The problem with the Russian people is that they don't know how to care about these principles. They are, in a lot of ways, indicative of what Americans are on their way to becoming if oligarchs in the US have their way. The lesson that the despotism of other nations can teach democratic societies is that it is possible to erase the collective memory of oppression and injustice among a people in a remarkably short amount of time. By (1) controlling the flow of information, (2) indenturing the public by encouraging excessive consumption and accumulation of debt, (3) legitimizing mass surveillance and draconian policing under the guise of defending against various bogeymen, (4) removing accountability and transparency in corporate and political systems, an entire society can be reverted to totalitarianism in less than a generation's time.
I have heard this claim repeatedly made and used as justification for a wide variety of things ranging from why voice guidance in GPS systems are invariably female by default, to why women's voices are preferred in radio advertising. Yet I see little or no solid scientific research to back up the claim. I am frankly skeptical, because (1) female voices seem to me to be just as diverse as male voices; (2) ethnicity and language seem to play a huge role; (3) the perceived sexual attractiveness of a voice clearly is a confounding variable.
Even if it were true, it doesn't mean that the default should always be some cooing female, especially with a synthesized voice which can easily be modified to sound androgynous. That, I suspect, is more a reflection of the personal preferences of the system's designers than it is a decision based in science.
Just to conclude with an unscientific and personal anecdote, I've noticed that I sometimes find the sound of female voices when they are socializing to be extremely grating, more often than I do with male voices. There is of course no shortage of instances of either sex being loud and obnoxious over lunch or dinner, but for some reason, I find the sound of female voices to get very piercing and the manner of inflection to be particularly cringe-inducing.
Tells you how odious such "retention practices" are when the ability to quit a business relationship with a corporation without undue burden has to be legislated.
In regard to legal precedent, you are mistaken. One ruling by a lower court does not establish precedent, because other courts can (and in fact, did) arrive at different conclusions in substantially similar cases. A precedent is set when the Supreme Court makes a ruling, or refuses to hear a case (in which the preceding ruling stands).
The fact that Apple chose to contest the ruling and mounted a vigorous defense, pointing out all the flaws in the FBI's argument, demonstrated that the matter was not settled; moreover, it also showed that the FBI had not done its due diligence and that there was a real possibility that the Supreme Court could have ruled against the FBI, which would have been their worst outcome. As it became increasingly clear to the Bureau that: (1) Apple had called their bluff, (2) very strong and persuasive legal counterarguments had been made to undermine their position, (3) the media exposure would not work in their favor in the long run, (4) a legal battle could be very costly and time consuming and Apple has extremely deep pockets, and (5) the possibility that this could become a Congressional issue--you know, with actual citizens who would be affected and might think about how their representatives stand on the matter of government accountability and the right to privacy...well, it's not surprising that they didn't keep pushing. It's always easier for the government to back off and reserve the right to litigate or settle at some other time when the conditions are ripe.
While there is a great deal of corruption and hypocrisy at all levels of the government, and a corresponding lack of accountability, it is important to be able to recognize when we have not fallen further, because if all one can see is things getting worse and worse, it would be all too easy to simply give up. Apple has shown they are willing to fight this, if not directly for the consumer, then for its own self interest, which happens to align with the consumer on this matter. There is the need for educating people on the importance of information security through strong encryption. That this has played out in the public eye has been a good thing. But if all you can do is bitch about the government as a criminal enterprise and see everyone as being doomed, you are no better than those who are seeking to pick away at our rights
1. No legal precedent has been established that says the All Writs Act can be used to compel a company to write new software to circumvent an encryption scheme, or to force a company to turn over source code and signing keys.
2. The FBI's legal credibility has been damaged by erroneously claiming that all technological avenues to breaking the encryption on the phone in question, only to later say that they did have another approach and that it was successful. Whether or not this is true, the contradiction is now on the record: they complained, "we need the court to force Apple to help us because there's no other way," then said "never mind, we did it another way in the end." This potentially could be used against them in future court cases.
I, for one, would have preferred to see things settled decisively in our favor: that a legal precedent would be established enshrining the right to encryption. But things could have turned out a lot worse. We need to continue to fight for our right to privacy and security. It's not over, and it won't be over for a long, long time.
The fact remains that the only major technology company that doesn't base their entire business model around collecting and exploiting the personal data of its users, is Apple. You can't even say that about Microsoft, which we have seen is all too willing to force people to upgrade to their Windows 10 spyware. And your reaction is, "another humble brag?" Boastful or not, leaked or not, deliberate manipulation or not, the bottom line is that nerds who bitch and moan about the attacks by of corporate and government entities on the security and privacy rights of the user should not, in the same breath, insinuate that a company who at least makes the defense of user security and privacy a selling point for their products is just motivated by greed and making the issue a marketing point.
If you want companies to care about protecting your rights, it's naive to think that they should do it purely out of the goodness of their hearts. The fact that Apple wants to create products that are secure and that they don't want to be in the business of tracking everything you do so that they can sell that data to someone else, is far more than you can say about Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and practically every other tech company on the planet.
That calculation could be misleading because the time period is not taken into account.
The equivalent of 500000 car emissions for a year, when adjusted for the number of days of the leak, would be 1.63 million cars over the 112 day period for which the leak had not been sealed. Under the assumption that there are 253 million cars on the road in the US, the correct percentage would be 0.64%. Now, this doesn't seem like much, and I grant you that. 0.64% represents the proportion of pollution caused by the leak as a percentage of the number of cars on the road in the US over the same time period.
Had the well not been capped, this percentage would reflect the percent contribution to greenhouse gas emissions compared to automobiles on an ongoing basis. As the well was capped, the study chose to express the equivalent cumulative amount of pollution in units of car-years. Both are legitimate. Even your calculation is legitimate as long as it is made clear what it represents: 0.2% is the percentage contribution of the leak compared to the total annual greenhouse gas output of US cars.
As for whether this is a significant amount, I say it still is, because the loss is twofold: not only was there atmospheric pollution, there were economic losses as a result of a failure to burn the lost fuel. In other words, it could have heated homes and fueled industrial processes, instead of going to waste and causing a lot of inconvenience to the public as well as costs to cap the well. If you were very rich and had a billion dollars, and a hacker or thief somehow stole 0.2% of that wealth, most people would still be upset by losing 2 million of that billion, because it's money they could have used to buy something they wanted, even if in the big picture it only represents a small fraction of your total wealth.
Props to all the folks out there who can actually drink two cups of coffee a day, but I can't even tolerate one. As for decaf? Nope, I get the coffee shits. And it's not because of the caffeine, because I can have an energy drink without feeling like I'm pooping out my bloody entrails.
But it's all rather academic anyway, since I don't drink alcohol either. I'm the life of the party, I know.
All you have provided is individual anecdotes and irrelevant analogies.
The only thing that matters is the actual level of contamination in the affected body of water, as measured by scientific instruments, and an objective risk analysis of pathogenicity based on those measurements. In plain English, your stories about people swimming and fruit dropping from trees means fuck all.
The water was already tested many months ago, and the levels of harmful bacteria and viruses were deemed too high to be safe:
At that time, some people even suggested that athletes competing in these water events should arrive in Rio early, train in the contaminated environment, get sick with the local diseases, and hopefully build up immunity before the Olympics. That, in my view, is an insane proposition.
After reading Apple's iOS Security Guide white paper, it is doubtful that Apple can write any kind of software to load onto the device to permit any of those options. This is because once the device is locked, it will not install any updates to the operating system. The boot firmware is already installed and automatically runs when the device is turned on. Updating the operating system requires the device password. These functions are cryptographically secured. See the section "Keybags," subsection "Escrow Keybag" in the paper. The auto-erase and time delay features are enforced by the Secure Enclave in hardware, and cannot be circumvented.
"The backup set is stored in the user’s iCloud account and consists of a copy of the user’s files, and the iCloud Backup keybag. The iCloud Backup keybag is protected by a random key, which is also stored with the backup set. (The user’s iCloud password is not utilized for encryption so that changing the iCloud password won’t invalidate existing backups.)
While the user’s keychain database is backed up to iCloud, it remains protected by a UID-tangled key. This allows the keychain to be restored only to the same device from which it originated, and it means no one else, including Apple, can read the user’s keychain items.
On restore, the backed-up files, iCloud Backup keybag, and the key for the keybag are retrieved from the user’s iCloud account. The iCloud Backup keybag is decrypted using its key, then the per-file keys in the keybag are used to decrypt the files in the backup set, which are written as new files to the file system, thus re-encrypting them as per their Data Protection class."
The relevant sections begin at page 38, in which the paper discusses iCloud, Apple ID, and general Internet Services security. Your misunderstanding stems from the mistaken belief that you can just "restore" the iCloud backup of your phone to a new device. But to do this, you need access to the user's Apple ID password. If two-step verification is turned on, Apple definitely has no way to circumvent this.
It stands to reason that the purpose of trying to decrypt the phone after the event, and after the death of the perpetrators, is to see if there might be any information that might implicate other individuals as accomplices or sympathizers, so that those individuals can be investigated. But if it is not possible for Apple to decrypt the phone, then other avenues of investigation will need to be considered.
Of course, mathematics being what it is, and lawyers and judges being who they are, it is not the least bit surprising that the latter should be ignorant of the former. It's a unique form of hubris to think that one can somehow circumvent a secure cryptographic system by the mere force of law, as if jurisprudence supersedes mathematical truth.
The whole notion of "designer babies" is built upon the flawed presumption that who we are as individuals is solely dictated by specific genes or groups of genes, and that editing these genes can, GATTACA-style, determine with complete precision how all of the traits that make up our physiology and psychology are eventually expressed. I regard genetic determinism in a manner not unlike the role of Newtonian gravitation in physics: a useful model, but a grossly simplistic one that, from a philosophical perspective, should not be used to attempt to explain all phenomena. The notion that genetics can explain sociological phenomena is not something that I can hang my hat on, personally speaking. It simply doesn't have the mark of scientific reasoning. (Not that the opposing point of view is without its flaws, either!)
Now, can we use gene editing to treat genetic diseases? Probably. Could we use the same approach to make a child grow taller? To give them a more desirable physical appearance? To improve their intelligence? Such a notion may be eventually possible, but in the foreseeable future, it is still firmly in the realm of science fiction. The issue is not whether to draw the line at all, but rather, where to draw the line, because the reality is that gene editing is here, it will not be legislated or moralized away, and it is going to be used to treat disease and advance our understanding of all kinds of health issues. The bottom line is that people are getting hysterical over something that is not even remotely in the realm of possibility at this time, not because they understand the science, but because they have been watching too many movies; when in the present reality, there is a real potential to deliver effective treatments and improvements to the quality of life.
No, this is not an accurate understanding of Go strategy or how it is played at the highest level.
In fact, if the game is played in the way you describe, previous computer algorithms were quite good at analyzing the local interactions of pieces, yet were roundly defeated even by top-level amateurs with handicaps. The reason is that at more sophisticated levels of play, one's skill level is correlated with how one perceives and evaluates the entire board. There is a sort of "gestalt" of Go that good players seem to grasp in ways that are very difficult to objectively describe, and sometimes a stone placement can seem arbitrary but become pivotal many, many moves later. This is reflective of a deep and global strategy that computer algorithms--at least until now, it seems--have had tremendous difficulty in emulating.
I don't get this. Why would anyone willingly use a browser that is designed to serve you targeted advertising, when you can simply block all ads with a hosts file + adblock + noscript + etc? You're simply replacing one nuisance and security risk with another.
I have no guilt about blocking all forms of advertisement on the web, because content providers cannot assure me that such advertising does not pose a threat to my computer's security or to my personal privacy. End of argument. They're welcome to not serve me content for the choice I make, and I accept not being able to access that content. I have every right to choose which data I am being served, and they have every right to decide they would rather serve me nothing. But the notion of baking advertising into the browser itself, and passing that off as being secure and in the best interest of the user, would be laughable if it were not so obviously a deliberate attempt at deception.
Whoever did this experiment and presented the results is quite clearly a much better programmer than they are a statistician, because I have never seen the results of a statistical analysis presented in such a way.
Typically, charts for the sample proportion of observed frequencies, and their standard errors (not standard deviation) are plotted as points with error bars around them. It is also not difficult to go beyond descriptive statistics and perform a simple hypothesis test for whether a die is biased, or to calculate confidence intervals.
As the data are presented, it is really difficult to answer questions of the form, "to what extent is the variation observed in a given die's performance explained by random chance, and to what extent is it due to a physical bias in the die itself?" That is the crux of the matter and the proper context in which to frame the question that the experimenter seems to want to answer, which is, "which brand of die is/are the least biased?" You can't give a statistically meaningful answer to that question by merely calculating sample statistics.
We don't eat bugs because historically and culturally, bugs have been a sign of spoilage and infestation. Some cultures do eat mealworms, but this almost exclusively happens in places where agriculture is difficult and high quality protein sources are rare.
Another reason why we are averse to eating bugs is that they are eaten whole. There are few animals that we consume in their entirety.
Ways to get around both of these issues ultimately come down to processing. Chemical processing has the potential to extract the proteins while rendering the result into a form that is unrecognizable as being derived from an insect. But, for my own personal tastes, I am not any more or less inclined to want to eat a mealworm than I am inclined to want to eat the intestine of a cow. It's just that, on a cow, it's a lot easier to separate the muscle tissue from the organs.
Both the captain and co-pilot did separate calculations. They just happened to make two different arithmetic errors that resulted in the same incorrect result, therefore failing to detect the error. The captain failed to carry a 1. The co-pilot type in a 6 instead of a 7.
What this incident shows is that automation or the use of computers to do calculations automatically, does not necessarily improve reliability. Independent and redundant systems are instrumental in reducing error, but basic vigilance and attention to detail frequently is the most effective means in preventing mistakes.
The whining of the rich about how difficult it is to be them is nothing more than a weak post hoc rationalization of their hypocrisy. They WANT people to know they are wealthy, because it is not merely the exercise of wealth, but its ostentatious display, that translates to power. The rich would justify that display as simply the consequence of wanting to live well with their "hard-earned" gains. But this is overwhelmingly not the case.
I once dated a trust-fund baby. He was a spoiled, entitled, attention-whoring asshole. Despite his claims that he wants to be treated like anyone else, and that he understood what it was like to be like all the other middle-class people in his life, he really had no clue. He drove around in his Tesla, lived in his multi-million dollar house his parents bought him, and relished the attention that he got as a result. I saw it firsthand. There was scarcely a day when I'd sit in the passenger seat and someone would roll down their window and ask what kind of car he was driving (this was back when the Model S went into production). This is what the obscenely rich do: they are completely delusional about the magnitude of the difference between themselves and the common folk. It is not that wealth does not have its problems, but it is the extent to which they think they are just like everyone else, and consequently, that they deserve equal sympathy for their problems as everyone else's, that is so disgustingly offensive.
Humans, like our primate relatives, do eat non-vegetable matter. Moreover, there is a case to be made that it is through our discovery of FIRE that our success as a species really started to take off, because while other animals consume their nutrition raw, the act of cooking one's food to break down plant and animal matter enabled the human digestive system to be simpler and less energy-consuming. We essentially offloaded a good part of the function of digestion into cooking, and this is what allowed us to evolve an increased intellectual and physical activity.
That said, the reason for meat substitutes has little to do with theories as to whether we as a species were/are "intended" or adapted to eat meat. It has a lot more to do with the environmental efficiency and cost of producing large volumes of meat for a very large population of humans; moreover, a greater proportion of the human population is increasing consumption of meat due to the general rising standard of living in developing nations.
Therefore, any discussion of the palatability of artificially synthesized meat (i.e., any meat not systematically produced from the raising and slaughter of live animals), must include a discussion of the efficiency of the process. How much water does it use? How must does it cost to implement at large scales? How much electricity does it use? How much organic/raw material does it need? How much does it pollute, and what are its polluting byproducts? And how good is its nutritional profile? All of these questions should be evaluated in themselves as well as in comparison to existing meat production processes.
Meat consumption will never go away unless the supply disappears completely. What matters is not why we eat it or whether we should stop; what matters is how we can do it in a way that is sustainable from an economic, environmental, and public health perspective.
Nerds don't understand this fundamental point: just because it sounds clever to YOU doesn't mean that the rest of the world is going to find it just as benign. When your goal is to maximize adoption, the last thing you want to do is pick a bad name.
Object lesson: GIMP. Come on, seriously?
It's not a question of "is it offensive" so much as "is it a STUPID-SOUNDING NAME?" You might say, "well, people need to be less sensitive and grow the fuck up"--but the fact of the matter is that GIMP, despite being free, has never gained widespread adoption as a legitimate competitor to Photoshop, and part of that reason--even if a small part--is because it has a completely ridiculous-sounding name that people who need to use such programs for real work do not want to have to mention in correspondence.
Indeed. I actually got into an argument with a former acquaintance regarding this point. He claimed that pedestrians ALWAYS have the right of way, anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance. I then asked why people can be ticketed for jaywalking. I asked who has legal liability if the pedestrian willfully jumps in front of a car.
His inane response went along these lines: jaywalkers still have the right of way but are ticketed so as to discourage people from getting injured. The driver is always at fault because they have a duty to always look out for potential road hazards. Failure to keep an adequate lookout and safe speed means the driver is liable.
Obviously, CVC does NOT agree with his interpretation of the law.
Every time I visit SF I am surprised by how readily the pedestrians casually cross the streets--they will cross at red lights; they will walk into cross traffic without regard to safety, expecting drivers to stop; and if they do bother to look before crossing, they take their sweet time. If you tried to pull that shit in Southern CA, especially in downtown or west LA, you'd be dead by lunchtime. I also found that drivers in SF are a lot more cautious and less aggressive than LA drivers. LA drivers are scary, especially in the westside. The aggression levels there are insane: drivers cutting each other off, running red lights, not stopping at intersections, and squeezing through narrow openings are extremely common occurrences. I suspect it is a combination of the traffic and culture there: it's a lot of local streets, with almost no relief from constant traffic gridlock; then add in a culture that rewards self-entitlement and conspicuous consumption, and the result is a lot of people behind the wheel with death wishes.
People (and the advertisers and content creators that are vying for their attention) forget that WE are paying--and at least in the US, quite dearly--for the data usage involved in serving those ads. If I use an app or a browser that is offering content for "free," it's not really "free" if I am forced to download gigabytes of video advertisements each month. That's data I could have spent in other ways. So I have a simple proposition: if you are a content provider who wants me to watch your ads to support your revenue model, then YOU pay for the data usage costs to serve those ads to me. Why should I have to pay to watch your commercial? By all means, forward that cost on to the advertiser if that's what you need to do to make money. But as it currently stands, there is NO incentive for advertisers and content providers to limit the amount of data they make US spend pushing their intrusive advertising on us.
Furthermore, many of these content providers do NOT have a method of allowing us to pay to avoid seeing any advertising. So it's facetious to complain that we are taking something for nothing by blocking these ads, because you don't provide us a way to NOT have to see them.
The bottom line is that we will continue to see this arms race escalate because in reality, content providers are stealing from us: they steal our data allotments, our privacy, and our time. They steal it in the name of providing a "free" service. Personally, if the transgression is severe enough, I won't block your ads. I simply DELETE you from my life. If I do block your ads, consider yourself fortunate that I still even care you exist.
And since your educators did not teach you these topics, it very clearly shows through your failure to understand the distinction between "the origin of life" (as you put it) and "the origin of species" (as Darwin put it). The origin of life is, to a large extent, still a scientific unknown, in the sense that science has not yet been able to determine how life on Earth originated. That is not to say that we can never know how life on Earth originated, or that we cannot eventually discover and execute a plausible mechanism for the origin of life. We simply don't know YET.
But the origin of species--that is to say, the theory that explains how living organisms on this planet have adapted and changed in response to changes in their environment, thus leading to the differentiation and EVOLUTION of different forms of life--is by contrast to the former, very much a scientific known. The evidence is so abundant as to be utterly compelling to anyone who has not been blinded by religious dogma. The entire field of genetics was not known before evolution as a theory was proposed, yet those findings have reinforced evolutionary theory countless times.
And then, for your science teach to have said such a thing: "I will teach what can be reproduced in a lab or examined first-hand"--betrays her ignorance of scientific thought and discourse. First-hand examination or reproducible experiments are of course a foundation of good science, but these are not the only means by which science can be done. We cannot, for example, obtain first-hand evidence of the temperature of the core of the Sun. We cannot at this time create an experiment to directly measure the temperature of a coronal mass ejection. Yet we can, through indirect means, infer these things from other information we know about nuclear physics and thermodynamics. That does not mean we know with great precision what those temperatures are, but we can obtain useful models based on scientific reasoning. Insistence on directly observable phenomena as the only form of scientific evidence is such an egregious ignorance of science that I wouldn't consider your "science" teacher worthy of her credential.
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The problem with the Russian people is that they don't know how to care about these principles. They are, in a lot of ways, indicative of what Americans are on their way to becoming if oligarchs in the US have their way. The lesson that the despotism of other nations can teach democratic societies is that it is possible to erase the collective memory of oppression and injustice among a people in a remarkably short amount of time. By (1) controlling the flow of information, (2) indenturing the public by encouraging excessive consumption and accumulation of debt, (3) legitimizing mass surveillance and draconian policing under the guise of defending against various bogeymen, (4) removing accountability and transparency in corporate and political systems, an entire society can be reverted to totalitarianism in less than a generation's time.
I have heard this claim repeatedly made and used as justification for a wide variety of things ranging from why voice guidance in GPS systems are invariably female by default, to why women's voices are preferred in radio advertising. Yet I see little or no solid scientific research to back up the claim. I am frankly skeptical, because (1) female voices seem to me to be just as diverse as male voices; (2) ethnicity and language seem to play a huge role; (3) the perceived sexual attractiveness of a voice clearly is a confounding variable.
Even if it were true, it doesn't mean that the default should always be some cooing female, especially with a synthesized voice which can easily be modified to sound androgynous. That, I suspect, is more a reflection of the personal preferences of the system's designers than it is a decision based in science.
Just to conclude with an unscientific and personal anecdote, I've noticed that I sometimes find the sound of female voices when they are socializing to be extremely grating, more often than I do with male voices. There is of course no shortage of instances of either sex being loud and obnoxious over lunch or dinner, but for some reason, I find the sound of female voices to get very piercing and the manner of inflection to be particularly cringe-inducing.
Tells you how odious such "retention practices" are when the ability to quit a business relationship with a corporation without undue burden has to be legislated.
In regard to legal precedent, you are mistaken. One ruling by a lower court does not establish precedent, because other courts can (and in fact, did) arrive at different conclusions in substantially similar cases. A precedent is set when the Supreme Court makes a ruling, or refuses to hear a case (in which the preceding ruling stands).
The fact that Apple chose to contest the ruling and mounted a vigorous defense, pointing out all the flaws in the FBI's argument, demonstrated that the matter was not settled; moreover, it also showed that the FBI had not done its due diligence and that there was a real possibility that the Supreme Court could have ruled against the FBI, which would have been their worst outcome. As it became increasingly clear to the Bureau that: (1) Apple had called their bluff, (2) very strong and persuasive legal counterarguments had been made to undermine their position, (3) the media exposure would not work in their favor in the long run, (4) a legal battle could be very costly and time consuming and Apple has extremely deep pockets, and (5) the possibility that this could become a Congressional issue--you know, with actual citizens who would be affected and might think about how their representatives stand on the matter of government accountability and the right to privacy...well, it's not surprising that they didn't keep pushing. It's always easier for the government to back off and reserve the right to litigate or settle at some other time when the conditions are ripe.
While there is a great deal of corruption and hypocrisy at all levels of the government, and a corresponding lack of accountability, it is important to be able to recognize when we have not fallen further, because if all one can see is things getting worse and worse, it would be all too easy to simply give up. Apple has shown they are willing to fight this, if not directly for the consumer, then for its own self interest, which happens to align with the consumer on this matter. There is the need for educating people on the importance of information security through strong encryption. That this has played out in the public eye has been a good thing. But if all you can do is bitch about the government as a criminal enterprise and see everyone as being doomed, you are no better than those who are seeking to pick away at our rights
Let's look at the positives here:
1. No legal precedent has been established that says the All Writs Act can be used to compel a company to write new software to circumvent an encryption scheme, or to force a company to turn over source code and signing keys.
2. The FBI's legal credibility has been damaged by erroneously claiming that all technological avenues to breaking the encryption on the phone in question, only to later say that they did have another approach and that it was successful. Whether or not this is true, the contradiction is now on the record: they complained, "we need the court to force Apple to help us because there's no other way," then said "never mind, we did it another way in the end." This potentially could be used against them in future court cases.
I, for one, would have preferred to see things settled decisively in our favor: that a legal precedent would be established enshrining the right to encryption. But things could have turned out a lot worse. We need to continue to fight for our right to privacy and security. It's not over, and it won't be over for a long, long time.
Really? Are we really that cynical?
The fact remains that the only major technology company that doesn't base their entire business model around collecting and exploiting the personal data of its users, is Apple. You can't even say that about Microsoft, which we have seen is all too willing to force people to upgrade to their Windows 10 spyware. And your reaction is, "another humble brag?" Boastful or not, leaked or not, deliberate manipulation or not, the bottom line is that nerds who bitch and moan about the attacks by of corporate and government entities on the security and privacy rights of the user should not, in the same breath, insinuate that a company who at least makes the defense of user security and privacy a selling point for their products is just motivated by greed and making the issue a marketing point.
If you want companies to care about protecting your rights, it's naive to think that they should do it purely out of the goodness of their hearts. The fact that Apple wants to create products that are secure and that they don't want to be in the business of tracking everything you do so that they can sell that data to someone else, is far more than you can say about Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and practically every other tech company on the planet.
That calculation could be misleading because the time period is not taken into account.
The equivalent of 500000 car emissions for a year, when adjusted for the number of days of the leak, would be 1.63 million cars over the 112 day period for which the leak had not been sealed. Under the assumption that there are 253 million cars on the road in the US, the correct percentage would be 0.64%. Now, this doesn't seem like much, and I grant you that. 0.64% represents the proportion of pollution caused by the leak as a percentage of the number of cars on the road in the US over the same time period.
Had the well not been capped, this percentage would reflect the percent contribution to greenhouse gas emissions compared to automobiles on an ongoing basis. As the well was capped, the study chose to express the equivalent cumulative amount of pollution in units of car-years. Both are legitimate. Even your calculation is legitimate as long as it is made clear what it represents: 0.2% is the percentage contribution of the leak compared to the total annual greenhouse gas output of US cars.
As for whether this is a significant amount, I say it still is, because the loss is twofold: not only was there atmospheric pollution, there were economic losses as a result of a failure to burn the lost fuel. In other words, it could have heated homes and fueled industrial processes, instead of going to waste and causing a lot of inconvenience to the public as well as costs to cap the well. If you were very rich and had a billion dollars, and a hacker or thief somehow stole 0.2% of that wealth, most people would still be upset by losing 2 million of that billion, because it's money they could have used to buy something they wanted, even if in the big picture it only represents a small fraction of your total wealth.
Props to all the folks out there who can actually drink two cups of coffee a day, but I can't even tolerate one. As for decaf? Nope, I get the coffee shits. And it's not because of the caffeine, because I can have an energy drink without feeling like I'm pooping out my bloody entrails.
But it's all rather academic anyway, since I don't drink alcohol either. I'm the life of the party, I know.
All you have provided is individual anecdotes and irrelevant analogies.
The only thing that matters is the actual level of contamination in the affected body of water, as measured by scientific instruments, and an objective risk analysis of pathogenicity based on those measurements. In plain English, your stories about people swimming and fruit dropping from trees means fuck all.
The water was already tested many months ago, and the levels of harmful bacteria and viruses were deemed too high to be safe:
http://espn.go.com/olympics/st...
At that time, some people even suggested that athletes competing in these water events should arrive in Rio early, train in the contaminated environment, get sick with the local diseases, and hopefully build up immunity before the Olympics. That, in my view, is an insane proposition.
After reading Apple's iOS Security Guide white paper, it is doubtful that Apple can write any kind of software to load onto the device to permit any of those options. This is because once the device is locked, it will not install any updates to the operating system. The boot firmware is already installed and automatically runs when the device is turned on. Updating the operating system requires the device password. These functions are cryptographically secured. See the section "Keybags," subsection "Escrow Keybag" in the paper. The auto-erase and time delay features are enforced by the Secure Enclave in hardware, and cannot be circumvented.
That isn't correct, according to the white paper:
"The backup set is stored in the user’s iCloud account and consists of a copy of the user’s files, and the iCloud Backup keybag. The iCloud Backup keybag is protected by a random key, which is also stored with the backup set. (The user’s iCloud password is not utilized for encryption so that changing the iCloud password won’t invalidate existing backups.)
While the user’s keychain database is backed up to iCloud, it remains protected by a UID-tangled key. This allows the keychain to be restored only to the same device from which it originated, and it means no one else, including Apple, can read the user’s keychain items.
On restore, the backed-up files, iCloud Backup keybag, and the key for the keybag are retrieved from the user’s iCloud account. The iCloud Backup keybag is decrypted using its key, then the per-file keys in the keybag are used to decrypt the files in the backup set, which are written as new files to the file system, thus re-encrypting them as per their Data Protection class."
The relevant sections begin at page 38, in which the paper discusses iCloud, Apple ID, and general Internet Services security. Your misunderstanding stems from the mistaken belief that you can just "restore" the iCloud backup of your phone to a new device. But to do this, you need access to the user's Apple ID password. If two-step verification is turned on, Apple definitely has no way to circumvent this.
It stands to reason that the purpose of trying to decrypt the phone after the event, and after the death of the perpetrators, is to see if there might be any information that might implicate other individuals as accomplices or sympathizers, so that those individuals can be investigated. But if it is not possible for Apple to decrypt the phone, then other avenues of investigation will need to be considered.
Of course, mathematics being what it is, and lawyers and judges being who they are, it is not the least bit surprising that the latter should be ignorant of the former. It's a unique form of hubris to think that one can somehow circumvent a secure cryptographic system by the mere force of law, as if jurisprudence supersedes mathematical truth.
(To borrow a title from Lewontin et al)
The whole notion of "designer babies" is built upon the flawed presumption that who we are as individuals is solely dictated by specific genes or groups of genes, and that editing these genes can, GATTACA-style, determine with complete precision how all of the traits that make up our physiology and psychology are eventually expressed. I regard genetic determinism in a manner not unlike the role of Newtonian gravitation in physics: a useful model, but a grossly simplistic one that, from a philosophical perspective, should not be used to attempt to explain all phenomena. The notion that genetics can explain sociological phenomena is not something that I can hang my hat on, personally speaking. It simply doesn't have the mark of scientific reasoning. (Not that the opposing point of view is without its flaws, either!)
Now, can we use gene editing to treat genetic diseases? Probably. Could we use the same approach to make a child grow taller? To give them a more desirable physical appearance? To improve their intelligence? Such a notion may be eventually possible, but in the foreseeable future, it is still firmly in the realm of science fiction. The issue is not whether to draw the line at all, but rather, where to draw the line, because the reality is that gene editing is here, it will not be legislated or moralized away, and it is going to be used to treat disease and advance our understanding of all kinds of health issues. The bottom line is that people are getting hysterical over something that is not even remotely in the realm of possibility at this time, not because they understand the science, but because they have been watching too many movies; when in the present reality, there is a real potential to deliver effective treatments and improvements to the quality of life.
No, this is not an accurate understanding of Go strategy or how it is played at the highest level.
In fact, if the game is played in the way you describe, previous computer algorithms were quite good at analyzing the local interactions of pieces, yet were roundly defeated even by top-level amateurs with handicaps. The reason is that at more sophisticated levels of play, one's skill level is correlated with how one perceives and evaluates the entire board. There is a sort of "gestalt" of Go that good players seem to grasp in ways that are very difficult to objectively describe, and sometimes a stone placement can seem arbitrary but become pivotal many, many moves later. This is reflective of a deep and global strategy that computer algorithms--at least until now, it seems--have had tremendous difficulty in emulating.
I don't get this. Why would anyone willingly use a browser that is designed to serve you targeted advertising, when you can simply block all ads with a hosts file + adblock + noscript + etc? You're simply replacing one nuisance and security risk with another.
I have no guilt about blocking all forms of advertisement on the web, because content providers cannot assure me that such advertising does not pose a threat to my computer's security or to my personal privacy. End of argument. They're welcome to not serve me content for the choice I make, and I accept not being able to access that content. I have every right to choose which data I am being served, and they have every right to decide they would rather serve me nothing. But the notion of baking advertising into the browser itself, and passing that off as being secure and in the best interest of the user, would be laughable if it were not so obviously a deliberate attempt at deception.
Whoever did this experiment and presented the results is quite clearly a much better programmer than they are a statistician, because I have never seen the results of a statistical analysis presented in such a way.
Typically, charts for the sample proportion of observed frequencies, and their standard errors (not standard deviation) are plotted as points with error bars around them. It is also not difficult to go beyond descriptive statistics and perform a simple hypothesis test for whether a die is biased, or to calculate confidence intervals.
As the data are presented, it is really difficult to answer questions of the form, "to what extent is the variation observed in a given die's performance explained by random chance, and to what extent is it due to a physical bias in the die itself?" That is the crux of the matter and the proper context in which to frame the question that the experimenter seems to want to answer, which is, "which brand of die is/are the least biased?" You can't give a statistically meaningful answer to that question by merely calculating sample statistics.
We don't eat bugs because historically and culturally, bugs have been a sign of spoilage and infestation. Some cultures do eat mealworms, but this almost exclusively happens in places where agriculture is difficult and high quality protein sources are rare.
Another reason why we are averse to eating bugs is that they are eaten whole. There are few animals that we consume in their entirety.
Ways to get around both of these issues ultimately come down to processing. Chemical processing has the potential to extract the proteins while rendering the result into a form that is unrecognizable as being derived from an insect. But, for my own personal tastes, I am not any more or less inclined to want to eat a mealworm than I am inclined to want to eat the intestine of a cow. It's just that, on a cow, it's a lot easier to separate the muscle tissue from the organs.
Both the captain and co-pilot did separate calculations. They just happened to make two different arithmetic errors that resulted in the same incorrect result, therefore failing to detect the error. The captain failed to carry a 1. The co-pilot type in a 6 instead of a 7.
What this incident shows is that automation or the use of computers to do calculations automatically, does not necessarily improve reliability. Independent and redundant systems are instrumental in reducing error, but basic vigilance and attention to detail frequently is the most effective means in preventing mistakes.
This. A trillion times this.
The whining of the rich about how difficult it is to be them is nothing more than a weak post hoc rationalization of their hypocrisy. They WANT people to know they are wealthy, because it is not merely the exercise of wealth, but its ostentatious display, that translates to power. The rich would justify that display as simply the consequence of wanting to live well with their "hard-earned" gains. But this is overwhelmingly not the case.
I once dated a trust-fund baby. He was a spoiled, entitled, attention-whoring asshole. Despite his claims that he wants to be treated like anyone else, and that he understood what it was like to be like all the other middle-class people in his life, he really had no clue. He drove around in his Tesla, lived in his multi-million dollar house his parents bought him, and relished the attention that he got as a result. I saw it firsthand. There was scarcely a day when I'd sit in the passenger seat and someone would roll down their window and ask what kind of car he was driving (this was back when the Model S went into production). This is what the obscenely rich do: they are completely delusional about the magnitude of the difference between themselves and the common folk. It is not that wealth does not have its problems, but it is the extent to which they think they are just like everyone else, and consequently, that they deserve equal sympathy for their problems as everyone else's, that is so disgustingly offensive.
Humans, like our primate relatives, do eat non-vegetable matter. Moreover, there is a case to be made that it is through our discovery of FIRE that our success as a species really started to take off, because while other animals consume their nutrition raw, the act of cooking one's food to break down plant and animal matter enabled the human digestive system to be simpler and less energy-consuming. We essentially offloaded a good part of the function of digestion into cooking, and this is what allowed us to evolve an increased intellectual and physical activity.
That said, the reason for meat substitutes has little to do with theories as to whether we as a species were/are "intended" or adapted to eat meat. It has a lot more to do with the environmental efficiency and cost of producing large volumes of meat for a very large population of humans; moreover, a greater proportion of the human population is increasing consumption of meat due to the general rising standard of living in developing nations.
Therefore, any discussion of the palatability of artificially synthesized meat (i.e., any meat not systematically produced from the raising and slaughter of live animals), must include a discussion of the efficiency of the process. How much water does it use? How must does it cost to implement at large scales? How much electricity does it use? How much organic/raw material does it need? How much does it pollute, and what are its polluting byproducts? And how good is its nutritional profile? All of these questions should be evaluated in themselves as well as in comparison to existing meat production processes.
Meat consumption will never go away unless the supply disappears completely. What matters is not why we eat it or whether we should stop; what matters is how we can do it in a way that is sustainable from an economic, environmental, and public health perspective.
Nerds don't understand this fundamental point: just because it sounds clever to YOU doesn't mean that the rest of the world is going to find it just as benign. When your goal is to maximize adoption, the last thing you want to do is pick a bad name.
Object lesson: GIMP. Come on, seriously?
It's not a question of "is it offensive" so much as "is it a STUPID-SOUNDING NAME?" You might say, "well, people need to be less sensitive and grow the fuck up"--but the fact of the matter is that GIMP, despite being free, has never gained widespread adoption as a legitimate competitor to Photoshop, and part of that reason--even if a small part--is because it has a completely ridiculous-sounding name that people who need to use such programs for real work do not want to have to mention in correspondence.
Indeed. I actually got into an argument with a former acquaintance regarding this point. He claimed that pedestrians ALWAYS have the right of way, anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance. I then asked why people can be ticketed for jaywalking. I asked who has legal liability if the pedestrian willfully jumps in front of a car.
His inane response went along these lines: jaywalkers still have the right of way but are ticketed so as to discourage people from getting injured. The driver is always at fault because they have a duty to always look out for potential road hazards. Failure to keep an adequate lookout and safe speed means the driver is liable.
Obviously, CVC does NOT agree with his interpretation of the law.
Every time I visit SF I am surprised by how readily the pedestrians casually cross the streets--they will cross at red lights; they will walk into cross traffic without regard to safety, expecting drivers to stop; and if they do bother to look before crossing, they take their sweet time. If you tried to pull that shit in Southern CA, especially in downtown or west LA, you'd be dead by lunchtime. I also found that drivers in SF are a lot more cautious and less aggressive than LA drivers. LA drivers are scary, especially in the westside. The aggression levels there are insane: drivers cutting each other off, running red lights, not stopping at intersections, and squeezing through narrow openings are extremely common occurrences. I suspect it is a combination of the traffic and culture there: it's a lot of local streets, with almost no relief from constant traffic gridlock; then add in a culture that rewards self-entitlement and conspicuous consumption, and the result is a lot of people behind the wheel with death wishes.
No no no... you don't understand. It's just THAT good of a ompression gorithm.
If I could give you mod points I would.
People (and the advertisers and content creators that are vying for their attention) forget that WE are paying--and at least in the US, quite dearly--for the data usage involved in serving those ads. If I use an app or a browser that is offering content for "free," it's not really "free" if I am forced to download gigabytes of video advertisements each month. That's data I could have spent in other ways. So I have a simple proposition: if you are a content provider who wants me to watch your ads to support your revenue model, then YOU pay for the data usage costs to serve those ads to me. Why should I have to pay to watch your commercial? By all means, forward that cost on to the advertiser if that's what you need to do to make money. But as it currently stands, there is NO incentive for advertisers and content providers to limit the amount of data they make US spend pushing their intrusive advertising on us.
Furthermore, many of these content providers do NOT have a method of allowing us to pay to avoid seeing any advertising. So it's facetious to complain that we are taking something for nothing by blocking these ads, because you don't provide us a way to NOT have to see them.
The bottom line is that we will continue to see this arms race escalate because in reality, content providers are stealing from us: they steal our data allotments, our privacy, and our time. They steal it in the name of providing a "free" service. Personally, if the transgression is severe enough, I won't block your ads. I simply DELETE you from my life. If I do block your ads, consider yourself fortunate that I still even care you exist.
And since your educators did not teach you these topics, it very clearly shows through your failure to understand the distinction between "the origin of life" (as you put it) and "the origin of species" (as Darwin put it). The origin of life is, to a large extent, still a scientific unknown, in the sense that science has not yet been able to determine how life on Earth originated. That is not to say that we can never know how life on Earth originated, or that we cannot eventually discover and execute a plausible mechanism for the origin of life. We simply don't know YET.
But the origin of species--that is to say, the theory that explains how living organisms on this planet have adapted and changed in response to changes in their environment, thus leading to the differentiation and EVOLUTION of different forms of life--is by contrast to the former, very much a scientific known. The evidence is so abundant as to be utterly compelling to anyone who has not been blinded by religious dogma. The entire field of genetics was not known before evolution as a theory was proposed, yet those findings have reinforced evolutionary theory countless times.
And then, for your science teach to have said such a thing: "I will teach what can be reproduced in a lab or examined first-hand"--betrays her ignorance of scientific thought and discourse. First-hand examination or reproducible experiments are of course a foundation of good science, but these are not the only means by which science can be done. We cannot, for example, obtain first-hand evidence of the temperature of the core of the Sun. We cannot at this time create an experiment to directly measure the temperature of a coronal mass ejection. Yet we can, through indirect means, infer these things from other information we know about nuclear physics and thermodynamics. That does not mean we know with great precision what those temperatures are, but we can obtain useful models based on scientific reasoning. Insistence on directly observable phenomena as the only form of scientific evidence is such an egregious ignorance of science that I wouldn't consider your "science" teacher worthy of her credential.