Of course it will alternate even and odd, the article is incomplete...
I don't think it will, at least not daily. That would result in a weird game of musical cars. You could drive somewhere one day and then have to wait a day to drive back. Annoying as it is if you have the wrong plate, it makes more sense not to alternate (at least not often, and hopefully the ban won't be around that long anyway.)
I wonder if they are banning electric cars with even numbered plates. I'd love to see the reactions to that.
Why not? You allow only half the vehicles on the street today and the other half tomorrow. You have halfed your traffic and brought your pollution levels down. It is quite simple to enforce by number plates. Petrol today and diesel tomorrow on the other hand is difficult to enforce, makes no sense.
I agree, but there's nothing in the article to suggest that it'll be half the vehicles today and the other half tomorrow. Instead it says "Only vehicles with numberplates ending in an odd number will be allowed to drive... for a few days" You'd think it'd be odd numbered plates on odd numbered days and even plates on even days, but that's not what it says.
But come to think of it, that'd be a little weird: you'd be able to drive your car into the city on one day, but wouldn't be able to drive it out the next. You wouldn't be able to go anywhere overnight, you'd have to wait a day for the return trip. They're using check points to stop cars from entering the city, but presumably they won't stop anyone leaving.
If you're already in the city, just plead ignorance; who watches the news anyway?:)
I agree overall with your comment, but I think UTF-8's backwards compatibility with ASCII was genius and is the reason we have as much Unicode support as we do today. I consider UTF-8 to be one of the best hacks of all time. Without it, the software that existed at the time would have had to be thrown out or re-written. The fact that software can (often) process UTF-8 without even being aware that it isn't ASCII was exactly what was needed to get Unicode off the ground. UTF-8 allowed Unicode to be adopted incrementally (especially by Unixes, which were much slower to adopt any (universal) international character set than Windows was).
Sadly, not everyone is as brilliant as Ken Thompson, so the UTF-8 encoding didn't exist when Unicode and ISO 10646 were first created. If someone had thought of it just a few years earlier we probably would have used that for nearly everything, and your second point would be irrelevant.
But by the time Unicode was even a thing, a lot of the software industry was already invested in ISO 10646, specifically UCS-2 (notably Microsoft and IBM, but plenty of others) so unless you think excluding IBM and Microsoft (in 1990!) would have been good for the widespread adoption of Unicode, the designers had no choice but to have multiple encodings.
Ironically, Linux and Apple were able to chose the (arguably much better) UTF-8 encoding only because they got serious about adopting an international character set several years later than Microsoft and IBM did (call it second mover advantage.)
So I couldn't call those mistakes. More like "historical accidents", just like most other bad designs we have to live with.
The GP was right; for a right-wing nutjob he makes a lot of sense. I've been saying the same thing for years, nobody listens.
You're never really "locked in". All that is really meant by that is that there is a cost to moving away from some external dependency, and there is always a cost. Every external dependency a project takes on is "lock in." That includes the operating system, programming language, third party libraries, and everything else that isn't part of the project itself. You can try to minimize it with abstraction layers, but that has a cost too, and it is often paid unnecessarily when the dependency never needs to be removed or changed. Or you can also try to minimize it by using the good old advice to avoid nonstandard/non-portable extensions. But that has a cost too when the nonstandard extension does exactly what you need and it's expensive to do yourself. That's just wasted effort if you never actually end up needing to switch.
The only good advice is to choose your dependencies carefully and if necessary have an escape plan. (But don't spend too much effort on the escape plan unless there's a high likelihood you'll actually use it.)
That's only true if you want to run controls that were written for windows. If COM and OLE were supported on other platforms, then presumably people would write COM/OLE components for those platforms, and those would run fine on their platforms.
Back in the 90s, there were some other systems that supported COM/OLE (IBM and Sun Microsystems for example.)
CORBA is practically the same thing, and is available everywhere. The problem with CORBA is that is a typical design-by-committee mess. It ended up way too complicated, even compared to COM/OLE.
The problem that COM and CORBA both solved (or at least tried to solve) still exists, with no commonly accepted solution. The "standard" binary interface between components on every single platform is the C function. That's the only code that can be called directly from (almost) every language without creating "bindings". Not even C++ code from different compilers can be mixed in the same program, because C++ doesn't define the binary interface.
Something like COM or CORBA is still needed. If we had it, and it was universally available, you could expose more than just C functions at the binary level (without bindings or without recompiling everything).
Because of all the years of bad press, nobody is going to believe it, but COM was and is a good idea, and it's completely unencumbered by patents or licensing issues. Being able to combine components written in different languages (or even just different C++ compilers) is a good thing, and is too complicated without something like COM.
I've written many ActiveX controls, some for use in a browser, some not.
At no point was I required to sign or agree to a license to do so.
With requiring a license he was talking about creating the ActiveX runtime environment for a web browser.
No license is required for that either. All ActiveX is, at heart, is a hierarchy of C++ style interfaces (classes with nothing but pure virtual functions) rooted in a single interface (IUnknown), together with a handful of global C functions (e.g. CoCreateInstance). It can be supported on any platform as long as the C++ compiler implements virtual functions with a pointer to a vtable at the beginning of any object with virtual functions. That's every major compiler on every major platform. Actually you can do COM "manually" in plain old C too, so you can do COM anywhere with a C compiler. Put pointer to an array of pointers to functions (the vtable) at the beginning of a struct, if the functions have the proper signatures then the struct is a COM object.
I know this because I've also written many ActiveX and COM components, and ported COM/OLE/ActiveX code to Linux and OS/X. Generally the problem with implementing ActiveX on other platforms has nothing to do with ActiveX itself. The problem is that virtually all ActiveX components are written for Windows and make Win32 calls.
Unicode is sort of complicated, or at least it's more complicated than might be expected. But the problem with Schneier saying "Unicode is too complex to ever be secure" is that he might as well just say "programming is too complex to ever be secure." Sure, Unicode is a little complicated. But it's hardly the most complicated thing you'll ever have to deal with as a programmer. If we can't even get that right, we might as well just quit.
It's not "a bug" in "a program". It's every major browser. And it's pretty much like this every time they do pwn2own. If a group of hackers are able to bring down every major browser with previously unknown* exploits every year just for a chance to win a laptop, what can better motivated (financed) groups do?
* unknown to the browser developers anyway... 17 seconds to pwn IE, yeah right... like they say on the cooking shows "here's one I prepared earlier"
The last thing Jersey needs is more car dealerships and lots. So I can see the numerical limits as having some merit.
Have you ever been to a Tesla dealership? They are nothing like typical dealerships. They don't have sprawling lots full of cars. They are small, typically in pedestrian friendly areas nowhere near other dealerships, and have just enough cars that you can look at the models and options, with a few more cars for test drives. They're more like a retail store than a dealership lot. Here is a blog with pictures of dealerships around the world.
Each car is built to order, and you come pick it up at the dealership or they deliver it to you. I suspect the limit is a compromise with opponents of Tesla's model, not anything to do with too many dealerships.
Most companies would not keep any developers over 50 on staff.
It's their loss. Most companies are horrendously bad at making software. The ones that are very good at it know better and have lots of older developers on staff.
Well, I still think the data can be deanonymized. I don't need to make any assumptions other than what you've told us.
the places that an individual goes to, and how they got there, how long it took, and how long and where they were stationary. key factors critical for shopping mall owners to be able to provide to their retailers: (1) how many unique shoppers went into *their* store (broken down by time and date is also helpful). (2) how long each unique shopper spent in their store. (3) also useful to know is where they went *before* going to another store.
Even if the time resolution is 5 minutes, and the spacial resolution is only enough to identify which stores I visit, that is enough to identify me. If I go to the mall, stop by and get a coffee, wander around for a while, then make another purchase in another store, using my credit card both times, I may very well be the only person who made purchases at those two stores within a 5 minute window at each store. Each purchase makes it more likely to be unique. Now if I put on dark glasses and a baseball cap and stop by Victoria's Secret to buy some lingerie for my mistress, with cash, it's possible to link that to me via your path data.
It isn't the path data per se that is identifying me -- it's a combination of that and other data. It doesn't have to be credit card data, like I said. It could be wifi, loyalty cards, security cameras, even witnesses... anything that can associate me uniquely with one of your paths. And it doesn't even have to be unique, just narrowing it down to a handful of people is useful to law enforcement.
Don't get me wrong: It sounds like you and the company you worked for care about privacy and did everything you could to protect it. That's commendable. And it sounds like you did a good job. (Plus I think it's cool you used GNU Radio.)
It's also commendable that you understand the conflict of interest. The retailers would like to have better spacial and temporal resolution: they'd like to know which aisles people walk down, what displays they stand in front of and for how long, etc. The retailers will ask for that and if you don't provide it someone else will. So there will always be pressure to make it more useful. But the more useful it is to retailers, the more useful it is to anyone else who might try to get access to it, whether it be through hacking or subpoena.
I am skeptical whenever I hear "don't worry, we've anonymized the data." I've seen too many ways that data can be deanonymized, and I'm not a professional data miner or forensic hacker, so I don't know what other devious methods there might be that I've never heard of and would never occur to me. The key point is that as long as you store the path itself then anything that can link me to part of it can link me to all of it. The only way to avoid that would be to obliterate the path data and only store aggregate information (averages, sums, etc.)
instead they used GNURadio to do GSM passive decoding and signal-strength detection. and no, you *can't* track the person themselves, nor can you get their telephone number, nor can you decode their phone conversations, nor can you decode their SMS messages (not "and track 1000s of phones on affordable commodity off-the-shelf hardware at the same time"). they also track bluetooth and wifi, but again, the mac addresses are hashed (with salting) *before* being stored on disk.
I think it would still be possible to deanonymize that path data. If you make a credit card purchase, the information about time and place of the credit transaction can be associated with whatever id you use hashed or not. The path data has information that someone was standing at the cash register at that time and place. With the credit card information (or even just loyalty card information) you know who it was and can associate that with the entire path through the mall. Similarly, if they walk past a Starbucks and their smartphone associates with their WIFI, now if you have access to Starbuck's information you can deanonymize it from that. Or it could be deanonymized with the security cameras.
I don't see then how it could be subpoena-proof if you store the actual path, regardless of however you anonymize it. They can subpoena your data together with other data to get what they want.
TFA says "the microbiome can influence, and be influenced by, a range of characteristics such as weight, disease, diet, exercise, mood and much more." So they acknowledge the causation can go both ways.
But it gets even more interesting. According to a Ted talk I saw about this the other day, there are apparently two different ways that our gut microbes might cause obesity. One is related to what you said:
Which gets to part 2 of the problem: We shit stuff that is still quite nutritious. Ask your local fly population. Our "waste" is not just waste. There's quite a bit of stuff in there that could still be "digested".
From the Ted talk:
When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them from a regular mouse. Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them eat as much as they want.
So apparently some microbes allow you to extract more energy from your food so you put on more weight for a given amount of calories. But other ones might affect your appetite somehow. There's more in the talk, and it's not just mice: there's research in humans as well.
I agree that it won't spark an interest that isn't already there, but it might spark a dormant interest in a lasting way. Maybe your criticisms are valid, I haven't read it, but then again we're not 8-year-olds.
I was probably going to be interested in math & science eventually anyway, but at that age I wasn't voluntarily reading any non-fiction science. But then I accidentally discovered an Isaac Asimov book, and I was hooked. Not long after that I asked for a subscription to Scientific American for Christmas. That book had a huge influence on me and got me started much younger than I would have otherwise. (And I can't even remember which Asimov book it was.)
The thing is, you don't know you're interested until you are exposed to it. I'm sure most slashdotters will agree that math & logic are inherently interesting, but that's because they already know a lot of it. You somehow have to learn enough to understand that it is more interesting than it is typically presented in school (hard as they try.)
I was hospitalized once for about 9 weeks, 2 of them in intensive care. I was on a lot of pain medication, so much that it had to be administered by an anesthesiologist. When it came time to start weaning me off, I didn't know what was happening at first. I felt sick like I had the flu. I had hot & cold flashes. I was nervous and irritable and couldn't sleep. The sheets had to be changed twice a day because I was sweating so much. It was awful. And that was in a controlled environment, weaning me off over a period of many days.
When I asked a nurse what was going on she told me I was going through withdrawal from all the pain meds I had been on. I was certainly addicted at that point, and going through physical withdrawal. I wasn't going through psychological withdrawal though, and I think that's because my brain had never made an association between the high and any behavior of mine. The withdrawal was terrible, but I never thought "I'd feel better if I just got some more." The drugs were being administered by the doctors and in a time-release way throughout the day. If I had taken the same amount of morphine and Oxycontin and whatever else on my own, in a way that made allowed my brain to associate it with a behavior (shooting the drug or whatever) then I would have been an addict by then.
I think that's partly how nicotine replacement therapy works, too. You put on a patch and get a steady dose of nicotine throughout the day, breaking the link between the drug and the behavior (smoking.) You don't go through physical withdrawal, because you're getting nicotine, but you still miss the behavior. As long as you don't smoke, eventually the brain stops associating the drug with the behavior. Then when it comes time to wean yourself off the patch, you're brain is in the situation I was in in the hospital: it wants the drug, but that no longer motivates the behavior of smoking since the association has been broken.
It has been proven many times that addiction is a result of miserable living conditions - social, economic, and/or psychological - not a result of the drugs themselves. the addiction is to the relief of pain, whether physical or psychological.
I don't think that is true: some drugs are inherently addictive. However, I have seen studies showing that the brain doesn't really distinguish emotional pain (from a shitty life, abusive relationships, whatever) from physical pain, so that could explain how people in those situations are more willing to take risks and continue doing things even when the negative consequences start to stack up, but once you're addicted you're addicted -- pain or not.
On the other other hand brains are orders of magnitude more energy efficient. I don't know if the efficiency is even related to the parallelism, asynchronicity, and ultra low "clock speed" of the brain, but it seems plausible that it is. The brain is optimized for efficiency above all else, where we have so far made the opposite trade-offs with computers.
We're doing that "real-time 3D vision and context-sensitive pattern recognition" with a few watts. Doing that with a bunch of GPUs would take thousands of watts at least. Doing it on a serial CPU is totally impossible but would require ludicrous clock speed and a few orders of magnitude more energy.
Yes, lets go back to the caves and live like NobleSavages.
For another point of view, see this talk by David Deutsch from 2005. He rambles for a while (in an entertaining way) before getting to the point. Here's the ending:
So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die.
Now the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.
The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause)
you can't impose these kinds of burdens (financial and otherwise) on people without the certainty that they'll make things better.
That's insane. You have to weigh the uncertainty against the consequences if the predictions are right. There will always be some uncertainty... even if just manufactured uncertainty. You're just burying your head in the sand.
Honestly it is better that he doesn't, otherwise all the papers would simply be attacked ad hominem based on who pays the grants. You want to discredit his work, attack the science in it, not the funding for the science.
The same could be said about publishing the names of the researchers and the institutions they are associated with. That will affect how a paper is received much more than the source of funding will, but the paper should speak for itself whether published by a world-famous scientist at a prestigious university or a high school student working in his garage.
Unfortunately credibility matters. Most people (including scientists) are unable to judge most research entirely on its merit, so they rely on the opinions of those who can. But how do you judge their credibility? Even if the reviewers are completely fair and honest, the volume of research is too high to review everything. Some measure of credibility (e.g. a degree, or a recommendation) is necessary to even be considered. You could just publish everything without regard to its merit, but then how can you call that science? No matter how egalitarian your attitude, there is no escaping the need for credibility. The reputations of the scientists, institutions and journals, and the sources of their funding all help to establish credibility.
When researchers publish bad science, their reputation suffers. Hopefully if a corporation or special interest group continues to fund bad science, the research they fund will also lose credibility and be met with increased skepticism. Eventually scientists won't want to risk their own reputation by accepting the money. But that can only work if the information is disclosed.
Even if the science is good, it is not unfair to be skeptical toward research funded by someone with an obvious stake in the outcome. Just getting a larger number of papers published on one side of a controversial issue gives that side the appearance of increased legitimacy. And grant money always has an effect on researchers even when the money supposedly comes with "no strings attached."
That's the problem with science, insofar as there is a problem: it's ultimately a social and political process done by fallible people. Established scientists and institutions have an unfair advantage and socially unpopular or inconvenient ideas can be suppressed, sometimes for generations. And it can be affected by money. (It's still far better than the alternatives.)
Languages aren't compiled or interpreted: implementations are.
That's true in theory, utterly false in practice. Major design choices hinge on whether the language is intended to be interpreted or compiled. Interpreting languages that are intended to be compiled can be done but it usually amounts to compiling in the background and doesn't work out well. Compiling languages that are intended to be interpreted typically results in an order of magnitude slower performance compared to a language designed to be compiled. The information needed to optimize the compiled code just isn't there so the compiler cannot eliminate type checks, type coercions, bounds checks, overflow checks, etc. Typically all function calls are virtual and many memory accesses are doublely indirect.
Node.js isn't fast. It's concurrent. You can handle many thousands of simultaneous requests, as long as none of them are working particularly hard.
That's not what concurrent means in this context. The word you're looking for is "asynchronous". All of the javascript code you write will execute on a single thread in Node.js. Some APIs are asynchronous with a callback. That style of programming is much older than me and I'm a greybeard. Asynchronous code is great if you need the performance and can deal with the complexity but it shouldn't be the only option. And seriously, Javascript? for performance? really?
Server-side web programming can have a lot of in-flight requests being handled simultaneously, and not much need for synchronization because the requests are relatively independent (and the heavy lifting of dealing with race conditions is being handled by the database, operating system, file system and other libraries not written in javascript.) Real concurrent programming has much more data passing between threads of execution and the Node.js design of one single-threaded process per core is going to really suck for that.
Look at this stackoverflow question about Node.js and multi-core processors (scroll down to the more up to date anwser.)
"Node.js is one-thread-per-process. This is a very deliberate design decision and eliminates the need to deal with locking semantics. If you don't agree with this, you probably don't yet realize just how insanely hard it is to debug multi-threaded code."
That made me actually laugh out loud. Threads were invented because they are easier than asynchronous programming. Asynchronous programming has it's own pitfalls. Writing asychronous libraries is hard, most programmers don't have much experience with it, and many available libraries can't be used because they're not asynchronous. It's all or nothing: one blocking call (or just one long running call) and every in-flight request in that process is stalled and you have one core doing nothing. The node.js people will tell you that if you're writing long running code in javascript, you're probably doing something wrong, completely contradicting the supposed advantage of being able to do client and server code in the same language.
It's an intentional design decision all right, but not for that reason. The fact is that javascript engines like V8 were designed from day one to run in browsers and are inherently single threaded. Now that they've escaped the browser they're trying to make their single threaded nature out to be a feature. They're hyping asynchronous single threaded code because that's the only option. The browser implementers have zero interest in adding multi-threaded javascript support. Adding threaded javascript to browsers would be very difficult to say the least and rich source of new bugs, and the browsers just don't need it. Adding threading to just the server would fracture the language and remove the only advantage Node.js has. So instead Node.js tries to spin the lack of threads as a feature.
Is there scientific evidence that supports the use of St. John's wort for depression?
There is some scientific evidence that St. John's wort may be helpful in treating mild depression, and the benefit seems similar to that of antidepressants. However, two large studies, one sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), showed that the herb was no more effective than placebo in treating major depression of moderate severity; ironically, the conventional drugs also studied did not fare any better than placebo, either.
Hmm. So, according to the first link (that you recommended) St John's wort is about as effective (or ineffective) as conventional drugs. Only cheaper and with far fewer side effects (Source: ask anyone who's taken a conventional antidepressant)
Meanwhile, Wikipedia (with references) says:
An analysis of twenty-nine clinical trials with more than five thousand patients was conducted by Cochrane Collaboration. The review concluded that extracts of St John's wort were superior to placebo in patients with major depression. St John's wort had similar efficacy to standard antidepressants.
And what about side effects?
The rate of side-effects was half that of newer SSRI antidepressants and one-fifth that of older tricyclic antidepressants.[9] A report[9] from the Cochrane Review states: The available evidence suggests that the Hypericum extracts tested in the included trials a) are superior to placebo in patients with major depression; b) are similarly effective as standard antidepressants; and c) have fewer side-effects than standard antidepressants. [...] St John's wort is generally well tolerated, with an adverse effect profile similar to placebo.[21]
Follow through with the references at your leisure.
Slashdot Mirror
All a bunch of bullshit invented to sell drugs that don't even WORK.
So the conditions are fake and the drugs don't work??
I'm curious.... how would you know if the drugs were working?
Of course it will alternate even and odd, the article is incomplete...
I don't think it will, at least not daily. That would result in a weird game of musical cars. You could drive somewhere one day and then have to wait a day to drive back. Annoying as it is if you have the wrong plate, it makes more sense not to alternate (at least not often, and hopefully the ban won't be around that long anyway.)
I wonder if they are banning electric cars with even numbered plates. I'd love to see the reactions to that.
Why not? You allow only half the vehicles on the street today and the other half tomorrow. You have halfed your traffic and brought your pollution levels down. It is quite simple to enforce by number plates. Petrol today and diesel tomorrow on the other hand is difficult to enforce, makes no sense.
I agree, but there's nothing in the article to suggest that it'll be half the vehicles today and the other half tomorrow. Instead it says "Only vehicles with numberplates ending in an odd number will be allowed to drive... for a few days" You'd think it'd be odd numbered plates on odd numbered days and even plates on even days, but that's not what it says.
But come to think of it, that'd be a little weird: you'd be able to drive your car into the city on one day, but wouldn't be able to drive it out the next. You wouldn't be able to go anywhere overnight, you'd have to wait a day for the return trip. They're using check points to stop cars from entering the city, but presumably they won't stop anyone leaving.
If you're already in the city, just plead ignorance; who watches the news anyway? :)
I agree overall with your comment, but I think UTF-8's backwards compatibility with ASCII was genius and is the reason we have as much Unicode support as we do today. I consider UTF-8 to be one of the best hacks of all time. Without it, the software that existed at the time would have had to be thrown out or re-written. The fact that software can (often) process UTF-8 without even being aware that it isn't ASCII was exactly what was needed to get Unicode off the ground. UTF-8 allowed Unicode to be adopted incrementally (especially by Unixes, which were much slower to adopt any (universal) international character set than Windows was).
Sadly, not everyone is as brilliant as Ken Thompson, so the UTF-8 encoding didn't exist when Unicode and ISO 10646 were first created. If someone had thought of it just a few years earlier we probably would have used that for nearly everything, and your second point would be irrelevant.
But by the time Unicode was even a thing, a lot of the software industry was already invested in ISO 10646, specifically UCS-2 (notably Microsoft and IBM, but plenty of others) so unless you think excluding IBM and Microsoft (in 1990!) would have been good for the widespread adoption of Unicode, the designers had no choice but to have multiple encodings.
Ironically, Linux and Apple were able to chose the (arguably much better) UTF-8 encoding only because they got serious about adopting an international character set several years later than Microsoft and IBM did (call it second mover advantage.)
So I couldn't call those mistakes. More like "historical accidents", just like most other bad designs we have to live with.
Your third point is just a face-palm, I agree.
The GP was right; for a right-wing nutjob he makes a lot of sense. I've been saying the same thing for years, nobody listens.
You're never really "locked in". All that is really meant by that is that there is a cost to moving away from some external dependency, and there is always a cost. Every external dependency a project takes on is "lock in." That includes the operating system, programming language, third party libraries, and everything else that isn't part of the project itself. You can try to minimize it with abstraction layers, but that has a cost too, and it is often paid unnecessarily when the dependency never needs to be removed or changed. Or you can also try to minimize it by using the good old advice to avoid nonstandard/non-portable extensions. But that has a cost too when the nonstandard extension does exactly what you need and it's expensive to do yourself. That's just wasted effort if you never actually end up needing to switch.
The only good advice is to choose your dependencies carefully and if necessary have an escape plan. (But don't spend too much effort on the escape plan unless there's a high likelihood you'll actually use it.)
That's only true if you want to run controls that were written for windows. If COM and OLE were supported on other platforms, then presumably people would write COM/OLE components for those platforms, and those would run fine on their platforms.
Back in the 90s, there were some other systems that supported COM/OLE (IBM and Sun Microsystems for example.)
CORBA is practically the same thing, and is available everywhere. The problem with CORBA is that is a typical design-by-committee mess. It ended up way too complicated, even compared to COM/OLE.
The problem that COM and CORBA both solved (or at least tried to solve) still exists, with no commonly accepted solution. The "standard" binary interface between components on every single platform is the C function. That's the only code that can be called directly from (almost) every language without creating "bindings". Not even C++ code from different compilers can be mixed in the same program, because C++ doesn't define the binary interface.
Something like COM or CORBA is still needed. If we had it, and it was universally available, you could expose more than just C functions at the binary level (without bindings or without recompiling everything).
Because of all the years of bad press, nobody is going to believe it, but COM was and is a good idea, and it's completely unencumbered by patents or licensing issues. Being able to combine components written in different languages (or even just different C++ compilers) is a good thing, and is too complicated without something like COM.
I've written many ActiveX controls, some for use in a browser, some not.
At no point was I required to sign or agree to a license to do so.
With requiring a license he was talking about creating the ActiveX runtime environment for a web browser.
No license is required for that either. All ActiveX is, at heart, is a hierarchy of C++ style interfaces (classes with nothing but pure virtual functions) rooted in a single interface (IUnknown), together with a handful of global C functions (e.g. CoCreateInstance). It can be supported on any platform as long as the C++ compiler implements virtual functions with a pointer to a vtable at the beginning of any object with virtual functions. That's every major compiler on every major platform. Actually you can do COM "manually" in plain old C too, so you can do COM anywhere with a C compiler. Put pointer to an array of pointers to functions (the vtable) at the beginning of a struct, if the functions have the proper signatures then the struct is a COM object.
I know this because I've also written many ActiveX and COM components, and ported COM/OLE/ActiveX code to Linux and OS/X. Generally the problem with implementing ActiveX on other platforms has nothing to do with ActiveX itself. The problem is that virtually all ActiveX components are written for Windows and make Win32 calls.
Unicode is sort of complicated, or at least it's more complicated than might be expected. But the problem with Schneier saying "Unicode is too complex to ever be secure" is that he might as well just say "programming is too complex to ever be secure." Sure, Unicode is a little complicated. But it's hardly the most complicated thing you'll ever have to deal with as a programmer. If we can't even get that right, we might as well just quit.
Stop the presses a bug found in a large complex program.
No Browser is safe : Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari all hacked at Pwn2Own contest
It's not "a bug" in "a program". It's every major browser. And it's pretty much like this every time they do pwn2own. If a group of hackers are able to bring down every major browser with previously unknown* exploits every year just for a chance to win a laptop, what can better motivated (financed) groups do?
* unknown to the browser developers anyway... 17 seconds to pwn IE, yeah right... like they say on the cooking shows "here's one I prepared earlier"
The last thing Jersey needs is more car dealerships and lots. So I can see the numerical limits as having some merit.
Have you ever been to a Tesla dealership? They are nothing like typical dealerships. They don't have sprawling lots full of cars. They are small, typically in pedestrian friendly areas nowhere near other dealerships, and have just enough cars that you can look at the models and options, with a few more cars for test drives. They're more like a retail store than a dealership lot. Here is a blog with pictures of dealerships around the world.
Each car is built to order, and you come pick it up at the dealership or they deliver it to you. I suspect the limit is a compromise with opponents of Tesla's model, not anything to do with too many dealerships.
Most companies would not keep any developers over 50 on staff.
It's their loss. Most companies are horrendously bad at making software. The ones that are very good at it know better and have lots of older developers on staff.
And the research shows they're right:
Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
My experience tells me the same. Most of the really good software engineers I know are at least 40, many are much older.
Go ahead, throw 'em out and get some newly-minted CS grads. Someone with some sense is going to get a great hire.
It was a virus developed by the NSA that accidentally escaped into the wild.
Nah. The autopilot became self-aware and, realizing its purpose, it committed suicide.
Well, I still think the data can be deanonymized. I don't need to make any assumptions other than what you've told us.
the places that an individual goes to, and how they got there, how long it took, and how long and where they were stationary. key factors critical for shopping mall owners to be able to provide to their retailers: (1) how many unique shoppers went into *their* store (broken down by time and date is also helpful). (2) how long each unique shopper spent in their store. (3) also useful to know is where they went *before* going to another store.
Even if the time resolution is 5 minutes, and the spacial resolution is only enough to identify which stores I visit, that is enough to identify me. If I go to the mall, stop by and get a coffee, wander around for a while, then make another purchase in another store, using my credit card both times, I may very well be the only person who made purchases at those two stores within a 5 minute window at each store. Each purchase makes it more likely to be unique. Now if I put on dark glasses and a baseball cap and stop by Victoria's Secret to buy some lingerie for my mistress, with cash, it's possible to link that to me via your path data.
It isn't the path data per se that is identifying me -- it's a combination of that and other data. It doesn't have to be credit card data, like I said. It could be wifi, loyalty cards, security cameras, even witnesses... anything that can associate me uniquely with one of your paths. And it doesn't even have to be unique, just narrowing it down to a handful of people is useful to law enforcement.
Don't get me wrong: It sounds like you and the company you worked for care about privacy and did everything you could to protect it. That's commendable. And it sounds like you did a good job. (Plus I think it's cool you used GNU Radio.)
It's also commendable that you understand the conflict of interest. The retailers would like to have better spacial and temporal resolution: they'd like to know which aisles people walk down, what displays they stand in front of and for how long, etc. The retailers will ask for that and if you don't provide it someone else will. So there will always be pressure to make it more useful. But the more useful it is to retailers, the more useful it is to anyone else who might try to get access to it, whether it be through hacking or subpoena.
I am skeptical whenever I hear "don't worry, we've anonymized the data." I've seen too many ways that data can be deanonymized, and I'm not a professional data miner or forensic hacker, so I don't know what other devious methods there might be that I've never heard of and would never occur to me. The key point is that as long as you store the path itself then anything that can link me to part of it can link me to all of it. The only way to avoid that would be to obliterate the path data and only store aggregate information (averages, sums, etc.)
instead they used GNURadio to do GSM passive decoding and signal-strength detection. and no, you *can't* track the person themselves, nor can you get their telephone number, nor can you decode their phone conversations, nor can you decode their SMS messages (not "and track 1000s of phones on affordable commodity off-the-shelf hardware at the same time"). they also track bluetooth and wifi, but again, the mac addresses are hashed (with salting) *before* being stored on disk.
I think it would still be possible to deanonymize that path data. If you make a credit card purchase, the information about time and place of the credit transaction can be associated with whatever id you use hashed or not. The path data has information that someone was standing at the cash register at that time and place. With the credit card information (or even just loyalty card information) you know who it was and can associate that with the entire path through the mall. Similarly, if they walk past a Starbucks and their smartphone associates with their WIFI, now if you have access to Starbuck's information you can deanonymize it from that. Or it could be deanonymized with the security cameras.
I don't see then how it could be subpoena-proof if you store the actual path, regardless of however you anonymize it. They can subpoena your data together with other data to get what they want.
TFA says "the microbiome can influence, and be influenced by, a range of characteristics such as weight, disease, diet, exercise, mood and much more." So they acknowledge the causation can go both ways.
But it gets even more interesting. According to a Ted talk I saw about this the other day, there are apparently two different ways that our gut microbes might cause obesity. One is related to what you said:
Which gets to part 2 of the problem: We shit stuff that is still quite nutritious. Ask your local fly population. Our "waste" is not just waste. There's quite a bit of stuff in there that could still be "digested".
From the Ted talk:
When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them from a regular mouse. Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them eat as much as they want.
So apparently some microbes allow you to extract more energy from your food so you put on more weight for a given amount of calories. But other ones might affect your appetite somehow. There's more in the talk, and it's not just mice: there's research in humans as well.
Only a fool would argue with a Canadian about ice.
I agree that it won't spark an interest that isn't already there, but it might spark a dormant interest in a lasting way. Maybe your criticisms are valid, I haven't read it, but then again we're not 8-year-olds.
I was probably going to be interested in math & science eventually anyway, but at that age I wasn't voluntarily reading any non-fiction science. But then I accidentally discovered an Isaac Asimov book, and I was hooked. Not long after that I asked for a subscription to Scientific American for Christmas. That book had a huge influence on me and got me started much younger than I would have otherwise. (And I can't even remember which Asimov book it was.)
The thing is, you don't know you're interested until you are exposed to it. I'm sure most slashdotters will agree that math & logic are inherently interesting, but that's because they already know a lot of it. You somehow have to learn enough to understand that it is more interesting than it is typically presented in school (hard as they try.)
Does that come with a USB port? Because the laptop does have one. Seriously, wtf.
I was hospitalized once for about 9 weeks, 2 of them in intensive care. I was on a lot of pain medication, so much that it had to be administered by an anesthesiologist. When it came time to start weaning me off, I didn't know what was happening at first. I felt sick like I had the flu. I had hot & cold flashes. I was nervous and irritable and couldn't sleep. The sheets had to be changed twice a day because I was sweating so much. It was awful. And that was in a controlled environment, weaning me off over a period of many days.
When I asked a nurse what was going on she told me I was going through withdrawal from all the pain meds I had been on. I was certainly addicted at that point, and going through physical withdrawal. I wasn't going through psychological withdrawal though, and I think that's because my brain had never made an association between the high and any behavior of mine. The withdrawal was terrible, but I never thought "I'd feel better if I just got some more." The drugs were being administered by the doctors and in a time-release way throughout the day. If I had taken the same amount of morphine and Oxycontin and whatever else on my own, in a way that made allowed my brain to associate it with a behavior (shooting the drug or whatever) then I would have been an addict by then.
I think that's partly how nicotine replacement therapy works, too. You put on a patch and get a steady dose of nicotine throughout the day, breaking the link between the drug and the behavior (smoking.) You don't go through physical withdrawal, because you're getting nicotine, but you still miss the behavior. As long as you don't smoke, eventually the brain stops associating the drug with the behavior. Then when it comes time to wean yourself off the patch, you're brain is in the situation I was in in the hospital: it wants the drug, but that no longer motivates the behavior of smoking since the association has been broken.
It has been proven many times that addiction is a result of miserable living conditions - social, economic, and/or psychological - not a result of the drugs themselves. the addiction is to the relief of pain, whether physical or psychological.
I don't think that is true: some drugs are inherently addictive. However, I have seen studies showing that the brain doesn't really distinguish emotional pain (from a shitty life, abusive relationships, whatever) from physical pain, so that could explain how people in those situations are more willing to take risks and continue doing things even when the negative consequences start to stack up, but once you're addicted you're addicted -- pain or not.
On the other other hand brains are orders of magnitude more energy efficient. I don't know if the efficiency is even related to the parallelism, asynchronicity, and ultra low "clock speed" of the brain, but it seems plausible that it is. The brain is optimized for efficiency above all else, where we have so far made the opposite trade-offs with computers.
We're doing that "real-time 3D vision and context-sensitive pattern recognition" with a few watts. Doing that with a bunch of GPUs would take thousands of watts at least. Doing it on a serial CPU is totally impossible but would require ludicrous clock speed and a few orders of magnitude more energy.
Yes, lets go back to the caves and live like Noble Savages.
For another point of view, see this talk by David Deutsch from 2005. He rambles for a while (in an entertaining way) before getting to the point. Here's the ending:
So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die.
Now the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.
The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause)
you can't impose these kinds of burdens (financial and otherwise) on people without the certainty that they'll make things better.
That's insane. You have to weigh the uncertainty against the consequences if the predictions are right. There will always be some uncertainty... even if just manufactured uncertainty. You're just burying your head in the sand.
Honestly it is better that he doesn't, otherwise all the papers would simply be attacked ad hominem based on who pays the grants. You want to discredit his work, attack the science in it, not the funding for the science.
The same could be said about publishing the names of the researchers and the institutions they are associated with. That will affect how a paper is received much more than the source of funding will, but the paper should speak for itself whether published by a world-famous scientist at a prestigious university or a high school student working in his garage.
Unfortunately credibility matters. Most people (including scientists) are unable to judge most research entirely on its merit, so they rely on the opinions of those who can. But how do you judge their credibility? Even if the reviewers are completely fair and honest, the volume of research is too high to review everything. Some measure of credibility (e.g. a degree, or a recommendation) is necessary to even be considered. You could just publish everything without regard to its merit, but then how can you call that science? No matter how egalitarian your attitude, there is no escaping the need for credibility. The reputations of the scientists, institutions and journals, and the sources of their funding all help to establish credibility.
When researchers publish bad science, their reputation suffers. Hopefully if a corporation or special interest group continues to fund bad science, the research they fund will also lose credibility and be met with increased skepticism. Eventually scientists won't want to risk their own reputation by accepting the money. But that can only work if the information is disclosed.
Even if the science is good, it is not unfair to be skeptical toward research funded by someone with an obvious stake in the outcome. Just getting a larger number of papers published on one side of a controversial issue gives that side the appearance of increased legitimacy. And grant money always has an effect on researchers even when the money supposedly comes with "no strings attached."
That's the problem with science, insofar as there is a problem: it's ultimately a social and political process done by fallible people. Established scientists and institutions have an unfair advantage and socially unpopular or inconvenient ideas can be suppressed, sometimes for generations. And it can be affected by money. (It's still far better than the alternatives.)
Languages aren't compiled or interpreted: implementations are.
That's true in theory, utterly false in practice. Major design choices hinge on whether the language is intended to be interpreted or compiled. Interpreting languages that are intended to be compiled can be done but it usually amounts to compiling in the background and doesn't work out well. Compiling languages that are intended to be interpreted typically results in an order of magnitude slower performance compared to a language designed to be compiled. The information needed to optimize the compiled code just isn't there so the compiler cannot eliminate type checks, type coercions, bounds checks, overflow checks, etc. Typically all function calls are virtual and many memory accesses are doublely indirect.
Node.js isn't fast. It's concurrent. You can handle many thousands of simultaneous requests, as long as none of them are working particularly hard.
That's not what concurrent means in this context. The word you're looking for is "asynchronous". All of the javascript code you write will execute on a single thread in Node.js. Some APIs are asynchronous with a callback. That style of programming is much older than me and I'm a greybeard. Asynchronous code is great if you need the performance and can deal with the complexity but it shouldn't be the only option. And seriously, Javascript? for performance? really?
Server-side web programming can have a lot of in-flight requests being handled simultaneously, and not much need for synchronization because the requests are relatively independent (and the heavy lifting of dealing with race conditions is being handled by the database, operating system, file system and other libraries not written in javascript.) Real concurrent programming has much more data passing between threads of execution and the Node.js design of one single-threaded process per core is going to really suck for that.
Look at this stackoverflow question about Node.js and multi-core processors (scroll down to the more up to date anwser.)
"Node.js is one-thread-per-process. This is a very deliberate design decision and eliminates the need to deal with locking semantics. If you don't agree with this, you probably don't yet realize just how insanely hard it is to debug multi-threaded code."
That made me actually laugh out loud. Threads were invented because they are easier than asynchronous programming. Asynchronous programming has it's own pitfalls. Writing asychronous libraries is hard, most programmers don't have much experience with it, and many available libraries can't be used because they're not asynchronous. It's all or nothing: one blocking call (or just one long running call) and every in-flight request in that process is stalled and you have one core doing nothing. The node.js people will tell you that if you're writing long running code in javascript, you're probably doing something wrong, completely contradicting the supposed advantage of being able to do client and server code in the same language.
It's an intentional design decision all right, but not for that reason. The fact is that javascript engines like V8 were designed from day one to run in browsers and are inherently single threaded. Now that they've escaped the browser they're trying to make their single threaded nature out to be a feature. They're hyping asynchronous single threaded code because that's the only option. The browser implementers have zero interest in adding multi-threaded javascript support. Adding threaded javascript to browsers would be very difficult to say the least and rich source of new bugs, and the browsers just don't need it. Adding threading to just the server would fracture the language and remove the only advantage Node.js has. So instead Node.js tries to spin the lack of threads as a feature.
The performance "g
St. John's Wort is no more effective than placebo.
(Sources: Search for "effectiveness of X" and pick nih.gov or webmd)
OK, sounds like fun! Lets see... google "effectiveness of st john's wort"... pick the first NIH or WebMD link. Got it, that'd be this one:
Is there scientific evidence that supports the use of St. John's wort for depression?
There is some scientific evidence that St. John's wort may be helpful in treating mild depression, and the benefit seems similar to that of antidepressants. However, two large studies, one sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), showed that the herb was no more effective than placebo in treating major depression of moderate severity; ironically, the conventional drugs also studied did not fare any better than placebo, either.
Hmm. So, according to the first link (that you recommended) St John's wort is about as effective (or ineffective) as conventional drugs. Only cheaper and with far fewer side effects (Source: ask anyone who's taken a conventional antidepressant)
Meanwhile, Wikipedia (with references) says:
An analysis of twenty-nine clinical trials with more than five thousand patients was conducted by Cochrane Collaboration. The review concluded that extracts of St John's wort were superior to placebo in patients with major depression. St John's wort had similar efficacy to standard antidepressants.
And what about side effects?
The rate of side-effects was half that of newer SSRI antidepressants and one-fifth that of older tricyclic antidepressants.[9] A report[9] from the Cochrane Review states:
The available evidence suggests that the Hypericum extracts tested in the included trials a) are superior to placebo in patients with major depression; b) are similarly effective as standard antidepressants; and c) have fewer side-effects than standard antidepressants. [...] St John's wort is generally well tolerated, with an adverse effect profile similar to placebo.[21]
Follow through with the references at your leisure.