I don't care what our "founders" thought, I care what is just and right. But if you prefer we speak more pragmatically, all we need to do to change "the constitution" is persuade one additional member of the supreme court to change their interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. No new amendment needed.

Even if I had nothing I currently wanted to install, I would still jailbreak out of principle. I believe we should be able to do what we want with our own computers. The idea that we should be locked out of our own devices for our own protection is bullshit.

Flagged for unironic use of "Sheeple".

I'm not saying it's "automatically outdated" (whatever that means). I'm saying that the very idea of working to change it presupposes that there is some moral criterion that takes logical precedence over the constitution itself. If you allow for the idea that it ought to be changed under certain circumstances, then…

Glad to see that there will always be a good reason to jailbreak.

By that logic, the 3/5 provision for blacks in the constitution was not flawed until it was actually changed in 1865. Not only is it consistent to say that certain aspects of the US constitution may be flawed prior to amendment, it is nonsensical to claim that until it is actually amended, it cannot be outdated. How…

They need to divide these numbers by these numbers to get the normalized measure.

This and the "Real Clear Science" article misrepresent the original study. The original study showed that avoiding FODMAPs genuinely improves a range of gastrointestinal symptoms, and that people who avoid gluten often see genuinely improved symptoms due not to the gluten but to the FODMAPs, which are often…

As a kid, I always wondered by what path someone could come to willingly wear something as clearly evil looking as the helmets of Darth Vader or the Stormtroopers. It's been a long sad process learning the answer to that question.

You can read all about this in The Cloud Atlas, by Liam Callanan. Weirdly, that novel came out in the same year as Cloud Atlas, and I read it by mistake thinking it was the latter, but it's actually a quite good novel featuring Japanese balloons, maps, magic, a love story, etc. Another weird coincidence is that the…

A narrative, or a political philosophy, can be internally consistent, and logically flawless, and yet still be utterly divorced from reality.

as much as the political right uses it a lot to justify their ideas, it's also quite rampant in more or less politically liberal institutions, too—particularly universities and studies of the humanities.

A right-leaning magazine reports on a right-leaning government's report on how liberals are ruining the economy. One of the pitfalls of reporting on international news is ignorance of the sorts of political contexts we're much more aware of at home. How much credence would you give to an article in the Wall Street…

This should be contrasted with Naive Relativism, where it's all just a matter of perspective and taste and there are no grounds for serious argument at all. Not only is Naive Relativism dominant on arts sites like this one, where people mainly just assert that preferences are relative and there's no point in arguing…

For any non-US readers, you should know that only about a half of us approve of the death penalty. Yes, there are plenty over here whose idea of justice seems to be stuck at about the level of a 5-year old, or the Old Testament or the medieval era (like this guy); but the rest of us are not quite so primitive in our…

Where's the option for "appoint a trusted expert whose politics match your own to make these decisions based on much better information"? I have no idea what it should cost for effective transportation, education, or welfare. But I know people who do. I vote for them!

My two-channel approach (see post above) gets around this by using a pair of domino lines for each signal. The right one toppling is 1, the left is 0; a NOT gate is simply having the two lines cross over at some point. The video also has AND, OR and XOR gates, albeit a bit hard to discern embedded in the adders.

I did a version of this in 2009 — although I only implemented it in SketchUp. It uses two channels instead of one, but otherwise the same idea. I think the linked video adds 5+6:

Just for comparison, here is the version for middle east civilians since "we" invaded. Pixel number is approximately accurate.

The most proximate influence is probably M John Harrison's baan, in 1971's The Pastel City: