Umm, dunno how else to say it, but honestly? Ignorance of mathematics isn't the cause of stupid laws and policy around technology; lobbyist money, bullshit ideological agendas, and self-serving BS flowing from big tech corporations would be your most likely sources for that.

I'm perfectly willing and eager to be proven wrong on this, but I figure in the list of causes? Ignorance of CompSci-oriented mathematics is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of causes for stupid governmental tech policy, somewhere around "Clippy".

Quoted complete for greater exposure. You should have posted this under a 'nym or login, because it needs to be modded way the fuck up. :)

Need to take a bit of exception here, but mostly because of degree and motive:

* You can agree or disagree with what Snowden did, but you cannot deny that the man acted on principle - more importantly, he put his name and his ass on the line for what he did. Note that he also could have just as easily just anonymously *sold* the info viz. Silk Road/BTC and quietly retired as a zillionare in Ecuador.

* Assange? IMHO he's a narcissistic asswipe (I base this mostly on Cryptome's assessment of Wikileaks' early dealings with them), but again, he put his name and ass out there for better or worse.

* These "lizard" guys? Script kiddies who wanted a 'rep and managed to get paid, then tried to cover it up with some nobility bullshit. Perhaps a smaller-scale version of Assange in the aspect that they wanted a reputation, but unlike Assange, they weren't willing to stick their necks out.

First of all there is no 'hyper inflation' in Russia. Hyper inflation is not just 50% or 100% inflation, hyperinflation is thousands percent and more. This is just kids play, compared to hyperinflation.

Secondly there are markets in Russia, people buy and sell products and commodities and labour and while there are regulations, actually they are much lower than regulations in countries like the USA. So store owners who paid their money for their stock respond to the market conditions by raising prices, that's market dictated behaviour and not government regulated behaviour (though this behaviour is a response to a government created problem).

The point is your example with a bakery is absolutely false, a bakery will change prices if the market forces dictate it so.

I tried this service a few months ago - I took pictures of about 200 books (out of 1,000 or so) and not a single match was found. It's a great idea, but the library is so thin that the service is probably near useless for most people. Still, it's worth a few minutes of your time to check it out just in case.

I do wish that the major publishers would get behind this service. I wouldn't mind paying a dollar or two for an electronic version of the paperback books I already own - but honestly not much more than that.

Perhaps you should go to a bakery in Russia over the last months, every day prices change more than once specifically because of increase of demand with the same supply. This increase of demand is caused by the falling currency value, but the result is the same.

It is. That law was designed to encourage large companies to spend lots of money on Washington lobbyists, to provide plenty of private-money jobs for the insiders that like to slide between public positions and private ones. So it's working as designed. Microsoft went from spending the least amount of political influence money of any Fortune 500 company to spending pretty much the most.

One of them would be the Borg...
The Borg (sounds Swedish) didn't see themselves as evil or believe that their mission was unjust. They wanted to add other civilizations to their own, making both sides better. The Borg did not have the problems most civilizations have such as crime, starvation, jealousy, etc. Who wouldn't want that?

Another good example is the Emperor...
The Emperor wanted to bring order to a chaotic galaxy. Sometimes, the only way is with an iron fist.

The Reapers is one more...
Reapers were changed against their will. What they became was not their fault.

Any position can change depending on the perspective. People... or cyborgs... don't see themselves as evil They are doing what they think is best, twisted as it may be.

First of all baker can absolutely change prices at any moment in time. If currency fluctuates during the day, if any kind of an unusual event happens that lowers supply or hikes demand any store will change prices quickly. As a matter of fact I build and sell software and services for retail, shipping, handling, logistics that lets chain operators change prices on groups of products, on individual products, on all products by a fixed amount or by percentages and the centralized control allows immediate change across the entire chain to take effect in 15 minutes, which is used all the time. I didn't sell to a bakery yet, but it is the same idea. Not only an individual baker but a chain can implement price changes during the day any number of times they want.

When currency fluctuates, for example, it presents a real opportunity for arbitrage and can kill profitability of a store or a chain in a blink of an eye. Currency fluctuation corresponds to demand very easily. Case in point: Russia last week.

Stores were changing prices many times in one day. 10 and even more times a day in some cases! And what happened to those who were not paying attention? They paid with their wallets. Falling currency created huge extra demand, people were spending all of their money, buying anything they could get their hands on before currency fell further in price.

So you have 0 understanding not only of theory but actually of the reality that happens even as we speak.

I guarantee you that if the FCC ignores their petition, they will be requiring all guests to sign an agreement allowing them block personal hotspots.

So is that what Marriott's "Wi-Fi monitoring system" did? All the jammers I've heard of jam ALL the signals, not just selected ones. The article says it prevented "customers from connecting to the Internet through their personal Wi-Fi hotspots." Not sure what they were doing, there, it's not really explained. How would a jammer block a HotSpot without interfering with the hotel's Wi-Fi - it would be the same type of signal. It seems like they would have had to use something a little more focused - like detecting "unauthorized" SSIDs and somehow interfering with those connections.

Is anyone familiar with this system?

- precisely.

Labour saving means exactly that: eliminate as much work as possible, that's why it's called 'labour saving' and not 'labour creating'.

That was my point and you are not even aware that you are making my point while you are making it, are you? Labour saving device means labour reducing device.

As an employer, if I can buy/build a machine that will reduce necessity for a job or fully eliminate a job I just acquired/built a machine that does what I am talking about: saving labour.

Saving labour is exactly what our civilisation does, the very first thing we did (fire, wheel, spear...) was already labour saving and everything we do today (computers, robots, cars, planes, tall buildings, factories, food processing...) it's all also labour saving.

It all saves labour, as in it reduces the labour needed or even eliminates labour altogether and it is all a good thing, that's what we want and need, otherwise we wouldn't be able to make more money by doing it, we would be making less money by doing it if it wasn't what we wanted and needed.

And does it use systemd?

Ha ha, the law exists and you fail to understand it. To make your example appropriate for the situation you have to set a condition that the bakery only has a limited supply of ingredients and/or energy and/or time to bake the cookies, so does Uber, they have a limited supply of drivers at any moment in time.

So a bakery cannot just rump up the supply on a moment notice if, for example, ten buses with tourists stopped by the bakery and all of them wanted some biscuits. However the baker can raise the prices if he sees an increased demand, thus making sure to reduce the secondary market for his product, which would be created (an opportunity for arbitrage) if a few tourists discovered the bakery first and decided to buy all the product in it, because they could then insert themselves between the baker and the rest of the tourists, making a nice profit for themselves.

The baker could raise the prices, but he would have to react quickly to the changing market demands.

What Uber is doing is they are looking at all of the information at once and deciding that the market conditions are such that raising prices will in fact allow them to make more money by finding the new equilibrium price for their service. If there is much more demand than there is supply, raising prices is a very legitimate (and used) method of ensuring efficiency, which otherwise would be much lower.

I am not Peter Thiel and I think welfare is horrendous and should not exist, nor should any form of welfare like system. Welfare is what keeps people down, lulls them into the sense of entitlement, that somebody else must work to keep them living.

WHY?

Why should anybody be forced by the (very visible and well armed) hand of government to pay for other people's consumption? Actually my argument is based not only around economics, but most importantly around immorality of slavery, which is what welfare recipients get in the system that they vote for: slaves.

Anybody who is forced by the well armed hand of government to pay any taxes (or when money is borrowed, so future taxes, or when money is printed, so the inflation tax) to support consumption of anybody is a slave of the system and I am completely and 100% against slavery.

Slavery is when your property and/or labour is forcibly taken away from you and given to anybody else. If you charitably provide somebody with money they need to survive, that is great, your life and your choice. Income based taxes, borrowing that causes future growth of taxes, inflation (money printing) is all a form of slavery, which is why I am against any government maintained welfare state.

I am completely and consistently against any form of slavery and basically initiation of force by any government organisation. Of-course I am against slavery and initiation of force by anybody, however it is the government initiation of force that is the most immoral of all, since it is the 'law of the land', so to speak, so you can be born into a system that prearranged your slavery within it.