I too don't really mind that Starbucks sees that I prefer fizzy drinks and chocolate brownies when I am with my coffee drinking friends. But I don't want them sharing that data with anyone. The best privacy law would be that you have 3 options when dealing with a company. 1 That they only use your data for internal purposes (No "trusted" third parties) 2. That they do with your data as they want. 3. That they destroy your data or at least anything that an information scientist could use to identify you (except for your preference) down to the minimum data required to do business with you. Also the companies could not offer discounts or charge extra depending on your preference. Lastly # 1 is the default option.
So looking at option 3 I would include information rich companies such as CC or phone companies. So with either of them they would be able to record what phone calls you made over the last month, Bill you, give you 30 days to dispute the charges, and then forget anything about you except that you are a customer and owe a certain amount. They wouldn't even be able to see what they billed you 5 months ago let alone who you called. Yes it is nice for the phone company to be able to look at their old records to figure out what they could sell you but that doesn't benefit me. That is stealing information from me. They would still have the information in aggregate so they could see that people 20% more each month and thus they should increase their capacity accordingly.
The same with things like EZPass, the power company, the water company, even the police handing out tickets. The moment I pay the ticket there is no reason for them to specifically remember that I got a parking ticket on the corner of South and Main. They could remember that someone did get a ticket, just not who.
It will take people very little time to game the system. They will figure out some way to buy a slew of little things that then let them lead up to a 55" TV being sent for free. Often these ML algorithms have trouble with edge cases. So you pick a pen, wishlist a pen, order a pen, pick a pen, wishlist a pen, order a pen for a few rounds, then you load up your wish list with 1000 55" TV. Maybe the system gave you a 1 in a 1000 chance of actually ordering the 55" screen but with 1000 of them in your wishlist it becomes quite certain that you are going to order one.
Or some other ingenious scheme. ML can come up with interesting solutions but disaster awaits when human common sense is out of the loop.
Quite simply there needs to be two things. One is get a warrant, and these warrants need go public in short order. Public with no redactions. My guess is that 99% of redactions are not to protect sources and whatnot but to avoid embarrassment.
Also these warrants need to go before real judges. If they can't trust the judges then how can they trust anyone?
When the transaction was finalized; There were MS stores before that worried me. I thought that MS would ruin it over time but I thought that Digia was going to shoot it right in the face as they tried to monetize it. My thinking was that they would let the open source part rot and continue all further development in some fairly closed and expensive way. But the qt-project seems to be very separate from Digia and I am very happy.
Python 2.8 is blasphemy to the 3.x crowd. Quite a few 2.7 people are calling for 3.x features to be backported into 2.8. The 3.x supporters say that this will kill 3.x if a 2.8 comes out that is backward compatible with 2.7 and has everything that people like about 3.
There is a huge fight about this. The two positions are fairly incompatible. The 2's insist on backward compatibility; while the 3's say that the 2's are missing the point and that backward compatibility involves too many compromises.
Many people are talking about their own fork to make a 2.8 that, in theory, does what the 2's want. But I doubt this has gone much past words but if that happens then it would be full on civil war.
I never really thought about it but different OS project have vastly different cultures. I have long had a happy relationship with Qt; I was worried a bit after their Nokia purchase, and then really worried after MS bought Nokia; but all seems to still be good. For instance the Python culture is embroiled in a civil war with 2.x vs 3.x. And quite clearly some OS projects are very responsive to customers (For example the warning that git screamed after typing "git add." disappeared. Other projects like Boost are definitely populated by academics, and so on.
I generally have stayed away from GTK and part of that reason might be that I sensed an unfriendliness there.
That server collection is a dump, that looks about identical to my wiring. I love it. It tells me two things. The admin is not some OCD creep that obsesses over the wrong things. But it also tells me that there isn't a person with a marketing bone within 1000 feet of that server collection. I am not a fan of the MBA mentality but gathering money is what they do (usually for their own selfish gain).
The horrible truth is that a tech company with all marketing people will generally do better than a tech company with all tech people. The key is to make sure that you have the minimum number of marketing types and that they are sufficiently neutered so as to prevent them from taking over as they are like Money Tribbles who will quickly find and eat your storehouse of value turning it into more Tribbles(MBAs) until all the value is gone.
So if you want OpenBSD to get out of the swamp get a marketing guy. But keep him on a short leash or OpenBSD will swell up and then burst in the next bust.
How the hell did this make it onto Slashdot. I have asked this question before but this is one of the most narcissistic blowhards to make onto slashdot in a long while.
Just the way he writes is so condescending so as to make me want to do the opposite of what he says. If he recommends 21% oxygen then I might give serious thought as to switching to argon.
I think that 90% of us can agree. G+ is a pile of dung being foisted upon us by some MBAs working at google. As for the spam thing. I just got 2 spam chat requests. I have never received a spam chat request before. Google quite simply is missing the point. Most people want to remain in contact with a small group of select friends. But a few narcissistic blow hards like this tool are so insecure that they think that the whole world is beating a path to their podium and thus they want things like FB and G+ to enable this mentally unstable behavior.
There is a reason why the term is Facebook Friend Whore and not Facebook-amazing-paragon-of-social-amazingness. The problem is that the social networks (Youtube included) are being deceived into thinking that these few unstable folks represent the rest of us; and thus are creating more and more features to enable their behavior. MySpace went straight for the heart of their own network when they primarily tailored their system to enable the worst behavior of rappers, highschool girls and whatnot; the result was that they drove away the regular users.
A simple example of only giving feedback to these self absorbed tampons of human beings is that facebook does not have a dislike button. This way a person might post the 800th picture of their dog being cute and find that the 20 likes are balanced by 120 dislikes. "Yeah you halfwitted oxygen sponge, we all hate your stupid dog now."
BTW I don't even know if Bennett Haselton has a dog; but I hate it now.
My point is that it is mostly C++ insiders who are all hot for templates. I read in discussion forums and discussions with friends that they generally hate anything but the simplest of templates. Then I read about people switching to C because of the nightmare of exceptions and templates. But when I showed all my C++ friends the new for loop for iterators they just about lost their minds. To be even more specific many people that I know who program yards and yards of C++ don't even like streaming that much, but again for anything but the simplest of things.
My personal view is that with templates that you can apply a common quote about regular expressions. "If you have a problem and you solve it with a regular expression; you now have two problems."
My other point is that if the C++ crew keep pushing templates so hard (with say the inclusion of boost) that they will turn C++ into a perfect academic language that will sit right beside lisp in the rankings. But wisely they haven't broken backward compatibility which would be an instant death headshot.
A good example of bad template use is that I (someone with 15 years C++ and many many commercial products) watched a Youtube video and was unable to understand almost anything the guy had typed. An example of useful new C++: std::string s = std::to_string(42);
An example of bad templated C++ is:
(define-syntax (while stx)
(syntax-case stx ()
[(_ test body)
(letrec ((loop (lambda () (if test (begin body (loop))))))
(loop))]
[else (raise-syntax-error 'while "Illegal syntax in while loop" stx)]))
Oh wait a second that isn't C++ that is Lisp; which is what C++ is beginning to look like.
Some code is not compatible? A huge number of Hello World level examples aren't compatible. That must be really off-putting to new developers starting out with Python when this tiny clip of intro code won't run. I would absolutely bet that the new programmer will think it their fault and not some version issue.
I love most things about python but there is something supremely arrogant about waving your hand and saying, sorry but we broke all your code. I hear all kinds of very well thought out arguments involving unicode and whatnot; but there are dozens of other languages that didn't break backward compatibility and have added all kinds of fundamentals such as ascii to unicode.
I get this feeling that the core developers of Python have lost focus of what the typical developer wants. I see the same thing happening in C++ with templates. Templates aren't bad its just that the bulk of C++ developers are far more interested in the cool new iterating system in C++ than all the wonky template features that are added hourly. Luckily with C++ there has been no threats to break backward compatibility.
It is almost like these people are trying to impress some old CS professor instead of making their customers more productive.
But where the python people are playing with fire is that if a company has a massive codebase that is getting creaky and needs a huge Python porting effort that would probably be combined with a huge architecture refactor then that company might think, "we don't want to be forced to do this in the future, so what other language has been more version stable?" Or you might have a new IT head who has been pushing for his favorite language and will take advantage of this to switch. Python is awesome but there are other fish in the sea; and as we all know even good languages can fade (see PERL) and no so good languages take their place (PHP).
It seems we Canadians were playing lapdog to all this nonsense; so why would anyone send their data here. It also seems that the Canadian government is perfectly happy to send Canadian data and its citizens to face US justice. I was proud of Canada's history of protecting draft dodgers; but then we sent an Iraq dodger back and my pride died that day. Then Mark Emery thrown to the wolves by the Canadian government, and recently the Canadian government has begun sending all sorts of bank records south.
So if you put your data into a Canadian server then I suspect that the US will have full access to it a dozen different ways.
Personally if I were the head of IT for a large non North American company there are few countries that I would truly trust. For instance I might look into a Swiss IT company, but only if it were wholly Swiss owned, and only staffed by natural born Swiss citizens. But Canada, heck no.
I don't want CentOS to be eaten and then shat out by Red Hat. I see no long term upside to this. Here is my "Mark these words": Within 5 years CentOS will solely exist as a marketing platform for Red Hat or it will be dead.
Red Hat has piles of cash, CentOS (at best) has piles of pennies. This is not a relationship of equals. I not only use CentOS because it is free but because I don't like the flavor of Red Hat; to me it is the most MS of Linux with Ubuntu a far distant second.
When Oracle snagged MySQL they swore on a stack of bibles that it would be left alone. Yet everyone is now switching to MariaDB, and I suspect that Oracle could make a solid argument that they have been kind to MySQL; the sort of argument that wins high school debating contests but is still a load of crap.
It is not so much the science of GMOs that is specifically bad but the companies that are typically behind them. These companies have a long history of being James Bond Villain evil, manipulating governments to their will, hurting people in corrupt countries, and pushing other things that are bad like pesticides, herbicides, hormone/antibiotic meat, and vicious anti consumer anti labeling campaigns.
The other thing with most GMOs is that they (the main commercial ones) are aimed at things that on the surface I don't care about such as herbicide resistance. I suspect that people would have a whole lot more buy in if the GMOs made the food healthier, tastier, have a longer shelf life (Bananas that don't turn brown in 3 seconds) etc.
But it seems the main beneficiaries of GMOs are big agribusiness and only big agribusiness. So when people reject GMOs they don't personally feel like they are losing much. One might argue that they are losing if the food costs a bit more but the reality is that the savings at the consumer end is actually quite minimal. (In theory a pest resistant crop might have fewer pesticides/herbicides which is a gain but hard for the average consumer to know as big agribusiness has fought all public disclosures of chemical levels in food.)
So looking at the science in most people's heads they might be thinking, "Hey this GMO only has one study in 100 that says it is bad. But what benefit do I have even taking that tiny risk? Whereas the agribusiness people won't eat this crap if it is toxic but they stand to make a fortune selling it."
Ah good clarification. So a good policy for yahoo would be if your site uses Java applets there is an 80% chance you are being a tool. I thought the coverage of Java Applet Ads would be pretty poor. I am not sure of the exact stats but with mobile devices growing this number must also be in freefall.
The only legitimate sites that I see where a java applet is a critical feature are older science websites. Astronomy calculators would be a common example.
Personally I am excited about the prospects of asm.js for when you want to put something hardcore in a browser. Something that might have been ported from C++ or some such language.
The moment that Yahoo allowed advertisers to use java they knew that minimally those ads would be used to annoy the crap out of the users. If your ad is a static picture with a clickable link then you don't need Java. What you need java for is to start prying into the user's business. Animations, sound, geolocations, saving data to the user's machine. So any "legitimate" ad using Java is halfway to being malware already. Plus why use Java instead of Flash? Generally ads should be made by Graphic artist types who are more familiar with Flash. Thus the primary reason to use Java is to access some feature that flash has blocked in Flash.
So if your goal with a Java ad is to circumvent something that Adobe has blocked then it probably should remain blocked. On top of that most users have turned off Java so it can't be to reach a wider audience.
So when Yahoo allows advertisers to use Java they knew perfectly well that the advertisers were up to no good whatsoever. Their acting surprised that some of the scumbags took it even further is total BS.
Basically at this point, anyone who has Java turned on in the browser is the same as having a house with a weeks worth of newspapers stacked up at the front door. Effectively a greeting card inviting the criminals in.
Some Egyptian beer used a yeast that produced huge quantities of tetracycline; enough that it changed the colour of their bones. I wonder if any of the text will refer to the beer's medicinal properties.
I think that HR departments should be prevented from examining any social media for hiring but that said, I look at different people's facebook pages and I can tell if they are a complete tool, looser, go getter, nutcase, or criminal. When I am buying something through an online classified I will check that person's email for a FB match. It is great to get a picture of them to identify them at the coffeeshop etc. But many of these people have pictures of themselves infront of their weed stash, treating women like crap, holding guns(Odd in Canada) or just 100 pictures of themselves drinking like it's a sport.
Also their politics usually come clear through FB, I am not saying that you should hire based on politics but if people are putting up pictures that say Obama is going to make it illegal to be white and get a bank loan, or that Romney is going to make Mormonism the state religion; then they are a tool.
You are correct, it is a good idea to pile on the cameras. Actually criminals are highly camera aware. But their general strategy is to conceal their face as much as possible given the environment. So if they are sneaking into an apartment building they won't completely cover their faces as that would be a huge signal to anyone crossing their path.
The other key is to use resolution correctly. For an area camera even a greyscale 320x200 will give you a great idea of what is happening. But for the cameras that have a good chance of capturing faces or license plates you want ultra clear, low light capable, brutally high resolution cameras. This way the crappy area cameras won't waste too much storage space while you are pretty much going to make a blueray of the stuff that will get you the positive ID.
If you watch the Youtube videos of various robberies you get a great view of the top of people's heads, and about all you can confirm is that they are humanoids. Basically enough to entertain us on Youtube but not enough for a conviction.
My dream has been to create a security system that generates a 3D map of what is going on, with a few cameras able to pan/tilt/zoom so they can go right up to the faces and stay locked on while other cameras maintain the big picture.
Ideally you could even combine that with some ML that would identify things that don't really fit. Say a person who passes by the house and looks at the house statistically longer than is normal. You would then be notified with the precise footage and you could then make a decision as to if the person looks like they are casing the joint.
There are two better uses for that $20 per month. You could either bump up your dataplan so that you are sent lots of pictures to your phone of any vaguely interesting activity. Or if you have a good data plan then you could use $20 per month to get a data only plan for your security system so that it can communicate via your internet connection or via a cell data system as backup.
My sister has me as a contact for her security system. So I have driven across town more than once only to find one of her family has set it off and the phone is turned down or off the hook. It would be great to just get a snap of whomever set it off. Neice. Nothing. Nephew. Nothing. Guy in balaclava with sack over his shoulder, call the cops and give them a blow by blow description of who is exactly where.
So a DIY security system should not only be as good as traditional ones but should be way cooler.
On a side note, don't mount the cameras up high looking down. All you will get is an image of the robber's hoodies or baseball cap logo. Mount the cameras in a concealed location at eye level. This way you basically get a mug shot. If you want cameras for deterrent you can get fake cameras to mount up high. The only cameras you want up high are to capture the over all picture. I will tell you that you will be sorely disappointed if your security camera only provides enough evidence to say that a guy(race unknown) 5'4" to 5'10" wearing a Blue Molson hat, a grey sweatshirt, jeans, and black sneakers took all your stuff. Get a good enough picture at eye level and the police will drive right over to the halfway house and arrest him 20 minutes later.
Where is the focal point? I really hope that there isn't a really solid focal point. Oh look the people thought they were ants. Not to mention that things like cats like to sleep in warm places.
There is another problem. The typical commuter is away from their car port during the best daylight hours.
That said, this would be perfect for me. I don't drive a car much so a solar panel would mean that I would plug the car in very rarely. I would love to drive for a year or more, check the charging logs and see that I have given the utility/petro fat cats $2.15 for the entire year. Also these freznel setups would probably be cheap enough that you could have one at the cottage and whatnot. Also they should be compatible from one car to the next.
But I suspect it would be great to have a solar panel on the car sipping up a bit extra energy while you work but that at home you would have a battery bank charging from dedicated solar panels. This being the key to all electric cars and solar energy; great batteries.
I did read it and there was no mention of Quaaludes. Actually it has been a long time but I don't remember him covering the banking sector corrupting the government into handing the nation's wealth to them and a few of their friends. But knowing his genius he did cover it. I almost wonder if that is why economists end up coming up with really stupid ideas; the problem being that he sort of wrote a near perfect textbook and that in reality that the entire branch of economics should be making tiny fixes to his book instead of trying to write a new one.
And yes people read whatever they want into Wealth of Nations; often to justify their completely batshit economic ideas that have almost no relationship with his. Sort of like Intel saying, "The Atom architecture is better than the ARM architecture because Atom is close to Adam and thus the Bible says so. Intelius 3:17"
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If they need money then then need an MBA. They might not be for profit but that just makes them a not-for-profit business.
I don't like people who get MBAs but they are often an necessary evil.
I too don't really mind that Starbucks sees that I prefer fizzy drinks and chocolate brownies when I am with my coffee drinking friends. But I don't want them sharing that data with anyone. The best privacy law would be that you have 3 options when dealing with a company. 1 That they only use your data for internal purposes (No "trusted" third parties) 2. That they do with your data as they want. 3. That they destroy your data or at least anything that an information scientist could use to identify you (except for your preference) down to the minimum data required to do business with you. Also the companies could not offer discounts or charge extra depending on your preference. Lastly # 1 is the default option.
So looking at option 3 I would include information rich companies such as CC or phone companies. So with either of them they would be able to record what phone calls you made over the last month, Bill you, give you 30 days to dispute the charges, and then forget anything about you except that you are a customer and owe a certain amount. They wouldn't even be able to see what they billed you 5 months ago let alone who you called. Yes it is nice for the phone company to be able to look at their old records to figure out what they could sell you but that doesn't benefit me. That is stealing information from me. They would still have the information in aggregate so they could see that people 20% more each month and thus they should increase their capacity accordingly.
The same with things like EZPass, the power company, the water company, even the police handing out tickets. The moment I pay the ticket there is no reason for them to specifically remember that I got a parking ticket on the corner of South and Main. They could remember that someone did get a ticket, just not who.
It will take people very little time to game the system. They will figure out some way to buy a slew of little things that then let them lead up to a 55" TV being sent for free. Often these ML algorithms have trouble with edge cases. So you pick a pen, wishlist a pen, order a pen, pick a pen, wishlist a pen, order a pen for a few rounds, then you load up your wish list with 1000 55" TV. Maybe the system gave you a 1 in a 1000 chance of actually ordering the 55" screen but with 1000 of them in your wishlist it becomes quite certain that you are going to order one.
Or some other ingenious scheme. ML can come up with interesting solutions but disaster awaits when human common sense is out of the loop.
Quite simply there needs to be two things. One is get a warrant, and these warrants need go public in short order. Public with no redactions. My guess is that 99% of redactions are not to protect sources and whatnot but to avoid embarrassment.
Also these warrants need to go before real judges. If they can't trust the judges then how can they trust anyone?
When the transaction was finalized; There were MS stores before that worried me. I thought that MS would ruin it over time but I thought that Digia was going to shoot it right in the face as they tried to monetize it. My thinking was that they would let the open source part rot and continue all further development in some fairly closed and expensive way. But the qt-project seems to be very separate from Digia and I am very happy.
Python 2.8 is blasphemy to the 3.x crowd. Quite a few 2.7 people are calling for 3.x features to be backported into 2.8. The 3.x supporters say that this will kill 3.x if a 2.8 comes out that is backward compatible with 2.7 and has everything that people like about 3.
There is a huge fight about this. The two positions are fairly incompatible. The 2's insist on backward compatibility; while the 3's say that the 2's are missing the point and that backward compatibility involves too many compromises.
Many people are talking about their own fork to make a 2.8 that, in theory, does what the 2's want. But I doubt this has gone much past words but if that happens then it would be full on civil war.
I never really thought about it but different OS project have vastly different cultures. I have long had a happy relationship with Qt; I was worried a bit after their Nokia purchase, and then really worried after MS bought Nokia; but all seems to still be good. For instance the Python culture is embroiled in a civil war with 2.x vs 3.x. And quite clearly some OS projects are very responsive to customers (For example the warning that git screamed after typing "git add ." disappeared. Other projects like Boost are definitely populated by academics, and so on.
I generally have stayed away from GTK and part of that reason might be that I sensed an unfriendliness there.
That server collection is a dump, that looks about identical to my wiring. I love it. It tells me two things. The admin is not some OCD creep that obsesses over the wrong things. But it also tells me that there isn't a person with a marketing bone within 1000 feet of that server collection. I am not a fan of the MBA mentality but gathering money is what they do (usually for their own selfish gain).
The horrible truth is that a tech company with all marketing people will generally do better than a tech company with all tech people. The key is to make sure that you have the minimum number of marketing types and that they are sufficiently neutered so as to prevent them from taking over as they are like Money Tribbles who will quickly find and eat your storehouse of value turning it into more Tribbles(MBAs) until all the value is gone.
So if you want OpenBSD to get out of the swamp get a marketing guy. But keep him on a short leash or OpenBSD will swell up and then burst in the next bust.
Can't people file freedom of information requests for this data. That should lock it up legally.
How the hell did this make it onto Slashdot. I have asked this question before but this is one of the most narcissistic blowhards to make onto slashdot in a long while.
Just the way he writes is so condescending so as to make me want to do the opposite of what he says. If he recommends 21% oxygen then I might give serious thought as to switching to argon.
I think that 90% of us can agree. G+ is a pile of dung being foisted upon us by some MBAs working at google. As for the spam thing. I just got 2 spam chat requests. I have never received a spam chat request before. Google quite simply is missing the point. Most people want to remain in contact with a small group of select friends. But a few narcissistic blow hards like this tool are so insecure that they think that the whole world is beating a path to their podium and thus they want things like FB and G+ to enable this mentally unstable behavior.
There is a reason why the term is Facebook Friend Whore and not Facebook-amazing-paragon-of-social-amazingness. The problem is that the social networks (Youtube included) are being deceived into thinking that these few unstable folks represent the rest of us; and thus are creating more and more features to enable their behavior. MySpace went straight for the heart of their own network when they primarily tailored their system to enable the worst behavior of rappers, highschool girls and whatnot; the result was that they drove away the regular users.
A simple example of only giving feedback to these self absorbed tampons of human beings is that facebook does not have a dislike button. This way a person might post the 800th picture of their dog being cute and find that the 20 likes are balanced by 120 dislikes. "Yeah you halfwitted oxygen sponge, we all hate your stupid dog now."
BTW I don't even know if Bennett Haselton has a dog; but I hate it now.
My point is that it is mostly C++ insiders who are all hot for templates. I read in discussion forums and discussions with friends that they generally hate anything but the simplest of templates. Then I read about people switching to C because of the nightmare of exceptions and templates. But when I showed all my C++ friends the new for loop for iterators they just about lost their minds. To be even more specific many people that I know who program yards and yards of C++ don't even like streaming that much, but again for anything but the simplest of things.
My personal view is that with templates that you can apply a common quote about regular expressions. "If you have a problem and you solve it with a regular expression; you now have two problems."
My other point is that if the C++ crew keep pushing templates so hard (with say the inclusion of boost) that they will turn C++ into a perfect academic language that will sit right beside lisp in the rankings. But wisely they haven't broken backward compatibility which would be an instant death headshot.
A good example of bad template use is that I (someone with 15 years C++ and many many commercial products) watched a Youtube video and was unable to understand almost anything the guy had typed. An example of useful new C++: std::string s = std::to_string(42);
An example of bad templated C++ is:
(define-syntax (while stx) (syntax-case stx () [(_ test body) (letrec ((loop (lambda () (if test (begin body (loop)))))) (loop))] [else (raise-syntax-error 'while "Illegal syntax in while loop" stx)])) Oh wait a second that isn't C++ that is Lisp; which is what C++ is beginning to look like.
Some code is not compatible? A huge number of Hello World level examples aren't compatible. That must be really off-putting to new developers starting out with Python when this tiny clip of intro code won't run. I would absolutely bet that the new programmer will think it their fault and not some version issue.
I love most things about python but there is something supremely arrogant about waving your hand and saying, sorry but we broke all your code. I hear all kinds of very well thought out arguments involving unicode and whatnot; but there are dozens of other languages that didn't break backward compatibility and have added all kinds of fundamentals such as ascii to unicode.
I get this feeling that the core developers of Python have lost focus of what the typical developer wants. I see the same thing happening in C++ with templates. Templates aren't bad its just that the bulk of C++ developers are far more interested in the cool new iterating system in C++ than all the wonky template features that are added hourly. Luckily with C++ there has been no threats to break backward compatibility.
It is almost like these people are trying to impress some old CS professor instead of making their customers more productive.
But where the python people are playing with fire is that if a company has a massive codebase that is getting creaky and needs a huge Python porting effort that would probably be combined with a huge architecture refactor then that company might think, "we don't want to be forced to do this in the future, so what other language has been more version stable?" Or you might have a new IT head who has been pushing for his favorite language and will take advantage of this to switch. Python is awesome but there are other fish in the sea; and as we all know even good languages can fade (see PERL) and no so good languages take their place (PHP).
It seems we Canadians were playing lapdog to all this nonsense; so why would anyone send their data here. It also seems that the Canadian government is perfectly happy to send Canadian data and its citizens to face US justice. I was proud of Canada's history of protecting draft dodgers; but then we sent an Iraq dodger back and my pride died that day. Then Mark Emery thrown to the wolves by the Canadian government, and recently the Canadian government has begun sending all sorts of bank records south.
So if you put your data into a Canadian server then I suspect that the US will have full access to it a dozen different ways.
Personally if I were the head of IT for a large non North American company there are few countries that I would truly trust. For instance I might look into a Swiss IT company, but only if it were wholly Swiss owned, and only staffed by natural born Swiss citizens. But Canada, heck no.
I don't want CentOS to be eaten and then shat out by Red Hat. I see no long term upside to this. Here is my "Mark these words": Within 5 years CentOS will solely exist as a marketing platform for Red Hat or it will be dead.
Red Hat has piles of cash, CentOS (at best) has piles of pennies. This is not a relationship of equals. I not only use CentOS because it is free but because I don't like the flavor of Red Hat; to me it is the most MS of Linux with Ubuntu a far distant second.
When Oracle snagged MySQL they swore on a stack of bibles that it would be left alone. Yet everyone is now switching to MariaDB, and I suspect that Oracle could make a solid argument that they have been kind to MySQL; the sort of argument that wins high school debating contests but is still a load of crap.
It is not so much the science of GMOs that is specifically bad but the companies that are typically behind them. These companies have a long history of being James Bond Villain evil, manipulating governments to their will, hurting people in corrupt countries, and pushing other things that are bad like pesticides, herbicides, hormone/antibiotic meat, and vicious anti consumer anti labeling campaigns.
The other thing with most GMOs is that they (the main commercial ones) are aimed at things that on the surface I don't care about such as herbicide resistance. I suspect that people would have a whole lot more buy in if the GMOs made the food healthier, tastier, have a longer shelf life (Bananas that don't turn brown in 3 seconds) etc.
But it seems the main beneficiaries of GMOs are big agribusiness and only big agribusiness. So when people reject GMOs they don't personally feel like they are losing much. One might argue that they are losing if the food costs a bit more but the reality is that the savings at the consumer end is actually quite minimal. (In theory a pest resistant crop might have fewer pesticides/herbicides which is a gain but hard for the average consumer to know as big agribusiness has fought all public disclosures of chemical levels in food.)
So looking at the science in most people's heads they might be thinking, "Hey this GMO only has one study in 100 that says it is bad. But what benefit do I have even taking that tiny risk? Whereas the agribusiness people won't eat this crap if it is toxic but they stand to make a fortune selling it."
Ah good clarification. So a good policy for yahoo would be if your site uses Java applets there is an 80% chance you are being a tool. I thought the coverage of Java Applet Ads would be pretty poor. I am not sure of the exact stats but with mobile devices growing this number must also be in freefall.
The only legitimate sites that I see where a java applet is a critical feature are older science websites. Astronomy calculators would be a common example.
Personally I am excited about the prospects of asm.js for when you want to put something hardcore in a browser. Something that might have been ported from C++ or some such language.
I used Lynx up until 2010 until I realized that it might be compromised. So now just telnet to port 80 and manually send GETs and POSTs.
The moment that Yahoo allowed advertisers to use java they knew that minimally those ads would be used to annoy the crap out of the users. If your ad is a static picture with a clickable link then you don't need Java. What you need java for is to start prying into the user's business. Animations, sound, geolocations, saving data to the user's machine. So any "legitimate" ad using Java is halfway to being malware already. Plus why use Java instead of Flash? Generally ads should be made by Graphic artist types who are more familiar with Flash. Thus the primary reason to use Java is to access some feature that flash has blocked in Flash.
So if your goal with a Java ad is to circumvent something that Adobe has blocked then it probably should remain blocked. On top of that most users have turned off Java so it can't be to reach a wider audience.
So when Yahoo allows advertisers to use Java they knew perfectly well that the advertisers were up to no good whatsoever. Their acting surprised that some of the scumbags took it even further is total BS.
Basically at this point, anyone who has Java turned on in the browser is the same as having a house with a weeks worth of newspapers stacked up at the front door. Effectively a greeting card inviting the criminals in.
Some Egyptian beer used a yeast that produced huge quantities of tetracycline; enough that it changed the colour of their bones. I wonder if any of the text will refer to the beer's medicinal properties.
I think that HR departments should be prevented from examining any social media for hiring but that said, I look at different people's facebook pages and I can tell if they are a complete tool, looser, go getter, nutcase, or criminal. When I am buying something through an online classified I will check that person's email for a FB match. It is great to get a picture of them to identify them at the coffeeshop etc. But many of these people have pictures of themselves infront of their weed stash, treating women like crap, holding guns(Odd in Canada) or just 100 pictures of themselves drinking like it's a sport.
Also their politics usually come clear through FB, I am not saying that you should hire based on politics but if people are putting up pictures that say Obama is going to make it illegal to be white and get a bank loan, or that Romney is going to make Mormonism the state religion; then they are a tool.
You are correct, it is a good idea to pile on the cameras. Actually criminals are highly camera aware. But their general strategy is to conceal their face as much as possible given the environment. So if they are sneaking into an apartment building they won't completely cover their faces as that would be a huge signal to anyone crossing their path.
The other key is to use resolution correctly. For an area camera even a greyscale 320x200 will give you a great idea of what is happening. But for the cameras that have a good chance of capturing faces or license plates you want ultra clear, low light capable, brutally high resolution cameras. This way the crappy area cameras won't waste too much storage space while you are pretty much going to make a blueray of the stuff that will get you the positive ID.
If you watch the Youtube videos of various robberies you get a great view of the top of people's heads, and about all you can confirm is that they are humanoids. Basically enough to entertain us on Youtube but not enough for a conviction.
My dream has been to create a security system that generates a 3D map of what is going on, with a few cameras able to pan/tilt/zoom so they can go right up to the faces and stay locked on while other cameras maintain the big picture.
Ideally you could even combine that with some ML that would identify things that don't really fit. Say a person who passes by the house and looks at the house statistically longer than is normal. You would then be notified with the precise footage and you could then make a decision as to if the person looks like they are casing the joint.
There are two better uses for that $20 per month. You could either bump up your dataplan so that you are sent lots of pictures to your phone of any vaguely interesting activity. Or if you have a good data plan then you could use $20 per month to get a data only plan for your security system so that it can communicate via your internet connection or via a cell data system as backup.
My sister has me as a contact for her security system. So I have driven across town more than once only to find one of her family has set it off and the phone is turned down or off the hook. It would be great to just get a snap of whomever set it off. Neice. Nothing. Nephew. Nothing. Guy in balaclava with sack over his shoulder, call the cops and give them a blow by blow description of who is exactly where.
So a DIY security system should not only be as good as traditional ones but should be way cooler.
On a side note, don't mount the cameras up high looking down. All you will get is an image of the robber's hoodies or baseball cap logo. Mount the cameras in a concealed location at eye level. This way you basically get a mug shot. If you want cameras for deterrent you can get fake cameras to mount up high. The only cameras you want up high are to capture the over all picture. I will tell you that you will be sorely disappointed if your security camera only provides enough evidence to say that a guy(race unknown) 5'4" to 5'10" wearing a Blue Molson hat, a grey sweatshirt, jeans, and black sneakers took all your stuff. Get a good enough picture at eye level and the police will drive right over to the halfway house and arrest him 20 minutes later.
Where is the focal point? I really hope that there isn't a really solid focal point. Oh look the people thought they were ants. Not to mention that things like cats like to sleep in warm places.
There is another problem. The typical commuter is away from their car port during the best daylight hours.
That said, this would be perfect for me. I don't drive a car much so a solar panel would mean that I would plug the car in very rarely. I would love to drive for a year or more, check the charging logs and see that I have given the utility/petro fat cats $2.15 for the entire year. Also these freznel setups would probably be cheap enough that you could have one at the cottage and whatnot. Also they should be compatible from one car to the next.
But I suspect it would be great to have a solar panel on the car sipping up a bit extra energy while you work but that at home you would have a battery bank charging from dedicated solar panels. This being the key to all electric cars and solar energy; great batteries.
I did read it and there was no mention of Quaaludes. Actually it has been a long time but I don't remember him covering the banking sector corrupting the government into handing the nation's wealth to them and a few of their friends. But knowing his genius he did cover it. I almost wonder if that is why economists end up coming up with really stupid ideas; the problem being that he sort of wrote a near perfect textbook and that in reality that the entire branch of economics should be making tiny fixes to his book instead of trying to write a new one.
And yes people read whatever they want into Wealth of Nations; often to justify their completely batshit economic ideas that have almost no relationship with his. Sort of like Intel saying, "The Atom architecture is better than the ARM architecture because Atom is close to Adam and thus the Bible says so. Intelius 3:17"