If you've done enough programming and know at least 1-2 languages fluently, you should be able to pick up another very quickly (less than a week).
I hear this a lot, but I respectfully disagree. Rather, if you know at least 1-2 languages fluently you should be able to pick up another based on the same programming paradigms very quickly. For instance, it definitely didn't take a week to learn Haskell, even though I knew a lot of other programming languages at the point I first started to play with it. And I'm quite sure most people spend more than a week learning object-oriented program design properly.
That means you could define a point in the universe (or several) from which ALL the mass would be on one side (within a hemisphere), or a point from which mass is roughly equal on all sides (center of mass)- unless the universe is curved, wraps around, etc. That could all the be the case, but I'm pretty sure we see no evidence of that. Am I incorrect?
The point is still that the update is being *forced* on the consumers, not just *offered* to the consumers. If you have some kind of mission-critical system, say a hospital computer that is relying on old drivers and commercial software that doesn't work with Windows 10, then having it automatically update is clearly a problem. Had Microsoft just *offered* the upgrade with an easy way to opt-out, that would have been great.
Contrary to popular belief, the big bang wasn't a conventional explosion that hurled lots of mass into empty space, but rather the creation and expansion of space itself, which diluted the mass and energy of the universe. Discussing where in the universe the big bang happened, is kind of like filling a large balloon with air, and then arguing where on the surface of the balloon it all expanded from.
That's why I had to add the qualifier "because almost everyone has an account, and most of them check it quite frequently":
* Email: I use it to communicate with colleagues, but most of my friends rarely or never check their email;
* SMS: I use it to communicate with local friends, but texting people abroad is expensive, and people keep changing their phone numbers anyway;
* Skype: I have Skype, but only ~1% of my friends have an account, so it doesn't work for the majority of people;
* Telephone call: Same problem as SMS;
* Tin cans and string: It's not that easy to get a piece of string that reaches from Norway to Australia;
* Smoke signals: Assuming that the smoke goes straight up, the curvature of the Earth makes them impossible to spot from the other end of the world;
* Cutting off a finger and painting the wall with your blood: Only works for local communication, I'm talking about keeping in touch with people abroad.
I do also have other communication apps lying around to talk to different groups people. I prefer using Signal or Telegram but only a few people I know actually use it; KakaoTalk is okay, but only the Koreans use it; Line is okay, but only the Japanese use it. But in the end, almost everyone I know are most easily reached using Facebook messenger, so for pragmatic reasons, that's what I use most frequently.
Using Farcebook is already evidence of gross stupidity.
I don't like Facebook the company, but I do have a Facebook account, and mainly use it because of the messenger feature. It's simply the easiest way to stay in touch with friends abroad, because almost everyone has an account, and most of them check it quite frequently.
If intelligent aliens are watching us from afar, they might have checked the spectroscopic signature of our atmosphere, and realized millions of years ago that we live on a temperate planet with a lot of water, and that the high oxygen content in the atmosphere is an indication of life.
You can, but I wouldn't say 'easily'. Unless you've got Android 6, you need to root your phone and install XPrivacy in order to block individual permissions for an app, and that's not something most people would do.
My father gave me a computer with Linux back in 2002, and taught me the basics of how to use a terminal and bash scripting. I'm not sure if this counts as "programming" in itself, but I feel that interacting with the computer in this way was precisely what gave me the programming mentality, and what made me think of programming as something fun and cool in the first place. I then continued learning about Linux on my own, by basically breaking/fixing/reinstalling my system every second week or so for a couple of years. I also taught myself basic Python during this time. Then, in 2009, I finished high school and started university, enrolling in a math and physics programme. I then learned Matlab and C++ from two compulsory programming courses, and learned parallel programming with OpenMP/MPI/CUDA from taking two additional programming courses for fun. I also learned lots of other languages by just playing around in my free time, especially Haskell, Scheme, and Fortran. These days I'm doing a PhD in physics, and mostly use modern Fortran for simulation programs, Python for data visualization, and random Bash scripts for miscellaneous tasks.
Fun fact: point scientific equipment up at the sky, and you'll find that it's actually violet. It only looks blue because the human eye is more sensitive to the colour ranges that we call blue than the colour ranges that we call violet. But I agree with your sentiment:).
XPrivacy can prevent applications from leaking privacy-sensitive data by restricting the categories of data an application can access. XPrivacy feeds applications fake data or no data at all. It can restrict several data categories, such as contacts or location. For example, if you restrict an application's access to contacts, that application will receive an empty contacts list (don't try this with the contacts application itself without a backup). Similarly, restricting an application's access to your location will send a fake location to that application.
Unfortunately, you have to root your phone for it to work. But in return, you can control your permissions as generally or specifically as you want, and for e.g. the location data, you can manually choose whether you want randomized coordinates, fixed coordinates, etc.
Now *that* is cool. Definitely gonna check out the vim-bracketed-paste plugin linked at the same page too, I'm also one of those who always forget to:set paste before copy-pasting stuff in, and the autoindent is then really annoying...
As many others have said already: they're not killing 32-bit support. They're just killing support for the i386, i486, and i586 architectures. But all i686 processors, meaning most 32-bit x86 processors since the Intel Pentium Pro was introduced in 1995, are still supported. In my opinion, this is a good thing: almost nobody uses i386 processors anymore, and restricting support to i686 and above permits the compiler to optimize code much better for those processors. So for people using Pentium Pro and above, this will likely increase the performance of their hardware if done right.
The publication process has to be paid for by either the readers (traditional publishing) or the scientists (open-access publishing). In the first case, the scientists don't make any money off the paper, as all the money the readers pay goes to the journal. In the second case, the readers won't have to pay anything, but the scientist may have to pay up to $3000 to get their work published. In both cases, the paper is reviewed by referees that also work for free. So the only people that make money off the system are actually the journals.
Normally, the telomeres get shorter every time a cell splits in two. After a certain number of cell divisions, the telomeres are exhausted, and you start corrupting the DNA with further divisions, leading to a whole array of issues that we know as aging. But decades before these age-related issues start to occur, some rogue cells in your body may mutate and start to multiply uncontrollably. This is typical of what will later become a cancerous tumor. In that case, the telomeres will be exhausted way faster than normal, and these aggressive rogue cells might simply die out due to genetic corruption. So yes, the telomeres are the first line of defence against cancer, and as far as I know, that's all kinds of cancer not only specific types.
Well, that's why I love the Firefox plugin self-destructing cookies. Most websites work fine because they get to store all the cookies they want; but ten seconds after closing the last tab of that page, all it's cookies are wiped out. (Just remember to also block 3rd-party cookies to prevent e.g. Facebook and Google from obtaining persistent cookies by being omnipresent on the web.)
Apropos, I remember reading about some research into "neurogenesis" some time ago (generation of new neurons in the brain). Sorry don't have a reference, but it should be possible to google it. The research indicates that people with high neurogenesis tend to learn new things very fast, which is kinda obvious. But perhaps less obvious, they also found that people with high neurogenesis tend to forget their old memories very fast. So apparently, there's a tradeoff between learning new things fast (average child), and retaining old memories well (average adult). Their hypothesis was that this is because adding new neurons to the network incurs some damage to the existing information stored in the network, so if you don't refresh and repair those memories often enough, they become too damaged to restore. But the faster you generate new neurons, the fewer old memories you have time to refresh in time, and so the faster you also forget your old memories. So I think people like us just have a higher neurogenesis than most adults:).
If a good storyteller tells you about someone throwing a pebble at a window, you can also hear that pebble hit the window in your mind, even though in real life your ears are listening to the storyteller's words. How is that different from reading a story and hearing the pebble hit the window? If it is not, then how do you know that people reading out loud can't also see and hear what's going on in their minds?
Alternatively... Just pull the power plug instead of shutting down 'nicely', and it shouldn't have any opportunity to delete your files. Don't reboot into the harddrive, but boot from a livecd, and try decrypting the contents from there.
In some cases, mixing your/you're is actually a typo and not illiteracy. It is quite common to think in sounds and transcribe those sounds into written words, especially for native speakers of a language, and this leads to a lot of spelling mistakes when it comes to homonyms. The difference between typos and illiteracy here is whether the author immediately understands what's wrong when you point it out...
Slashdot Mirror
If you've done enough programming and know at least 1-2 languages fluently, you should be able to pick up another very quickly (less than a week).
I hear this a lot, but I respectfully disagree. Rather, if you know at least 1-2 languages fluently you should be able to pick up another based on the same programming paradigms very quickly. For instance, it definitely didn't take a week to learn Haskell, even though I knew a lot of other programming languages at the point I first started to play with it. And I'm quite sure most people spend more than a week learning object-oriented program design properly.
That means you could define a point in the universe (or several) from which ALL the mass would be on one side (within a hemisphere), or a point from which mass is roughly equal on all sides (center of mass)- unless the universe is curved, wraps around, etc. That could all the be the case, but I'm pretty sure we see no evidence of that. Am I incorrect?
According to the current cosmological models the universe is either curved or infinite, and both options make it impossible to define a unique center.
The point is still that the update is being *forced* on the consumers, not just *offered* to the consumers. If you have some kind of mission-critical system, say a hospital computer that is relying on old drivers and commercial software that doesn't work with Windows 10, then having it automatically update is clearly a problem. Had Microsoft just *offered* the upgrade with an easy way to opt-out, that would have been great.
Contrary to popular belief, the big bang wasn't a conventional explosion that hurled lots of mass into empty space, but rather the creation and expansion of space itself, which diluted the mass and energy of the universe. Discussing where in the universe the big bang happened, is kind of like filling a large balloon with air, and then arguing where on the surface of the balloon it all expanded from.
Stop sending them the contents of all your emails
I dumped GMail for Kolab, and am quite satisfied with that. Costs $3 per month for a privacy-friendly webmail based in Switzerland.
block their tracking shit that's all over the web
Using Disconnect, Self-destructing Cookies, and UBlock Origin seems to get rid of most of the crap on the web without breaking anything.
use alternate map services
There's the OpenStreetMap project: check out this online and this for mobile.
That's why I had to add the qualifier "because almost everyone has an account, and most of them check it quite frequently":
* Email: I use it to communicate with colleagues, but most of my friends rarely or never check their email;
* SMS: I use it to communicate with local friends, but texting people abroad is expensive, and people keep changing their phone numbers anyway;
* Skype: I have Skype, but only ~1% of my friends have an account, so it doesn't work for the majority of people;
* Telephone call: Same problem as SMS;
* Tin cans and string: It's not that easy to get a piece of string that reaches from Norway to Australia;
* Smoke signals: Assuming that the smoke goes straight up, the curvature of the Earth makes them impossible to spot from the other end of the world;
* Cutting off a finger and painting the wall with your blood: Only works for local communication, I'm talking about keeping in touch with people abroad.
I do also have other communication apps lying around to talk to different groups people. I prefer using Signal or Telegram but only a few people I know actually use it; KakaoTalk is okay, but only the Koreans use it; Line is okay, but only the Japanese use it. But in the end, almost everyone I know are most easily reached using Facebook messenger, so for pragmatic reasons, that's what I use most frequently.
Using Farcebook is already evidence of gross stupidity.
I don't like Facebook the company, but I do have a Facebook account, and mainly use it because of the messenger feature. It's simply the easiest way to stay in touch with friends abroad, because almost everyone has an account, and most of them check it quite frequently.
If intelligent aliens are watching us from afar, they might have checked the spectroscopic signature of our atmosphere, and realized millions of years ago that we live on a temperate planet with a lot of water, and that the high oxygen content in the atmosphere is an indication of life.
Secret twist: Larry Page posted this story to Slashdot, to make more people interested, thus driving up the stock price.
You can, but I wouldn't say 'easily'. Unless you've got Android 6, you need to root your phone and install XPrivacy in order to block individual permissions for an app, and that's not something most people would do.
My father gave me a computer with Linux back in 2002, and taught me the basics of how to use a terminal and bash scripting. I'm not sure if this counts as "programming" in itself, but I feel that interacting with the computer in this way was precisely what gave me the programming mentality, and what made me think of programming as something fun and cool in the first place. I then continued learning about Linux on my own, by basically breaking/fixing/reinstalling my system every second week or so for a couple of years. I also taught myself basic Python during this time. Then, in 2009, I finished high school and started university, enrolling in a math and physics programme. I then learned Matlab and C++ from two compulsory programming courses, and learned parallel programming with OpenMP/MPI/CUDA from taking two additional programming courses for fun. I also learned lots of other languages by just playing around in my free time, especially Haskell, Scheme, and Fortran. These days I'm doing a PhD in physics, and mostly use modern Fortran for simulation programs, Python for data visualization, and random Bash scripts for miscellaneous tasks.
Or we could eliminate the problem by just not censoring nipples. If you get PTSD from seeing nipples on Facebook, see a psychologist...
Fun fact: point scientific equipment up at the sky, and you'll find that it's actually violet. It only looks blue because the human eye is more sensitive to the colour ranges that we call blue than the colour ranges that we call violet. But I agree with your sentiment :).
We really need a third option "Allow, Deny, Emulate" so the app even THINKS it has the mic access but just gets silence sent to it
This already exists in the form of XPrivacy:
XPrivacy can prevent applications from leaking privacy-sensitive data by restricting the categories of data an application can access. XPrivacy feeds applications fake data or no data at all. It can restrict several data categories, such as contacts or location. For example, if you restrict an application's access to contacts, that application will receive an empty contacts list (don't try this with the contacts application itself without a backup). Similarly, restricting an application's access to your location will send a fake location to that application.
Unfortunately, you have to root your phone for it to work. But in return, you can control your permissions as generally or specifically as you want, and for e.g. the location data, you can manually choose whether you want randomized coordinates, fixed coordinates, etc.
Now *that* is cool. Definitely gonna check out the vim-bracketed-paste plugin linked at the same page too, I'm also one of those who always forget to :set paste before copy-pasting stuff in, and the autoindent is then really annoying...
As many others have said already: they're not killing 32-bit support. They're just killing support for the i386, i486, and i586 architectures. But all i686 processors, meaning most 32-bit x86 processors since the Intel Pentium Pro was introduced in 1995, are still supported. In my opinion, this is a good thing: almost nobody uses i386 processors anymore, and restricting support to i686 and above permits the compiler to optimize code much better for those processors. So for people using Pentium Pro and above, this will likely increase the performance of their hardware if done right.
Authors are often not paid to write the paper, they are paid to do the work.
If you work in academia and not industry, then publishing is an essential part of "doing the work".
The publication process has to be paid for by either the readers (traditional publishing) or the scientists (open-access publishing). In the first case, the scientists don't make any money off the paper, as all the money the readers pay goes to the journal. In the second case, the readers won't have to pay anything, but the scientist may have to pay up to $3000 to get their work published. In both cases, the paper is reviewed by referees that also work for free. So the only people that make money off the system are actually the journals.
Normally, the telomeres get shorter every time a cell splits in two. After a certain number of cell divisions, the telomeres are exhausted, and you start corrupting the DNA with further divisions, leading to a whole array of issues that we know as aging. But decades before these age-related issues start to occur, some rogue cells in your body may mutate and start to multiply uncontrollably. This is typical of what will later become a cancerous tumor. In that case, the telomeres will be exhausted way faster than normal, and these aggressive rogue cells might simply die out due to genetic corruption. So yes, the telomeres are the first line of defence against cancer, and as far as I know, that's all kinds of cancer not only specific types.
Well, that's why I love the Firefox plugin self-destructing cookies. Most websites work fine because they get to store all the cookies they want; but ten seconds after closing the last tab of that page, all it's cookies are wiped out. (Just remember to also block 3rd-party cookies to prevent e.g. Facebook and Google from obtaining persistent cookies by being omnipresent on the web.)
Apropos, I remember reading about some research into "neurogenesis" some time ago (generation of new neurons in the brain). Sorry don't have a reference, but it should be possible to google it. The research indicates that people with high neurogenesis tend to learn new things very fast, which is kinda obvious. But perhaps less obvious, they also found that people with high neurogenesis tend to forget their old memories very fast. So apparently, there's a tradeoff between learning new things fast (average child), and retaining old memories well (average adult). Their hypothesis was that this is because adding new neurons to the network incurs some damage to the existing information stored in the network, so if you don't refresh and repair those memories often enough, they become too damaged to restore. But the faster you generate new neurons, the fewer old memories you have time to refresh in time, and so the faster you also forget your old memories. So I think people like us just have a higher neurogenesis than most adults :).
If a good storyteller tells you about someone throwing a pebble at a window, you can also hear that pebble hit the window in your mind, even though in real life your ears are listening to the storyteller's words. How is that different from reading a story and hearing the pebble hit the window? If it is not, then how do you know that people reading out loud can't also see and hear what's going on in their minds?
Alternatively... Just pull the power plug instead of shutting down 'nicely', and it shouldn't have any opportunity to delete your files. Don't reboot into the harddrive, but boot from a livecd, and try decrypting the contents from there.
At that exchange rate, I don't think Google and Facebook will mind paying their due taxes in the EU...
In some cases, mixing your/you're is actually a typo and not illiteracy. It is quite common to think in sounds and transcribe those sounds into written words, especially for native speakers of a language, and this leads to a lot of spelling mistakes when it comes to homonyms. The difference between typos and illiteracy here is whether the author immediately understands what's wrong when you point it out...