Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
"super-calculator capable of managing tens of millions of gigaoctets of information".
Love it. Them Frenchies refusing to use foreign words like "computer" and "byte".
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And we’re across the issue
I've always been confused by the imagery of that phrase. Road? River? Bridge? Mountain?
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Southerly: Now I Am Permitted, in reply to David Haywood,
Also important. We never have discussions about a topic. They must always be around it. Eg, we're having a lot of discussions around rising poverty these days.
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I'd say a Randroid parses Adam Smith, but the parse tree just reflects the prejudice of the programmer.
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Kumara Republic,
that has me resisting the temptation to throw stuff at my screen
Heh, I feel that way when Libertarians misuse Karl Popper. FFS, Hide, Popper believed in "Piecemeal Social Engineering" and said of NZ under the Savage Government welfare reforms that it was the best organized country on the planet. His fucking book that he wrote right here in NZ was The Open Society and It's Enemies . The idea of a society routinely reading every communication would have disgusted him, and he fled to NZ to escape just such a society. He opposed every kind of dogma. He even opposed his own dogma, believing that his own theories would be proved wrong and improved upon, which they have been. The fact that he disagreed with Marxism is no evidence that he would have agreed with Ayn Rand's works. I believe, on the contrary, he would have thought them dangerous and ridiculous.
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Howard Edwards,
LOL
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to David Hood,
I understood Lucy’s question to be asking “if you’re going to filter electronic communication, you really have to filter all of it, don’t you? And you do have to take account of electronic communication nowadays, surely?”. In other words, filtering all the traffic flows naturally from the idea that it is worthwhile to filter any of it, and surely it’s worth filtering some of it?
It’s a good framing to show the way that such reasoning works. Because it can be done, then it would actually be remiss not to do it.
Reminds me very much of extraordinary lengths that a stockbroking firm I worked at went to to cover it’s arse from accusations of insider trading. They had scanners that looked for stock codes in every message sent, and would tag any messages containing those codes with disclosures of stock interest by the board of directors. They kept tapes containing every telephone conversation that every stockbroker made. This was in the late 90s. And yet anyone wanting to engage in insider trading would just speak to their source via some unmonitored medium, like their own mobile phone, or they could always just meet the people off-premises for a beer or something.
For all those precautions, no one ever got busted for insider trading. It’s just too hard to detect like that, and a serious enough crime that anyone doing it would take precautions. Possibly the easiest way to avoid any kind of paper/binary trail for insider trading is simply via contra deals. If you have an friendly insider in some publicly traded stock, then instead of paying them for information, you just reward them with some of your own information. Then you can buy their stock for the easy quick money, and they can buy from your stock tip, and neither party can be detected as trading on the inside unless the communication itself is actually intercepted. How do you intercept a couple of old boys standing at a bar chatting in muted voices about what stocks to buy? These networks are as uncrackable as terrorist cells. Only a fucking idiot broker would tell someone some inside information over a recorded company telephone line, or even worse, in an e-mail, encrypted or otherwise.
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Southerly: Now I Am Permitted, in reply to Bart Janssen,
My issue was slightly different, since it was definitely really bad posture immediately after getting my back all warm and flexible.
That happened to me too. Car seats are posturally terrible, and that's often the seat I was cooling down in. But when your postural muscles are exhausted, there's very few actually good ways to relax. Prone on the floor, maybe?
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Stephen Judd,
This is because the ACT-style libertarians have a weird way of understanding liberty that bases everything on property rights.
Yes, I'm all for liberty. The philosophical arguments for liberty itself are very sound. The idea that a primacy given to property rights maximizes liberty is a big leap, especially since property rights are in themselves a denial of liberty to everyone but the owner of the property.
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Southerly: Now I Am Permitted, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
which largely got better when I changed to a funny keyboard and started slouching on my chair under medical advice. Relaxed muscles.
Yup adjusting the working environment is much more likely to help than trying to adjust your posture consciously, because when you're working, you really haven't got mental time for thinking about it. Strengthening postural muscles would probably be best done at a time set aside for that purpose.
@Bart
Actually my problems started after exercise
I've noticed that most of my aches and pains have actually become less as I get further and further from a body trained for sport. It's very hard to find a generally healthy kind of exercise - everything creates some kind of asymmetry in the body. Also, it seems somewhat unusual to actually train with nothing but health in mind - always it's with some other purpose, to get better at the sport, usually. To run further, faster, to cycle longer and harder, to lift more and more weight. You always end up "putting your back into it". Since I stopped doing that with exercise (figuring that my back is worth more than the exercise) all the strange aches and pains that have plagued me for years have melted away.
I'm finally treating my body like I want it to last another 50 years.
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