The point of prison time is to rehabilitate them. Most people who are cut off from regular contact with friends and family, will just end up on the streets when they're released, and then obviously make their way back to prison. If you're condemning them to a life in prison anyway, you might as well just give them the death sentence, that would be much more humane.
Well, Facebook still has roughly 1.5 billion daily active users (numbers from september 2018), which means that 20% of the world's population care about Facebook enough to use it every single day. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the world's population with unfiltered internet access fall in the "casual Facebook user" segment. Even if you don't have a Facebook account, you'll be indirectly affected by whatever Facebook chooses to do via all the people and companies around you that still interact with Facebook.
I don't like Facebook either, but similarly to other tech monopolies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, they're way too powerful and important to not report on them in the news...
Signal. When you text or call someone that has the app, you get seamless end-to-end encryption by default. When you text or call someone that doesn't have the app, it automatically reverts to conventional SMS or phone calls. So in that sense, it's a very streamlined app, since you can talk to people with and without the app just as easily, and automatically "upgrade" your conversations to full encryption when your friends download it.
The app itself is quite good in my opinion, and works on both Android and iOS. The desktop version is kinda quirky (at least on Linux), and sometimes takes forever to start up, but it works OK. Both the frontend and backend are open source.
Yup. Personally I have a Google-free Android phone for this reason. I can recommend such a setup to some people, if you're willing to live with a somewhat "crippled" smartphone, since it means going without Google Play Store. F-droid covers some needs, and there's Amazon Store and Yalp if you're desperate for a specific proprietary app, but it doesn't work for everyone. But to most family and friends, I now just recommend getting an iPhone for the best out-of-the-box privacy setup. Depending on where the Android market is heading, I might well be be buying my first iPhone myself soon. (Depends on e.g. if a replacement for CopperheadOS surfaces after the recent hostile takeover, and whether the phones themselves will be locked down more tightly so you can't root and flash them.)
I don't trust having anything from Google on my phone after I found out that Google Maps was tracking my movement in the background for several months that I never opened the app. I know this because I was trying out an OpenStreetMaps-based competitor, and after a few months, I started getting popups from Google Maps asking me to rate restaurants and places that I had visited recently (including a few places I had just been to for the first time)...
The Economist article actually did it the best way: using smallcaps for DNA, RNA, A, T, C, G, X, Y. In contrast to full caps, smallcaps letters don't "pop out" of the text and attract undue attention, making the text smoother to read.
If you don't have smallcaps available, both full-caps and lower-case letters are legitimate style choices for such abbreviations, as long as you do it consistently. (For instance, in electronics it's quite common for "ac" and "dc" to be consistently spelled using lower-case letters. It's also very common for abbreviations in the software world.)
Full caps is however more common outside of tech, and personally I'd prefer it to lower-case letters just to make it easier to see how one should pronounce a word (i.e. if "dna" should be pronounced "dnah" or "dee-enn-ayh".)
However, in my opinion, the best choice is the most traditional one: using smallcaps for abbreviations.
I'm exactly opposite. I prefer dealing with emails over either calling or in-person meetings, and set my phone on silent while working.
First of all, if I'm working on a problem and am "in the zone", people calling me or popping into my office breaks the flow, and it can take an hour or two to get back on track with my work after a longer distraction. Emails on the other hand, I can deal with in the natural breaks in-between work bursts. Since my phone is on silent while working, I don't see texts or instant messages before actively checking my phone, so I just treat those as I do emails.
While replying to emails, I can look up the details of any technical questions that the other person might have. That means that I can usually be more precise and helpful in writing than in conversation, at least in work-related communication on collaborative projects.
Finally, if people send me an email, I can use it as a todo-note for things that I need to do at work. If people call me or pop in to my office, I need to actively take notes on paper to remember tasks.
This is at least how I work most efficiently. When it comes to keeping in touch with family and friends, the situation is quite different, and I tend to like in-person meetings or long phone calls. I still use instant messaging similarly to email though, usually writing a long reply to each person once per day (usually in the evening), instead of "instantly" sending dozens of half-sentence texts.
The worst version of this is if someone asks you for help. Then you spend a few hours looking into it, and write a timely but detailed response. Then a few weeks later, they ask "btw have you looked at my question yet?" If that's how much attention you pay to my input, I won't spend that time on you next time.
Work email:
Skim all email on arrival. If it's spam, delete it. If it's a brief update, just read it. If it's something I'll need to work on later, "Mark as unread". While I'm in the office, I often have a tab open that lists the unread emails, so I can easily see what I need to process later. I don't really sort the email into folders, just search when I need to find something (usually I recall the author and some keywords when needed).
Personal email:
I try to keep the inbox empty, and sort emails into folders based on who they're from (digital receipts in one folder, email from family in another, email related to work in another, flight tickets in another, and so on.) If some person or company often sends emails of the same kind, I setup a filter to automatically sort such emails into the correct folders. When I'm busy, some emails remain unsorted, so I usually have a couple of days per year when I clean up the inbox again.
I was taught to spell out numbers up to twelve. But in scientific or technical writing, it is also quite common to use numerals for more or less all numbers. In different languages, there are also different conventions for which numbers should be written in words or in numerals. Since many Slashdot readers have a technical background, and many are not native English speakers either, I don't find it strange that someone would write a small number in numerals instead of letters.
Not their problem. They don't get any salary as long as the government is shut down, right? So why should they make it easier for the government to function in their absence?
Also, none of those metrics are failsafe. Some legitimate customers will travel a lot (varying location), work alternating day and night shifts (stream at seemingly random hours), and/or have irregular sleep cycles or suffer from insomnia (sometimes spending all day and night watching Netflix). Judging peoples taste in series to judge whether they are one or multiple people also sounds like something that can backfire for people that legitimately have unusual tastes, or people that often have friends visiting with different tastes. I hope their solution is to at least ask the customer for an explanation, instead of an "AI" simply autobanning all "weird" customers.
DNS manipulation is one of the most common forms of online censorship used by oppressive regimes or unscrupulous ISPs, used to block access to news sites, information portals, social media platforms, undesirable software, and more.
It's not just stereotypical "oppressive regimes or unscrupulous ISPs" that do this. It's also commonly used to block sites like thepiratebay.
When you parse licenses, you have to be conscious that they do not exist in a vacuum. They rest upon the entire body of law and precedent going back, in the US case, to British Common Law (yes, courts still cite it here).
Legitimate question: if the parsing of a licence depends so strongly upon the laws of a country, what happens in todays international world? If e.g. German and Japanese laws turn out to allow rescinding "by default", can the kernel developers rescind parts of the kernel in such a way that they are now illegal to use in Germany and Japan?
If it doesn't depend on where the product is used, what does determine what laws to follow? Where the kernel developers were based when they contributed the code? Where the kernel project is formally based? Where the licence was written?
Actually, people have thought carefully about the ramifications. Firstly, note that only ~200/3500 mosquito species actually target humans. Probably, not even all these 200 human-biting mosquito types carry malaria, and not all of those carrying malaria have that high risk of transmission. If you drive the specific malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes extinct, it's not unlikely that other mosquito species will naturally fill their void, and that most predators will happily eat other mosquitoes too. We could even help them on their way, by releasing "safe mosquitos" in the same regions where we release "sterilized mosquitos".
Secondly, note that for many species, mosquitoes are not as large a part of their diet as people think, it's more of an opportunistic food source since they're slow and stupid. For instance, while many species of bats eat a lot of mosquitoes, it only constitutes ~2% of their food, since moths are larger and more nutritious.
Finally, it's estimated that malaria has killed roughly half of all people that ever lived. And that's just malaria; the same mosquitos tend to spread dengue fever, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus, West Nile virus, and so on. We should also ask how much damage to specific ecosystems we are willing to accept to save a ridiculous number of human lives.
The European Economic Area countries usually follow the regulation by the European Union anyway. Excluding those, the non-EU countries left on the continent are basically Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Balkan states, and some city states (I don't count Russia and Turkey). Belarus is in the same timezone as western Russia, while the rest follow Central European Time or Eastern European Time. I'd expect everyone but Belarus to discard DST for practical reasons if the rest of the countries in the CET and EET blocks switch.
So although I agree that the European Union doesn't span the continent, in practice the entire continent except Belarus will probably end up getting rid of DST in the near future.
Not a webmonkey, but I'll give you a layman's summary.
Firefox launched a new version 57 almost a year ago, which made broad changes to its core and architecture. Some users were very happy: it replaced parts of the rendering engine with some new stuff written in Rust ("Firefox Quantum"), which made the browser much faster. Other users were not very happy: they basically scrapped their entire plugin ecosystem, and adopted a chromium-like plugin API ("WebExtensions").
The upside is that by Firefox aligning themselves with the Chrome ecosystem, it's much easier to port plugins between them, which can be a boon since Firefox is not really that popular these days. But most people that use Firefox for non-political reasons do so because they love its plugin ecosystem, and were thus not happy with the change. Especially because some plugins turned out to be impossible to port, and some plugin authors were not interested in rewriting their projects from scratch.
Some Firefox-forks like Palemoon kept supporting the older plugin API, and Firefox also officially had an "Extended Support Release" that they kept around while waiting for plugin authors to rewrite their plugins with the new API. The last part of the saga is that Firefox has now ended their official support for these legacy versions, and removed the corresponding plugins from their repository.
First of all, most chemical synthesis reactions don't give one product with a 100% yield. Some molecules don't undergo the reaction, leaving some of the reactants behind. Some molecules have multiple sites where they can be chemically substituted, producing a statistical mixture of products. And some molecules have multiple isomeres that can be produced in the same reaction, but then behave differently in later reactions. So at each step of a chemical synthesis, you're polluting the system with more and more chemicals that might interact with each other and surprise you at later stages of the synthesis. The machine might perhaps be good at figuring out such interactions between biproducts of synthesis reactions even if a human just told it what the main product of each synthesis step would be.
That's not a trap though. If they can't profit from it themselves, just throwing away the data or letting it rot on a backup drive would be extremely wasteful for society as a whole. Donating it to volunteers that can make something out of it is the right thing to do, and I appreciate that Microsoft chose to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of prison time is to rehabilitate them. Most people who are cut off from regular contact with friends and family, will just end up on the streets when they're released, and then obviously make their way back to prison. If you're condemning them to a life in prison anyway, you might as well just give them the death sentence, that would be much more humane.
If you want a real way to prevent autism: make sure pregnant mothers get enough vitamin D. Seriously.
Well, Facebook still has roughly 1.5 billion daily active users (numbers from september 2018), which means that 20% of the world's population care about Facebook enough to use it every single day. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the world's population with unfiltered internet access fall in the "casual Facebook user" segment. Even if you don't have a Facebook account, you'll be indirectly affected by whatever Facebook chooses to do via all the people and companies around you that still interact with Facebook.
I don't like Facebook either, but similarly to other tech monopolies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, they're way too powerful and important to not report on them in the news...
For the record: if you end up liking Signal, consider donating a couple of dollars to their development :).
Signal. When you text or call someone that has the app, you get seamless end-to-end encryption by default. When you text or call someone that doesn't have the app, it automatically reverts to conventional SMS or phone calls. So in that sense, it's a very streamlined app, since you can talk to people with and without the app just as easily, and automatically "upgrade" your conversations to full encryption when your friends download it.
The app itself is quite good in my opinion, and works on both Android and iOS. The desktop version is kinda quirky (at least on Linux), and sometimes takes forever to start up, but it works OK. Both the frontend and backend are open source.
Co2 emissions
Don't laugh about dicobalt emissions, that shit's poisonous...
Yup. Personally I have a Google-free Android phone for this reason. I can recommend such a setup to some people, if you're willing to live with a somewhat "crippled" smartphone, since it means going without Google Play Store. F-droid covers some needs, and there's Amazon Store and Yalp if you're desperate for a specific proprietary app, but it doesn't work for everyone.
But to most family and friends, I now just recommend getting an iPhone for the best out-of-the-box privacy setup. Depending on where the Android market is heading, I might well be be buying my first iPhone myself soon. (Depends on e.g. if a replacement for CopperheadOS surfaces after the recent hostile takeover, and whether the phones themselves will be locked down more tightly so you can't root and flash them.)
I don't trust having anything from Google on my phone after I found out that Google Maps was tracking my movement in the background for several months that I never opened the app. I know this because I was trying out an OpenStreetMaps-based competitor, and after a few months, I started getting popups from Google Maps asking me to rate restaurants and places that I had visited recently (including a few places I had just been to for the first time)...
This is also what funnel plots are for.
The Economist article actually did it the best way: using smallcaps for DNA, RNA, A, T, C, G, X, Y. In contrast to full caps, smallcaps letters don't "pop out" of the text and attract undue attention, making the text smoother to read.
If you don't have smallcaps available, both full-caps and lower-case letters are legitimate style choices for such abbreviations, as long as you do it consistently. (For instance, in electronics it's quite common for "ac" and "dc" to be consistently spelled using lower-case letters. It's also very common for abbreviations in the software world.)
Full caps is however more common outside of tech, and personally I'd prefer it to lower-case letters just to make it easier to see how one should pronounce a word (i.e. if "dna" should be pronounced "dnah" or "dee-enn-ayh".)
However, in my opinion, the best choice is the most traditional one: using smallcaps for abbreviations.
Source?
And six is the smallest perfect number. Also, all numbers are interesting anyway. So not sure we lost any numerological perfection here.
I'm exactly opposite. I prefer dealing with emails over either calling or in-person meetings, and set my phone on silent while working.
First of all, if I'm working on a problem and am "in the zone", people calling me or popping into my office breaks the flow, and it can take an hour or two to get back on track with my work after a longer distraction. Emails on the other hand, I can deal with in the natural breaks in-between work bursts. Since my phone is on silent while working, I don't see texts or instant messages before actively checking my phone, so I just treat those as I do emails.
While replying to emails, I can look up the details of any technical questions that the other person might have. That means that I can usually be more precise and helpful in writing than in conversation, at least in work-related communication on collaborative projects.
Finally, if people send me an email, I can use it as a todo-note for things that I need to do at work. If people call me or pop in to my office, I need to actively take notes on paper to remember tasks.
This is at least how I work most efficiently. When it comes to keeping in touch with family and friends, the situation is quite different, and I tend to like in-person meetings or long phone calls. I still use instant messaging similarly to email though, usually writing a long reply to each person once per day (usually in the evening), instead of "instantly" sending dozens of half-sentence texts.
The worst version of this is if someone asks you for help. Then you spend a few hours looking into it, and write a timely but detailed response. Then a few weeks later, they ask "btw have you looked at my question yet?" If that's how much attention you pay to my input, I won't spend that time on you next time.
Work email:
Skim all email on arrival. If it's spam, delete it. If it's a brief update, just read it. If it's something I'll need to work on later, "Mark as unread". While I'm in the office, I often have a tab open that lists the unread emails, so I can easily see what I need to process later. I don't really sort the email into folders, just search when I need to find something (usually I recall the author and some keywords when needed).
Personal email:
I try to keep the inbox empty, and sort emails into folders based on who they're from (digital receipts in one folder, email from family in another, email related to work in another, flight tickets in another, and so on.) If some person or company often sends emails of the same kind, I setup a filter to automatically sort such emails into the correct folders. When I'm busy, some emails remain unsorted, so I usually have a couple of days per year when I clean up the inbox again.
I was taught to spell out numbers up to twelve. But in scientific or technical writing, it is also quite common to use numerals for more or less all numbers. In different languages, there are also different conventions for which numbers should be written in words or in numerals. Since many Slashdot readers have a technical background, and many are not native English speakers either, I don't find it strange that someone would write a small number in numerals instead of letters.
Not their problem. They don't get any salary as long as the government is shut down, right? So why should they make it easier for the government to function in their absence?
Don't you have dictionaries in English too? Where you look up the meanings and pronunciations of rarely-used words?
Also, none of those metrics are failsafe. Some legitimate customers will travel a lot (varying location), work alternating day and night shifts (stream at seemingly random hours), and/or have irregular sleep cycles or suffer from insomnia (sometimes spending all day and night watching Netflix). Judging peoples taste in series to judge whether they are one or multiple people also sounds like something that can backfire for people that legitimately have unusual tastes, or people that often have friends visiting with different tastes. I hope their solution is to at least ask the customer for an explanation, instead of an "AI" simply autobanning all "weird" customers.
DNS manipulation is one of the most common forms of online censorship used by oppressive regimes or unscrupulous ISPs, used to block access to news sites, information portals, social media platforms, undesirable software, and more.
It's not just stereotypical "oppressive regimes or unscrupulous ISPs" that do this. It's also commonly used to block sites like thepiratebay.
When you parse licenses, you have to be conscious that they do not exist in a vacuum. They rest upon the entire body of law and precedent going back, in the US case, to British Common Law (yes, courts still cite it here).
Legitimate question: if the parsing of a licence depends so strongly upon the laws of a country, what happens in todays international world? If e.g. German and Japanese laws turn out to allow rescinding "by default", can the kernel developers rescind parts of the kernel in such a way that they are now illegal to use in Germany and Japan?
If it doesn't depend on where the product is used, what does determine what laws to follow? Where the kernel developers were based when they contributed the code? Where the kernel project is formally based? Where the licence was written?
Actually, people have thought carefully about the ramifications. Firstly, note that only ~200/3500 mosquito species actually target humans. Probably, not even all these 200 human-biting mosquito types carry malaria, and not all of those carrying malaria have that high risk of transmission. If you drive the specific malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes extinct, it's not unlikely that other mosquito species will naturally fill their void, and that most predators will happily eat other mosquitoes too. We could even help them on their way, by releasing "safe mosquitos" in the same regions where we release "sterilized mosquitos".
Secondly, note that for many species, mosquitoes are not as large a part of their diet as people think, it's more of an opportunistic food source since they're slow and stupid. For instance, while many species of bats eat a lot of mosquitoes, it only constitutes ~2% of their food, since moths are larger and more nutritious.
Finally, it's estimated that malaria has killed roughly half of all people that ever lived. And that's just malaria; the same mosquitos tend to spread dengue fever, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus, West Nile virus, and so on. We should also ask how much damage to specific ecosystems we are willing to accept to save a ridiculous number of human lives.
The European Economic Area countries usually follow the regulation by the European Union anyway. Excluding those, the non-EU countries left on the continent are basically Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Balkan states, and some city states (I don't count Russia and Turkey). Belarus is in the same timezone as western Russia, while the rest follow Central European Time or Eastern European Time. I'd expect everyone but Belarus to discard DST for practical reasons if the rest of the countries in the CET and EET blocks switch.
So although I agree that the European Union doesn't span the continent, in practice the entire continent except Belarus will probably end up getting rid of DST in the near future.
Not a webmonkey, but I'll give you a layman's summary.
Firefox launched a new version 57 almost a year ago, which made broad changes to its core and architecture. Some users were very happy: it replaced parts of the rendering engine with some new stuff written in Rust ("Firefox Quantum"), which made the browser much faster. Other users were not very happy: they basically scrapped their entire plugin ecosystem, and adopted a chromium-like plugin API ("WebExtensions").
The upside is that by Firefox aligning themselves with the Chrome ecosystem, it's much easier to port plugins between them, which can be a boon since Firefox is not really that popular these days. But most people that use Firefox for non-political reasons do so because they love its plugin ecosystem, and were thus not happy with the change. Especially because some plugins turned out to be impossible to port, and some plugin authors were not interested in rewriting their projects from scratch.
Some Firefox-forks like Palemoon kept supporting the older plugin API, and Firefox also officially had an "Extended Support Release" that they kept around while waiting for plugin authors to rewrite their plugins with the new API. The last part of the saga is that Firefox has now ended their official support for these legacy versions, and removed the corresponding plugins from their repository.
First of all, most chemical synthesis reactions don't give one product with a 100% yield. Some molecules don't undergo the reaction, leaving some of the reactants behind. Some molecules have multiple sites where they can be chemically substituted, producing a statistical mixture of products. And some molecules have multiple isomeres that can be produced in the same reaction, but then behave differently in later reactions. So at each step of a chemical synthesis, you're polluting the system with more and more chemicals that might interact with each other and surprise you at later stages of the synthesis. The machine might perhaps be good at figuring out such interactions between biproducts of synthesis reactions even if a human just told it what the main product of each synthesis step would be.
That's not a trap though. If they can't profit from it themselves, just throwing away the data or letting it rot on a backup drive would be extremely wasteful for society as a whole. Donating it to volunteers that can make something out of it is the right thing to do, and I appreciate that Microsoft chose to do that.