Of course. Obviously as he claims he isn't a feminist either, he must be a feminist, right?

RoK has nothing to do with the MRA movement, he's red pill and despises men that want equal rights for men.

Still, when you look at some proxy variables for discrimination, such as imprisonment, homelessness, victimization rates in violence, suicide rates and average lifespan it's quite interesting how most groups suffering discrimination are overrepresented in those negative outcomes. Except when it comes to women vs. men, when apparently women are so discriminated against, yet somehow seem to avoid actually suffering from the worst outcomes that usually follow such discrimination.

But well, hey, they're not as well represented on corporate boards, which most men are.

It's not about who's pure. I can't control information once third parties have it. Pure today, evil tomorrow, who knows. I don't like sharing anything with Dropbox, Apple or Facebook either, and I try to avoid it.

It's just that I already use Google for searching the web, for maps, and for translation. And I use Youtube. I also store my contacts and keep a few bookmarks with Google because I use Android, but I'm close to stopping that practice.

Because of Google's search they collect too much information about me already, and I'm wary of them regardless of what they do or do not do. (Well, unless they encrypted everything client side with free software, utterly blinding themselves and their clients to everything I do)

I need to use Google a lot less, and I'm always on the lookout for ways to:

1) Use it less
2) Deny it access to information about me
3) Feed it false information about me
4) Encourage others to do all of the above

They already have too much of my online attention. Sharing anything except my searches with them is a non-starter. It doesn't matter how well implemented the service is. Because it's Google, there's just absolutely no way I'm using it.

I won't even look at files people try to share with me through Google. I just say, "Sorry, I don't use Google drive!" I feel so strongly about it I don't even care if it loses me business or friends.

I doubt it's actually possible to enforce encryption backdoors beyond a few major vendors. The result would be similar to exiting attempts to prohibit reverse engineering. It's impossible to outlaw debuggers, disassemblers, logic analyzers, and similar tools. It's like outlawing radios that can tune in to any station. It's been done, but it's not all that effective.

Even if all software from major vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and Google implemented protocols with backdoors, correct implementations of the underlying algorithms are necessary for those to function.

We've seen forced decryption laws in the UK. Forward secrecy basically defeats RIPA, because you can't force someone to decrypt something they never had the key for in the first place.

China has attempted to regulate cryptography, essentially requiring a license to develop, buy, sell, or research encryption. They have mandatory key escrow too. It's useless. Everyone uses encryption all the time. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Such backdoors aren't enforceable in open source projects. If this comes to pass then free software will have a great competitive advantage.

Hopefully an autonomous system would be designed so well that no human pilot could think that. See for example NASA's Adaptive Control tech; even if that's made to assist human pilots, the fact that it can actually bring some semblance of control to a plane that has lost function and form in many ways shows what can actually be done.

And as Air France Flight 447 shows, pilots may very well do the completely wrong thing, ignoring every correct procedure intended to prevent disaster.

But the most important, and often overlooked, part of such a system would be that you cannot skimp on the electronics. With an autonomous plane, if there's a problem with frosting over on sensors, you're grounded. There's no 'but the pilot is human so he can fly blind if the autopilot fails'. It has to be 100% reliable, all the time, and with massive enough over-redundancy that the plane would essentially already have to be falling apart into pieces for the overall control systems to fail. That would of course be a significant help to human pilots as well, as it sometimes seems they're being used as an excuse to live with flawed instruments and quality deficiencies in the planes.

Yeah, a better compromise is removing the pilots. If it's possible to build an autonomous car, building a completely automated plane is a simple exercise in comparison. Run it on cargo for a few years, leave an option for remote control, but frankly, between terrorists, suicidal pilots, drunk pilots and pilots doing the completely wrong thing, it's time to look for a more long term solution.

You can find any number of stories about people without any acting skills convincing those professionals that they are psychotic. Frankly, it's just a question of presenting the correct initial criteria, of which the first one will be 'being delivered by the police', and confirmation bias will take care of the rest. Seeing a lot of pathology simply doesn't help that much when symptoms are as vague and subject to interpretation as they are with mental illness.

Usually people seem to have a harder time convincing the professionals that they are, in fact, perfectly rational and not suffering from any serious mental illness. That will of course be an uphill battle against confirmation bias; they are, after all, in a psychiatric holding facility.

If I ever get the fleeting motivation to just get it over with, I certainly don't want anyone intervening, because at that point I'll know that the only thing worse than depression is ending on your deathbed at an advanced age with the biggest regret in your life being that you didn't end it a long time ago, while there still was something but a wasteland of meaninglessness to look back on. Once anhedonia has turned everything you ever used to enjoy into ash and you're a shadow of what you were, it's not like there's much left to save. Just some flesh going through the motions like some horrific parody of life.

And no, the vast majority of suicides would not ultimately be grateful if they were saved. Ultimately they'll just be dead. Either way. Like everyone else.

I'd find the arguments for suicide prevention much more convincing if the proponents weren't seemingly suffering from psychotic delusions that they're not just postponing the termination point. I get the uneasy feeling that it's more about refusing to face their own mortality than any genuine concern for how the individual will experience the rest of their existence. That they have their delusions threatened by people deciding to check out early.

It would be far more honest to simply admit that as biological beings we are, for some very logical evolutionary reasons, afflicted with a certain level of mental illness, delusions and compulsory behaviour that will make us prefer living to dying and if the depressed person will give it a chance and take some help, maybe the lower biological instincts will assert themselves and override the cold logic of reality. And we can pretend that it'll last... just... a... little... bit... more...

That's true, but there was no book at the library that listed which articles in the newspaper we decided to read and which ones we decided to skip. The post office didn't make copies of all our letters and the phone company didn't record all our calls. When we used a map to find directions, none of this information used to be recorded. When we had our photographs developed, we could be quite sure the photo lab wasn't making copies of all of them.

Records of our financial transactions were much more limited because most of them were cash. Now we use payment cards for almost everything.

The economics prize is not a Nobel prize, it's a memorial prize to Nobel, instituted by the Swedish Riksbank (central bank). If economics as a science is even mature enough to have any serious prize is debtatable, considering the state of the field seems to be pretty much still arguing about whether the earth is flat or spherical (and awarding 'Nobel prizes' to members of both factions, plus the faction arguing that the earth is actually a dimension-traversing hypercube).

But then again, there's a Nobel prize for literature, so maybe they could merge the economics prize into that one.

I think the idea is to have a huge source of neutrons in physical proximity to increase the chances of one leaking into the other universe first so it can leak back on the other side of the shielding.

Android developer here. Samsung has good reason for not pushing an update: The update breaks a lot of stuff.