I'm pretty sure they mean that the car was 10.8 feet from the pedestrian on a direct collision course with the pedestrian.
Well you're free to assume that... but that would imply the car was going to run him over at a crossroad. That does seem like one of the simplest tasks a SDC would have to deal with, unless it missed it entirely. I don't see any SDC logic that would be built so it can't stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk but hey... Uber might have built it. I can only speak from personal experience but if you *know* it's a point where people cross it's entirely different from a random stretch of road where you honestly don't.
10.8 feet is one second away at 7 mph. Too damn close -- company deserves a ticket.
Well, it appears to be a pedestrian crossing and the self driving car was apparently stopped before the crossing and accelerated through it so I image that means the pedestrian was 10.8 feet away roughly perpendicular to the car. That means it's the pedestrian would have to move almost 11 feet and 7 mph would be a guy running straight into traffic, not sure where you got that number from as I don't see it any of the news stories. Preferred walking speed is around 4.6 ft/s so 2.35 seconds and that's if the guy was already walking in the direction to cross. I certainly think it's the kind of distance most people would drive through the intersection even if the pedestrian had to take a short step or two for the rear end to clear the crosswalk.
In this case, these are people who served their time, and in the past would have been allowed to try to rebuild their lives and become productive members of society. (...) The right to be forgotten is a very important thing to maintain society's ability to let private citizens actually do the time they owe to the society, and then be able to reintegrate.
You keep repeating the same lie but it doesn't make it any truer. What you're saying is that you can't rebuild and reintegrate unless the slate is wiped clean, but lots of people have done just that through remorse, making amends and being forgiven while being totally open about their past. Perhaps the past is stickier than you'd like and some will never forgive, forget or even accept that you've changed because some wounds never heal but you will have to live with that. Not having to own up to your past by moving far away to a place nobody knows you was more of a bug than a feature, if you ask me.
And the harder you argue why it's not relevant anymore, the more I question why you want it off your record so badly. The attempt at whitewashing is a far more disturbing sign of your character now than whatever you did many years ago and only makes me question how many other skeletons you're trying to stuff back in the closet. I mean unless it's serial killer bad you're probably better of saying something like "I had a drinking / drug / gambling problem that got out of control", "I was drunk / high and had anger management / impulse control issues" or "I was young and stupid looking for quick and easy money".
Everybody who's lived a little knows you can't go back and unwrite the past. Of course some have much bigger regrets than others, but all you can change is the present and future. And that's what people should judge you by, not what your past is but what you think of your past now. I don't think I've got anything major where I've inflicted harm on others though, for me it's mostly things I'd like to have done differently with my life. Of course when you play with hindsight it's always hard to tell if things would have worked out the way you hope or if you'd actually end up even worse off.
Reminder: after person has served his/her time, they are innocent of any thought crime you may think they're guilty of "based on their character". There are some exceptions generally accepted to this rule (crimes of sexual nature driven by specific incurable pathologies).
First of all that's not even true in a legal sense, convicted felons for example can't own guns and kiss your chance to work in law enforcement goodbye. Repeat offenders are punished harder. Visas to foreign countries may be denied. None of that would be true if serving time reset you to an innocent snowflake, the sex offender registries are just the icing on the cake. More importantly, judgement of character is something we do all the time without any legal standard of proof or what may be inferred or assumed from that. If you say "I love Trump" I'm going to start believing a ton of things about your character, until there's some better evidence to the contrary.
If I know an eBay seller is a convicted fraudster then hell yeah, I'm going to think he's done it before he's likely to do it again. I know there's such a thing as miscarriage of justice and that it's not absolute proof, but I don't need that. I don't have to give anyone a fair trial and presumption of innocence, I can use any lack of evidence, suspicion or statistic to conclude you're not really a Nigerian prince looking for help transferring money. It doesn't mean it's a black mark forever but it's up to you to convince me that whatever debt / drinking / drug / gambling problem drove you to do it is it in the past and/or that you've had some kind of moral epiphany and is trying to turn a new leaf. I'm not going to assume that by default.
Of course I do know that "no smoke without fire" and overzealous use of statistics is likely to fuck over a lot of innocent people who have simply been caught up in ambiguous circumstances, are the victims of false accusations, guilt by association or simply share visible and measurable characteristics and demographics with groups that actually commit crime. But, what are you going to do about it? Is there some way to do it "right" given that you will always have uncertainty and will always have both positive and negative errors? I don't think so. For those of you who aren't basement virgins and have reproduced, answer the following questions:
1) If you were to translate "beyond a reasonable doubt" to a percentage, what degree of certainty would you demand before throwing someone in jail for child molestation? 2) If you were to hire a babysitter, what risk in percent would you tolerate of that person being a child molester? If you say flat zero you're lying to yourself, female molesters exist. 3) Assuming there's a gap between the answers to 1) and 2), how would you treat everybody in between? Like, his crazy ex made some 5% probability accusations in a bitter divorce.
The truth is that the real world is much more like guilty until proven innocent, sure the court wouldn't convict but we can't risk that there's some truth to it so let's drop you like a hot potato. Or we have like 100 candidates for the job, lets just drop any candidate that raises any flags because we'll have plenty left. We're risk adverse, not just. If you're a 2% risk and the other people a 1% risk it doesn't mean you get half the offers they do, it means they float to the top every time while you're struggling to find someone willing to give you a chance. It's why smear campaign works, even if it just leaves a smudge you tumble down the list of candidates real quick.
This exactly. I'm always amused by the sci-fi trope of an immortal being eventually getting tired of life, or people needing jobs, no matter how pointless, to "give them purpose". There is so much to see, do and learn to last countless lifetimes. Anyone that would get bored of life has no intellectual curiosity.
There is so much to see, do and learn but it's harder and harder to find something that tops what you've already seen, done and learned. Like once you've had a Kobe steak and three star Michelin meals, where do you go from there? If you've driven a Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bugatti what car will give you a kick? If you've done bungee jumping what's the next adrenaline kick? Everything becomes a drudgery after a while, even rock stars with lots of groupies will start thinking it's just another pussy. Or people get tired of the same old and will try to "spice up" their sex life with the same woman. I could see an immortal eventually going meh, life is just more of the same shit in a different wrapping.
Take for example having more kids, so many people have 2-3 kids. But if you ask them if they'd like a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th kid it's usually like hell no I've done my share of sleepless nights and dirty diapers. Is that really going to be different just because you're immortal? Or will it be more like been there, done that, not really looking to repeat it. I'm trying not to let my adulthood get in the way of my inner childish excitement, but it's hard to avoid becoming more and more blase over the years and start seeing things as rehashes or variations of the past. It's just that with the limited years we got we run out of life before we run out of things to get excited about.
I feel like this misses that point that they are not repairable, be it by the school or the vendor. You are no longer buying a support/repair contract, but a warranty/replacement contract.
Aside from some eco-perspective, why should a customer care? Send in broken device, get working device. How they make that happen doesn't matter if the total is lower. You could say the "worst case" would be Apple saying there's no point in repairing, just order some extra and keep a running supply of spares. It could still be the cheapest option if the product is cheaper to build that way and the savings of feasible repairs are small and far between. But if you're the vendor and collect tons of these I'm sure you can salvage something with specialized tools that might be worth it if you do this by the thousands, besides they get good data on how it breaks or wears out. That's good input for doing design tweaks.
Of course you could try to spin this into some conspiracy about planned obsolescence and milking people for repairs, but I think it's pretty far fetched. It's pretty easy to make a device fragile, it's hard to make it robust. It's easy to design in a short lifespan, it's hard to predict all the ways your product will crap out early. I tend to get really pissed with products that don't work or breaks easily, unless it's really old and worn out I think it's a pretty piss poor strategy for making new sales. If I was playing any dirty tricks I'd do it with software, like sorry your device can't use the new cool version or you're now out of support and not getting updates. Broken hardware is just not a good sell-in.
So even if someone did read it, they click, knowing it's not enforceable.
And they're what, one in a hundred? A thousand? Nobody cares what the people who read it do, because it's been proven over and over that 99%+ will not read any long legalese so what it actually says makes no difference. They just click and pray that if there's some really bad shit in there a judge will stop it and okay, giving away your firstborn wouldn't fly. But US courts stretch the idea of freedom as the right to agree to damn near anything very far, it almost has to border on fraud to qualify. The examples you find are mostly cartoonish while the actual court cases typically find the terms enforceable almost no matter how bad they get. It's just a fig leaf people hold up to justify clicking through, not reality.
You imply here threats not equally applicable to the central phonebook server configuration. Please elaborate.
You're running a service, unless it's got a 24x7 uptime it starts revealing metadata on when you're online. This could potentially also be used maliciously, drop/delay traffic to your IP and see what TOR service stops/responds slowly. And then there's the whole announcement mechanism to say here I am, which they recently upgraded from v2 to v3. There's a lot of effort made on trying to unmask hidden services. A client polling a server would be more like using TorBrowser, if you can compromise that you've essentially broken all of Tor, while hidden services is just one little bit that many people don't use and most certainly don't run.
What is the "metadata problem"? The article has no info about it.
Well it said:
although the sender's IP address was concealed, some metadata could still be logged by the server, including contacts and details around when and how often two people communicated.
Sounds like the classic issues if you have all the clients connect to a server to find each other. The alternative though is that every user has to run their own hidden service, which has a whole lot of other threats even if there's no centralized metadata storage.
I'm thinking there should probably be some way to avoid that using a rolling shared secret. Like say my "permanent" identity is "Kjella", but my rolling identity is sha256("Kjella" + date + secret) which is shared with my contacts but not the server. At server it looks like every day a new identity goes online, with a new message history. That would stop any meaningful metadata collection pretty much dead in its tracks.
To date, Apple has stridently refused to incorporate a touchscreen on their notebooks, which would be the most obvious step in bridging the development/user-interface divide between iOS and OSX, yet they feel it's useful to switch to a single processor architecture to achieve the same goal?
And I pray they keep it that way. Adding a touchscreen would be incentive to start creating the horrible Win8 hybrid UIs that are made to fit 5-10" screens and sausage fingers. I hope they manage to unify the system while keeping the touch and keyboard+mouse interfaces distinct. If there's a dual-purpose device or docking solution I'd rather see a switchable/morphable interface, if you attach it you go into k+m mode and detach it you go back to touch mode but it's one or the other.
The backend database takes longest match for the most flexibility and the EMS UI is nothing more than a glorified frontend directly to the DB. There's little business logic actually protecting you. (...) Everyone who uses Sonus knows this is how it works. It sounds like they gave a task to someone and only trained them on one piece of data entry. The fact that 800 people had access to this highly specialized software without higher level tooling that adds in the required business logic is the terrifying piece.
Well is any other API than the EMS UI supported for creating DIY management tools, like do they want you writing directly to the database? Creating your own, custom UI to behind the scenes call the real UI seems excessively complex for what you get. Seems like EMS could fix this quite trivially with a warning and/or permissions, like you can only add blocks over a certain length, that blocking single numbers/area codes doesn't mean permission to pull the plug on entire countries. Even as a paid enhancement request that can't be that expensive...
It depends on what the question is, if it's Microsoft doing a kernel swap while keeping all their binary blobs nVidia-style I imagine they could do it fairly easily. Like if all you want from the Linux kernel is totally generic functionality like allocating memory, mapping IO, catching interrupts etc. with blob drivers and blob libraries providing most the API, kinda like using winetricks to install the real DirectX libraries from Windows. It wouldn't really be Linux as you know it though, it'd be more like that deep, deep buried in OS X is the BSD kernel.
There's a couple of guys who spend most of their time on Wikipedia writing about subway stations. Apparently they're "incredible".
More like half crazy but it's obsessive people like this that makes Wikipedia have huge, detailed articles on an absurd number of things. I mean how much would you pay someone to write on the New York subway for an encyclopedia? Even online where printing cost is not an issue you'd probably pay someone a buck or two for a tiny subsection. Instead you have a guy who'll write hundreds of articles for free out of some sense of public service. Some other dude will be an astronomy nut and write articles on stars and so on for every event, time period, area, species and whatever. Of course the downside is that many of these will treat their area as their own fiefdom, but the good crazy mostly outweigh the bad crazy.
We need a root source of trust or everything else falls apart.
Yeah, we could call that the Ministry of Truth.
How could I possibly know? Without personally having deep technical expertise, how can I trust anything.
Personally you'll only be able to prove high school physics and none of history, that is if you're not trapped in the Matrix.
An comments about tinfoil hats could be legit, or yet more planted posts.
Personally I feel like you're trying to make a reductio ad absurdum argument so say that since you don't know any absolute truth, any loony bin theory could be true. Blind faith is not good, total disbelief of everything you haven't personally verified is also not good. If you disagree here's some fatally poisonous mushrooms, enjoy your Darwin award. Many people have too little healthy skepticism. But many also see fate, destiny and meaning in the random, conspiracies and lies in simple truth. I really don't know a "cure" for being say a flat-earther, if you're willing to discard that body of evidence I don't see how more evidence could convince you otherwise. That's really the trap, people get so convinced of their "truths" that no evidence can shake it.
I've found that the most common catch-all is "It's the process, not the people". Blame the testing process, the training, poor documentation, unclear instructions and agree that we, collectively, must improve as a team. It's almost the inverse scapegoating process that happens in private industry. Same with failed projects, that we ran the ship aground is neither the captain nor the crew's fault it's a fault of our project management process. But with more experience and lessons learned we'll be smarter next time, it's like adding more process will turn poor workers into good workers. Or rather we'd not admit to having poor workers at all, they're just good workers who haven't gotten the support they need to shine. And we're sticking to that story in face of pretty damning evidence otherwise.
And it sorta works because if we refuse to point out a scapegoat what will they do? Maybe it's an inefficient department, but they need us and we're not in direct competition with anybody. If they really tried to get rid of someone for incompetence that person would probably try to air as much dirty laundry as possible, like why are you singling me out. And when you've never done any spring cleaning, there will be a lot of it... it's the consistent fuck-ups and the people who've been letting them do it over and over again.
A full-stack developer is a jack of all trades and master of none.
That is nonsense. If you are to dumb to do several things that all are centered around software development that is your problem.
You think a doctor knows everything about medicine? A lawyer knows everything about law? Software development is a huge field, the only people who think they master all of it are wildly delusional. By all means I think I've dabbled in most things except maybe exotic things like GPU shaders, functional languages like Haskell/Erlang, NUMA architectures, real-time control systems etc. but I don't presume to master the rest.
I can build whole applications but for example my UI skills are the "I know how to add a dialog with basic controls" essentials. If you want anything more fancy than a stock business app look like a game that'd appeal to kids, a real interaction/workspace design for a professional tool etc. don't call me. You don't need to hire another guy just to get a button to push though, that's as far as my "full stack" skills go. I agree it would be strange to work on software development and not have any such skills at all, but if you market yourself as "full stack" it should be more than what you incidentally get almost whether you want to or not.
Some employers have trouble with wanting unicorns but only having the budget for newbies, but that's an entirely different problem.
Actually I think they're related, very often it's like we should have had three people, got the budget for one but let's throw in the requirements for all of them and hope for a miracle. There's some realism in it in that we can shuffle people around a little depending on what we get, but not that much.
It's a different story in the United States, where since the 19th century a moot point has been one that is at best academic and at worst irrelevant. The OED quotes the supreme court, no less, ruling that "a moot question" has "no bearing" on an issue.
In my opinion it's better used that way, moot in the first meaning sounds like it means exactly the same as debated, disputed etc. while a moot point is an efficient way of saying "that is no longer relevant/important/possible, let's move on and discuss the options left on the table". Which is not to say you can't take lessons from it, but it's an efficient way to shut down pointless bickering.
That makes no sense. We have no moral obligation to nature, or to extinct species. "Nature" doesn't care if those species are around or not. Nature is not suffering without them, and neither are those creatures.
Ah, the utilitarian perspective. Well that's true as long as you say "nature" = ~forces of nature well then they also don't care whether humanity or even life itself survives. If we're wiped out by an Armageddon-size asteroid today, though shit. The universe goes on. With luck even Earth goes on with cockroaches instead of people, or if not we go the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo bird.
Really when they say nature most people mean a proxy of humanity. We should support the biodiversity of Earth because it supports us in more ways than domesticated crops and farm animals. I'm not sure what saving a few endangered pandas will bring. But I'm pretty sure it's more than hunting them to extinction. Though if you're looking for a formal proof of what we haven't discovered/learned so far I don't have it.
We need Workstations where we can do real work. For the fun stuff we have consoles, and tablets, and mobile devices.
The statistics don't really support that, if you look at the platform comparison at StatCounter it's 52% mobile, 44% desktop and 4% console/tablet web browsing. And the last one is down from about 5% last year. At work we don't need workstations, but laptops sure. My parents need their 24"+ monitors because their vision is getting poor. I need my gaming box for gaming. There's lots of people that won't be properly served by smartphones and a tablet. The problem is that there's nobody really making a push for it, either they want you to stay on proprietary platforms or move to the cloud. Which would make Linux just an open source client/shell while all the data/processing moves out of your control, it's like out of the frying pan and into the fire. It's the independent, local computer that's dying, everything else is moving to become tentacles of centralized services.
Here's roughly the breakdown in Norway, of 100k people: Age 0-1 you have 0.63% die, most due to birth defects Age 1-40 you have just 1% die, mostly drugs, suicide and massive trauma Age 41-67 you have another 8.3% die, mostly lifestyle diseases
So 90% will make it to retirement age. From there it's quickly downhill, at 75 it's 80% and 95 only 10% remain. So for practical life planning you can expect to grow old (>75) but not very old (<95), of course if you got a family you should have insurance if you die in a car crash or suffer a massive heart attack but that's not a fate you plan for. I doubt there's any app that can give you a more meaningful practical answer even if they could tweak a few percentages correctly.
In fact I think they got it creepily well planned out, in the last year my life expectancy decreased by 0.97 years. Basically it's almost like an alarm clock counting down, okay you don't know exactly when the end comes but I'm young enough that my death is essentially one year closer per year. It's just the cycle of life I suppose, but it's not like that makes it any better.
Or perhaps actually a little bad for the guy who wrote the memo. You're getting dreadfully punished for actually having someone consider the potential negative consequences and put that to paper, instead of acting like you're oblivious to the possibility. It's like if you consider digital/cell phone cameras vs old film cameras. Will they be used for spying on people in the shower? Corporate espionage? Making kiddie porn? Yes. Yes. Yes. We're not going to outlaw them though. Facebook is connecting people, it's obviously going to connect good people with bad people and bad people with other bad people. I dread to think how that works as a general principle, like if you have a security risk you can't fix or haven't fixed yet let's not write it down. Because then we knew and did nothing, if we don't write it down we didn't know... yeah, that'll improve security.
Obviously having broadband is nice but I spent most of my childhood without it in my home and managed to survive.
Yeah and people lived without electricity and indoor plumbing too. Spreading broadband is exactly the kind of public communication/education/modernization project like the postal service, public libraries, rural electrification etc. was meant to achieve. When I grew up, my parents had a full encyclopedia because back then it was an edge to have a "mini-library" at home, even though this was an urban environment where the public library was reasonably close. Today just Wikipedia alone is vastly superior and available to anyone with an Internet connection. Maybe broadband isn't strictly a necessity, but if it's not a flat rate or low cap or occupies the phone line or is so slow it impacts the rest of the house you'll see it curbed. At least that's how it was when I was on dial-up as a teenager.
Personally I see the Internet as the biggest and best equalizer ever made, even if you live on the most remote farm in the smallest Podunk in the middle of nowhere and you got broadband there's no excuse to be ignorant or blame your town's poor quality or lack of institutions for it. You had a world of information at your fingertips and if all you used it for is cat videos that's on you. And compared to everything else, it's probably a relatively cheap social program if you can turn even a few kids from future welfare recipients to tax payers. Maybe a few adults too, I'm more doubtful there but with the Internet you can waste less time using online services. You can waste ridiculous amounts of time navigating phone menus many levels deep to reach a script monkey or going to a physical office to stand in line.
Don't generalise. This was a road vehicle accident, and in the overwhelming vast majority of cases the family of victims get diddley squat. Doubly so that there was an employee Uber was able to throw under the bus for this. And the person was crossing the road where she wasn't supposed to.
Well if I was a Uber lawyer I'd point out that despite all the things they could, might or should have done, any liability would depend on the legally required minimum of what they must do. So the family might drag Uber through the gutter, but in the end is anyone going to claim it's Uber's fault? I think they might have underestimated the Streisand effect, as a result of this NDA they probably can't say nothing. But I'm guessing they could make as much or more talking to the media, even if the actual case vanishes into nothing. Unless Uber made a really generous please STFU forever offer. If so, it might have been a ridiculously good payday compared to a human mowing her down.
On the one side you have the engineers that rely on APIs to Get Stuff Done, on the assumption that that's why the APIs exist. On the other side you have the 1% parasites who realize "oops, somebody took our work and made billions off it. Bring in the lawyers!"
An API is just a set of function declarations to call the code, you can't avoid making them because that's how it works but it doesn't have to mean you want everyone to use them. To make a car analogy, imagine you have an proprietary car with proprietary wheels. The width, length, thread and location of the wheel bolts are the interface. If you're building a new car, do they have to be the exact same? No, but if you want interoperability they do. So a lot of people here would say hey, I want to be able to make open source wheels for my proprietary car, yey interoperability. Maybe even an open source car too.
But the reverse should then also be true, I can build my own proprietary wheels with my own improvements to go on your open source car, boo interoperability. Because it's a standard and I'm not derived from your car, I'm just following the standard API for wheels so the license doesn't transcend that gap, go sue some car owners for putting the wrong tires on the wrong car if you want. And maybe that decoupling sounds reasonable, they're fairly distinct products.
But then somebody goes "Hey, we picked your car apart and every piece has its own interface... same principle applies right?" and then I can understand somebody going "Hey we worked hard on designing what parts it's made of and how they all fit together and you can't take all of that, make third party knock-offs and slap a new name on it. That's kinda what Google did to Oracle, they took all the tiny little parts of Java and copied the outer shell. Then they rewrote the insides - not that hard if the pieces are small, isolated and transparent in functionality as a good API should be - and you have a clone Java.
I don't know if that means interfaces should be copyrighted, I'm still leaning towards no on that one. But people do put a lot of effort into good interfaces and designing them is creative work. It's just that in use you're bound by using them the way they are in order to achieve interoperability. So I kinda feel the effort should be compensated, but then you'd basically be at the creator's mercy because the only way to be compatible is to follow the API. And it'd be insane to create new APIs just to be different from old ones.
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I'm pretty sure they mean that the car was 10.8 feet from the pedestrian on a direct collision course with the pedestrian.
Well you're free to assume that... but that would imply the car was going to run him over at a crossroad. That does seem like one of the simplest tasks a SDC would have to deal with, unless it missed it entirely. I don't see any SDC logic that would be built so it can't stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk but hey... Uber might have built it. I can only speak from personal experience but if you *know* it's a point where people cross it's entirely different from a random stretch of road where you honestly don't.
10.8 feet is one second away at 7 mph. Too damn close -- company deserves a ticket.
Well, it appears to be a pedestrian crossing and the self driving car was apparently stopped before the crossing and accelerated through it so I image that means the pedestrian was 10.8 feet away roughly perpendicular to the car. That means it's the pedestrian would have to move almost 11 feet and 7 mph would be a guy running straight into traffic, not sure where you got that number from as I don't see it any of the news stories. Preferred walking speed is around 4.6 ft/s so 2.35 seconds and that's if the guy was already walking in the direction to cross. I certainly think it's the kind of distance most people would drive through the intersection even if the pedestrian had to take a short step or two for the rear end to clear the crosswalk.
In this case, these are people who served their time, and in the past would have been allowed to try to rebuild their lives and become productive members of society. (...) The right to be forgotten is a very important thing to maintain society's ability to let private citizens actually do the time they owe to the society, and then be able to reintegrate.
You keep repeating the same lie but it doesn't make it any truer. What you're saying is that you can't rebuild and reintegrate unless the slate is wiped clean, but lots of people have done just that through remorse, making amends and being forgiven while being totally open about their past. Perhaps the past is stickier than you'd like and some will never forgive, forget or even accept that you've changed because some wounds never heal but you will have to live with that. Not having to own up to your past by moving far away to a place nobody knows you was more of a bug than a feature, if you ask me.
And the harder you argue why it's not relevant anymore, the more I question why you want it off your record so badly. The attempt at whitewashing is a far more disturbing sign of your character now than whatever you did many years ago and only makes me question how many other skeletons you're trying to stuff back in the closet. I mean unless it's serial killer bad you're probably better of saying something like "I had a drinking / drug / gambling problem that got out of control", "I was drunk / high and had anger management / impulse control issues" or "I was young and stupid looking for quick and easy money".
Everybody who's lived a little knows you can't go back and unwrite the past. Of course some have much bigger regrets than others, but all you can change is the present and future. And that's what people should judge you by, not what your past is but what you think of your past now. I don't think I've got anything major where I've inflicted harm on others though, for me it's mostly things I'd like to have done differently with my life. Of course when you play with hindsight it's always hard to tell if things would have worked out the way you hope or if you'd actually end up even worse off.
Reminder: after person has served his/her time, they are innocent of any thought crime you may think they're guilty of "based on their character". There are some exceptions generally accepted to this rule (crimes of sexual nature driven by specific incurable pathologies).
First of all that's not even true in a legal sense, convicted felons for example can't own guns and kiss your chance to work in law enforcement goodbye. Repeat offenders are punished harder. Visas to foreign countries may be denied. None of that would be true if serving time reset you to an innocent snowflake, the sex offender registries are just the icing on the cake. More importantly, judgement of character is something we do all the time without any legal standard of proof or what may be inferred or assumed from that. If you say "I love Trump" I'm going to start believing a ton of things about your character, until there's some better evidence to the contrary.
If I know an eBay seller is a convicted fraudster then hell yeah, I'm going to think he's done it before he's likely to do it again. I know there's such a thing as miscarriage of justice and that it's not absolute proof, but I don't need that. I don't have to give anyone a fair trial and presumption of innocence, I can use any lack of evidence, suspicion or statistic to conclude you're not really a Nigerian prince looking for help transferring money. It doesn't mean it's a black mark forever but it's up to you to convince me that whatever debt / drinking / drug / gambling problem drove you to do it is it in the past and/or that you've had some kind of moral epiphany and is trying to turn a new leaf. I'm not going to assume that by default.
Of course I do know that "no smoke without fire" and overzealous use of statistics is likely to fuck over a lot of innocent people who have simply been caught up in ambiguous circumstances, are the victims of false accusations, guilt by association or simply share visible and measurable characteristics and demographics with groups that actually commit crime. But, what are you going to do about it? Is there some way to do it "right" given that you will always have uncertainty and will always have both positive and negative errors? I don't think so. For those of you who aren't basement virgins and have reproduced, answer the following questions:
1) If you were to translate "beyond a reasonable doubt" to a percentage, what degree of certainty would you demand before throwing someone in jail for child molestation?
2) If you were to hire a babysitter, what risk in percent would you tolerate of that person being a child molester? If you say flat zero you're lying to yourself, female molesters exist.
3) Assuming there's a gap between the answers to 1) and 2), how would you treat everybody in between? Like, his crazy ex made some 5% probability accusations in a bitter divorce.
The truth is that the real world is much more like guilty until proven innocent, sure the court wouldn't convict but we can't risk that there's some truth to it so let's drop you like a hot potato. Or we have like 100 candidates for the job, lets just drop any candidate that raises any flags because we'll have plenty left. We're risk adverse, not just. If you're a 2% risk and the other people a 1% risk it doesn't mean you get half the offers they do, it means they float to the top every time while you're struggling to find someone willing to give you a chance. It's why smear campaign works, even if it just leaves a smudge you tumble down the list of candidates real quick.
This exactly. I'm always amused by the sci-fi trope of an immortal being eventually getting tired of life, or people needing jobs, no matter how pointless, to "give them purpose". There is so much to see, do and learn to last countless lifetimes. Anyone that would get bored of life has no intellectual curiosity.
There is so much to see, do and learn but it's harder and harder to find something that tops what you've already seen, done and learned. Like once you've had a Kobe steak and three star Michelin meals, where do you go from there? If you've driven a Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bugatti what car will give you a kick? If you've done bungee jumping what's the next adrenaline kick? Everything becomes a drudgery after a while, even rock stars with lots of groupies will start thinking it's just another pussy. Or people get tired of the same old and will try to "spice up" their sex life with the same woman. I could see an immortal eventually going meh, life is just more of the same shit in a different wrapping.
Take for example having more kids, so many people have 2-3 kids. But if you ask them if they'd like a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th kid it's usually like hell no I've done my share of sleepless nights and dirty diapers. Is that really going to be different just because you're immortal? Or will it be more like been there, done that, not really looking to repeat it. I'm trying not to let my adulthood get in the way of my inner childish excitement, but it's hard to avoid becoming more and more blase over the years and start seeing things as rehashes or variations of the past. It's just that with the limited years we got we run out of life before we run out of things to get excited about.
I feel like this misses that point that they are not repairable, be it by the school or the vendor. You are no longer buying a support/repair contract, but a warranty/replacement contract.
Aside from some eco-perspective, why should a customer care? Send in broken device, get working device. How they make that happen doesn't matter if the total is lower. You could say the "worst case" would be Apple saying there's no point in repairing, just order some extra and keep a running supply of spares. It could still be the cheapest option if the product is cheaper to build that way and the savings of feasible repairs are small and far between. But if you're the vendor and collect tons of these I'm sure you can salvage something with specialized tools that might be worth it if you do this by the thousands, besides they get good data on how it breaks or wears out. That's good input for doing design tweaks.
Of course you could try to spin this into some conspiracy about planned obsolescence and milking people for repairs, but I think it's pretty far fetched. It's pretty easy to make a device fragile, it's hard to make it robust. It's easy to design in a short lifespan, it's hard to predict all the ways your product will crap out early. I tend to get really pissed with products that don't work or breaks easily, unless it's really old and worn out I think it's a pretty piss poor strategy for making new sales. If I was playing any dirty tricks I'd do it with software, like sorry your device can't use the new cool version or you're now out of support and not getting updates. Broken hardware is just not a good sell-in.
So even if someone did read it, they click, knowing it's not enforceable.
And they're what, one in a hundred? A thousand? Nobody cares what the people who read it do, because it's been proven over and over that 99%+ will not read any long legalese so what it actually says makes no difference. They just click and pray that if there's some really bad shit in there a judge will stop it and okay, giving away your firstborn wouldn't fly. But US courts stretch the idea of freedom as the right to agree to damn near anything very far, it almost has to border on fraud to qualify. The examples you find are mostly cartoonish while the actual court cases typically find the terms enforceable almost no matter how bad they get. It's just a fig leaf people hold up to justify clicking through, not reality.
You imply here threats not equally applicable to the central phonebook server configuration. Please elaborate.
You're running a service, unless it's got a 24x7 uptime it starts revealing metadata on when you're online. This could potentially also be used maliciously, drop/delay traffic to your IP and see what TOR service stops/responds slowly. And then there's the whole announcement mechanism to say here I am, which they recently upgraded from v2 to v3. There's a lot of effort made on trying to unmask hidden services. A client polling a server would be more like using TorBrowser, if you can compromise that you've essentially broken all of Tor, while hidden services is just one little bit that many people don't use and most certainly don't run.
What is the "metadata problem"? The article has no info about it.
Well it said:
although the sender's IP address was concealed, some metadata could still be logged by the server, including contacts and details around when and how often two people communicated.
Sounds like the classic issues if you have all the clients connect to a server to find each other. The alternative though is that every user has to run their own hidden service, which has a whole lot of other threats even if there's no centralized metadata storage.
I'm thinking there should probably be some way to avoid that using a rolling shared secret. Like say my "permanent" identity is "Kjella", but my rolling identity is sha256("Kjella" + date + secret) which is shared with my contacts but not the server. At server it looks like every day a new identity goes online, with a new message history. That would stop any meaningful metadata collection pretty much dead in its tracks.
To date, Apple has stridently refused to incorporate a touchscreen on their notebooks, which would be the most obvious step in bridging the development/user-interface divide between iOS and OSX, yet they feel it's useful to switch to a single processor architecture to achieve the same goal?
And I pray they keep it that way. Adding a touchscreen would be incentive to start creating the horrible Win8 hybrid UIs that are made to fit 5-10" screens and sausage fingers. I hope they manage to unify the system while keeping the touch and keyboard+mouse interfaces distinct. If there's a dual-purpose device or docking solution I'd rather see a switchable/morphable interface, if you attach it you go into k+m mode and detach it you go back to touch mode but it's one or the other.
The backend database takes longest match for the most flexibility and the EMS UI is nothing more than a glorified frontend directly to the DB. There's little business logic actually protecting you. (...) Everyone who uses Sonus knows this is how it works. It sounds like they gave a task to someone and only trained them on one piece of data entry. The fact that 800 people had access to this highly specialized software without higher level tooling that adds in the required business logic is the terrifying piece.
Well is any other API than the EMS UI supported for creating DIY management tools, like do they want you writing directly to the database? Creating your own, custom UI to behind the scenes call the real UI seems excessively complex for what you get. Seems like EMS could fix this quite trivially with a warning and/or permissions, like you can only add blocks over a certain length, that blocking single numbers/area codes doesn't mean permission to pull the plug on entire countries. Even as a paid enhancement request that can't be that expensive...
It depends on what the question is, if it's Microsoft doing a kernel swap while keeping all their binary blobs nVidia-style I imagine they could do it fairly easily. Like if all you want from the Linux kernel is totally generic functionality like allocating memory, mapping IO, catching interrupts etc. with blob drivers and blob libraries providing most the API, kinda like using winetricks to install the real DirectX libraries from Windows. It wouldn't really be Linux as you know it though, it'd be more like that deep, deep buried in OS X is the BSD kernel.
There's a couple of guys who spend most of their time on Wikipedia writing about subway stations. Apparently they're "incredible".
More like half crazy but it's obsessive people like this that makes Wikipedia have huge, detailed articles on an absurd number of things. I mean how much would you pay someone to write on the New York subway for an encyclopedia? Even online where printing cost is not an issue you'd probably pay someone a buck or two for a tiny subsection. Instead you have a guy who'll write hundreds of articles for free out of some sense of public service. Some other dude will be an astronomy nut and write articles on stars and so on for every event, time period, area, species and whatever. Of course the downside is that many of these will treat their area as their own fiefdom, but the good crazy mostly outweigh the bad crazy.
We need a root source of trust or everything else falls apart.
Yeah, we could call that the Ministry of Truth.
How could I possibly know? Without personally having deep technical expertise, how can I trust anything.
Personally you'll only be able to prove high school physics and none of history, that is if you're not trapped in the Matrix.
An comments about tinfoil hats could be legit, or yet more planted posts.
Personally I feel like you're trying to make a reductio ad absurdum argument so say that since you don't know any absolute truth, any loony bin theory could be true. Blind faith is not good, total disbelief of everything you haven't personally verified is also not good. If you disagree here's some fatally poisonous mushrooms, enjoy your Darwin award. Many people have too little healthy skepticism. But many also see fate, destiny and meaning in the random, conspiracies and lies in simple truth. I really don't know a "cure" for being say a flat-earther, if you're willing to discard that body of evidence I don't see how more evidence could convince you otherwise. That's really the trap, people get so convinced of their "truths" that no evidence can shake it.
I've found that the most common catch-all is "It's the process, not the people". Blame the testing process, the training, poor documentation, unclear instructions and agree that we, collectively, must improve as a team. It's almost the inverse scapegoating process that happens in private industry. Same with failed projects, that we ran the ship aground is neither the captain nor the crew's fault it's a fault of our project management process. But with more experience and lessons learned we'll be smarter next time, it's like adding more process will turn poor workers into good workers. Or rather we'd not admit to having poor workers at all, they're just good workers who haven't gotten the support they need to shine. And we're sticking to that story in face of pretty damning evidence otherwise.
And it sorta works because if we refuse to point out a scapegoat what will they do? Maybe it's an inefficient department, but they need us and we're not in direct competition with anybody. If they really tried to get rid of someone for incompetence that person would probably try to air as much dirty laundry as possible, like why are you singling me out. And when you've never done any spring cleaning, there will be a lot of it... it's the consistent fuck-ups and the people who've been letting them do it over and over again.
A full-stack developer is a jack of all trades and master of none.
That is nonsense. If you are to dumb to do several things that all are centered around software development that is your problem.
You think a doctor knows everything about medicine? A lawyer knows everything about law? Software development is a huge field, the only people who think they master all of it are wildly delusional. By all means I think I've dabbled in most things except maybe exotic things like GPU shaders, functional languages like Haskell/Erlang, NUMA architectures, real-time control systems etc. but I don't presume to master the rest.
I can build whole applications but for example my UI skills are the "I know how to add a dialog with basic controls" essentials. If you want anything more fancy than a stock business app look like a game that'd appeal to kids, a real interaction/workspace design for a professional tool etc. don't call me. You don't need to hire another guy just to get a button to push though, that's as far as my "full stack" skills go. I agree it would be strange to work on software development and not have any such skills at all, but if you market yourself as "full stack" it should be more than what you incidentally get almost whether you want to or not.
Some employers have trouble with wanting unicorns but only having the budget for newbies, but that's an entirely different problem.
Actually I think they're related, very often it's like we should have had three people, got the budget for one but let's throw in the requirements for all of them and hope for a miracle. There's some realism in it in that we can shuffle people around a little depending on what we get, but not that much.
Thanks a lot Rick Springfield, you screwed a word by making it opposite of itself. I'm happy you didn't get Jessie's girl.
According to this story in the Guardian:
It's a different story in the United States, where since the 19th century a moot point has been one that is at best academic and at worst irrelevant. The OED quotes the supreme court, no less, ruling that "a moot question" has "no bearing" on an issue.
In my opinion it's better used that way, moot in the first meaning sounds like it means exactly the same as debated, disputed etc. while a moot point is an efficient way of saying "that is no longer relevant/important/possible, let's move on and discuss the options left on the table". Which is not to say you can't take lessons from it, but it's an efficient way to shut down pointless bickering.
That makes no sense. We have no moral obligation to nature, or to extinct species. "Nature" doesn't care if those species are around or not. Nature is not suffering without them, and neither are those creatures.
Ah, the utilitarian perspective. Well that's true as long as you say "nature" = ~forces of nature well then they also don't care whether humanity or even life itself survives. If we're wiped out by an Armageddon-size asteroid today, though shit. The universe goes on. With luck even Earth goes on with cockroaches instead of people, or if not we go the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo bird.
Really when they say nature most people mean a proxy of humanity. We should support the biodiversity of Earth because it supports us in more ways than domesticated crops and farm animals. I'm not sure what saving a few endangered pandas will bring. But I'm pretty sure it's more than hunting them to extinction. Though if you're looking for a formal proof of what we haven't discovered/learned so far I don't have it.
We need Workstations where we can do real work. For the fun stuff we have consoles, and tablets, and mobile devices.
The statistics don't really support that, if you look at the platform comparison at StatCounter it's 52% mobile, 44% desktop and 4% console/tablet web browsing. And the last one is down from about 5% last year. At work we don't need workstations, but laptops sure. My parents need their 24"+ monitors because their vision is getting poor. I need my gaming box for gaming. There's lots of people that won't be properly served by smartphones and a tablet. The problem is that there's nobody really making a push for it, either they want you to stay on proprietary platforms or move to the cloud. Which would make Linux just an open source client/shell while all the data/processing moves out of your control, it's like out of the frying pan and into the fire. It's the independent, local computer that's dying, everything else is moving to become tentacles of centralized services.
Here's roughly the breakdown in Norway, of 100k people:
Age 0-1 you have 0.63% die, most due to birth defects
Age 1-40 you have just 1% die, mostly drugs, suicide and massive trauma
Age 41-67 you have another 8.3% die, mostly lifestyle diseases
So 90% will make it to retirement age. From there it's quickly downhill, at 75 it's 80% and 95 only 10% remain. So for practical life planning you can expect to grow old (>75) but not very old (<95), of course if you got a family you should have insurance if you die in a car crash or suffer a massive heart attack but that's not a fate you plan for. I doubt there's any app that can give you a more meaningful practical answer even if they could tweak a few percentages correctly.
In fact I think they got it creepily well planned out, in the last year my life expectancy decreased by 0.97 years. Basically it's almost like an alarm clock counting down, okay you don't know exactly when the end comes but I'm young enough that my death is essentially one year closer per year. It's just the cycle of life I suppose, but it's not like that makes it any better.
Or perhaps actually a little bad for the guy who wrote the memo. You're getting dreadfully punished for actually having someone consider the potential negative consequences and put that to paper, instead of acting like you're oblivious to the possibility. It's like if you consider digital/cell phone cameras vs old film cameras. Will they be used for spying on people in the shower? Corporate espionage? Making kiddie porn? Yes. Yes. Yes. We're not going to outlaw them though. Facebook is connecting people, it's obviously going to connect good people with bad people and bad people with other bad people. I dread to think how that works as a general principle, like if you have a security risk you can't fix or haven't fixed yet let's not write it down. Because then we knew and did nothing, if we don't write it down we didn't know... yeah, that'll improve security.
Obviously having broadband is nice but I spent most of my childhood without it in my home and managed to survive.
Yeah and people lived without electricity and indoor plumbing too. Spreading broadband is exactly the kind of public communication/education/modernization project like the postal service, public libraries, rural electrification etc. was meant to achieve. When I grew up, my parents had a full encyclopedia because back then it was an edge to have a "mini-library" at home, even though this was an urban environment where the public library was reasonably close. Today just Wikipedia alone is vastly superior and available to anyone with an Internet connection. Maybe broadband isn't strictly a necessity, but if it's not a flat rate or low cap or occupies the phone line or is so slow it impacts the rest of the house you'll see it curbed. At least that's how it was when I was on dial-up as a teenager.
Personally I see the Internet as the biggest and best equalizer ever made, even if you live on the most remote farm in the smallest Podunk in the middle of nowhere and you got broadband there's no excuse to be ignorant or blame your town's poor quality or lack of institutions for it. You had a world of information at your fingertips and if all you used it for is cat videos that's on you. And compared to everything else, it's probably a relatively cheap social program if you can turn even a few kids from future welfare recipients to tax payers. Maybe a few adults too, I'm more doubtful there but with the Internet you can waste less time using online services. You can waste ridiculous amounts of time navigating phone menus many levels deep to reach a script monkey or going to a physical office to stand in line.
Don't generalise. This was a road vehicle accident, and in the overwhelming vast majority of cases the family of victims get diddley squat. Doubly so that there was an employee Uber was able to throw under the bus for this. And the person was crossing the road where she wasn't supposed to.
Well if I was a Uber lawyer I'd point out that despite all the things they could, might or should have done, any liability would depend on the legally required minimum of what they must do. So the family might drag Uber through the gutter, but in the end is anyone going to claim it's Uber's fault? I think they might have underestimated the Streisand effect, as a result of this NDA they probably can't say nothing. But I'm guessing they could make as much or more talking to the media, even if the actual case vanishes into nothing. Unless Uber made a really generous please STFU forever offer. If so, it might have been a ridiculously good payday compared to a human mowing her down.
On the one side you have the engineers that rely on APIs to Get Stuff Done, on the assumption that that's why the APIs exist. On the other side you have the 1% parasites who realize "oops, somebody took our work and made billions off it. Bring in the lawyers!"
An API is just a set of function declarations to call the code, you can't avoid making them because that's how it works but it doesn't have to mean you want everyone to use them. To make a car analogy, imagine you have an proprietary car with proprietary wheels. The width, length, thread and location of the wheel bolts are the interface. If you're building a new car, do they have to be the exact same? No, but if you want interoperability they do. So a lot of people here would say hey, I want to be able to make open source wheels for my proprietary car, yey interoperability. Maybe even an open source car too.
But the reverse should then also be true, I can build my own proprietary wheels with my own improvements to go on your open source car, boo interoperability. Because it's a standard and I'm not derived from your car, I'm just following the standard API for wheels so the license doesn't transcend that gap, go sue some car owners for putting the wrong tires on the wrong car if you want. And maybe that decoupling sounds reasonable, they're fairly distinct products.
But then somebody goes "Hey, we picked your car apart and every piece has its own interface... same principle applies right?" and then I can understand somebody going "Hey we worked hard on designing what parts it's made of and how they all fit together and you can't take all of that, make third party knock-offs and slap a new name on it. That's kinda what Google did to Oracle, they took all the tiny little parts of Java and copied the outer shell. Then they rewrote the insides - not that hard if the pieces are small, isolated and transparent in functionality as a good API should be - and you have a clone Java.
I don't know if that means interfaces should be copyrighted, I'm still leaning towards no on that one. But people do put a lot of effort into good interfaces and designing them is creative work. It's just that in use you're bound by using them the way they are in order to achieve interoperability. So I kinda feel the effort should be compensated, but then you'd basically be at the creator's mercy because the only way to be compatible is to follow the API. And it'd be insane to create new APIs just to be different from old ones.