I've also bumped into the US school-maths (it's an insult to call it maths) syllabus, when I did some tutoring for a friend's kid.
It wasn't just demoralizing. It nearly made me lose the will to live. It is that bad.
Can you elaborate a little? I have a 5 year old daughter, live in the US, and I confess to being ignorant to how mathematics are taught abroad. If there are things I could be doing to make the learning process less painful in the future, I'd love to know about it. We are currently working with basic set theory, shapes, counting, and simple addition/subtraction and everything seems to be going well so far.
If no one is tuning in though, those big revenue numbers are going to go away as advertisers become less willing to pay a premium to appear on Monday night Football. That means the NFL is going to have to get used to less broadcast licensing revenue or cut out the middle man and start streaming directly.
This is addressed a bit in other comments below but to be clear: ISPs are not covered entities under HIPAA and have no explicit obligations with regards to your medical records. The three major types of organizations covered by HIPAA are: healthcare service providers (doctors, hospitals, group practices, etc), medical insurance providers, and clearinghouses (they help the first two types of entities communicate with each other).
Assuming any web-facing EMR you interact with is itself HIPAA compliant, your ISP won't be able to see any health records you access because the data will be encrypted in transit over the internet (a HIPAA requirement). The fact that you accessed your doctor's, hospital's, or insurance company website and how often you accessed it could be seen by the ISP, but it would be hard to construe this information as PHI, and even if you could somehow, see above: ISPs are not covered entities.
It's illegal to publish any medical information that can be linked back to an individual, even indirectly.
I want to call this out specifically because it is not true as stated and a lot of people believe something to this effect and think they are more protected than they actually are. It is illegal for a HIPAA covered entity to disclose your protected health information (PHI) to a third party without your consent. If you authorize a covered entity to disclose your information to a non-covered entity, and that third party then misuses the information, no law has been broken.
For example if you authorize the hospital to disclose a condition to your parents who then post the information to Facebook against your wishes, neither the hospital (who obtained your consent), your parents (not a covered entity), nor Facebook (not a covered entity) are liable under HIPAA.
Source: I was a software engineer at a HIPAA covered entity (medical claims clearinghouse) for ~10 years.
You wouldn't get your brain hacked, that's silly. It would just be a better version of the currently existing human interface (keyboard input, VGA output).
There is evidence that the right kind of sensory input can damage, or at least rewire, your brain. Look up the McCollough Effect. I imagine that once we understood the visual cortex well enough to be injecting images directly into our optic nerve, we might be able to figure out more nefarious memetic hazards.
If someone starts off inside a plane, passes through a hole and ends up on the outside of the plane screaming as they plunge to their doom, does it really matter whether they're blown or sucked?
The point is, why should we care? If the bomb only kills a couple of people but fails to bring down the plane, then it is no worse than the mayhem a lone gunman could cause on the ground. In fact he could probably cause more death and economic chaos by blowing himself up in an airport choke point.
The reality is that well-funded, competent terrorists who are knowledgeable enough to plan a mission like this and suicidal enough to carry it out are really, really rare. Rare enough that I would be happy if we reverted to 1999 level passenger screening as my chances of sitting next to a laptop/shoe/underwear bomber would still be less than the probability of getting stung to death by bees on the way to the airport.
The problem with acetaminophen is that the toxic dose is surprisingly close to the therapeutic dose -- much closer than other over the counter analgesics like aspirin or ibuprofen. This property is in fact leveraged in some prescription painkillers to discourage abuse - the opioid will be doped with a stupid amount of acetaminophen, way more than is necessary for pain relief, so that it will poison you before it gets you high. The problem is that someone doesn't know that and is taking a Vicodin for back pain may then take some NyQuil for an unrelated cold and wind up in the hospital with liver failure.
The whole water thing is a dumb argument environmentalists dreamed up to make us feel bad about being alive. It's not like water from a stream in Minnesota is being diverted to livestock instead of irrigating poor farmers in the Sahara.
For the most part the water isn't coming out of a stream in Minnesota either. It's being pumped out of an aquifer in Kansas to irrigate the alfalfa and corn that we are feeding to the livestock. Those aquifers were built up over millions of years and are being drained over the course of decades. Just like we need to get off of fossilized fuels for our energy supply, we need to stop or reduce our reliance on fossil water for our agriculture. We can do this either by eating lower on the food chain, or finding ways to produce animal protein more efficiently.
(with key exceptions for the identity of human sources; for example, their disclosure may be only to the judge hearing the case, etc.).
This denies the defendant's right to face their accuser and prevents the defense from cross examining. There are very limited exceptions to this, such as dying declarations, but they should be few and far between, and event then the witness's identity isn't concealed.
But yeah, absolutely, if the method of acquiring evidence can't be disclosed because it is too valuable to national security or whatever, then you obviously value the method over the conviction and the evidence should be thrown out. That also serves as an incentive to keep a strict firewall between our intelligence agencies/military and domestic law enforcement.
We need to start treat workers as humans and stop thinking private corporations have the right to anything and everything. They take advantage of the stable society we all provide for them. It should come with a responsibility to treat employees humanely.
I think it is telling that we call the people management department of our corporations human resources. It used to be the personnel department. Persons you relate to. Resources are things you exploit.
Is it a shock that our covert HUMINT foreign intelligence agency has a pile of tools for covertly gathering human intelligence? No. I'd be more surprised if they didn't have stuff like this. These tools are useful for the kind of targeted, one-off, POI-focused surveillance that we want our spies to be doing, rather than the sweeping, rights-trampling dragnets we've been seeing from the FBI and NSA.
I'm mostly upset that this stuff was mishandled and leaked, not that it exists.
So am I upset that our spies are spying? No, no I'm not.
If I where in the same situation and would not have lost my job or anything else, but pushing back, I would be happy with it.
Obviously I would be happier if it were 10 Brazillian, but that would be, I think, not reasonable. As it was settled outside court, it means he was compensated for his loss in time and not their fault in it.
What about when you are looking for you next job (assuming you didn't lose your current one that is), and no one calls you back because the top hit on Google is an article about you being arrested for pedophilia. What about losing your home because you are now essentially unemployable? Will you have the resources to be able to "push back" each time you are discriminated against due to this false black mark that will follow you around forever and be compensated each time?
If those manufacturing companies destroy all the wealth of the middle class by outsourcing all the jobs, they'll have nobody left to sell their shit too. This is why globalization is a loser's game. The "invisible hand" and free market only work if both labor and capital are mobile. But in the global economy, capital is infinitely mobile, while people are still mostly restricted to finding work in their own countries. This allows globalized corporations to play countries off each other in a game of international labor arbitrage to the detriment of every single human being on the planet.
There's a straightforward reason why lots of web apps continued to use MD5 *long* after it was deprecated: MySQL had a function for md5() almost from the start, but didn't have an inline function for SHA() until 4.0.2...
What sane person does their hashing inside their RDBMS? You hash it in code before you store it.
Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall.
Maybe if you work for NASA, are building life and safety critical industrial software, or writing firmware for a pacemaker you get requirements that are this specific. In the other 99% of use cases a developer will be writing to, forget about it. The cost of specifying a problem to that level of detail is astronomical and also multiplies the cost of any changes you might have to make.
Also, who is writing these detailed specs for the AI to follow? Software engineers. This thing is a threat to code monkeys churned out of 6-month certificate programs, not experienced developers. And if my job in 10 years is to interpret hand wavy customer specs into Lojban for an AI to interpret and then hand the results to some interns to groom into something maintainable, then I'll adapt. It's not that different than what I'm doing today.
Now tell me how to stop a friend or acquaintance from uploading something about me (video, image, or text) and having Facebook have the rights to that.
Depending on where you live and whether anyone is making a profit off of it, you might be able to claim a violation of your likeness rights. I doubt your friend got a model release from you before posting to Facebook. I don't know if something like that has ever been tried though.
"Partner" is a generic way to refer to someone's primary romantic relation in a gender and relationship neutral manner. In this case, maybe the woman was his wife, maybe she wasn't. When talking to a group of people, saying "feel free to bring you partner to the party," is way less awkward than saying "girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, or domestic partner".
Also, during power failures, every bus stops. This is great when two buses happen to be passing in opposite directions, causing the entire road to be blocked.
If this happens often enough to be even a remote source of concern for your city then the busses are the least of your problem.
A single branch falling and shorting the overhead lines, a blown transformer, an oopsie with a back hoe can all take out electric bus power without affecting city-wide power. The MBTA's mixed record of maintaining its infrastructure notwithstanding, we don't have this problem nearly as much with the green line trolleys because they have dedicated, limited access rights of way and travel on a fixed path.
Some buses run on batteries, but I've seen several systems now for buses that get power from overhead lines (similar to trains). The summary seems to be overlooking these vehicles.
While overhead wires are fine for trains, which have predictable, smooth, well-maintained paths to travel, they are less than optimal for buses.
We have these in Cambridge, MA. They are a hassle because it's a fairly common occurrence that the armature will pop off the overhead wire and the bus will grind to a halt until the driver can go around and use a pole to hook it back on, creating a huge traffic hazard in the meantime. It would be great if they had some battery backup and could limp along to a bus stop before having to be reconnected.
Also, during power failures, every bus stops. This is great when two buses happen to be passing in opposite directions, causing the entire road to be blocked.
I can't find the source, but I remember reading that speakers of lower entropy languages simply end up speaking faster than speakers of higher entropy languages. E.g. English on average is spoken more slowly than Spanish by native speakers because English has less redundancy, so errors are more likely to affect received meaning. Overall spoken information rate (bps) remains pretty constant.
Federal government law enforcement agency requires federal government employee to unlock federal government owned phone for inspection. Controversial!
Of course it's controversial. Did the officer show proper security clearance? Did he have a need-to-know? Was there a completed dd2875 on file for the officer? Did the officer give the scientist a chance to validate his credentials and need to know with the program manager?
Another interesting question would be what is red material doing on a cell phone, especially one that was taken out of the country? I suspect there was no classified material unless this scientist was grossly negligent. Probably just some FOUO communications. Still bad, but not as bad as it could have been. I imagine he will still get chewed out for not just surrendering the locked phone instead of unlocking it though.
Heavy emphasis on "US citizens" there, because it's kind of important.
I object to the citizen part being important. Much of the restraints placed on government by the constitution are worded with phrases like "The government shall not" or "No person shall be required to", with no mention of citizenship. If these are inalienable human rights, and if all men are created equal, then it shouldn't matter which country a person is from, the government has no business violating them.
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I've also bumped into the US school-maths (it's an insult to call it maths) syllabus, when I did some tutoring for a friend's kid.
It wasn't just demoralizing. It nearly made me lose the will to live. It is that bad.
Can you elaborate a little? I have a 5 year old daughter, live in the US, and I confess to being ignorant to how mathematics are taught abroad. If there are things I could be doing to make the learning process less painful in the future, I'd love to know about it. We are currently working with basic set theory, shapes, counting, and simple addition/subtraction and everything seems to be going well so far.
If no one is tuning in though, those big revenue numbers are going to go away as advertisers become less willing to pay a premium to appear on Monday night Football. That means the NFL is going to have to get used to less broadcast licensing revenue or cut out the middle man and start streaming directly.
This is addressed a bit in other comments below but to be clear: ISPs are not covered entities under HIPAA and have no explicit obligations with regards to your medical records. The three major types of organizations covered by HIPAA are: healthcare service providers (doctors, hospitals, group practices, etc), medical insurance providers, and clearinghouses (they help the first two types of entities communicate with each other).
Assuming any web-facing EMR you interact with is itself HIPAA compliant, your ISP won't be able to see any health records you access because the data will be encrypted in transit over the internet (a HIPAA requirement). The fact that you accessed your doctor's, hospital's, or insurance company website and how often you accessed it could be seen by the ISP, but it would be hard to construe this information as PHI, and even if you could somehow, see above: ISPs are not covered entities.
I want to call this out specifically because it is not true as stated and a lot of people believe something to this effect and think they are more protected than they actually are. It is illegal for a HIPAA covered entity to disclose your protected health information (PHI) to a third party without your consent. If you authorize a covered entity to disclose your information to a non-covered entity, and that third party then misuses the information, no law has been broken.
For example if you authorize the hospital to disclose a condition to your parents who then post the information to Facebook against your wishes, neither the hospital (who obtained your consent), your parents (not a covered entity), nor Facebook (not a covered entity) are liable under HIPAA.
Source: I was a software engineer at a HIPAA covered entity (medical claims clearinghouse) for ~10 years.
You wouldn't get your brain hacked, that's silly. It would just be a better version of the currently existing human interface (keyboard input, VGA output).
There is evidence that the right kind of sensory input can damage, or at least rewire, your brain. Look up the McCollough Effect. I imagine that once we understood the visual cortex well enough to be injecting images directly into our optic nerve, we might be able to figure out more nefarious memetic hazards.
If someone starts off inside a plane, passes through a hole and ends up on the outside of the plane screaming as they plunge to their doom, does it really matter whether they're blown or sucked?
The point is, why should we care? If the bomb only kills a couple of people but fails to bring down the plane, then it is no worse than the mayhem a lone gunman could cause on the ground. In fact he could probably cause more death and economic chaos by blowing himself up in an airport choke point.
The reality is that well-funded, competent terrorists who are knowledgeable enough to plan a mission like this and suicidal enough to carry it out are really, really rare. Rare enough that I would be happy if we reverted to 1999 level passenger screening as my chances of sitting next to a laptop/shoe/underwear bomber would still be less than the probability of getting stung to death by bees on the way to the airport.
The problem with acetaminophen is that the toxic dose is surprisingly close to the therapeutic dose -- much closer than other over the counter analgesics like aspirin or ibuprofen. This property is in fact leveraged in some prescription painkillers to discourage abuse - the opioid will be doped with a stupid amount of acetaminophen, way more than is necessary for pain relief, so that it will poison you before it gets you high. The problem is that someone doesn't know that and is taking a Vicodin for back pain may then take some NyQuil for an unrelated cold and wind up in the hospital with liver failure.
The whole water thing is a dumb argument environmentalists dreamed up to make us feel bad about being alive. It's not like water from a stream in Minnesota is being diverted to livestock instead of irrigating poor farmers in the Sahara.
For the most part the water isn't coming out of a stream in Minnesota either. It's being pumped out of an aquifer in Kansas to irrigate the alfalfa and corn that we are feeding to the livestock. Those aquifers were built up over millions of years and are being drained over the course of decades. Just like we need to get off of fossilized fuels for our energy supply, we need to stop or reduce our reliance on fossil water for our agriculture. We can do this either by eating lower on the food chain, or finding ways to produce animal protein more efficiently.
Maybe go with the original this time? Get William Gibson to adapt it for them?
The sad thing is at this point everyone would think it was a ripoff of The Matrix or Hackers.
Agree with everything you said except this:
This denies the defendant's right to face their accuser and prevents the defense from cross examining. There are very limited exceptions to this, such as dying declarations, but they should be few and far between, and event then the witness's identity isn't concealed.
But yeah, absolutely, if the method of acquiring evidence can't be disclosed because it is too valuable to national security or whatever, then you obviously value the method over the conviction and the evidence should be thrown out. That also serves as an incentive to keep a strict firewall between our intelligence agencies/military and domestic law enforcement.
We need to start treat workers as humans and stop thinking private corporations have the right to anything and everything. They take advantage of the stable society we all provide for them. It should come with a responsibility to treat employees humanely.
I think it is telling that we call the people management department of our corporations human resources. It used to be the personnel department. Persons you relate to. Resources are things you exploit.
Is it a shock that our covert HUMINT foreign intelligence agency has a pile of tools for covertly gathering human intelligence? No. I'd be more surprised if they didn't have stuff like this. These tools are useful for the kind of targeted, one-off, POI-focused surveillance that we want our spies to be doing, rather than the sweeping, rights-trampling dragnets we've been seeing from the FBI and NSA.
I'm mostly upset that this stuff was mishandled and leaked, not that it exists.
So am I upset that our spies are spying? No, no I'm not.
If I where in the same situation and would not have lost my job or anything else, but pushing back, I would be happy with it.
Obviously I would be happier if it were 10 Brazillian, but that would be, I think, not reasonable. As it was settled outside court, it means he was compensated for his loss in time and not their fault in it.
What about when you are looking for you next job (assuming you didn't lose your current one that is), and no one calls you back because the top hit on Google is an article about you being arrested for pedophilia. What about losing your home because you are now essentially unemployable? Will you have the resources to be able to "push back" each time you are discriminated against due to this false black mark that will follow you around forever and be compensated each time?
Really, mine just flashes a string of 0s and I receive a baffling bill every month.
10%-15% is a significant rate hike for a basic utility. I wouldn't call it a low figure.
If those manufacturing companies destroy all the wealth of the middle class by outsourcing all the jobs, they'll have nobody left to sell their shit too. This is why globalization is a loser's game. The "invisible hand" and free market only work if both labor and capital are mobile. But in the global economy, capital is infinitely mobile, while people are still mostly restricted to finding work in their own countries. This allows globalized corporations to play countries off each other in a game of international labor arbitrage to the detriment of every single human being on the planet.
There's a straightforward reason why lots of web apps continued to use MD5 *long* after it was deprecated: MySQL had a function for md5() almost from the start, but didn't have an inline function for SHA() until 4.0.2...
What sane person does their hashing inside their RDBMS? You hash it in code before you store it.
Maybe if you work for NASA, are building life and safety critical industrial software, or writing firmware for a pacemaker you get requirements that are this specific. In the other 99% of use cases a developer will be writing to, forget about it. The cost of specifying a problem to that level of detail is astronomical and also multiplies the cost of any changes you might have to make.
Also, who is writing these detailed specs for the AI to follow? Software engineers. This thing is a threat to code monkeys churned out of 6-month certificate programs, not experienced developers. And if my job in 10 years is to interpret hand wavy customer specs into Lojban for an AI to interpret and then hand the results to some interns to groom into something maintainable, then I'll adapt. It's not that different than what I'm doing today.
Now tell me how to stop a friend or acquaintance from uploading something about me (video, image, or text) and having Facebook have the rights to that.
Depending on where you live and whether anyone is making a profit off of it, you might be able to claim a violation of your likeness rights. I doubt your friend got a model release from you before posting to Facebook. I don't know if something like that has ever been tried though.
"Partner" is a generic way to refer to someone's primary romantic relation in a gender and relationship neutral manner. In this case, maybe the woman was his wife, maybe she wasn't. When talking to a group of people, saying "feel free to bring you partner to the party," is way less awkward than saying "girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, or domestic partner".
Also, during power failures, every bus stops. This is great when two buses happen to be passing in opposite directions, causing the entire road to be blocked.
If this happens often enough to be even a remote source of concern for your city then the busses are the least of your problem.
A single branch falling and shorting the overhead lines, a blown transformer, an oopsie with a back hoe can all take out electric bus power without affecting city-wide power. The MBTA's mixed record of maintaining its infrastructure notwithstanding, we don't have this problem nearly as much with the green line trolleys because they have dedicated, limited access rights of way and travel on a fixed path.
Some buses run on batteries, but I've seen several systems now for buses that get power from overhead lines (similar to trains). The summary seems to be overlooking these vehicles.
While overhead wires are fine for trains, which have predictable, smooth, well-maintained paths to travel, they are less than optimal for buses.
We have these in Cambridge, MA. They are a hassle because it's a fairly common occurrence that the armature will pop off the overhead wire and the bus will grind to a halt until the driver can go around and use a pole to hook it back on, creating a huge traffic hazard in the meantime. It would be great if they had some battery backup and could limp along to a bus stop before having to be reconnected.
Also, during power failures, every bus stops. This is great when two buses happen to be passing in opposite directions, causing the entire road to be blocked.
So it sounds like GE is more like JGraphT -- a platform for applying graph algorithms without a persistence layer.
I can't find the source, but I remember reading that speakers of lower entropy languages simply end up speaking faster than speakers of higher entropy languages. E.g. English on average is spoken more slowly than Spanish by native speakers because English has less redundancy, so errors are more likely to affect received meaning. Overall spoken information rate (bps) remains pretty constant.
Federal government law enforcement agency requires federal government employee to unlock federal government owned phone for inspection. Controversial!
Of course it's controversial. Did the officer show proper security clearance? Did he have a need-to-know? Was there a completed dd2875 on file for the officer? Did the officer give the scientist a chance to validate his credentials and need to know with the program manager?
Another interesting question would be what is red material doing on a cell phone, especially one that was taken out of the country? I suspect there was no classified material unless this scientist was grossly negligent. Probably just some FOUO communications. Still bad, but not as bad as it could have been. I imagine he will still get chewed out for not just surrendering the locked phone instead of unlocking it though.
I object to the citizen part being important. Much of the restraints placed on government by the constitution are worded with phrases like "The government shall not" or "No person shall be required to", with no mention of citizenship. If these are inalienable human rights, and if all men are created equal, then it shouldn't matter which country a person is from, the government has no business violating them.