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Comment Anthropic principle (Score 0) 138

Anthropic principle can be applied here. If birds had teeth, they would evolve into mammal-eaters and pose great threat to any mamal that lives above surface. It is hard to imagine human evolution in such circumstances. Basically, if birds had teeth, there would be nobody intelligent to observe them. It is one of many unlikely random events in nature (including many constants physics) that is somehow biased towards our existence.
Google

Eric Schmidt: To Avoid NSA Spying, Keep Your Data In Google's Services 281

jfruh writes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensitive data.
Businesses

Sony Pictures Leak Reveals Quashed Plan To Upload Phony Torrents 130

retroworks writes Motherboard.vice offers an interesting scoop from the hacked Sony Pictures email trove. A plan championed by Polish marketing employee Magda Mastalerz was to upload false versions of highly-pirated Sony programming, effectively polluting torrent sites with false positives. For example, a "Hannibal"-themed anti-piracy ad to popular torrent sites disguised as the first episode. Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them. There were plans in WW2 to drop phony counterfeit currency to disrupt markets, and I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread. Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites? For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?

Comment Elephants can paint too (Score 1) 91

We know that african elephants are capable of painting beuatifull pictures, so it is quite easy to imagine Neanderthals doing that and much more then that. It seems, that intelligence is not "so special" as we tought. We probably slaughtered Neanderthals, otherwise we could have 2 intelligent species already (and probably many more to come in the coming millions of years).

Comment Reason (Score 1) 276

If we imagine society as noise of randomly colored dots, for example, blue dots can represents people currently connected to Facebook. There are so many blue dots in current society, that highly intelligent person could easily predict this even 20 years ago, right? Well, problem is, this color first appeared couple of years ago, there was no blue color among dots we see *at all*. Breakthrough events that forms society like this comes like explosion, and brings new colors that was never seen before. We can predict and imagine only in colors we know, not in colors we've never seen.

Comment "Dolmush" (Score 5, Interesting) 72

In Turkey, I saw even better thing. Idea is this: public transport bus is too slow and awkward: stops are either sparse - lots of walking, or dense - making traveling too slow, and taxi for single person is too expensive (fuel + driver). In Turkey these is this "Dolmush" thing, which is mini-bus, that stops anywhere (like Taxi), costs fix rate (like public transport) and is just practical. It kicks ass of all other forms of public transport *AND* computerized car/taxi sharing.

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