"charge the full societal cost of gasoline consumption (up to $1,000 per person per year [fullerton.edu]) and adding that to the price of gasoline"
That's nothing. If you want to charge full costs of consumption, then you need to look at road use. The damage to roads rises as the fourth power of vehicle weight, so a 40-ton 18 wheeler causes 160000 times as much damage to the road as a 2 ton SUV. Basically, truckers should pay for nearly the entire road infrastructure, excepting only residential roads. Instead, they are massively subsidized by private car owners. Which is to say: Amazon and other online retailers that rely on trucks for delivery are massively subsidized by private car owners.
Brick-and-mortar stores would be eternally grateful. So would all of the organizations that promote local produce. Transport is far too cheap.
Why not reduce emissions? I'm a skeptic: CO2 is a minor problem - there is exactly zero evidence of positive feedbacks. Nonetheless, you are absolutely right - there is no reason not to reduce emissions. However, it is a question of price. Where emissions can be reduced with a reasonable effort, then absolutely, there is every reason to do so. However, I disagree with efforts that are disproportionately expensive.
What I'm not seeing - from either side - is any attempt to produce a prioritized list. Either it's "OMG we're all gonna die - let's destroy civilization in order to save it", or else its "go away, don't bother me".
"It sounds like you are saying there is little value in pure research. Please elaborate."
Not at all. But: how many professors in how many universities are doing "pure research"? And how many are writing useless crap in journals that no one reads, because their university says they have to publish X articles a year?
As for students: the number of doctoral students has exploded over the past 20, 50, 100 years. We are awarding around twice as many doctorates now as compared to 1990. Yet there aren't any more really brilliant people than there ever were, and average students are not going to contribute to fundamental research.
The current "publish or perish" climate, combined with universities' hunger for grants, means that most professors forced to do "research", whether it makes sense or not. There's a whole industry out there to support pretend research - my email is continuously spammed with invitations from yet-another-journal that no one has ever heard of. This does not advance the state-of-the-art in anything, but it is a great waste of time and resources.
I'm speaking as a professor at a university, and I don't see why this is a bad thing.
Research at universities is a good thing, don't get me wrong, But R&D at companies is also valuable. In many cases even more valuable, because companies want research that actually leads to a practical result. Too many university researchers are farting around with abstract stuff of no foreseeable use to anyone, publishing useless results in write-only journals.
Research at a company is measured on a different scale: can it be used for something? Who thinks we would have multi-core, multi-GHz processors in our pockets, if this hadn't been driven by commercial interests? A few ideas were developed at universities, but practically the entire computer revolution has been driven by commercial research. Maybe it's now time for AI to follow that route as well - we've fiddled with it in academia since the 1950s, but finally - finally - it may lead to something more than niche applications in the real world.
This is all noise. The real, fundamental problem in the US is the fact that you can apply for credit with essentially *no* verification of your actual identity.
IMHO, these problems stem from the following source problems:
- Incompetent developers. Look at the number one problem, number one for years now: injection. I teach students how to avoid this the first time they touch a database, which is typically in year two of their degree program. It doesn't matter: half of them still write injectable queries, even though using "prepared statements" isn't any more complex. The thing is: there is so much code to be written, that even these students - who evidently don't understand, don't care, and can't be bothered - even these students will find jobs, and some of them will be working on your web projects.
- Internet speed. TFA talks about "agile methodologies" as if they were a good thing. While "iterative development" absolutely does make sense, in too many companies "agile", and "Scrum" and their brethren are an excuse for pushing half-tested code out the door, because everything has to be fast, fast, fast. I have news for the marketing department: No, your latest brainstorm does not have to be live next week. In fact, given that the brainstorm-after-next will basically reverse this one, it would really be better for everyone if you just fell off a bridge and drowned.
- Too many frameworks. Real example: I used to use Guice, a small dependency-injection framework from Google, for a small demo-project. A few months ago I decided to update Guice to the latest version. But the latest version depends on another framework, Guava. Guava requires JavaX. JavaX requires Spring. Spring requires...good god, at this point I deleted Guice. I mean, seriously, binding in that much foreign code? First, you are now dependent on all that code, and whatever changes are made to it. Second, you are bringing in all of the vulnerabilties present in that code. And you have absolutely no idea what those may be, because you certainly aren't going to validate all of that code yourself. Thank you very much, I'll just implement that small bit of functionality I need, all by myself.
IIRC, the FBI raided his house three times. Once, when he pissed off the dentist for informing him of a vulnerability. Not sure why that should provide a raid by law enforcement - they really needed to tell the dentist to send a "thank you". Anyway, the guy started gathering information on the FBI agent; he was quite public about this, and it was all public information. But the agent didn't like it, so the FBI raided his house again. He got pissed, and wrote to the FBI agent (and separately to his wife) something like "when can I get the videos of my kids back?". So the FBI raided him a third time.
Federal law enforcement in the US is just out of control. These people have no sense of humor, and think that they, themselves, are empowered to do anything they want. Piss them off, and they'll abuse their powers to make your life miserable.
Yet another reason not to gamble: the house cheats. Always. Win consistently against the house anywhere, and you will be asked to leave. Win too much off a slot machine, and it was "out of order".
The betting houses and casinos exist to take people's money. One should not forget this.
Pass a couple of laws making it clear that companies are liable for any costs resulting from security failures of their products, and making it easy for consumers to file and collect on such claims.
Even more important: make it easier to nail company executives personally, if one can show that executives were negligent. Equifax is the perfect example: There is plenty of evidence that the CxOs were informed of failures in their processes as much as a year in advance of the first breach. Yet they did nothing. Their personal assets should be on the line right along with the corporate assets, when the inevitable lawsuits come to a conclusion.
Because Microsoft never inflicted Windows Vista and Windows 8 on the world. They didn't destroy a stable Office interface with the disaster known as the "Ribbon". Windows is totally stable, and immune to the whims of GUI designers looking to make their mark./sarc
Seriously, this is a disease that affects the entire software community. However, Linux gives you the tools to minimize the problems. Granted, you won't escape SystemD easily, but Gnome is actually easy: choose a more stable desktop, like xfce. I've been using Xubuntu for ages - any changes to the desktop have been minor. There are a few hiccups in getting things configured, but even those hiccups have been stable for a long time.
I think the mistake that Munich has made is allowing such a large set of Windows computers to exist. This means that they are essentially maintaining two complete infrastructures, requiring two sets of administrators, support personnel who have to cover both worlds, etc.. They haven't ever finished their migration, and that is the real problem.
I obviously don't know what Tesla is really up to. However, should be actually be what they say, I applaud them. One of the horrible things about big organizations is seeing useless people kept on, with everyone else having to carry their dead weight through project after project.
If Tesla really is just doing a housecleaning to get rid of people who are not doing their jobs, I applaud them.
"investors should be able to go long or short on an asset"
Um...why? Those are derivatives. If you invest in a small company, i.e., not publicly traded, derivatives don't exist. You invest because you believe the company will increase in value. If you believe the opposite, you sell your investment.
Options, and indeed all derivatives, are mostly tools for the big investment houses and banks. In the best case, this is to hedge their bets, to limit potential losses. In the worst case, they use these tools to manipulate the market. For the ordinary investory, it's more like gambling: the fluctuations on derivatives are mostly driven by the games the big boys are playing, and have very little to do with the fundamentals of the investment.
Lots of people use their Google account, or their Facebook account, to log into various sites and services. I'm not sure how Facebook works, because I rarely use it. Google makes you type in your password once per month, so Google users are also trained to enter their password more-or-less at random, when asked. It would be dead easy to fake the password dialog.
Users trading of security for convenience, yet again. The stupid thing is that companies encourage this behavior. If some service really wants you to login again, it should ask you to go log in, not present you with some dialog to type in your password.
Biometrics are fine, as along as people realize exactly what they are. They are one step in a possible identification process.
Like an SSN, biometrics are unchangeable. However, using them in identity theft is considerably harder. Creating a fake fingerprint is possible, but it's not trivial. It's like putting a better lock on your front door - one you can't open just by jiggling it: it keeps the stupid thieves out, but the slightly less stupid ones will just come in through the window. As such, biometrics are an improvement, if not much of one.
There's the old saying in security: Something you have, something you know and something you are.
- Lousy security requires only one of those: Have a (fake) ID, Know (someone else's) SSN, Show a (picture of a) face to a face scanner. Easy to bypass.
- Better security requires two (2FA): For example: Know a password, and have the Smartphone that gets the SMS.
- The best security requires all three: For example: biometrics (you are) embedded on the ID (you have), unlocks with a PIN (you know).
Perfect security? Doesn't exist, we shouldn't pretend it does, and we shouldn't allow governments and corporations to pretend that they can provide it.
Biometrics are a better lock. By themselves insufficient, but better than what we had before.
Any research performed at a public university, or funded by any sort of government grant, should be public domain. Has anyone ever tried to push that through in court? It seems to me (IANAL) that it must be a valid argument, and it would invalidate the vast majority of the publisher's copyrights.
On top of that, the authors of an article should retain the copyright, rather than signing it over to the publishers. How did that ever get started, anyway?
ResearchGate is a fine enough site, but I do wish it were not commercial. It really ought to be some sort of co-operative amongst universities.
"People who have the time to breakfast also probably suffer from less stress and generally have more time to prepare healthy meals"
No, it's just a choice, like any other. I choose to get up about 45 minutes earlier, so I can do a bit of exercise, drink a cup of coffee, and eat a cooked breakfast. This costs me a bit of sleep, but (for me) the health benefits are worth it.
There are days I can't pry myself out of bed, and that's fine. As Scott Adams says in his book: you just need a system, and your doing fine, if you system mostly works.
The SSN was never intended to be an ID number. Any organization that ever said "if you know this number, we accept that as proof of identity" was stupid, and frankly should be legally liable for any fraud that they enabled.
The simplest form of identity check is to require a physical government-issued ID with a picture. This could be a driver's license, or a passport, or something similar. These are (a) reasonably difficult to fake, and (b) faking them is a crime. Those may be low barriers, but just knowing an SSN is no barrier at all.
Cryptographic keys? Joe Sixpack and Granny Gina don't have a clue about cryptography, and aren't going to get one. If you want to put a chip into the aforementioned government IDs, to make them harder to fake, sure. But the users don't need to know about this, and shouldn't have to care about it.
Of course, the drivers licenses in the US all look different, which makes them difficult to verify when used out of state. I really do not understand why USAians are so resistant to having a uniform, federal ID. It's not really going to make you any easier (or harder) to track, but being uniform, it would be a lot easier to check it's validity.
From the numbers, that pretty much has to be 10 million impressions, not 10 million people. I.e., the ads were shown 10 million times, to some (smaller) number of people.
I don't live in the US, but answer me this: During election season, how many ads did eacy person see? Hundreds? Possibly thousands? Multiply by a population of 300,000,000, and we are talking on the order of hundreds of billions of ad impressions. Against which, 10 million is not even a drop in a bucket.
This Russian fetish never was relevant. The more information that emerges, the more obvious this is. Some people just cannot accept that Hillary! was an absolutely crappy candidate, and that half the country voted for "anybody else".
The D's need to get over it already, and maybe put up a decent candidate next time. But they won't, they'll nominate someone like Pelosi. Trump is very likely to win again in 2020.
TFA misses the point entirely. People who consider the simulation hypothesis don't claim that the quantum effects are part of the simulation.
"The phenomenon indicates an anomaly in the underlying space-time geometry"
Exactly. Quantum effects show the limits of the simulation. They are not being modelling; they are, in essence, errors. Artifacts, not intent. That would also be why the Planck length (smallest possible physical distance) exists: that is the resolution of the simulation.
By exploiting the limits of the simulation, we have the potential to exploit the simulation system itself, or even gain insight into whatever is outside of the simulation.
The whole "hate speech" crap is just a crying shame. Really, it's nothing but political censorship, because whoever is in charge gets to determine what viewpoints are hateful. Despite the European charter of human rights, Europe does not really believe in free speech. Really, the US doesn't either - look at the latest mess in Berkeley.
If and when we can, it is important to push back against this kind of censorship. No one makes you follow anyone on Twitter - so why would hateful opinions even bother you? On Facebook, if someone posts something you don't like, block them, or make your page private. Are so many people really such snowflakes that a few hateful words will destroy their world?
"Using a debit card for anything other than when you want to withdraw cash is stupid behavior.... You have vastly better consumer protection in terms of being able to dispute charge"
Why would I want to be able to dispute a charge? If I am making the transaction, it's not fraud. If I'm buying something like groceries, or a new shirt, there is exactly zero chance that I'm going to involve a credit card company in any dissatisfaction I may have.
And there are two reasons *not* to use a credit card. First, privacy. The credit cards can and do compile and sell your data. Your local bank or credit union, probably not. Second, being nice. Especially if you're buying from a small shop, remember that your credit card convenience costs them 2%-3% gross, which can be a huge part of their actual margin.
Use credit cards for online purchases, where you don't immediately take possession of the goods. Use them for risky purchases, where you really don't trust the seller (but then, why are you buying from them?). For everything else: cash or debit.
The whitepaper discusses this problem indirectly: as long as the Iota network remains small, it is vulnerable to a variety of attack. Hence, the (supposedly temporary) need for a central authority to check the honesty of the nodes.
The problem is: there are all sorts of ways that you have to trust the nodes. For example, the algorithm for choosing which prior transactions to confirm: you are supposed to use an algorithm given by Iota.org, but there is absolutely nothing to prevent you from using some other means. There are other problems as well, not least of which is the fact that there is not absolute requirement for branches to ever merge, which means that it is essentially impossible to prevent double-spending, at least, not without the risk of rolling back arbitrary numbers of valid transactions.
It's a cool idea, but in its current form there are lots of unresolved problems.
Coincidentally, I was just reading about Iota yesterday. The super-condensed summary, for/.ers who don't want to look it up: Instead of a linear blockchain, you have a directed, acyclic graph with multiple "last transactions". In order to carry out a transaction yourself, you must do a unit of work to create a node (block) that incorporates two previous transactions. Hence, there are no miners, and also no transaction fees. Those are the positives.
The Iota whitepaper mentions a number of - as yet unresolved - problems. For example, double-spending is entirely possible. In addition, my first impression is that you simply have to trust that everyone is running software that honestly implements the algorithm. For example, part of your duty when creating a node is to check past transactions for consistency. What if you deliberately fail to do that, because the inconsistent transactions are to your benefit? In addition, the directed graph can diverge for long periods of time - indeed, diverging branches never need to be reconnected - so there are a lot of potential ways to cheat.
Maybe a failure of understanding on my part, but: I don't understand cryptocurrencies where all currency units are created in the genesis block. Maybe the algorithm is a fun technical toy, never meant to be used in reality? Otherwise, why should anyone use a currency where one person initially holds all the wealth?
Take an arbitrary limit, and change it to a different, arbitrary limit. But only for "select" users. Wow.
The point of the limit, and Twitter's only USP, is that messages have to be short. The original limit was based on text-messaging (SMS), of course, but that hasn't been relevant for a long time. They could drop the limit entirely - and just become a rather strange blogging platform.
Twitter has other problems. In particular, their tendency to political censorship has already pissed off everyone who doesn't subscribe to the progressive world view. However, having started down that road, reversing course would piss off the progressives. On top of all of that, their corporate expenses are just nuts - they don't need (and cannot pay) thousands of employees, to run a simple messaging platform.
Changing the tweet length really is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Slashdot Mirror
"charge the full societal cost of gasoline consumption (up to $1,000 per person per year [fullerton.edu]) and adding that to the price of gasoline"
That's nothing. If you want to charge full costs of consumption, then you need to look at road use. The damage to roads rises as the fourth power of vehicle weight, so a 40-ton 18 wheeler causes 160000 times as much damage to the road as a 2 ton SUV. Basically, truckers should pay for nearly the entire road infrastructure, excepting only residential roads. Instead, they are massively subsidized by private car owners. Which is to say: Amazon and other online retailers that rely on trucks for delivery are massively subsidized by private car owners.
Brick-and-mortar stores would be eternally grateful. So would all of the organizations that promote local produce. Transport is far too cheap.
Why not reduce emissions? I'm a skeptic: CO2 is a minor problem - there is exactly zero evidence of positive feedbacks. Nonetheless, you are absolutely right - there is no reason not to reduce emissions. However, it is a question of price. Where emissions can be reduced with a reasonable effort, then absolutely, there is every reason to do so. However, I disagree with efforts that are disproportionately expensive.
What I'm not seeing - from either side - is any attempt to produce a prioritized list. Either it's "OMG we're all gonna die - let's destroy civilization in order to save it", or else its "go away, don't bother me".
"It sounds like you are saying there is little value in pure research. Please elaborate."
Not at all. But: how many professors in how many universities are doing "pure research"? And how many are writing useless crap in journals that no one reads, because their university says they have to publish X articles a year?
As for students: the number of doctoral students has exploded over the past 20, 50, 100 years. We are awarding around twice as many doctorates now as compared to 1990. Yet there aren't any more really brilliant people than there ever were, and average students are not going to contribute to fundamental research.
The current "publish or perish" climate, combined with universities' hunger for grants, means that most professors forced to do "research", whether it makes sense or not. There's a whole industry out there to support pretend research - my email is continuously spammed with invitations from yet-another-journal that no one has ever heard of. This does not advance the state-of-the-art in anything, but it is a great waste of time and resources.
I'm speaking as a professor at a university, and I don't see why this is a bad thing.
Research at universities is a good thing, don't get me wrong, But R&D at companies is also valuable. In many cases even more valuable, because companies want research that actually leads to a practical result. Too many university researchers are farting around with abstract stuff of no foreseeable use to anyone, publishing useless results in write-only journals.
Research at a company is measured on a different scale: can it be used for something? Who thinks we would have multi-core, multi-GHz processors in our pockets, if this hadn't been driven by commercial interests? A few ideas were developed at universities, but practically the entire computer revolution has been driven by commercial research. Maybe it's now time for AI to follow that route as well - we've fiddled with it in academia since the 1950s, but finally - finally - it may lead to something more than niche applications in the real world.
This is all noise. The real, fundamental problem in the US is the fact that you can apply for credit with essentially *no* verification of your actual identity.
IMHO, these problems stem from the following source problems:
- Incompetent developers. Look at the number one problem, number one for years now: injection. I teach students how to avoid this the first time they touch a database, which is typically in year two of their degree program. It doesn't matter: half of them still write injectable queries, even though using "prepared statements" isn't any more complex. The thing is: there is so much code to be written, that even these students - who evidently don't understand, don't care, and can't be bothered - even these students will find jobs, and some of them will be working on your web projects.
- Internet speed. TFA talks about "agile methodologies" as if they were a good thing. While "iterative development" absolutely does make sense, in too many companies "agile", and "Scrum" and their brethren are an excuse for pushing half-tested code out the door, because everything has to be fast, fast, fast . I have news for the marketing department: No, your latest brainstorm does not have to be live next week. In fact, given that the brainstorm-after-next will basically reverse this one, it would really be better for everyone if you just fell off a bridge and drowned.
- Too many frameworks. Real example: I used to use Guice, a small dependency-injection framework from Google, for a small demo-project. A few months ago I decided to update Guice to the latest version. But the latest version depends on another framework, Guava. Guava requires JavaX. JavaX requires Spring. Spring requires...good god, at this point I deleted Guice. I mean, seriously, binding in that much foreign code? First, you are now dependent on all that code, and whatever changes are made to it. Second, you are bringing in all of the vulnerabilties present in that code. And you have absolutely no idea what those may be, because you certainly aren't going to validate all of that code yourself. Thank you very much, I'll just implement that small bit of functionality I need, all by myself.
IIRC, the FBI raided his house three times. Once, when he pissed off the dentist for informing him of a vulnerability. Not sure why that should provide a raid by law enforcement - they really needed to tell the dentist to send a "thank you". Anyway, the guy started gathering information on the FBI agent; he was quite public about this, and it was all public information. But the agent didn't like it, so the FBI raided his house again. He got pissed, and wrote to the FBI agent (and separately to his wife) something like "when can I get the videos of my kids back?". So the FBI raided him a third time.
Federal law enforcement in the US is just out of control. These people have no sense of humor, and think that they, themselves, are empowered to do anything they want. Piss them off, and they'll abuse their powers to make your life miserable.
For more information, see the Popehat article.
Yet another reason not to gamble: the house cheats. Always. Win consistently against the house anywhere, and you will be asked to leave. Win too much off a slot machine, and it was "out of order".
The betting houses and casinos exist to take people's money. One should not forget this.
Pass a couple of laws making it clear that companies are liable for any costs resulting from security failures of their products, and making it easy for consumers to file and collect on such claims.
Even more important: make it easier to nail company executives personally, if one can show that executives were negligent. Equifax is the perfect example: There is plenty of evidence that the CxOs were informed of failures in their processes as much as a year in advance of the first breach. Yet they did nothing. Their personal assets should be on the line right along with the corporate assets, when the inevitable lawsuits come to a conclusion.
Because Microsoft never inflicted Windows Vista and Windows 8 on the world. They didn't destroy a stable Office interface with the disaster known as the "Ribbon". Windows is totally stable, and immune to the whims of GUI designers looking to make their mark. /sarc
Seriously, this is a disease that affects the entire software community. However, Linux gives you the tools to minimize the problems. Granted, you won't escape SystemD easily, but Gnome is actually easy: choose a more stable desktop, like xfce. I've been using Xubuntu for ages - any changes to the desktop have been minor. There are a few hiccups in getting things configured, but even those hiccups have been stable for a long time.
I think the mistake that Munich has made is allowing such a large set of Windows computers to exist. This means that they are essentially maintaining two complete infrastructures, requiring two sets of administrators, support personnel who have to cover both worlds, etc.. They haven't ever finished their migration, and that is the real problem.
I obviously don't know what Tesla is really up to. However, should be actually be what they say, I applaud them. One of the horrible things about big organizations is seeing useless people kept on, with everyone else having to carry their dead weight through project after project.
If Tesla really is just doing a housecleaning to get rid of people who are not doing their jobs, I applaud them.
"investors should be able to go long or short on an asset"
Um...why? Those are derivatives. If you invest in a small company, i.e., not publicly traded, derivatives don't exist. You invest because you believe the company will increase in value. If you believe the opposite, you sell your investment.
Options, and indeed all derivatives, are mostly tools for the big investment houses and banks. In the best case, this is to hedge their bets, to limit potential losses. In the worst case, they use these tools to manipulate the market. For the ordinary investory, it's more like gambling: the fluctuations on derivatives are mostly driven by the games the big boys are playing, and have very little to do with the fundamentals of the investment.
Lots of people use their Google account, or their Facebook account, to log into various sites and services. I'm not sure how Facebook works, because I rarely use it. Google makes you type in your password once per month, so Google users are also trained to enter their password more-or-less at random, when asked. It would be dead easy to fake the password dialog.
Users trading of security for convenience, yet again. The stupid thing is that companies encourage this behavior. If some service really wants you to login again, it should ask you to go log in, not present you with some dialog to type in your password.
Biometrics are fine, as along as people realize exactly what they are. They are one step in a possible identification process.
Like an SSN, biometrics are unchangeable. However, using them in identity theft is considerably harder. Creating a fake fingerprint is possible, but it's not trivial. It's like putting a better lock on your front door - one you can't open just by jiggling it: it keeps the stupid thieves out, but the slightly less stupid ones will just come in through the window. As such, biometrics are an improvement, if not much of one.
There's the old saying in security: Something you have, something you know and something you are.
- Lousy security requires only one of those: Have a (fake) ID, Know (someone else's) SSN, Show a (picture of a) face to a face scanner. Easy to bypass.
- Better security requires two (2FA): For example: Know a password, and have the Smartphone that gets the SMS.
- The best security requires all three: For example: biometrics (you are) embedded on the ID (you have), unlocks with a PIN (you know).
Perfect security? Doesn't exist, we shouldn't pretend it does, and we shouldn't allow governments and corporations to pretend that they can provide it.
Biometrics are a better lock. By themselves insufficient, but better than what we had before.
Any research performed at a public university, or funded by any sort of government grant, should be public domain. Has anyone ever tried to push that through in court? It seems to me (IANAL) that it must be a valid argument, and it would invalidate the vast majority of the publisher's copyrights.
On top of that, the authors of an article should retain the copyright, rather than signing it over to the publishers. How did that ever get started, anyway?
ResearchGate is a fine enough site, but I do wish it were not commercial. It really ought to be some sort of co-operative amongst universities.
What I don't get is the emphasis on the Google Assistant. Always available, even when the phone is locked.
Does anyone care? I have never heard anyone using it. It's one of the first things I disable. Why is this supposed to be a feature?
"People who have the time to breakfast also probably suffer from less stress and generally have more time to prepare healthy meals"
No, it's just a choice, like any other. I choose to get up about 45 minutes earlier, so I can do a bit of exercise, drink a cup of coffee, and eat a cooked breakfast. This costs me a bit of sleep, but (for me) the health benefits are worth it.
There are days I can't pry myself out of bed, and that's fine. As Scott Adams says in his book: you just need a system, and your doing fine, if you system mostly works.
The SSN was never intended to be an ID number. Any organization that ever said "if you know this number, we accept that as proof of identity" was stupid, and frankly should be legally liable for any fraud that they enabled.
The simplest form of identity check is to require a physical government-issued ID with a picture. This could be a driver's license, or a passport, or something similar. These are (a) reasonably difficult to fake, and (b) faking them is a crime. Those may be low barriers, but just knowing an SSN is no barrier at all.
Cryptographic keys? Joe Sixpack and Granny Gina don't have a clue about cryptography, and aren't going to get one. If you want to put a chip into the aforementioned government IDs, to make them harder to fake, sure. But the users don't need to know about this, and shouldn't have to care about it.
Of course, the drivers licenses in the US all look different, which makes them difficult to verify when used out of state. I really do not understand why USAians are so resistant to having a uniform, federal ID. It's not really going to make you any easier (or harder) to track, but being uniform, it would be a lot easier to check it's validity.
From the numbers, that pretty much has to be 10 million impressions, not 10 million people. I.e., the ads were shown 10 million times, to some (smaller) number of people.
I don't live in the US, but answer me this: During election season, how many ads did eacy person see? Hundreds? Possibly thousands? Multiply by a population of 300,000,000, and we are talking on the order of hundreds of billions of ad impressions. Against which, 10 million is not even a drop in a bucket.
This Russian fetish never was relevant. The more information that emerges, the more obvious this is. Some people just cannot accept that Hillary! was an absolutely crappy candidate, and that half the country voted for "anybody else".
The D's need to get over it already, and maybe put up a decent candidate next time. But they won't, they'll nominate someone like Pelosi. Trump is very likely to win again in 2020.
TFA misses the point entirely. People who consider the simulation hypothesis don't claim that the quantum effects are part of the simulation.
"The phenomenon indicates an anomaly in the underlying space-time geometry"
Exactly. Quantum effects show the limits of the simulation. They are not being modelling; they are, in essence, errors. Artifacts, not intent. That would also be why the Planck length (smallest possible physical distance) exists: that is the resolution of the simulation.
By exploiting the limits of the simulation, we have the potential to exploit the simulation system itself, or even gain insight into whatever is outside of the simulation.
The whole "hate speech" crap is just a crying shame. Really, it's nothing but political censorship, because whoever is in charge gets to determine what viewpoints are hateful. Despite the European charter of human rights, Europe does not really believe in free speech. Really, the US doesn't either - look at the latest mess in Berkeley.
If and when we can, it is important to push back against this kind of censorship. No one makes you follow anyone on Twitter - so why would hateful opinions even bother you? On Facebook, if someone posts something you don't like, block them, or make your page private. Are so many people really such snowflakes that a few hateful words will destroy their world?
Really, it's kind of pathetic...
"Using a debit card for anything other than when you want to withdraw cash is stupid behavior. ... You have vastly better consumer protection in terms of being able to dispute charge"
Why would I want to be able to dispute a charge? If I am making the transaction, it's not fraud. If I'm buying something like groceries, or a new shirt, there is exactly zero chance that I'm going to involve a credit card company in any dissatisfaction I may have.
And there are two reasons *not* to use a credit card. First, privacy. The credit cards can and do compile and sell your data. Your local bank or credit union, probably not. Second, being nice. Especially if you're buying from a small shop, remember that your credit card convenience costs them 2%-3% gross, which can be a huge part of their actual margin.
Use credit cards for online purchases, where you don't immediately take possession of the goods. Use them for risky purchases, where you really don't trust the seller (but then, why are you buying from them?). For everything else: cash or debit.
The whitepaper discusses this problem indirectly: as long as the Iota network remains small, it is vulnerable to a variety of attack. Hence, the (supposedly temporary) need for a central authority to check the honesty of the nodes.
The problem is: there are all sorts of ways that you have to trust the nodes. For example, the algorithm for choosing which prior transactions to confirm: you are supposed to use an algorithm given by Iota.org, but there is absolutely nothing to prevent you from using some other means. There are other problems as well, not least of which is the fact that there is not absolute requirement for branches to ever merge, which means that it is essentially impossible to prevent double-spending, at least, not without the risk of rolling back arbitrary numbers of valid transactions.
It's a cool idea, but in its current form there are lots of unresolved problems.
Coincidentally, I was just reading about Iota yesterday. The super-condensed summary, for /.ers who don't want to look it up: Instead of a linear blockchain, you have a directed, acyclic graph with multiple "last transactions". In order to carry out a transaction yourself, you must do a unit of work to create a node (block) that incorporates two previous transactions. Hence, there are no miners, and also no transaction fees. Those are the positives.
The Iota whitepaper mentions a number of - as yet unresolved - problems. For example, double-spending is entirely possible. In addition, my first impression is that you simply have to trust that everyone is running software that honestly implements the algorithm. For example, part of your duty when creating a node is to check past transactions for consistency. What if you deliberately fail to do that, because the inconsistent transactions are to your benefit? In addition, the directed graph can diverge for long periods of time - indeed, diverging branches never need to be reconnected - so there are a lot of potential ways to cheat.
Maybe a failure of understanding on my part, but: I don't understand cryptocurrencies where all currency units are created in the genesis block. Maybe the algorithm is a fun technical toy, never meant to be used in reality? Otherwise, why should anyone use a currency where one person initially holds all the wealth?
Like, wow, man, totally radical!
Take an arbitrary limit, and change it to a different, arbitrary limit. But only for "select" users. Wow.
The point of the limit, and Twitter's only USP, is that messages have to be short. The original limit was based on text-messaging (SMS), of course, but that hasn't been relevant for a long time. They could drop the limit entirely - and just become a rather strange blogging platform.
Twitter has other problems. In particular, their tendency to political censorship has already pissed off everyone who doesn't subscribe to the progressive world view. However, having started down that road, reversing course would piss off the progressives. On top of all of that, their corporate expenses are just nuts - they don't need (and cannot pay) thousands of employees, to run a simple messaging platform.
Changing the tweet length really is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.