james-watson

I enjoy that you had the courage to bring "factually incorrect" into this conversation.

If someone, anyone, goes looking for the facts, there is only one destination in which they will end up. The facts aren't hard to find. They are all in boring science textbooks. But nobody reads those anymore.

The current culture war is waged by those who profit off ignorance against those who crusade for truth. You may think this is a black and white view of it, but it isn't. One side wishes to obliterate facts, the other wishes to incinerate pretty lies at the expense of hurt feelings.

So yes, there are a great many positions that are factually incorrect. All of them, to be exact, except the factually correct ones.

The problem of course is that facts can be inconvenient to those who seek power.

Who exactly has proposed starting a war with Russia or anything remotely resembling that?

The entire left establishment, from Hillary to Obama.

Hillary wanted a no-fly zone in Syria. Obama just imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia, which is a precursor to war.

The mental gymnastics are hitting Olympic levels with the left.

Tell me, friend, how does a group of people enforce their rights within a country against those who wish to deny those rights?

ISIS wants a global Islamic caliphate, along with a Caliph at its head and Sharia law. They want this in the US, Europe, and every other country on the planet. They do not negotiate, because they believe they carry out the will of an omnipotent deity. And most importantly, they will brutally slaughter anyone who stands in their way.

So, how do we defend our rights to a different way of life, against those who would kill us for it?

Oh, and a cursory glance at history would be educational. Pacifism is a great idea, until it isn't.

Ah yes, because average Americans control US geopolitical strategy.

Sounds like a pretty accurate implementation of a Randian Utopia.

Pure self interest isn't a difficult vector to map. The results are predictable and repeatable.

"Taxation is theft!"

http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

Don't be sorry. We need scientists to be skeptics when it comes to absurd assertions which violate the most fundamental principles of physics.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What gets forgotten here, and something that I keep bringing up, is the lack of a Martian magnetosphere. This means long term human settlements have to be artificially shielded.

This means living underground, which defeats the point of going to Mars in my opinion. Elon mentioned using a local magnetosphere generator, which is one of those ideas that is theoretically possible but whose practicality seems questionable. How powerful a magnetosphere generator is required to deflect ionizing radiation? How much power generation capacity will a Martian colony have to spare? Will this require a Fusion reactor?

The only hope I have for Martian settlement is that Musk and his engineers are some of the most audacious and brilliant people on the planet. I will never bet against their success, and I wish them the best of luck.

I have been a space exploration fan since as long as I can remember, I just worry that humans have a tendency to focus on the wrong goals when ideals and emotion cloud our judgement (e.g. the Space Shuttle).

Understood. My post was a retaliation to a blatant ad hominem.

I do not enjoy getting into the mud, but sometimes it is necessary. As you can see from my parent post, I was engaging in discussion whereas EdHominem lived up his name almost immediately.

Regardless, your site, your rules.

Had the Germans fought a civil war in the 1930s instead of accepting their populist leader they and the rest of the world would have been better off.

Oh, was there another populist leader the Germans should have rejected in the 1930s? Do enlighten me.

Wow you've got a Hitler fixation. I wasn't really talking about him [...]

Projection at its finest. See above.

"LITERALLY HITLER!!!!!!!" is the totality of your argument. Perhaps you should broaden your critical thinking landscape.

Ah, the "literally Hitler" argument!

What you energetic Godwinians forget, is that Hitler was a socialist and abused the executive powers of a massively oversized state to obtain his dictatorial powers.

Powers that the outgoing President of the USA pushed to new horizons in a government bureaucracy larger than has ever existed.

Perhaps if the Godwin-kin stopped creating turn-key totalitarian states, we wouldn't have to suffer from an endless list of genocidal dictators.

Or did you think Hitler was a conservative?

In what meta-logical wonderland is requiring ID equivalent to a poll tax?

I can't go to a bar or buy alcohol/tobacco without showing ID.

Why should I be able to vote for the country's future without ID?

I stated we could have mass violence in this country if the election were overturned this late after the election.

"Could"?

There will be a civil war if Trump's presidency is revoked. Count on it.

By the way, how many Democrats are there in the Army, Navy and Air Force? How about the National Guard? Law enforcement? How many Democrats own guns?

Democrats are funny people. "Mass violence is better than a Trump presidency."

Be careful what you wish for.

Sounds complicated. Musk has said that Lithium batteries are improving at a rapid enough pace that they expect impressive increases in capacity and duty cycles by the third iteration of the Model 3.

The BlackBerry was also the first widely adopted smartphone. Many experts laughed at Apple's attempt to enter the phone industry.

And with this thread, we have conclusively proven the assertion upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309120).

Good day.

There's a lot of disparate claims you are making here without a central argument.

No, I did not use sockpuppet accounts. Unlike fulltime moderators, I have things to do other than spend every hour of the day on HN to score political points. I only had one previous account, and it was banned as a result of that thread.

As to your other questions, you are losing the forest for the trees. What I am saying is this:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/helena_cronin-getting-huma...

You are free to make of it what you will. Obviously, neither I, or Dr. Cronin, or the Holy Ghost himself can convince you of a fact that you do not wish to be convinced of; the choice is yours.

The only way this is going to work, is if some company with a lot invested in the gaming ecosystem (e.g. Valve) spends some of those billions of dollars to make a ground up OS from the Linux kernel, similar to Android.

The ONLY usable Linux "distros" at the moment are hobbyist projects. This includes Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, etc. etc.

No serious company or individual that relies on a predictable and reliable user experience is going to use any of the modern flavors of Linux. Someone has to spend the money to do this right, and do it right once and for all.

Obviously, Stallman was right and every closed source OS is going the way of 1984 by making the users the product and gathering every single keystroke and mouse click in order to monetize you. As a convenient side effect, they are creating a perfect turn-key totalitarian system that could be used to devastating effect with the necessary political will.

Greed is good? Apparently it isn't good enough, because Gabe Newel would rather hoard his billions than spend on critical infrastructure for his company's future.

A Linux OS needs to be built from the kernel by professional and well paid developers who don't fork every single repo if they don't like tab spacing.

Democracy doesn't work in engineering, it doesn't work in business, and it probably doesn't work in politics. Linux works because Linus is a "benevolent" dictator. That's why the kernel is such a marvel of engineering. Because he oversees every commit. The same needs to happen downstream.

Here's to dreams of the Linux desktop in 2050!

This isn't a morality issue. Soros is a very clever, rational, and self serving individual. This is currently the model citizen, as we are all supposed to rationally optimize our own individual utility within the free market.

Soros is a financial speculator, so he literally makes money off chaos. He made his billions by betting against the Bank of England. Everything he is doing to destabilize Europe and the West makes perfect sense from his point of view. He is simply rationally maximizing his own utility given the tools at his disposal. This isn't immoral, its rationally amoral.

Soros is the perfect counterexample to libertarian fantasies of rational self-interest-run societies. Because it becomes very clear very quickly that one person's self interest is another person's dystopian nightmare.

Childish good and evil narratives don't apply here. It is just a very clear case of good intentions causing immense harm. When there is profit to be made off chaos, you are economically incentivizing it, and will receive more of it.

So riddle me this, if there are no borders demarcating countries, what exactly is the definition of a country?

The open borders zealots like Soros never seem to have a clear answer to this.

Furthermore, I think it's an insult to the past Democrats like FDR if you compare them with the likes of Hillary/Obama.

The left leaning presidents of old did not openly participate in corruption of the US Constitution nor did they willfully undermine the American worker for the benefit of Wall St.

Obama? He hired the architect of the Mortgage Crisis, Henry Paulson, as his Treasury Secretary. That's like hiring El Chapo Guzman as the head of the DEA. And it doesn't end there.

I think the entire political spectrum has been captured by corrupt oligarchs. There is no real right or left anymore, just a group of vicious oligarchs battling for supremacy using the old colors so that people accept them.

The year of the Linux desktop better be getting closer, because Windows and OSX are both doubling down on their closed source codes and shady snooping practices.

Too many identical days and weeks which get compressed into nothing. Few new memories will be made. Your life will feel much shorter and uneventful.

It is profound that I'm not the only one who quit a day job because of this exact reason. This is a biological fact. Your brain compresses memories that are too similar down into the smallest size possible. The result is that a year can often feel like a week, with a few memorable weekends and absolutely nothing else.

This is utterly frightening, and can feel like you've hit the fast forward button on your life and are careening towards the end.

As usual, memristor based computing architecture is left out.

Intel's 3DXPoint has already brought memristor memory units to market. The beauty of memristor architectures is that they can be used for logic and storage, so you can create some radical new architectures with them.

I'm too lazy to link the talk by Stan Williams of HP, but if you google it it's the ~45min one.

This is the next architecture because it's already here. All that other stuff is vaporware.

From Wikipedia:

"Bloomberg Businessweek has called private equity a rebranding of leveraged-buyout firms after the 1980s. Common investment strategies in private equity include: leveraged buyouts, venture capital, growth capital, distressed investments and mezzanine capital."

So this is just a continuation of the Gordon Gekko LBO firms, made possible by the deregulation of Wall St that occurred around that time.

No surprise here. The Wall St genie is out of the bottle, and it will continue to wreak havoc until we have another Great Depression.

It's illogical from a rational, maximum-utility-for-all perspective.

However, looking at it from the point of view of a primate status hierarchy competition, it makes perfect sense. The apex individuals derive pleasure from subjugating their lower status colleagues, and thus seek to make their lives as miserable as possible.

From this point of view, all of human history makes sense. We are but primates, and no amount of highbrow pontificating can change that.

Starting today, if the powerful wanted to, they could design a rational system that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering for the largest number of people possible. But then, there is no incentive in the primate brain to foster such an endeavor. Even philanthropists, instead of uniting and agreeing on a shared vision, compete with each other for status amongst themselves by virtue signalling their own superiority over their peers.

It is nature red in tooth and claw. We are no exception.

If you are a female engineer living in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you.

Totally not sexism folks. Equality at its best!

Where you see weakness, I see strength.

American companies are obsessed with political correctness, affirmative action, marketing and copyright law.

Chinese firms are only concerned with winning. They'll steal, lie and cheat, as long as they can build a superior product. Because they have no marketing, the product has to speak for itself.

Furthermore, Chinese culture is ruthlessly competitive as you alluded to. Guess what? This means it is incredibly robust and successful.

I personally believe the west is collapsing in on its kindness, and the east is rising up on its strength. A cursory look at what the two societies value will tell you the whole story.

West: Feigned Altruism at the expense of survival

East: Survival and Victory at the expense of everything else

Who wins? I think history can make a good guess...

It ain't innovation, it's cleverness.

I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a textbook.

Discovering from first principles is the honorable path, but it is a colossal waste of time. To get to the state of the art, you have to steal knowledge. Only then can you begin to understand and improve it.