proof?