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lalc

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DemocracyOS 11 years ago

Democracy does exactly that - it gives everyone the same vote, regardless what minority they come from. Therefore, it protects any minority for maximum possible extent.

From my reading, doesn't this say nothing? "democracy protects minorities as much as democracies could ever protect minorities."

the majority is emergent

How does "emergence" affect the possibility of tyranny?

it violates the basic democratic rule, "every person should get the same power in politics"

So maybe the takeaway here is that pure democracy is insufficient? The original point was that "Political systems should protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority."

Democracy is defined by the end result (same access to power), not the procedure (voting).

Isn't this just semantics?

It's true that even without stripping other voter's rights, minorities can still be persecuted. But it is a cultural issue, which won't be resolved by formal constitutional framework.

Isn't "stripping other voter's rights" a loaded way to put it? Freedom to vote doesn't necessarily have to mean freedom to persecute--freedoms generally end at the boundary where they begin trampling other freedoms. Also, in which situations "It is a cultural issue"? What does that imply? Does DemocracyOS fix cultural issues?

In fact, historically, it very often were elites (that you may think are the solution) who participated or even organized these persecutions.

Did the parent suggest a return to oligarchy? Do current elites participate in persecutions?

For example, in the U.S., there is a large minority of people in prison who are not protected by democracy, because they don't have voting rights.

How will people in prison obtain fair representation under DemocracyOS?

This can possibly protect a minority, but it can also delay progress in helping minority. The minority that needs to be overruled in super-majority voting can keep the status quo longer than desired by most, and that's unfair too.

So the solution is to never protect minorities in the first place?

We don't know what the future morality will be; it may be different in positive, not negative, fashion compared to today's morality. We could perhaps say, though, that the future society will be more happy with their own morality than ours (because they can compare the two, we cannot); therefore, it should be possible for them not be too conservative and implement it.

Yes, political systems should enable the implementation of policies. This says nothing about the merits of different political systems.

Right, book publishers are largely middlemen. Let the old ways die and a hundred new business models flourish.

I bet it has lots to explore and "lovingly crafted" I can buy, but "gorgeous"? Not everything can be gorgeous. Maybe try "quirky" or "with character"?

Anyway, buying to support, and wishing you success.

I believe proprioception is resilient to minor offsets or miscalibration, as I've seen such illusions at science exhibits--false hands that you're tricked into thinking is your own. And the STEM system (absolute body position tracking) apparently is high-precision.

It's more likely that immersion will be broken by perceptible latency.

Yeah, virtual phone and virtual laptop seem ridiculous when you have an AR headset. There's even a virtual laptop keyboard... how could the glasses possibly detect your typing?

That Oculus demo looks great! See, there's an honest video you can actually believe. Promising for sure.

I'm writing a middlebrow (lowbrow, really) dismissal because this actually deserves it. This is... shamelessly phony. "Your laptop is now a hologram"?[1] Do I have to 3D scan my laptop in? Are they going to mind-upload my Intel CPU to the cloud while they're at it?

Your use-case for AR is a ghostly 5FPS replica of my laptop or phone that I can vaguely gesture at? Tracing in the air to lathe a rocket hull will bring me closer to the world? Meta has access to non-rendered pages of app icons inside the iOS sandbox? "ROCKET COMPLETED"? "500+ Meta Applications in development"?

They say this is real footage, and have a big red "BUY NOW" button. What target audience is this supposed to convince?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/unxD96I.jpg

Where my mouth is 13 years ago

I have to admit I'm ignorant as to what Java libraries I'm missing out on by not using a JVM language. I hear about this advantage a lot though! What are some examples of good Java libraries that aren't as good in other common languages?

I get that App.net is supposed about owning your own data, and sure there's a brief mention of PRISM at the top. But why I would want to write an app for it in the era of PRISM? How can I trust this notion of a "private cloud?"

What I'm looking for now is more decentralization and encryption than a walled garden.

Any legitimate business accepting payment in bitcoins can only receive bitcoins from other registered addresses, else they are black flagged and no longer a registered address.

This particular implementation wouldn't actually work. Anyone can send BTC to any address, so it would be easy to poison the well.

(But I suspect some similar scheme could be feasible. You might be able to enforce the rule on BTC->$ withdrawls? I wonder about mixers, though.)

>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet?

A little early for April Fools'. Let's try this again.

>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to get things done. If your work is useful to other people, you will be able to enjoy life on this planet for a long time.

This looks great and that is a huge amount of effort. I have to ask about what I think is the elephant in the room: Surely you must have noticed that all your mountains are chopped off at the exact same altitude? Wouldn't the scene look way better if you just increased the maximum, with basically no effort?

It's as though you spent a month painstakingly mixing 64 channels of crystal clear audio, but, right at the end, threw your hands up and clipped the final mix into oblivion.

Why HN was down 13 years ago

Here I was thinking you were referring to the Japanese meme "No ___, No Life!"

I'd like to see a custom version of Chromium for this purpose. Google's sandboxing is great. Just reduce the attack surface by stripping out non-essentials like plugins, SVG, WebGL, NaCl, etc. etc. and you have a pretty darn secure browser. See the ridiculous complexity of those two exploits by Pinkie Pie for what attackers are up against.

Seems like a good convenience/security tradeoff to me.