mdpopescu

6 ms·

1.
by mdpopescu 5y ago
Seriously, stop with this crap. The people on this forums are some of the people who have the know-how to actually DO something about the internet. If they can't discuss these things, we get the situation that your company seems to lik
2.
by mdpopescu 5y ago
> But the answer is not to stop having laws. Why? Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.) Are a trillion laws too many? A billion? A million? A thou
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Almost right. On the basis of their political affiliation, mostly.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
And yet, the number of otherwise informed, intelligent people I've talked to who believe that the frequently-used image of the Covid virus is an actual picture is astonishing.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Yes. The reason is the most people are idiots. Like a ruler says in one of our books, "stupid, but many".
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
All blackmail involves exposing something that someone doesn't want exposed - usually because the "something" is illegal. And yet, blackmail itself is illegal. Most countries have a culture against whistleblowers, starting fr
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
He went against the consensus. You cannot go against the consensus.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
There are a lot of use cases. For example, I have 17 applications running on a system that need a connection string. When I need to change that connection string, I can 1) change 17 config files; 2) change 17 shortcuts containing command-li
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
It's difficult :)
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious effort
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Eh, unlimited data plans might still be valuable to someone.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Really? So I can send anyone I want to jail, as long as they have one of these? Wow, that's definitely not going to cause problems!
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Huh. Almost as if a company would provide a guarantee and only get paid if they kept the servers running for at least 99.999% of the time. Weird, huh?
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
> ... but the counter incentive is the free market. Yes. Which is why the free market is ILLEGAL in the medical system, in the police system, in the educational system, in the judiciary system...
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
As a general rule, the entire medical profession has the incentives set up the wrong way - the more problems you have, the more they benefit. I have read that there was a time, in the distant past, where you paid a doctor only as long as yo
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Huh. Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance? Would that be illegal? Would anyone care? :)
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
I have no idea why you believe TV makers won't handle this market. Here's a list of non-smart TVs on the local equivalent of Amazon[1], which includes this 75" 4K Samsung TV[2]. [1] https://www.emag.ro/televiz
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
> Or if that doesn't work, then torches and pitchforks. It's America. I think the Matrix quote "guns; lots of guns" is more appropriate :)
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Off-topic: this is one of the few comments you have that aren't dead.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
> Or half of antartica disappearing? Or Australia, and Western United States constantly on fire? I rest my case.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? In fiction? Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
I have. The number of people killed by the US government in the last 50 years dwarfs that of people killed by Facebook by many orders of magnitude.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
> Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors. That's exactly my position, except the opposite. Anyone who claims t
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Name three scientific papers (that you have studied) that contributed to mobile phones.
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
From your mouth to God's ears. /grin This religion, despite Asimov, was not successful because it worked. It was successful because - like all other religions - it made it easier for people to stop thinking for themselves, and acc
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
I think this is another example of "worse is better" [1] -- it's something that's yucky, and has a lot of flaws, but worked (for some value of worked) well enough for a lot of people. [1] https://www.dreamsong
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
This is one of those instances where I find it difficult to accept honesty. The entire purpose of the public school system - in EVERY country - it to make you accept stuff without evidence, or AGAINST evidence. E.g.: the Earth revolving aro
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
The number of downvotes / flagged comments on this page suggests that this site is heavily biased towards the left / atheist crowd. Then again, reading the comments for a couple of days will do the same :)
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
I understand this, and even agree with it up to a point. However, sometimes the gap between worldviews is too large. Here's a few hypotheticals: - you're a Christian trying to politely explain to a Satanist that you dislike sacrif
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by mdpopescu 5y ago
Yep. The purpose of taxes is building up the treasury, so that the people in power can keep being in power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

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