Viewing profile — mdpopescu

Seriously, stop with this crap. The people on this forums are some of the people who have the know-how to actually DO something about the internet. If they can't discuss these thin…

> But the answer is not to stop having laws. Why? Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.) A…

Almost right. On the basis of their political affiliation, mostly.

Wait till you hear that the US Senate pressured Facebook...

And yet, the number of otherwise informed, intelligent people I've talked to who believe that the frequently-used image of the Covid virus is an actual picture is astonishing.

Yes. The reason is the most people are idiots. Like a ruler says in one of our books, "stupid, but many".

All blackmail involves exposing something that someone doesn't want exposed - usually because the "something" is illegal. And yet, blackmail itself is illegal. Most countries have …

He went against the consensus. You cannot go against the consensus.

There are a lot of use cases. For example, I have 17 applications running on a system that need a connection string. When I need to change that connection string, I can 1) change 1…

It's difficult :)

The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoo…

Eh, unlimited data plans might still be valuable to someone.

Really? So I can send anyone I want to jail, as long as they have one of these? Wow, that's definitely not going to cause problems!

Huh. Almost as if a company would provide a guarantee and only get paid if they kept the servers running for at least 99.999% of the time. Weird, huh?

> ... but the counter incentive is the free market. Yes. Which is why the free market is ILLEGAL in the medical system, in the police system, in the educational system, in the judi…

As a general rule, the entire medical profession has the incentives set up the wrong way - the more problems you have, the more they benefit. I have read that there was a time, in …

Huh. Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance? Would that be illegal? Would…

I have no idea why you believe TV makers won't handle this market. Here's a list of non-smart TVs on the local equivalent of Amazon[1], which includes this 75" 4K Samsung TV[2]. [1…

> Or if that doesn't work, then torches and pitchforks. It's America. I think the Matrix quote "guns; lots of guns" is more appropriate :)

Off-topic: this is one of the few comments you have that aren't dead.

> Or half of antartica disappearing? Or Australia, and Western United States constantly on fire? I rest my case.

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? In fiction? Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view …

I have. The number of people killed by the US government in the last 50 years dwarfs that of people killed by Facebook by many orders of magnitude.

> Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors. That's exactly my pos…

Name three scientific papers (that you have studied) that contributed to mobile phones.