What we have is a management-problem, not a resource-problem. We do know how to grow 3-5 times more food pr acre than is done today in much of the world, it's just a matter of using that knowledge.
Indeed, food-prices are not high, but low. Relative to income (which is what counts!) people of the world use a smaller fraction of their income for feeding themselves and their families now than in any previous generation. This is one of the reasons why malnourishment has been sharply dropping for decades.
In 1970, 37% of the population in the developing world was malnourished, in 2009 that had dropped to 16. The FAO estimates that -current- food-production is sufficient for 12 billion people (assuming the food that is produced is well-handled and well-distributed)
With modest increases in technology we can feed several tens of billions. And incase you've not noticed it, we're on an exponential curve for technology-development. We'll see more progress in the next 30 years than we saw in the last 100.
There's rock-solid evidence that younger people are more influenced by advertising. Thus the primary target is old-enough-to-have-money but at the same time young-enough-to-be-influencable. To a certain degree younger children influence the purchases of their parents offcourse, so those too get targeted.
Thing is, most habits are pretty well-formed before you're 40, and odds are you'll stick with many of them for life. Sure you'll drop -some- old stuff, and pick up -some- new stuff. But at a rate nowhere near that of the younger generation which doesn't yet *have* a developed mature taste.
Consider how music-taste changes 10-25 versus 30-45. The first is a huge change, and probably most of the music-styles and/or artists that'll be your favourites for life, you learn to know in this age, the second age-span ? Not so much. You'll maybe get to know a few new artists, mostly such as play in genres you already know and like.
But odds are, most of the music you love at 30, you'll still enjoy at 45. Same goes for food, for vacations, for cars, for clothing, for *most* stuff you buy, infact.
Why does it attempt to detect "explosives and liquids" ?
I thought the supposed problem with liquids was that they might be explosive, thus if you where able to successfully detect explosives, there'd be no reason whatsoever for denying liquids ?
Explosives come in all phases: solids, gels, liquids, gas. And solids are generally the most practical form. Never got the point of the liquid-ban, why ban liquids when all actual plane-bombs that I've ever heard of have been composed of solids, and solid explosives are readily available anyway ?
Here's an idea ! Let's ban gases, liquids and solids on planes !
Yeah. Though arguably even 31/12/1990 is suboptimal, it -does- have the advantage of not having the least-significant-part in the *middle*, but it still, for example, sorts wrong regardless of if you sort numerically or alphabetically.
Generally, the most significant part should be -first-
1990-05-30 is superior for this reason, it sorts correctly both numerically and alphabetically, and follows the general convention we have of having the most significant part come FIRST.
URLs suffer from the same problem, with the most significant part being in the middle of the URL. It would really be a lot more logical to have:
Yes it is, generally speaking, hard to parse strings into date and time.
What date or time does "Tomorrow", "Next friday", "7/5/09", "6 o 'clock", or "directly after lunch" refer to ? Keep in mind that the document may not be current - and make sure to take into account different time-zones and different conventions for dates. (in particular, some odd countries like to print dates as M/D/Y where the least-significant part is in the *middle*)
May 8, 7:30pm is better than average - but you're still left with the question of which year is meant, and 7:30pm in which timezone ?
There's a reason (actually many reasons!) we store hashes of password+salt instead of storing the passwords in cleartext you know ?
You seem to be arguing that defeating this line of defence makes no noticeable difference to security. If that was true, we might just as well have stored plaintext passwords in the first place.
You are right that ideally, attackers should not be able to get the hashes. Still, they are hashed for a reason - some attackers (insiders for example) typically -can- get access to hashes.
Just because you have several lines of defence, it doesn't follow that having one of them breached, is meaningless.
Nobody can. There's only so many hours in a day. Even if you spend 14 hours a day -only- being social (=100% of your waking time minus the time you eat and visit the bathroom etc), then 150 friends would still only get 10 minutes a day each.
And most people do other things than just be social, you know, stuff like holding a job or studying, shopping, cooking, doing housework, showering, etc.
A more realistic (but still high!) time-available estimate is 3-4 hours on weekdays and 10 hours on weekends, which gives you 35 hours/week, or 2 minutes a day for your friends.
On Facebook, "friend" tends to mean "someone I met at some point in my life and can recognize".
Human beings are group-animals. Guesstimating what others in the group are likely to do, has obvious benefits to your survival. Thus evolution will favor those who are capable of understanding what others might be thinking and feeling.
Being empathic is also a good thing, *especially* in smaller groups, like how humans have lived for most of our existence. Odds are, if you act with kindness towards others when they're in trouble, you are more likely to be helped out yourself when you are. Evolutionary, groups who tend to be nice to eachothers, will outdo groups where everyone is 100% an egoist.
Yeah. Furthermore, this is a *really* old and *really* well-known side-channel. Everyone knows, and has known for many decades, that crypto by itself is no defence against traffic-analysis, that is, you still know what size the packets are, and who the sender and recipient is, and the frequency they're sent with.
The only way to thwart that completely, would be to send a constant stream of constant-size packages regardless of if anything is being said or not, this is an easy fix, but it conflicts with the goal of saving bandwith.
I do off-site backups by rsyncing to a TB-disc in the basement of a co-worker. (and he does his off-site backups by rsyncing to a disc in my basement)
This gives us both reasonable security against possibilities like flooding, fire, burglars or lightning-strikes that could all potentially destroy both my laptop, and all in-house backups at the same time.
By using encfs for the backup, I preserve the property of only needing to sync changed files, but at the same time keep reasonable privacy.
Yes, a lost pass-phrase would mean a worthless backup, but this being a secondary backup, that's acceptable. (I'd lose the data if my house burnt down AND I forgot the password at the same time)
Socialism, in the more pragmatic forms, such as it's practiced in the scandinavian countries for example, can work quite well, but communism, the utopia, is bullshit. Having a single answer to all questions is bullshit regardless of what that answer is, actually. (there's some people who claim "the market" is the answer to ALL questions, and that's -ALSO- bullshit)
Reality is complex. We need more than one answer. A *balance* is the trick.
Taxis are neither cheap, nor -nearly- as awesome as you make them out to be, and for this reason a tiny fraction of human transport happens by taxi (especially outside city-centres).
Taxis amount to using one human being and a car to transport another human being. (or more, but a large fraction of taxi-rides are single) If that human being is paid the same you are, then because of things like VAT and taxes, it ends up being significantly MORE expensive to let a taxi do it, than to do it yourself.
You have to wait for taxis - if you want one at the same time many others do, you'll wait a lot. Not all taxi-drivers are dependable. Taxi-fares are expensive, especially in countries without a large poor-caste. Storing belongings, or items bought in one shop, while visiting another, is right out, and so on.
You mean you never have, and expect you never will:
* Go to a restaurant, want to get home by car after a few drinks.
* Be a kid, and want to get driven somewhere - at a time inconvenient for your parents.
* Have kids, and need them driven somewhere at a inconvenient time.
* Park somewhere expensive
* Check something online, while going somewhere by car
* Deliver something somewhere, or pick up something or someone from somewhere, without spending the time sitting in the car yourself.
If you've not done any of these things, and can't imagine yourself wanting to do any of these things, I suspect you're a tiny minority. Keep in mind that a self-driving car may -also- allow manual driving, for those occasions when you want it.
It's not as if auto-pilots on a plane mean you CANNOT fly manually at will.
that was sort of my point when I mentioned commuting.
Reading trough todays email, having a look trough the commit-logs, browsing some docs, taking those phonecalls -- is all more productive than sitting around steering a car.
Sort of right. But when the benefits are large enough and obvious enough, a way is found (by changing law, if need be).
Self-driving cars are significantly awesomer than normal cars, and I strongly suspect that their advantage is sufficient to force the necessary changes.
Imagine what self-driving cars would do to DUI, to child-delivery, to parking-problems, to taxi-prices, to overnight long-distance driving, to commutes, to airport-parking-prices, to accidents-from-tiredness, to congestion.
What will happen is -some- place will allow them, and shortly thereafter people elsewhere will demand that they be allowed, with sufficient force that they will be. (and in this case, industry is on the same side: the car-industry wants to sell these, at a significant premium initially offcourse)
Certainly ! Allthough, offcourse the payment could be in hours instead of in cash - it's fine, for example, to make an agreement to be paid less, but compensated with some shares in the company in addition.
There's an upside to the company: employees who own shares in their company are usually more motivated to help the company run well, and they are -less- likely to swap jobs. Both factors tend to increase profits.
That is, all else being equal, it's *better* for the company to give you $10K worth of stock, instead of $10K in cash. Both will have the same cost -now-, but the former will likely motivate you better in the future.
Yeah. Random audits. Check that 5 randomly picked articles are scanned for every tenth shopper or something.
If you discover that one or more isn't scanned, check the rest and respond apropriately. (if someone has 137 articles, one of which isn't scanned, they -probably- forgot it, if they've got 137 articles, none of which are scanned, they're a thief)
One problem is people in the "nothing-to-lose" category. You've got a 90% chance of wheeling a cartful of high-value groceries out unhindered. For most people, the 10% chance of being stopped, will be a deterrent. For the desperate junkie, it probably will not be a sufficient deterrent. (but a high fraction of them are spottable, offcourse)
It doesn't take longer. To the contrary, you save the time you currently spend waiting for the checkout, and packing your goods.
Instead you bring your own crate, and put it in the cart. Scan goods and put them in the crate. Then when done, wheel the entire thing directly to your car and lift the crate over into your trunk. Simple, quick.
Today ?
Put things in cart. Wait in line. Take things -out- of cart to have them scanned. Put things -back- in cart, bring to car.
Todays pack-wait-unpack-pack-go cycle is a lot more cumbersome than scan-pack-go
The real answer is always "it depends". Fuel-prices matter more the further you drive.
If I've got a $20K car that I plan to drive for ~5 years, then that's $4K/year in deprecation alone. If I drive not a lot, let's say 10.000km/year which at 8l/100km would mean I consume ~200 gallons a year.
Then at $5/gallon I spend $1000 on petrol, and $4000 on deprecation. If the car had better mileage and managed to get down to 6l/100km, then I'd spend only $750 on petrol.
But the $250/year saved aren't very significant.
A $20K car that drinks 8l/100km will cost me the same as $21K car that drinks 6l/100km.
A 25% reduction in fuel-consumption is only worth 5% extra on the purchase-price to me.
If I drove 5 times as much, this would look rather different.
Not so sure. Public pressure is a strong force, and this can come in many small steps. Infact arguably the trend started long ago.
We've got automatic transmissions. Sure, no biggie. Then we've got cruise-control. Sure, it's a tiny step. Then the cruice-control is adaptive, slowing down if the vehicle in front does. Then you add lane-assist, where the car actively warns you if you're leaving the lane. Add automatic-braking for pedestrians. Add automatic parking. Add automatic sideline-stops if the car "thinks" the driver is asleep.
A driverless car is HUGELY more useful than a driven car, so much so that everyone will want one. Or atleast everyone except for a few nostalgics. (the same demographic that today drive cars with no ABS - they exist, but are a fringe)
Because the airport demands $130 for a week of parking, and I live 15 miles from it ? Because it's going to [place] to pick up a person. (possibly me, possibly a person with no drivers license) Because it's delivering an item, and the recipient can unload it ?
If they're unlimited, yes. Ethical agreements aren't. For example, I handle patient-records for a health-institution which requires a confidentiality-agreement that prohibits me from spreading any personal information I learn about a person trough this work.
However, the agreement is not limitless. It covers their personal health-situation, and social situation and other personal information, but there's explicit exceptions even there for gross criminal conduct. (it's specified too)
The best you can ethically promise is: "I won't talk about what I learn, unless talking is more important to me than this agreement is. I can't know that before I know what I'll learn."
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed.
What we have is a management-problem, not a resource-problem. We do know how to grow 3-5 times more food pr acre than is done today in much of the world, it's just a matter of using that knowledge.
Indeed, food-prices are not high, but low. Relative to income (which is what counts!) people of the world use a smaller fraction of their income for feeding themselves and their families now than in any previous generation. This is one of the reasons why malnourishment has been sharply dropping for decades.
In 1970, 37% of the population in the developing world was malnourished, in 2009 that had dropped to 16. The FAO estimates that -current- food-production is sufficient for 12 billion people (assuming the food that is produced is well-handled and well-distributed)
With modest increases in technology we can feed several tens of billions. And incase you've not noticed it, we're on an exponential curve for technology-development. We'll see more progress in the next 30 years than we saw in the last 100.
There's rock-solid evidence that younger people are more influenced by advertising. Thus the primary target is old-enough-to-have-money but at the same time young-enough-to-be-influencable. To a certain degree younger children influence the purchases of their parents offcourse, so those too get targeted.
Thing is, most habits are pretty well-formed before you're 40, and odds are you'll stick with many of them for life. Sure you'll drop -some- old stuff, and pick up -some- new stuff. But at a rate nowhere near that of the younger generation which doesn't yet *have* a developed mature taste.
Consider how music-taste changes 10-25 versus 30-45. The first is a huge change, and probably most of the music-styles and/or artists that'll be your favourites for life, you learn to know in this age, the second age-span ? Not so much. You'll maybe get to know a few new artists, mostly such as play in genres you already know and like.
But odds are, most of the music you love at 30, you'll still enjoy at 45. Same goes for food, for vacations, for cars, for clothing, for *most* stuff you buy, infact.
Why does it attempt to detect "explosives and liquids" ?
I thought the supposed problem with liquids was that they might be explosive, thus if you where able to successfully detect explosives, there'd be no reason whatsoever for denying liquids ?
Explosives come in all phases: solids, gels, liquids, gas. And solids are generally the most practical form. Never got the point of the liquid-ban, why ban liquids when all actual plane-bombs that I've ever heard of have been composed of solids, and solid explosives are readily available anyway ?
Here's an idea ! Let's ban gases, liquids and solids on planes !
Dumb shit.
Yeah. Though arguably even 31/12/1990 is suboptimal, it -does- have the advantage of not having the least-significant-part in the *middle*, but it still, for example, sorts wrong regardless of if you sort numerically or alphabetically.
Generally, the most significant part should be -first-
1990-05-30 is superior for this reason, it sorts correctly both numerically and alphabetically, and follows the general convention we have of having the most significant part come FIRST.
URLs suffer from the same problem, with the most significant part being in the middle of the URL. It would really be a lot more logical to have:
http://org.slashdot/folder/file
Yes it is, generally speaking, hard to parse strings into date and time.
What date or time does "Tomorrow", "Next friday", "7/5/09", "6 o 'clock", or "directly after lunch" refer to ? Keep in mind that the document may not be current - and make sure to take into account different time-zones and different conventions for dates. (in particular, some odd countries like to print dates as M/D/Y where the least-significant part is in the *middle*)
May 8, 7:30pm is better than average - but you're still left with the question of which year is meant, and 7:30pm in which timezone ?
There's a reason (actually many reasons!) we store hashes of password+salt instead of storing the passwords in cleartext you know ?
You seem to be arguing that defeating this line of defence makes no noticeable difference to security. If that was true, we might just as well have stored plaintext passwords in the first place.
You are right that ideally, attackers should not be able to get the hashes. Still, they are hashed for a reason - some attackers (insiders for example) typically -can- get access to hashes.
Just because you have several lines of defence, it doesn't follow that having one of them breached, is meaningless.
Nobody can. There's only so many hours in a day. Even if you spend 14 hours a day -only- being social (=100% of your waking time minus the time you eat and visit the bathroom etc), then 150 friends would still only get 10 minutes a day each.
And most people do other things than just be social, you know, stuff like holding a job or studying, shopping, cooking, doing housework, showering, etc.
A more realistic (but still high!) time-available estimate is 3-4 hours on weekdays and 10 hours on weekends, which gives you 35 hours/week, or 2 minutes a day for your friends.
On Facebook, "friend" tends to mean "someone I met at some point in my life and can recognize".
Empathy ain't strange at all.
Human beings are group-animals. Guesstimating what others in the group are likely to do, has obvious benefits to your survival. Thus evolution will favor those who are capable of understanding what others might be thinking and feeling.
Being empathic is also a good thing, *especially* in smaller groups, like how humans have lived for most of our existence. Odds are, if you act with kindness towards others when they're in trouble, you are more likely to be helped out yourself when you are. Evolutionary, groups who tend to be nice to eachothers, will outdo groups where everyone is 100% an egoist.
Yeah. Furthermore, this is a *really* old and *really* well-known side-channel. Everyone knows, and has known for many decades, that crypto by itself is no defence against traffic-analysis, that is, you still know what size the packets are, and who the sender and recipient is, and the frequency they're sent with.
The only way to thwart that completely, would be to send a constant stream of constant-size packages regardless of if anything is being said or not, this is an easy fix, but it conflicts with the goal of saving bandwith.
That depends on how you do backups, I guess ?
I do off-site backups by rsyncing to a TB-disc in the basement of a co-worker. (and he does his off-site backups by rsyncing to a disc in my basement)
This gives us both reasonable security against possibilities like flooding, fire, burglars or lightning-strikes that could all potentially destroy both my laptop, and all in-house backups at the same time.
By using encfs for the backup, I preserve the property of only needing to sync changed files, but at the same time keep reasonable privacy.
Yes, a lost pass-phrase would mean a worthless backup, but this being a secondary backup, that's acceptable. (I'd lose the data if my house burnt down AND I forgot the password at the same time)
Agreed.
Socialism, in the more pragmatic forms, such as it's practiced in the scandinavian countries for example, can work quite well, but communism, the utopia, is bullshit. Having a single answer to all questions is bullshit regardless of what that answer is, actually. (there's some people who claim "the market" is the answer to ALL questions, and that's -ALSO- bullshit)
Reality is complex. We need more than one answer. A *balance* is the trick.
Taxis are neither cheap, nor -nearly- as awesome as you make them out to be, and for this reason a tiny fraction of human transport happens by taxi (especially outside city-centres).
Taxis amount to using one human being and a car to transport another human being. (or more, but a large fraction of taxi-rides are single) If that human being is paid the same you are, then because of things like VAT and taxes, it ends up being significantly MORE expensive to let a taxi do it, than to do it yourself.
You have to wait for taxis - if you want one at the same time many others do, you'll wait a lot. Not all taxi-drivers are dependable. Taxi-fares are expensive, especially in countries without a large poor-caste. Storing belongings, or items bought in one shop, while visiting another, is right out, and so on.
You mean you never have, and expect you never will:
* Go to a restaurant, want to get home by car after a few drinks.
* Be a kid, and want to get driven somewhere - at a time inconvenient for your parents.
* Have kids, and need them driven somewhere at a inconvenient time.
* Park somewhere expensive
* Check something online, while going somewhere by car
* Deliver something somewhere, or pick up something or someone from somewhere, without spending the time sitting in the car yourself.
If you've not done any of these things, and can't imagine yourself wanting to do any of these things, I suspect you're a tiny minority. Keep in mind that a self-driving car may -also- allow manual driving, for those occasions when you want it.
It's not as if auto-pilots on a plane mean you CANNOT fly manually at will.
that was sort of my point when I mentioned commuting.
Reading trough todays email, having a look trough the commit-logs, browsing some docs, taking those phonecalls -- is all more productive than sitting around steering a car.
Sort of right. But when the benefits are large enough and obvious enough, a way is found (by changing law, if need be).
Self-driving cars are significantly awesomer than normal cars, and I strongly suspect that their advantage is sufficient to force the necessary changes.
Imagine what self-driving cars would do to DUI, to child-delivery, to parking-problems, to taxi-prices, to overnight long-distance driving, to commutes, to airport-parking-prices, to accidents-from-tiredness, to congestion.
What will happen is -some- place will allow them, and shortly thereafter people elsewhere will demand that they be allowed, with sufficient force that they will be. (and in this case, industry is on the same side: the car-industry wants to sell these, at a significant premium initially offcourse)
Certainly ! Allthough, offcourse the payment could be in hours instead of in cash - it's fine, for example, to make an agreement to be paid less, but compensated with some shares in the company in addition.
There's an upside to the company: employees who own shares in their company are usually more motivated to help the company run well, and they are -less- likely to swap jobs. Both factors tend to increase profits.
That is, all else being equal, it's *better* for the company to give you $10K worth of stock, instead of $10K in cash. Both will have the same cost -now-, but the former will likely motivate you better in the future.
If by "trivial" you mean "the worlds best snipers, on a day with perfect conditions, can do it with some luck", then yes.
Yeah. Random audits. Check that 5 randomly picked articles are scanned for every tenth shopper or something.
If you discover that one or more isn't scanned, check the rest and respond apropriately. (if someone has 137 articles, one of which isn't scanned, they -probably- forgot it, if they've got 137 articles, none of which are scanned, they're a thief)
One problem is people in the "nothing-to-lose" category. You've got a 90% chance of wheeling a cartful of high-value groceries out unhindered. For most people, the 10% chance of being stopped, will be a deterrent. For the desperate junkie, it probably will not be a sufficient deterrent. (but a high fraction of them are spottable, offcourse)
It doesn't take longer. To the contrary, you save the time you currently spend waiting for the checkout, and packing your goods.
Instead you bring your own crate, and put it in the cart. Scan goods and put them in the crate. Then when done, wheel the entire thing directly to your car and lift the crate over into your trunk. Simple, quick.
Today ?
Put things in cart. Wait in line. Take things -out- of cart to have them scanned. Put things -back- in cart, bring to car.
Todays pack-wait-unpack-pack-go cycle is a lot more cumbersome than scan-pack-go
The real answer is always "it depends". Fuel-prices matter more the further you drive.
If I've got a $20K car that I plan to drive for ~5 years, then that's $4K/year in deprecation alone. If I drive not a lot, let's say 10.000km/year which at 8l/100km would mean I consume ~200 gallons a year.
Then at $5/gallon I spend $1000 on petrol, and $4000 on deprecation. If the car had better mileage and managed to get down to 6l/100km, then I'd spend only $750 on petrol.
But the $250/year saved aren't very significant.
A $20K car that drinks 8l/100km will cost me the same as $21K car that drinks 6l/100km.
A 25% reduction in fuel-consumption is only worth 5% extra on the purchase-price to me.
If I drove 5 times as much, this would look rather different.
Not so sure. Public pressure is a strong force, and this can come in many small steps. Infact arguably the trend started long ago.
We've got automatic transmissions. Sure, no biggie. Then we've got cruise-control. Sure, it's a tiny step. Then the cruice-control is adaptive, slowing down if the vehicle in front does. Then you add lane-assist, where the car actively warns you if you're leaving the lane. Add automatic-braking for pedestrians. Add automatic parking. Add automatic sideline-stops if the car "thinks" the driver is asleep.
A driverless car is HUGELY more useful than a driven car, so much so that everyone will want one. Or atleast everyone except for a few nostalgics. (the same demographic that today drive cars with no ABS - they exist, but are a fringe)
Are you kidding ?
Why should a car move without a person in it ?
Because the airport demands $130 for a week of parking, and I live 15 miles from it ? Because it's going to [place] to pick up a person. (possibly me, possibly a person with no drivers license) Because it's delivering an item, and the recipient can unload it ?
A hundred and one simple reasons.
If they're unlimited, yes. Ethical agreements aren't. For example, I handle patient-records for a health-institution which requires a confidentiality-agreement that prohibits me from spreading any personal information I learn about a person trough this work.
However, the agreement is not limitless. It covers their personal health-situation, and social situation and other personal information, but there's explicit exceptions even there for gross criminal conduct. (it's specified too)
The best you can ethically promise is: "I won't talk about what I learn, unless talking is more important to me than this agreement is. I can't know that before I know what I'll learn."
Brooks - and also The Pragmatic Programmer.
Agreed. Read both. Fire people who do not or can not understand it.
You mean it's not the norm already ? Could've fooled me !