Your comment doesn’t make any sense.

The fundamental forces are physical forces.

It is feasible for consciousness to be something like a force (more accurately, perhaps, a field) and as such it would be by definition a “physical” force. The use of the modifier “physical” on force doesn’t make much sense here: all forces are physical, as are all things that actually exist. It could be useful to consider the objects of consciousness as emergent, and the force of consciousness as fundamental; I don’t know enough about this line of thought to say much on that.

Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.

That’s literally what the comment you’re replying to says. Emphasis on “as far as we know”. There’s no obvious way to dismiss it outright as not being a force, it’s just that as far as we know currently, it isn’t a force.

I don’t personally have a well thought out stance on the matter.

the worth of the guns and tanks and other things we’ve been giving them that were just collecting dust over here?

Use of reserves motivates replacement. Just because you’re giving them weapons that were produced in the past, and therefore whose (production) cost has already been incurred, doesn’t mean that occurs in a vacuum. With stock running low, contemporary money goes in to replenishing that stock. In effect, there’s no difference whether you send old or new equipment, because both incur costs in the present.

No actual money was involved and so didn’t really cost us anything.

It cost you exactly the amount it cost to produce them. Just because it was produced in the past, doesn’t mean it was free. You paid for it X years ago, and are only now seeing it used. You paid for it. Moreover, you’re now going to pay to replace it.

Tangentially related but I can’t seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:

1. Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
2. If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
3. Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.

Congratulations citizen! You have been awarded with a 600 FICO score for promulgating sinophobic nonsense. If you also prove that China is the Big Evil, you can get an additional 250 FICO score.

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I don’t think you see the irony in using the dead trope of “Social Credits” when an actual credit score exists in FICO and can be used to deny you housing, loans (and therefore access to education), jobs, and more. And if you think it’s just financial transactions, try looking at what companies like LexisNexis have on you that it coalesces into things like “RiskView”, or how much of a profile skip tracing agencies have on everyone. Then you have the profiles built on you by several government domestic (and foreign) surveillance agencies. And you have the profiles built on you by several big tech companies. Just because there’s not a single, unified, government-sponsored surveillance and consumer rating agency doesn’t mean the tangible effects of such disparate systems aren’t identical to what you claim happens in China (i.e., denial of services and access). It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 different entities controlling parts of the system if the end result is identical.

Call that tin foil hat syndrome or whatever.

Racism. It’s racism and xenophobia.

If you support the death penalty then you believe either:

• The government’s judgements are infallible and it would never falsely execute an innocent person, OR
• You are okay with the government executing an innocent person.

I definitely don’t think they’re infallible, as there are loads of cases where people are exonerated only after serving decades in prison, or after their death. And I’m definitely not okay with the government executing an innocent person.

No point lying. If you check the modlog plenty of his comments get removed. You can check for yourself.

I’ll just summarize my point: if you think you have educational value in your comments, that value is nil if the comment gets removed.

As someone who largely agrees with the content of what you have to say, your delivery is absolutely disgusting. You litter every comment with personal attacks, insults, and are needlessly offensive. I genuinely don’t know if you think that aggression helps get your point across, but it doesn’t. And, considering how many of your comments get removed by mods for that insult and disrespect, you should realize that even if you personally think it’s constructive, the mods don’t. If you think the content of your comments is valuable, don’t you think it’d have more value if it is left up for others to see, instead of having it removed where nobody can learn from it? If you resort to this namecalling and aggression so much, and the comments get removed, they’re of no value. As an outside observer, by reading your comments, I’m less likely to trust what you have to say, and instead would assume you have a set agenda that you won’t stray from. Your behavior detracts from your trustworthiness.

So what’s the conclusion as to what’s happening?

As I wrote about in a thread a couple weeks back (here, here, and here), this should have been fine, and was fine on paper.

According to official statements it was going to be diluted, before release, to a level that was even lower than what Fukushima NPP put out while operational. Then it was going to be released at a rate that maintained this concentration.

Did Japan lie? Did it not dilute how it said it would? Was it a technical failure and dilution did not occur at the level they said it would, or was it released too fast at the dilution level they set? Was there not testing at release time/site?

Olga is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion”, telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.

Russia, Donbass, and the reality of the conflict in Ukraine

It is disturbing how righteous you feel in your ignorance.

If France does that we will beat their ass.

I wish I could say this response is surprising, but it’s really not. When you can’t win by diplomacy, reasoning, and discussion, and when you feel that you have the right to punish other countries for being sovereign, you resort to force and “beat their ass”.

Do you believe France is sovereign, can make their own decisions, and can act in their own best interest, and are fully competent and able to do so? Or do you not believe they have the right to be sovereign and you (whoever “we” is) have the right to force them to align with your interests? If they end up in any agreement with China, it was their own decision and they did so because it benefits them in some way; do you feel you are permitted to punish them for that?

It’s interesting how you went from “it’s not relevant at all” to “it’s relevant in general but not in this case” after I gave you a reply.

If you have found a new security or privacy flaw, I would love to hear about it. But pushing your irrelevant opinions on others who are not interested, is unpleasant for us, and a waste of time for you.

My opinions are not irrelevant, as I laid out in my previous comment that you just agreed with. Others are obviously interested, and it’s not “unpleasant” for them, as people responded and upvoted (and no downvotes)–indicating it’s relevant. It’s not a waste of time for me, because not only did it take me negligible time to type literally three sentences (actually, I copy-and-pasted the comment from one I made earlier, I didn’t even write it fresh here), but it has value to others and as such is not a waste of time for me.

So whether he agrees with you that guys can become girls or vice versa, or whether he believes the same narrative that you do regarding corona is simply irrelevant.

The strawman construction was a nice little touch. Completely ignoring the part where I laid out that my personal stance and agreement or disagreement with the CEO is irrelevant, you act as if I personally disagree with the CEO and then use that to dismiss me.

You obviously have an agenda. So be it. But this conversation is truly a waste of time: you were obviously wrong and as soon as that was pointed out you shift goalposts.

If you think the two are unrelated you’re oblivious to the considerations that must be taken into account when discussing potential privacy concerns in software. It’s not ad hominem to acknowledge that the personal convictions and values of the CEO (and indeed other employees) can potentially decrease the sense of privacy of a product.

If the CEO is so adamant in his anti-X stance that he decides it’s acceptable to censor access to materials about X, or perhaps worse that he decides to expose anyone using his software that discusses or supports X, would not consider those valid concerns?

Companies are made of people, and software is made by people. Since people are not neutral, companies and software are also not neutral. The stances of a company or software on privacy, freedoms, etc are all influenced by the stances on those exact issues by the constituent people of the company and developers of the software.

Consider Elon Musk and Twitter. Given Elon’s personal beliefs and how adamant he is to enact and enforce those beliefs, do you consider him a neutral influence on the privacy of Twitter as a product? There is no way to see him as a neutral influence; he has direct influence by his ideological stance on the software. As such, if you have enough distrust in him or his ideological stance, that can transfer to distrust in Twitter as software.

In fact, it’s not even about whether I support the CEO or whether I think his stance is “right” or “wrong” as you imply. It’s entirely about how the CEO sees his beliefs in relation to the company and product he’s overseeing. I could entirely agree with the CEO and still consider their influence to be a detriment to the product if he puts his ideology ahead of pragmatism, for example.

It depends on how Google wants to play this. If they require website operators to use WEI in order to serve ads from Google’s ad network (a real possibility), then suddenly 98.8% of websites that have advertising, and 49.5% of all websites would be unusable unless you’re using Chrome. It’s probably safe to assume they’d also apply this to their own products, which means YouTube, Gmail, Drive/Docs, all of which have large userbases. The spec allows denying attestation if they don’t like your browser, but also if they don’t like your OS. They could effectively disallow LineageOS and all Android derivatives, not just browser alternatives.

A fork like Vivaldi, Brave or Opera could opt not to implement these changes

It doesn’t quite work like that. They wouldn’t choose to not implement the change, because the change comes from upstream via Chromium. They would have to choose to remove the feature which, depending on how it’s integrated, could be just as much work as implementing it (or more, if Google wants to be difficult on purpose). Not implementing the change is zero effort; removing the upstream code is a lot of effort.

Within the context of Chrome and other Chromium based web browsers, this means that Google will be able to monitor your web browsing in a new way any time you’re using a browser based on Chrome/Chromium.

With only slight hyperbole, we can say that Google can do this monitoring already.

What’s worse, is now they can:

• Refuse you access to information by refusing to attest your environment.
• Restrict your browser, extensions, and operating system setup by refusing attestation.
• Potentially bring litigation against you for attempting to circumvent DRM (in the USA it’s illegal to bypass DRM).
• Leverage their ad network to require web site operators to use attestation if they wish to serve ads via Google. AKA force you to use Chrome to use big websites.
• Derank search results for sites that are not using attestation.

In my opinion, the least harmful part of this is the ability to monitor page access, because they can more or less do this for Chrome users anyway. What’s really harmful here is the potential to restrict access to and destroy practically the entirety of the internet.

So far, the USA alone has spent more on this war than Russia has. And the USA is not the only one sending money and resources to Ukraine.

ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it.

You must have the distinct privilege of not living in the USA or several other Western countries.

I’d jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

If you mean jump ship off that ISP, there’s nothing you can do. You can go to another ISP (if there even is one in your area), who will do the exact same thing. You can jump ship entirely and not have internet, I guess.