Wasn't the money in Namibia given out to some of the poorest members of the community? The articles cited a 301 percent increase in self-employment. The concerns about gaming the system are certainly real, but it seems to me that you will always have outliers who want to take advantage. The question is whether or not a certain percentage of people behaving badly is worth the overall benefits to society, and I believe that is it.
As far as it being more of a burden on the middle class, I would happily pay more if it meant that everyone was getting more in return. Furthermore, why does it only have to be the burden of the middle class? If a corporation sees a 500 million dollar increase in profits because it aggressively automated its processes, why can't we institute rules to mandate they pay a certain percentage of the back into the UBI fund? More money for people means more potential consumers of their goods, right?
None of this is surprising to an extremely small subset of the global population, those who have had the means to study computer science and cryptography, and the history(ies) of government sanctioned spy agencies for a long enough period to be able to glean insights into the future behaviour of said agencies.
Since not everyone who reads this site meets those criteria, I suspect that it is even a not-insignificant subset on hacker news as well.
Does the developer have access to the raw data stream as well? I.e, can I apply filters the audio or record the incoming data?
If not, will I be able to run this concurrently with multiple audio gathering programs? Should probably google if a computer's input source can be multiplexed in that way :)
I'm sorry, but do you mean the violent behaviour that didn't cause the bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem? Or the persistent treatment of the Palestinians as non-entities in a country in which they account for some 20 percent of the population? Or perhaps you're refering to the hawkish attitude taken towards Iran and syria? Neither of those countries support anything close to democracy, but it's a farce and a damn shame to pretend that the religious extremists in Israel are anything but.
Did they run out of money to design the back or something? They can't have Jony Ive but was there no one else they could hire to approximate 60s era Braun? Like a 4th year design student?
As far as it being more of a burden on the middle class, I would happily pay more if it meant that everyone was getting more in return. Furthermore, why does it only have to be the burden of the middle class? If a corporation sees a 500 million dollar increase in profits because it aggressively automated its processes, why can't we institute rules to mandate they pay a certain percentage of the back into the UBI fund? More money for people means more potential consumers of their goods, right?