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Comment Smile, semi-relax your posture, have eye contact (Score 3, Insightful) 218

Read up on defensive or aggressive versus relaxed/friendly postures (position of arms, leaning too far forward or back etc).

Also, actively listen, and try to understand what is behind some of the questions they ask. Make sure your more opinionated answers are not the kind that risk offending someone who is in the room.

Oh, and as toastmasters probably taught you, avoid saying ummm ahhhh, and keep your answers brief and to the point.

Comment What does "stealing" bitcoins mean anyway? (Score 2) 227

If you copy my wallet (cloudy or cold) and know the decryption password or whatever, presumably I still have it as well, since it's just digital data.

So it is a race to see who spends them first I guess, me, if I discover the "theft" quickly, or you right after you access the data.

Or I guess you could copy the coins data then do a secure wipe on my storage including my backups. That seems implausible if I have a decent backups policy.

Anyone know what "stealing" bit coins from MtGox actually meant in this case?

Comment Re:Do you want to have eternal life? (Score 1) 334

Best of luck with that. I all in favour of boat floating, and whatever floats your boat, as they say.

By the way, how did the each of the 80,000 servants and 72 virgins available as a reward for each one of "the people of heaven" die, anyway, and do they remain virgins forever? Just pondering, and these little "logic viruses" keep invading my beautiful dreams.

Comment Life is not about the individual (Score 1) 334

An essence of life is the continuation and gradual improvement of the self-sustainment capabilities of the information pattern that is conserved; that is, the genome.
Individual organisms are temporary containers (guardians) of the pattern, ensuring that the pattern survives (remains embodied in local matter and energy) for some more time. But each individual is almost always a redundant guardian of the information. There are many backups.

The inevitability of either accidental catastrophic destruction of the organism container, or of slow entropic decay of the complex structure and complex process of the container, is why life a) creates multiple copies of the pattern, and b) has a "reproduction of the container" mechanism, whereby the physical container's complex structure and process can be periodically rebooted. The container of the information is recreated in its simplest possible physical form, that uses the least material, and is again at a relatively simple and uniform beginning of its structural evolution. The beginning (embryonic) stage of the form, being simpler and smaller and newer in arrangement of atoms, is refreshed and cleaned of defect (like a rebooted computer), ready to begin its new round of combatting accident and entropy.

Another essence of life is entailed in the simultaneous creation of multiple almost identical but subtly varying containers of almost identical but slightly varying information patterns. This does not have to be specially engineered, because the variation (by accident and entropy) would be the natural expected outcome of multiple concurrent complex physical construction processes. It is generally the prevention of the variation that is remarkable, and was among the first results of the evolutionary selection process. By creation of multiple co-existent almost identical copies, a game playing field is set up, and competition (and co-operation strategies) ensue, and evolutionary selection creates more viable forms, and forms more viable) that become able to inhabit more general physical environments over time.

Endless perpetuation of one individual organism instance is not an essential feature of this evolution of self-maintaining information patterns, and may arguably be counter-productive to the larger maintenance of life agenda of life.

Comment Regulated by whom? (Score 1) 240

What jurisdiction has the authority to regulate inherently global cryptocurrencies? The UN perhaps?

I suppose every federal jurisdiction has an ability to regulate some things about how the currency is used inside their borders (e.g. how exchanges physically located there work and how they have to report),

is the definition of an unregulated currency a currency that no federal jurisdiction anywhere in the world, nor the UN, has regulated explicitly or implicitly yet?

Or is this another case of someone conveniently forgetting that there is a whole world out there outside of the US of A.

Comment If browsers auto-translate pages, what then? (Score 1) 506

The Chrome browser offers to translate whatever website's text into whichever language my operating system defaults to.

If all of the common web browsers / smart phones / google glass equivalents start doing this, I guess there will be no more need for this mandatory translation at the source side of things.

Comment This will get even more interesting (Score 1) 921

with the next generation of this wearable computing and recording technology, where the recording device will be so small it will be easily concealed as for example a finger ring, a watch, a button, or a bobby pin/hair clip.

I'm pretty sure we're all going to have to get used to the possibility of being recorded surreptitiously by others at any time, speaking pragmatically.

Even now, there are these things called eyes that most people have, attached to a vast memory device with a playback mechanism.

Before, you'd be reported on in a society gossip column or gossip network (if anybody cared about your existence and antics, that is).
Now you'll be on InstaTube or WhatsAppetizing or whatever it is.

Plus sa change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Comment Re:Wisdom follows, pay attention! (Score 1) 97

Where your'e wrong is two places:

1. All these concepts you speak of (private property, democracy) are just aspirations which are only effective if they can be enforced by direct force or by established and successfully maintained social structure and mechanisms of social pressure to conform to rules and norms. There is no "God-given" anything (such as "right to private property), because it is a given that there is no God (except, again, as a socially constructed collectively maintained concept: a meme if you will). So your word "sacrosanct" here, again, is just a wish, or a word used to invoke fear that there will be social consequences for violating it.

2. There is no fundamentally important dichotomy between the private and the collective, so long as the collective is acting to some degree as a super-organism, which most if not all collectives with surprising longevity must be doing. Again, individuals versus organized groups of individuals are more alike (in how they interact with their own parts and with their environment) than they are fundamentally different.
What we have is a continuum of self-interested environment-sensing and acting agents, from our individual cells and organs, to us as "individual" humans, through tightknit resource-sharing, inter-supportive family groups, to corporations and associations, to various levels of governed groups like cities, states, nations, and federations. All can "claim to have and act as if they have" private property:
- cell 1 to cell 2: this is my blood sugar, I'm taking it inside, you can't have it
- person1 to person 2 or to nation 3: This is my house and possessions with walls and doors and you can't have it or live in it:
    oh and this is my gun and I'm gripping it tightly and pointing it at you and you can't have it, or the other stuff I mentioned.
- nation 1 to nation 2: this is my fertile valley near an ocean port. I'm invading it and building a wall and an army around it, and you can't have it.
- nation 1 to person 2: Get over yourself. If I want your stuff I will incarcerate you or eliminate you, and take your stuff.

 

Comment Re:blatant copyright violation?? (Score 1) 248

If you publish something, and don't indicate that you have restricted the right to copy it, I can legitimately assume that you are not intent on restricting the right to copy it. I can assume, if I wish, that you have put the item in the public domain, by publishing it without any notice of your intent.

If you later decide to exercise your legal ability to restrict copying, you can inform people of that, but that should carry no legal weight retroactively. If I republish before you have asserted that you are restricting, c'est la vie. If I republish after I should have known your intent to restrict, then I am at fault.

Comment Re:Hacker??!! (Score 5, Insightful) 248

Ok I'l give you another analogy.

This is pretty much like leaving a stack of pamphlets on a table in a train station, then arresting those who pick one up for possession of classified material.

I can't make it any clearer: Content that is behind a URL in a publicly searchable server directory, with no password or secure session protection, has been placed in plain sight in public. There is no fault in accessing it, nor in republishing it (posting the pamphlet on the door of your house) unless it contained an explicit copyright restriction statement.

Comment Re:Hacker??!! (Score 5, Insightful) 248

Hey!

The world wide web was designed to make accessible via hyperlinks (URLs) a whole bunch of documents / generated content. Key word being accessible. If someone is stupid enough to put documents intended not to be public on the public world wide web, that's their issue.

It is not a transgression on the part of the person who used the URL to access the content, doing nothing more than the technology is explicitly designed to do.

This is just another example of judges who got an A in social studies and a C in technical subjects making asinine rulings about use of technology they don't understand.

Comment The controversy is why is science being attacked (Score 1) 665

If I were a teacher in a little town like Lord's Mudbucket, South Carolina, I'd teach the theory of evolution of religion, as a means of gaining insight into why there is a controversy in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Ref: "Evolution for Everyone" David Sloan Wilson"

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