saraid216

Sure, as a band-aid to make existing real people feel secure? Hiding things and keeping them hidden is fine. It's just an indicator of how far we as a society still have to go.

Do remember: "it's our responsibility to hide things to support freedom and democracy" is the exact argument used by the government against things like Wikileaks. The exact argument.

Comment · 11 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8150346

Comment · 11 years ago

Javascript will run anywhere you have something to run it on, same as Java, or any other language.

Comment · 11 years ago

  style['border-width']

Comment · 11 years ago

What exactly is it you think the problem is?

Comment · 11 years ago

It's a noble attempt at compromise, but at that point, you're not talking about UBI anymore. The entire point of UBI is a rejection of the notion that a person must contribute before they have permission to live. It's a statement that the right to life is inherent to every individual, details on the morality of suicide or abortion aside, and that if we can't simply provide those necessities, then we can at least provide the means to get them through guaranteed income.

Basic Income is, by itself, already a compromise. To compromise again is to no longer be a separate concept.

At the point you're talking about, it's not actually different from the situation as it stands now: what you're really saying is that the minimum wage needs to be sufficient for living expenses. Nothing more.

Comment · 11 years ago

He didn't cite http://theoryoffun.com/ either.

Comment · 11 years ago

They're not expected to go to the mill to help support their family.

Comment · 11 years ago

> And what are those benefits, exactly?

The fundamental offering that diversity brings to a society is plurality of opinion. This presents us with a mildly interesting paradox: a segregated society has no use for plural opinion, but a highly integrated society flat-out lacks them: diversity is the middle ground at which plural opinion is available.

As an aside, mainstream "controversy" is a segregated-society phenomenon, not a diverse-society one. You can tell the three kinds by their reaction to a reasonable alternative: a segregated society reacts with hostility or contempt; a diverse society reacts with toleration or moderation; an integrated society reacts with confusion or ignorance.

Comment · 11 years ago

Dammit. I thought I had been careful enough to get the correct number.

Alright. Picking the simplest formula off Wikipedia, cosine of 85 degrees is ~0.0871557 times a (6378137m) times pi is ~1746383.9m for the circumference. That's still approximately 500k squares at the exact latitude. My point is one of the sheer magnitude still available.

What I should do is calculate how many decimal points down from 90 degrees 3 meters is and get that circumference, since that's the low bound, but I'm not really feeling up to the number-plugging.

I could be incorrect about what a is; I presumed it is the semi-major axis on WGS84, but I might have picked the wrong thing.

...

Ooh. I forgot there's a Wolfram|Alpha. ... And 10 minutes later I haven't convinced the input parsing to give me what I want. Oh well.

Comment · 11 years ago

That's true for large chunks, but I'd imagine 3 meters is small enough to remain useful well past the 85 degrees latitude mark. Straight Dope informs me that the circumference up there is approximately 24k miles, which becomes 38,624,256 meters which means approximately 1 million divisions.

As long as the system works, what's the big deal?

Comment · 11 years ago

Oh dear, no.

Legislature is the business people. The executive is the developers. The judiciary is the test team. That's how it's designed in the Constitution. The "original intent" of the judiciary was to be the guys waving their hands frantically saying, "Uh, this is a bug," while being completely ignored because there's a ship date to meet.