rxp's comments

"Slow money" in Neptune's Brood is a digital currency, and is confusingly referred to as a "bitcoin" a few times, but it's actually a really fascinating idea that's very different from BTC.

The gist of it, if I remember it right, is that all transactions are authenticated by an interstellar 2-phase commit handshake. The distances involved keep the value of the currency stable, because transactions can take decades to process, and the direction of the signal is actually used as a form of authentication, to guard against (literal) MITM attacks. The goal of slow money was to have a currency that was stable enough to finance multi-century interstellar colonization projects.

What's to stop people from just running off with your loan? Would you require some sort of tie-in to real-world identity?

This article is weirdly convinced that Microsoft is talking about dual-booting WP and Android, but even the source article they cite says that that's pretty unlikely.

If only we had some sort of rigorous process for evaluating the evidence impartially, and coming up with conclusions, and constantly reevaluating those conclusions when new evidence comes to light.

Actually, I've heard of something like that - I think they called it "science". Hey, maybe we should put some "scientists" on this question, and see what they come up with!

Keeping an open mind is one thing, but if you ever take what any politician says at face value, then you're nuts.

Politicians like Matt Ridley can say what they like. I'll believe that things have changed when experts in the field begin to say so, and not a moment sooner.

The way I read it, the author is asserting that Microsoft did exactly what a corporation is "supposed" to do, by focusing on maximizing shareholder value, and in the process stagnated. Meanwhile, Apple and Amazon are held up as examples of companies which culturally value customers more than shareholders, and as a result do better for shareholders as well.

This would imply that doing what's best for shareholders in the short term looks very different from the long term.

Ah, yes, very logical of you. I think I recognize the form of the proof; isn't this the same basic argument that Fermat used to prove his last theorem? :p

Anyway, your point isn't nearly as straightforward and uncontroversial as you've made it out to be. You're not just saying that people should discuss things using logic, you're saying that people should discuss things using logic exclusively. Or at least that's how I interpret your statement that we should be insulted when somebody uses rhetorical devices.

If you really have the philosophical or mathematical background it would take to make a proper argument grounded only in logic, that would be one thing (and I suppose I can't conclude that you don't, based solely on the lack of evidence so far). What you see entirely too often online, though, are people who claim to be making perfectly logical arguments, but are only able to do so because they're extremely cavalier with their axioms ("freedom trumps health", perhaps, or "it is only possible to have a rational discussion with somebody who explicitly rejects all other forms of reasoning".)

And, for the record, I am explicitly not claiming to be making a proper, logically sound argument here. I acknowledge and accept that I don't know how to do it properly, and I'd most likely just make a mess of things.

Come on, like you're any better.

You start off with a dismissal of the author's point based on a completely subjective value judgment, then point out some trivial rhetorical techniques to try to discredit their argument, and then you make another completely unsubstantiated value judgment by saying that we should be insulted by any argument that's not laid out in bland logical terms.

What part of what you have said is based in reason or logic? Should I be insulted by your comment as well?

RAINN's numbers only cover the US, as far as I can see, and the US is only about 5% of the world's population. So if we extrapolate naively from your numbers, we end up with 160,000, which is a lot closer to the figure from the article.

Ouch, sounds like somebody got hit by a really bad batch of drives. Always a risk when you buy a bunch at the same time. :/

You are oversimplifying by assuming that the supply of applicants for a given job is gender-neutral. I think it's generally accepted that one of the causes of the wage gap is that women are pushed toward stereotypically "female" careers, and those usually pay less.

Sure, but all the leaks so far are about cases where your data is already going through Microsoft services. If there were any evidence that there was a backdoor in Windows itself, or in any Microsoft software, then you'd have a point.

So... does that mean that it's right? Because I don't think you can prove a point by assuming the existence of things that haven't been invented yet.

> Aren't you curious why the majority of programmers have dark hair or brown eyes? Sometimes it doesn't matter.

Is that actually true? If there's a statistically significant difference compared to the population as a whole, then I am definitely interested in why.

I don't understand where you're coming from at all. You care about women in the tech industry, you want more good people in the industry, but you don't care at all about social forces that might be driving people away? Not even enough to wonder about what they are?

When there's obviously something driving people away from tech, then I'm sorry, but you can't say "I don't care let's stop talking about this" and pretend that that's a neutral position.

And... you're satisfied with that explanation? "There are fewer women in technical careers, because fewer women choose to go into technical careers, QED"? You're not even a little bit curious about why that might be the case?

But top schools like that admit (and I'm completely making this number up, based on average class size for a school like that) on the order of tens of thousands of students per year, combined, and most of those are not going to be "rural kids". For the kinds of kids the article is talking about, the price of tuition at Stanford is basically irrelevant.

The more interesting question is, what kind of financial aid can they expect at your average state university?