Billionaire capitalist talking some sense because he understands the tragedy of the commons? That's ... surreal.

It applies to anything televised, not just news anchors.

"Turtles all the way down" is an argument against the necessity of "God" as a source of existence. Basically, we're standing on a turtle, and "God" is the second turtle. Why do we need 2 turtles? Why can't we just accept this turtle below our feet is the entire world? If there must be a second turtle, why can't there be a third or fourth one? And then, you know, it's turtles all the way down.

I guess he means the theoretical bases on which these systems operate has not improved much. It's the same old tricks hacked together at higher and higher complexity, and the best guidance is uninformed trial-and-error. Useful sometimes and at times an engineering feat, but there's no interesting science in it.

Although I hate copyright extensions, your argument is weak. Selling things based older productions is probably a sizable revenue stream for a company over its lifetime. There's copyright on derivative work, so a competitor can't beat you out in making a sequel. It can also snowball into franchise over which you have a monopoly. This gives more incentive to make stuff.

It won't work. This system detects when a programmer is trying very hard to deal with a difficult problem. On the other hand, a decision to use LOC as a productivity metric is more of a result of a blank head and a habit to avoid inevitable difficulties rather than to face them up front

A lot of the strength in cryptography is lost in areas that depend on trust. Like trusting that the vendor doesn't put a backdoor in your system, or trusting your OS doesn't break your firewall, or that any third-party CA's are actually trustworthy, or there isn't a weird compiler bug that kills your entire encryption system. These things may be tested against and prevented one-by-one, but they are overhead, which makes the notion of security a matter of risk management. Cryptography tries hard to reduce the reliance on trust, but it's always a big issue.

More of a theoretician, I was once lectured by a competent software engineer that in security the devil is in the details, where any system has to stand the test of time and often goes through many fixes to be just usable. Theoretical security guarantees are much stronger what is often realized in practical security systems, because implementation details fall through cracks that are covered up by theoretical abstractions that breed high-level cryptography.

Just a note that it takes a strong economy and good financial health to peg a currency to the USD, or the currency will be destroyed by speculators anyway.

Sometimes true, sometimes not. An enterprise parasite looking for a golden parachute would rationally prefer to suppress disruption to his personal agenda in the short term rather than enhancing the business in the long term. Disclaimer: I hold no opinion on any conspiracy theories of this case.

US isn't seeing any of the benefits (yet) because it's a massive power that can borrow and print money willy-nilly, and the currency is mostly under control at the moment. But not all countries are like that. There are countries where something like Bitcoin can be a viable alternative to official currency, like Argentina. Bitcoin is flawed, but it guards against certain attacks that can be performed to a currency, in a way that is sometimes useful.

On the other hand, the way Dell accepts Bitcoin doesn't bear a lot of risk; a third-party accepts Bitcoin for them and pay them in cash, and absorbs fluctuation risk in return for some fees. It relies on customers bearing the risks themselves. It isn't a big step for Bitcoin; it is only a very small step towards forming a sufficient number of nodes of a skeleton that may or may not turn into an actual ecosystem that eventually circulates Bitcoin. But isn't a terrible decision for Dell either.

Build a system that offers only short term incentives, you can often end up, pretty predictably, with *nothing useful at all*. Lots of research is useless, but they often turn out to be so only after some difficult exploration. It's not very often that you can validly point to a researcher and say "I told you so". There are also research that look promising in early stages and turn out to be pure crap. Research is a treasure hunt - you dig the ground and most of the time it's just plain soil. You should reward risk-taking, because that's like paying the scientists of America each for a discount-price lottery ticket. And the results: even with immensely high research costs over the country, the overall profit is huge.

I think it is quite a big problem for pilots to stare at LCD monitors for 10+ consecutive hours without having a window to look out to.

Practically and theoretically, a lot of these rights come with a few "buts" and trade-offs. Due process forces you to give up a couple of rights under certain circumstances. Property rights are "rights", but virtually all governments have the power to claim land "owned" by anyone, most with policies that mandate compensation. Copyright enforcement excludes "fair use", which is related to public interest and the common good. Free speech is a "right", but there are also widely-accepted libel laws. Many other rights are subject to conditions (being in a certain society, accepted some kind of responsibility), even at the philosophical level, especially those classified as non-natural rights. Even with your definition of "rights", note that the "right to be forgotten" is not a universally accepted concept; the "right" part is just a name arbitrarily given to this legal notion, and this very naming is subject to debate, so is the extent of matters that are covered by this "right". Just because somebody else calls it a right doesn't mean you have to defend it unconditionally. Diminishing this "right" doesn't give you a slippery slope to mess with other rights.

The "right" to be forgotten has not yet made its way of being seen as a universal human right on par with free speech. Arguably it's often contradictory to free speech. It is not even well-defined; the name "right" was slapped on it too early before the matter was discussed enough. A concern of public interest is still valid here, and it should not affect the way people should view other rights.

But it's even harsher for people in their 30s with no substantial industry experience to speak of