All Hail Azathoth! The Primordial Chaos that gave Birth to All and shall Devour All!

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Actually I think we do need to change it. We need to bring programming into the modern world.

master/slave should be changed to warden/convict.

If I could pay FB a subscription fee in return for owning my own information then I might actually start using them. Their main hurdle would be to build up the trust they would need for me to actually believe their offer was genuine.

It seems clear to me that to the extent that "you" fall into such a black hole, you are a particle not a human. Since, apparantly, once you're inside determinism no longer applies there is no way your human body with all its complex interactions will still function properly and you as a person will cease to be pretty fast.

The term "free will" is so poorly defined there is still debate over whether you can have both free will and have deterministic behaviour.

My prediction is that we will never define "free will" to include anything but humans, certainly not other animals. We might be prepared to extend it to sufficiently advanced machines (we made them after all, so their free will is our great success!) and also any intelligent extraterrestrials we might encounter.

Free will is a red herring. Why is it even important to know whether people have "free will"? It is little more than a poorly defined dick measuring contest we've invented to make ourselves look superior to all the other animals.

The various failure modes of the hyperloop system were described in some detail in the initial paper released by Elon Musk's team. In essence, the only catastrophic failure mode is if someone blows up the part of the tube that your pod is about to enter so that it cannot slow down in time to avoid crashing into the breach. Every other failure mode is fairly easy to deal with and the main drawback is that the failure of one pod or one tube section will slow down the entire system until they can get it handled.

The hyperloop system depends on being at very low pressure and most of the failure modes involve an increase in air pressure up towards outside pressure - either as a consequence of the failure itself or as a response to the failure. This slows down the pods safely, everything comes to a stop, and there will be some work to evacuate the passengers.

Strictly speaking a laptop isn't a desktop computer.

Not having kept in touch, how is linux battery and sleep management these days?

This is an undesirable measure for a forward-looking regime like China's: they don't want to deny their tech sector etc. access to knowledge sources useful to their profession.

They have an alternative however, they can mirror wikipedia within China and censor their mirror while blocking the international site.

We have many trillions of dollars sunk into infrastructure that depends on the local environment being what it was when the infrastructure was designed and built. If the environment changes significantly in its average or peak temperature levels, or its humidity, or its solar radiation, or any of a range of other environmental factors, then the infrastructure may see reduced functionality, increased wear, or outright failure. As climate changes start to make themselves known in earnest we will have to start chasing them to patch up all of this infrastructure which imposes a tremendous cost on us. Instead of maintaining our existing bridges, road systems and hospitals we will need to come up with a hasty plan to relocate the Netherlands, build sea walls around Manhattan, allocate new areas and develop them to house everyone who needs to leave their old homes on the Equator, etc.

While the Antarctic may eventually become habitable, relocating e.g. a hundred million displaced Chinese there is going to be tremendously expensive and a huge drag on the global economy that we might have avoided with relative ease by simply stopping coal subsidies and letting market forces phase in solar for us.

Easy. Just put reddit on the blockchain.

Because your greatness is measured by the enemies that you keep.

A Russia whose enemies are Georgia and Ukraine is a puny Russia. A Russia whose enemies are the US and NATO is a great Russia. Putin wants Russia to be great.

That provision is in there to prevent the ride sharing companies from putting the line "Charlie Baker Tax $0.20" on the receipts. It is obvious to everyone that these $0.20 will be coming from the customer, because Lyft doesn't actually print money, but the moment they expllicitly admit in writing that this is the case they are in vioation of the law.

Charlie Baker protecting his own ass in other words, making sure it's illegal to tell the voter why Lyft prices have gone up ever so slightly.

On the other hand, when you actually think your work is likely to get you suicided by the feds it gives the term a whole 'nother meaning wouldn't you say?