Viewing profile — shasta

Isn't that mostly because of the legal process? When a guy is accused of rape, he's the one on trial. Mentioning his drug use might be excluded as prejudicial, even though the jury…

Of course it's not reasonable to conclude that he's telling the truth on the basis of her clothing. But my point is that it's also not reasonable to treat any mention of her clothi…

Your claim is that P(consent | sexy clothes) = P(consent | not sexy clothes)? Seems counterintuitive. Do you have evidence to support this claim?

Is there really a big problem with acceptable/legal behavior not being agreed upon? Isn't the problem usually that the guy claims "it was consensual?" Similarly, when police consid…

Is the analogy really that good? A pilot will never be called upon to engineer a plane. Lots of good "hackers" will get stuck if they have to design an algorithm.

Well, what did it do when you tried?

I think this is it. To be good at mathematics you need a considerable amount of time to sit and do mathematics. The only way someone is going to fund this as part of a job is if yo…

Patent lawyer or no, you're still more qualified than the average participant. I'm not sure what criteria you're using to judge that the proposal would be worse for a less wealthy …

Wow, a real patent lawyer in a patent law thread. You don't belong here, but I'll upvote whatever you have to write. I have a comment and a question: The comment. Summary judgement…

> I agree that the UBI should be flat, because anything else is equivalent to changing our tax brackets; and if we want to do that, we should just change our tax brackets. This was…

I got mine down to 0.31xxx. I did about a hundred strokes and it never went over 0.48.

According to Google, the average human male foot is 26.3 cm, or 0.86 feet. So I suppose I am literally 7 feet fall.

Simpler still: "the autopsy showed poison, so put the spouse in prison."

This article seems to miss the role of theories in physical sciences. When we talk about 'cause' we understand that to mean that some chain of events, governed by the rules of phys…

"On the eve of publication, Bertrand Russel wrote to Frege and pointed out that Frege's logical system allowed statements that were ambiguous -- neither false nor true." This makes…

Maybe this isn't enough data points, but I just tested this and the elephant with the human brain just lies there on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox

It's almost as if "number of lines" isn't particularly meaningful.

That's impossible. Everyone here knows crunch mode doesn't work and you're most productive working 20 hours a week.

From what I just read, it doesn't even sound that deep. If you ask me whether a good act was "intentional", I'd assume you mean whether the good effect was the purpose of the act. …

> The reason is quite simple. As inequality gets more pronounced, a larger fraction of the population faces more stringent budget constraints, and the spectrum of possible economic…

That's a pretty simplistic explanation. There are lots of ways to mess up Lisp in an attempt to enable the style of meta-programming that Kernel supports. What distinguishes Kernel…

Your last question is a good one. How can we set up checks and balances so that the surveillance apparatus cannot be misused? This is particularly important in our democracy, where…

I anticipated the word games, which is why I wrote "or at least the dystopian society that the term is intended to conjure." I did not admit that most terrorism is in response to o…

Look, I value my privacy too and I don't want to live in a police state, either. I don't think giving additional power over to our government at its current levels of incompetence …