The silk road wasn’t taken down by an acronym. It was a bunch of hypocritical bigots called the American bureaucracy. They talk a lot about freedom but when they see something that promotes freedom like Wikileaks, south American socialism or the silk road, they seek to shut it down, often violently.

The people who believe that war criminals such as George Bush and Dick Cheney should be walking free and people like Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht should be locked up, these people are our enemy.

Why didn’t the ACLU defend Ross Ulbricht? What about all the whistleblowers that have been imprisoned lately? Seems like there are better candidates than this guy.

We are locked into the big heavy vehicle paradigm. People have become so accustomed to moving around in a 2t vehicle they have forgotten about the alternatives. Lithium batteries are not a good fit for this type of vehicle and most of the time the use case is single occupant, where the bicycle is king of efficiency.

Sadly, you are speaking for a great many places. I’ve cycled in most of the countries I’ve visited and it can be relatively dangerous.

If people want to see how to integrate a public transport network with a cycle path network, places like Netherlands and Denmark are leading the way.

Over here in the UK we have one of the most regressive attitudes to sustainable transport in Europe. Our trains don’t work and cycling is barely tolerated.

I’ll take the guy with man boobs under the stripey parasol

I would imagine most of these remote interviews are just an initial conversation and an employer would insist on a formal interview in person if they have a policy on physical presence. My policy is to advance the requirement that there be hot chicks in the office if I need to be in that space.

Do you have excess creative energy?

Pour it into discussion that achieves nothing of value.

I would imagine it’s very difficult to make a universal architecture but if I have learnt anything about computers it’s that the manufacturers of software and hardware deliberately created opaque and monolithic systems, e.g. phones. They cynically insert barriers to their reuse and redeployment. There’s no profit motive for corporations to make infintitely scalable computers. Short sighted greed is a much more plausible explanation.

The EU is one of the few institutions that are fighting the American corporations on our most basic freedoms. It’s the only one with real teeth.

It’s kind of lame that they need to junk the entire apparatus after only a decade. I get that processor technology moves on apace but we already know it does that so why doesn’t a universal architecture exist where nodes can be added at will?

The EU has found the cure for cancer

As engineers, we should never insert proprietary interfaces into our designs. We shouldn’t obfuscate the design.

The motivation for these toxic practices comes from the business side because it’s profitable. These people won’t share the profits with you because they are psychopaths. Ultimately we are making more waste when electronics cannot be upgraded, maintained and repaired. It’s bad for people and it’s bad for the environment.

I don’t have any suggestions, just want to say thanks for making this stuff. It’s very cool.

Genius idea. Is there an app that reverses a vasectomy and twenty years of aging? But seriously, this idea has got legs, I love it. Congrats with your baby. Have you made a Facebook account for them yet?

Classic?

This post made me beat my head with a 2 by 4

An assessment is not a measurement and safety is not an SI unit, deal with it bro.

It’s a measurement on an arbitrary scale. Nothing I’ve said is news to anyone who designs safety critical systems. I’m certainly not saying that safety isn’t important or that we can’t assess it. What I’m saying is that placing a number on that assessment will always stray into the realm of politics in a way that physics and mathematics never does. It lulls ignorant people into the belief that something is safe or not safe. They feel safe because they’ve been told it is safe or vice versa. Physics doesn’t care if you feel safe.

It’s notable that contemporary safety standards such as ISO 26262 generally avoid numerical assessments, for the reasons outlined above.

I take a lot of risks but never with yo mama. I always take my time with her.

Safety cannot be measured because it’s a feeling. One person feels safe climbing a mountain without a rope and the next person is petrified. Safety is just word to describe a concept. It’s different to the wavelength of light or force or charge. These things are based on fundamental properties of the universe that can be measured and are repeatable.

A reasonable approximation might be to consider the likelihood of an adverse event given a use case over time. We could say that an accident every million hours is our definition of safe but that is completely arbitrary in the way that the physical laws and constants are not.