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Comment Re:Insurance (Score 1) 217

Enough commenters have said something along those lines that I think it deserves a response

Kickstarter is an investment platform. Investment does not require you to receive equity or similar (indeed, in the broadest sense, any financial transaction that offers a (potential) return can be considered an investment). In the case of Kickstarter the return is twofold: the formal reward the project gives you for the backing and the creation of a product you wanted to see, but that wouldn't have made it to market otherwise.

Really this latter one is the whole point of Kickstarter: I want to be able to buy x, but it isn't available. Some other people want to make it but don't have the money. I'm not a serious investor - I don't want to jump through the hoops of VC or Angel investing - here is a way I can help make the product a reality so that I can have it in my life. Call it a donation if you will, but it's not a traditional altruistic donation in the way that one might donate to the Red Cross or the local Scouts. And it certainly is an investment: You are giving them cash in the hope that you'll have the opportunity to get whatever product they're developing. But there's certainly no guarantee it's going to happen.

As for all the people calling it a rubbish investment platform: at the end of the day that decision is for the investor to make. If you think it's rubbish don't use it, simples.

Comment Re:Lost focus (Score 1) 52

Yes, I'm sure Ayatollah Khamenei and Kim Jong Un will join in with the ban and won't begin plotting the obliteration of civilisation. The reality is, even if the US, Russia, UK, China, France, India and Pakistan all claimed to have decommissioned their nukes we wouldn't know for sure. The state that secretly hasn't may gamble they're the only one and use them. And then you have states like Israel that probably have nuclear weapons but will neither confirm nor deny it. No, we're safest keeping a nuclear stalemate balanced between the major power blocs with the majority of the nuclear armed states openly so.

FWIW, out of the states listed above (excluding Iran and NK, but including Israel) I'm not most worried about east-west relations; it's the two states that are less than friendly with each other but share a large land border with sporadic violence between them (one of which could, not inconceivably, have an Islamist government at some point in the future) that make me most jittery (on the plus side they're probably only interested in nuking each other and neither of them are near me). Israel don't worry me too much because all the countries they're likely to want to nuke are close enough to Israel to make that a very unattractive option. Iran and NK are the wildcards - NK in particular because they're already almost totally isolated from the rest of the world and I doubt Kim Jong Un gives enough of a rat's arse about his people to care if they get atomised.

Comment Re:Insurance (Score 1) 217

Why? Kickstarter is an investment platform, not a preorder platform; this is the single most important thing to understand about Kickstarter. In return for investing in the product you get some kind of reward, often the product, but you are not purchasing the product. You are investing in the product, and that carries a much higher level of risk than in a simple purchase - one of those risks is that the product will fail to deliver to the original spec. If you don't want the risk don't use Kickstarter, you can't get insurance on other forms of investment like stocks and shares. Also, it's most likely that purchase of the insurance would be heavily weighted towards more ambitious/higher risk products; so I'm sceptical that it would be viable. (Unless you make it mandatory... but I think that would drive profitable, low risk products away from the platform.)

Certainly in some cases there may be issues where a product team has misrepresented what they can do, squandered funds or created some other issue of fiduciary trust; in these cases there are legal routes to seek recompense. In cases where a project just fails for some reason... that's part and parcel of R&D, the backers knew the risk. And, this project, seem to have followed completely the correct course releasing the fruits of their labour to the community for others to build on: in this way the original backers don't lose out, they can still exploit the benefits of their investment.

Comment Re:But can we believe them? (Score 3, Insightful) 99

Initially I thought we could probably believe that they believed it. But then TFA said this:

...we are conscious that [they] have ... legal support that go[es] far beyond that ... typical. And, we are concerned that they[NSA, GCHQ et al] could be involved in such indiscriminate operations against private companies with no grounds for suspicion....

This seems to be a bit more than simply "you can't prove a negative"; it seems to be a warning carrying overtones of much that's been left unsaid. The reference to legal support seems to suggest that Gemalto have been on the receiving end of a visit from the men in dark glasses. "No grounds for suspicion" sounds like a ominous reference to suppressed truth, rather than just Russell's teapot

Comment Re:Dang! (Score 1) 99

Also the Gemalto internal network is not a series of tubes!:

It is important to understand that our network architecture is designed like a cross between an onion and an orange; it has multiple layers and segments which help to cluster and isolate data.

I'll definitely be filing that one on the list of creative computing analogies!

Comment Dang! (Score 1) 99

From TFA:

We immediately informed the customer and also notified the relevant authorities both of the incident itself and the type of malware used.

A lot of good "informing the relevant authorities" turned out to be (unless the customer was in China or Russia or somewhere, I suppose). They were just like "dang, we'll have to try harder next time". Or perhaps "yay!, they bought the distraction!".

Comment Re:Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy! (Score 1) 681

From TFA:

We have this top tier [of scientists] in the U.S., the people who graduated from Stanford, from Berkeley, from MIT, Cornell. Those people are still exceptional and really good. But we have this enormous gap between that and just regular software writers and farmers and people that need to be scientifically literate.

I don't think what I said is an inaccurate representation of the article under discussion. Now that article may not be representative of his usual, or actual, views. If he was put on the spot by the interviewer he may have given a less well planned answer than in other situations. And that's fine, I can forgive him for that.

But it didn't take me much scrolling through his twitter feed to find some incredibly bad science. I would have hoped that "one of the foremost scientific communicators of our day" would know that science does not and cannot tell you what your rights are. Or here. One snow storm in Boston is as consistent with no climate change as it is with climate change, one would hope that "one of the foremost scientific communicators of our day" would understand the dangers of taking individual datapoints in isolation.*

*The fact that he may well know this, and know the rigorous statistics that support climate change, does not change the fact his job is to help people embrace scientific thinking. This means not tweeting blatantly erroneous logic, no matter how correct the conclusion may be.

Comment Re:Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy! (Score 1) 681

You originally said that to be consistent, if I shout down someone who says X is true, I should also shout down someone who says X is false. I didn't need to bring up "authority" at all to point out what a dumb statement that was.

OK, I should have written my comment from Nye's perspective not mine. If these "farmers" and "programmers" aren't qualified to speak then neither are democrat politicians nor green campaigners, regardless what opinion they hold. Only the high priests of science should be allowed to say anything. If Nye is going to apply appeal to authority then he should, at least, apply it consistently. You are making the mistake of assuming that a conclusion is all there is to an argument.

Consensus is part of the scientific method. You come up with a theory, test it with an experiment, publish your conclusion, and subject it to peer review where it may or may not gain consensus

No, consensus is part of the way science is done today (and not part of (formal) peer review, btw). The essential scientific method is observation > (falsifiable) hypothesis > experiment to test > review hypothesis > repeat. Now there is a LOT of research published today, no individual could ever review all the data and hypotheses and form their own conclusions on everything: that's where scientific consensus comes in - it's a shortcut made of pragmatic necessity.

As for the peer review process the reviewers are assessing your paper for scientific integrity, reasonableness and originality (and whether it meets the journals standards of "importance"), nothing more. Now, in utopia, there exists an informal review process where others try and repeat your experiments, add to your conclusions, test your reasoning and so on; ultimately your work will be discarded or accepted. The reality is that this never happens for most papers, but even when it does that process in itself does not lend validity to the conclusions, only the additional data and reasoning provided do so.

Comment Re:Evidence based, reasoned arguments don't work (Score 1) 681

I often hear people say things like this. It's hard for this to come across as anything other than a lazy "we failed to win the argument so lets just call them names" approach. Of course you don't think their arguments are correct, otherwise you'd (presumably) agree with them. Describing anyone with whose arguments you disagree, or who fails to come round to your position, as irrational and unworthy of engagement is a very dangerous form of arrogance that will quickly lead you into cognitive echo chambers - indeed your argument seems to display the very behaviour it purports to condemn. Sooner or later you will do it to the next Galileo.

If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defence of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.

Certainly the fact that some people are irrational is not an argument against maintaining logical argument. I don't think anyone benefits from widespread use of fallacious arguments. Not only do I not think that ends justify means, but I don't think the ends of such behaviour are positive. Say I'm a high profile science communicator and I call climate change deniers or creationists "idiots who are clearly wrong and I have a PhD, so you can trust me": it may very well be the case that reasoned logical arguments wouldn't have convinced that group of people, but what I've done is I've taught a whole load more people (including the school kids who are learning about science, what it is and how it works; who should be the next generation of scientists and reasoners) that argument from authority is an acceptable approach. I've done untold damage to the worldviews of people that were, or could have been, rational individuals.

Comment Re:Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy! (Score 1) 681

Yes. If I attack you for bad reasoning, say an appeal to authority, I should do so whether your conclusion happens to be valid or not. Now, if I were to say that that disproves your conclusion I would be guilty of argument from fallacy; but I don't need to say that. And certainly poor reasoning does nothing to help the cause of science.

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