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Comment Re:Everyone wants to be compuserve... again. (Score 0) 70

With respect to the post office scandal, the issue is partly that the rules of the court mandate that a computer should be trusted unless there is a reason to distrust it, and partly because Fujitsu, The Post Office Ltd and their lawyers engaged in a criminal conspiracy to conceal and destroy any evidence that the computer system was highly suspect, to charge individuals with theft and false accounting when they reasonably believed them to be not guilty of the charges, and to prevent any defence lawyer from discovering how many other people were being charged with false accounting and theft by the Post Office.

I mean, to be fair to the court rule, it's terrible but it's not the main reason for the scandal. The main reason is conduct which could be described highly unethical at best, knowingly criminal at worst. I would like to see the innocent vindicated and changes to the system that allowed it to happen. Justice for the perpetrators is probably beyond hope, but there will always be some people to carry the can.

Comment Re:Does the pr0n still carry a stigma? (Score 0) 187

*MANY* years ago, the ISP I worked for received a threatening letter from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, threatening consequences for our hosting of pornography. We didn't worry too much about it but our upstream contract terms forbade it so we investigated it. It was an online lingerie store that one of our customers hosted... It's not easy to define porn across borders.

Comment Not one biologist in the list of authors (Score 0) 112

really, this doesn't seem right. Not one biologist of any kind collaborated on this? Philosophers and planetary scientists?

It seems to me this is purely descriptive, and doesn't really reflect what evolution is.

Is it a natural law that simple structures combine into complex structures, when that begs the question can complex structures combine to create simple ones?

I think about the meaning of those words and wonder how a philosopher put their name to this.

But then, I only read the abstract...

Comment Prime Directive (Score 0) 39

I am thoroughly ashamed of the title of this post.

If the telescope can detect where life may be, these are the planets we must steer clear of. Our arrival in *any* form is very unlikely to benefit the life of that planet, more likely that we will harm it in ways we cannot predict.

I mean, the ways are unpredictable. The harm is predictable. We must avoid them. Totally. To the point where any encroachment into the solar system is forbidden.

Comment Re:Why minus the criminals? (Score 1) 67

When the UK narrowly voted for Brexit

The UK didn't vote narrowly for Brexit. England & Wales had a narrow majority for leaving the EU. Scotland & NI had a pronounced majority for remaining but numerically it was outweighed by the population of England.

Many of the problems in the UK are down to the massive disparity in electorate sizes in the constituent countries and the inability of the English electorate to recognise that they remain in a political, customs and currency union called the United Kingdom. It would be funny if they didn't keep voting for politicians with such hateful policies.

Comment Re:Redistribution pools (Score 1) 263

I really like this idea.

However, I see a flaw that should be addressed.

This generates poor outcomes for members of the board who are in disporoportionately large characteristic groups which maintain their homogeneity. This assumes that the group is likely to be the dominant subgroup (let's just go with straight white men for now) and outgroups are at structural disadvantage.

In boards which have already bucked the trend of the dominant group (a largely femail board, or one that is predominantly a non-white ethnic group) would be incentivised to make their boards more diverse (not a bad thing in itself, but the rule is meant to address the dominance of another subgroup which is the typical issue)

In addition to this, any minority on the board would be incentivised to keep their anomaly status if they received the balance of the redistributed pay. There should instead be a win-win outcome for individuals

But there is a really good idea in there.

Comment Re:Probability for intelligent life (Score 1) 71

The oldest tools found yet are around 3.3myo. They pre-date humans and the homo genus. That's well within hominid evolution timescales. The tools are stone.

Humans haven't changed significantly for hundreds of thousands of years, and our tools didn't vary greatly from several million years ago until a few hundred centuries ago. And of course, we appear to be heading towards a mass extinction event of our own making!

Compare that with what went before. We have fossils of animals (including dinosaurs) which are relatively few, considering dinosaurs spanned 165MY. Unusual circumstances turned creatures into stone (this is a massive simplification, don't @me!). We often only find them because they are exposed, and they would quickly (archaeologically speaking) be weathered away.

If any creature had developed tools or civilisation before hominids, the timescales since then would pretty much guarantee that organic remains and inorganic remains would have been exposed, weathered and gone before we saw them. The archaeological window would have closed to the tiniest crack.

The point I'm making is that any previous intelligent life on the planet may be nearly impossible to detect, however many times it developed. The accidents that preserve evidence are rarer than the accidents that erase them - and we may not recognise them for what they are because we are looking for evidence of hominid intelligence.

Comment TLDR: No. (Score 1) 513

As always, I, like the rest of the world, am staggered by the USA's inability to grasp the basic relationship: more guns and less regulation means more gun deaths. AI will not help. Just get rid of the guns. I won't be coming back to read any replies to this, if you disagree then you're part of the problem.

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