if you look for older dates, you'll see that the route is much more to the south, almost above Crimea.
If you look further back, you'll see plenty of flights along the same route as the one used at the time of the crash. This was a quite ordinary flight route for MH17.
The real question is why it would ever fly over Crimea, when Crimean airspace has been closed since the Russian invasion in February.
It is a fundamental problem, that leads to the division of bulk (slow) hauling = railways, people & fast hauling = trucks/cars.
You're right about the division, but... In much of Europe, it's the other way around: trains carry passengers, trucks carry cargo. Because the higher speed trains have right-of-way vs. slow cargo trains. In the US, slow cargo trains have right-of-way, slowing down passenger trains.
Denmark doesn't even have real high-speed trains, but at a top-speed of 180 km/h it still exceeds anything you'd ever get away with on the highway. The few cargo trains we have mostly do their 40 km/h thing at night.
Long-distance bus lines like the American Greyhound are essentially non-existent in Denmark; the moment you need to travel more than maybe 30 km, it's by train or private car (or plane, for the longest distances).
When an interpreted language breaks backwards compatibility, everyone is affected. Users suddenly can't run the program when their interpreter is updated.
Which is why we have separate/usr/bin/python2 and/usr/bin/python3 interpreters. So that programs can specify which one they use. You can even install e.g. Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 side-by-side if you have an application that is finicky enough to only run on 2.6.
On Windows, the situation is messier, which is why serious Python applications (e.g. Mercurial) bundle Python on Windows.
There's a lot of moaning about Python 2 vs. Python 3, but having worked professionally in Python and with Python applications for years, I have yet to experience problems worse than "oh, it'd be nice if Paramiko supported Python 3, so we could upgrade". (Which it does as of this March, so there's a nice little summer project at work.) Fact is, by now, the Python community is over the hump. All the important libraries support Python 3, and new applications are targeted at Python 3, with Python 2 compatibility being optional. (That's my professional experience, anyway.)
No single court has been appointed the Supreme Court of the European Union, with jurisdiction of every legal matter in the EU. SCOTUS does have jurisdiction over pretty much every legal matter in the US.
The US Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over all legal matters in the US. Specifically, it has no jurisdiction over state law, unless that law conflicts with federal law. In this respect it resembles the European Court of Justice quite a bit.
Jurisdiction over federal law (including treaties to which the federation is a party)? Both. Jurisdiction over member state law not in conflict with federal law? Neither. Jurisdiction in disputes about federal law between member states? Both. Jurisdiction in other disputes between member states? No in the case of ECJ, and not applicable in the case of SCOTUS, since US states cannot enter treaties on their own and are hence only bound by federal law.
I'll grant you that SCOTUS has jurisdiction over all maritime matters and the ECJ does not (unless regulated by EU law or a treaty to which the EU is a party), as well as certain federal officials. (In the EU, officials are bound by national law, except for actions in an official capacity, which are under ECJ jurisdiction like all other EU institutions.)
The more you argue, the more I'm beginning to realize that the ECJ and the SCOTUS are in fact very similar; the biggest difference being that the EU still clings to the fantasy that it's not a federation.:-)
So no, the ECJ or ECHR are NOT an equivalent of the United States Supreme Court.
I never claimed that the ECJ was anything like the SCOTUS, only that it was a supreme court, as in "the highest judicial tribunal in a political unit" (Merriam-Webster), or specifically as in a court that makes final judicial decisions that bind lower courts and is not subject to any other court.
And no, I was not thinking about the ECHR. Even if this case might tangentially touch upon European human right law, I am well aware that the ECHR is not an EU court.
Did you even read the page you're quoting? The ECJ is not a Supreme Court, as national cases cannot be appealed to the ECJ.
You (as a citizen) cannot appeal a case to the ECJ, but you can challenge the law or intepretation of that law (under which the original case was decided) in a national court; the court may then direct the case to the ECJ. In other words, if you can make a reasonable case that GCHQ violates EU law, but is found in a UK court not to violate UK law, the case can certainly end up before the ECJ.
The [U.S.] Supreme Court has a much broader horizon when it comes to legal issues, most notably they can declare a national law to be unconstitutional.
For privacy reasons, phones should of course also randomize their MAC address before every association request. There are 46 bits available for randomization
I thought network interface makers were supposed to use only MACs from their own respective registered prefixes.
That goes for the statically assigned MAC addresses, yes. But if the first octet ends with the bits 01, it is a "locally administered unicast address", for which there are no assignment rules - you can pick whatever value you want. (Hence 46 bits, not 48 bits.)
In theory, the local system administrator is supposed to assign the MAC addresses. In practice, randomization is the optimal assignment strategy. These random addresses will never collide with a statically assigned address (which do not have a first octet ending in 01), and if they're picked at random, the odds are insignificant that they might collide with another random address.
... the problem is not "listening for beacons", you can do that without broadcasting your position to the whole world (NSA included...).
For some reasons, modern smartphones constantly yell in all directions, "Hear me! Hear me! My globally unique ID is 02:12:f6:12:8a:33! That said, any nice APs around that I might know?".
This despite the fact that standard APs broadcast beacons every 102.4 ms, obviating the need for the phone to send anything until it wants to actually associate.
Not sending beacons all the time would also save quite a bit of battery. Passively listening for beacons is almost free.
For privacy reasons, phones should of course also randomize their MAC address before every association request. There are 46 bits available for randomization; the risk of collisions is on the order of 1E-8 even if you have 1000 devices on the WLAN (which would be painful for other reasons).
Now, using the cell phone network without being tracked...
To be fair, there is a difference in water level of about 20 cm across the entire Panama canal, which was the grandparent's point. That is not the reason for the locks, though.
Please accept my apologies for the delayed reply. You appear to be lacking firsthand experience with interactions involving certain law enforcement agencies and persons who are subject to device examination. The first step will be production of a bit for bit copy of the digital media in question, followed by a quick analysis of the disk image. In many cases, said analysis will rapidly identify media regions which are likely to represent "hidden containers", and interesting interactions between the owner of the device and law enforcement personnel will commence shortly thereafter.
I may not have first-hand experience with police overreach, but then I have first-hand experience with cryptography, and therefore I know that an analysis of a TrueCrypt-encrypted disk will determine the presence of the outer, encrypted container. The hidden container, on the other hand, is mathematically indistinguishable from encrypted empty space, and there is no way to determine if a hidden container is present unless you 1) have the secret second key (which we assume you don't), 2) can brute-force the key (which you can't), 3) can learn about it from side channel attacks (of which several are known, but for which countermeasures exist) or 4) exploit bugs in the TrueCrypt software (of which none are known).
If they see a hard drive with only half its capacity in use yet the system reads full, they'll be wondering what's in the hidden container.
They won't see a hardrive that reads full, because they will only have the password to the outer container, and the hidden container will hence not be protected... writes to the outer container will simply overwrite the contents of the inner container, making it impossible to tell that it was ever there.
Whoever the Truecrypt developers are, they're not idiots.
None of those points are relevant, except maybe "it's difficult to get right".
The first third of the thread, people are either not talking about hidden containers or don't know what a hidden container is, and instead go on about various steganographic methods of hiding the use of encryption. (E.g. "LUKS header, by design, is visible header."... that goes for TrueCrypt as well, and has nothing to do with hidden containers.)
In the middle third of the thread, they're discussing variations of "it's hard!" and "you can't protect the outer container" (though TrueCrypt does just that).
In the last third of the thread, random people are musing about their little pet-ideas and other off-topic tangents.
There are good arguments for not adding hidden containers to LUKS, most importantly the fact that nobody's stepping up to implement it, but no real arguments against hidden containers.
According to the results of that Nature study, Wikipedia had, on average, 32% more errors per article than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
First of all, that "32 % more" is based on finding an average of 4 errors in Wikipedia articles and only 3 errors on average in EB articles.
Secondly, note that this is per article. Since Wikipedia articles are generally much longer than EB articles, the number of errors compared to the volume of information is less in Wikipedia than in EB.
Only 4 serious errors were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in Encyclopædia Britannica. The study concluded: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries."
Also note that this study was done in 2005, before the Seigenthaler biography incident, which led to a great increase in quality control on the English Wikipedia, including a much harsher attitude towards unsourced statements.
empathy [em-puh-thee] noun.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. (Dictionary.com Unabridged, my emphasis)
Empathy is more than just understanding another person's feelings; it's about intuitively sharing those feelings. The layman definition of psycopathy is a lack of empathy. (There is no medical definition of psycopathy; the medical terms are narcissistic and/or antisocial personality disorder.)
Or do we need more perspective? For those who prefer the typical journalistic approach to understanding numbers, it's a reduction from 872'000 Olympic pools to just under 37'200 Olympic pools.
For an even better perspective: It's a reduction from what the US consumes in 2 years, to what the US consumes in 1 month. [1]
Whichever estimate holds, one should probably start considering alternatives.
Heisenbugs: All experienced programmers have faced situations where the bug that crashed the software just disappears when the software is restarted
That's not a Heisenbug; that's just a plain old unreproducible bug. A Heisenbug is a bug that disappears when you look for it, and reappears when you stop looking. The classic example is a bug that appear in the release build, but disappears in the debug build where optimizations are disabled.
Why would anyone be inspired by the mutiny on the Bounty? As far as I know, the story goes like this:
16 escaped to Tahiti.
A year later, one was killed by a fellow mutineer, who was subsequently killed by an angry mob.
Within another year, the Royal Navy arrived and arrested them; 4 drowned.
After lengthy trials, 3 were executed, 4 acquitted and 3 pardoned.
The 9 remaining mutineers marooned themselves (along with a group of kidnapped natives) on the deserted Pitcairn island, with all of 4.6 km to spend their remaining life on. Within 4 years, 5 mutineers died in a violent clash; the remaining mutineers began drinking heavily, with one suicide and another two killed in the following years.
But yeah, one of 25 managed to escape the law and survive long enough to even name a town after himself (populated entirely by the natives he and the other mutineers had raped, and their offspring).
...
Okay, scratch that; I realize that compared to the Royal Navy anno 1789, Pitcairn starts to look mighty swell.
It's not either/or. A car can protect its occupants and other people on the road. I'm pretty sure people looking to buy a car don't actively disregard the Volvo V40, just because it has external airbags to protect pedestrians. Unless they're sociopaths.
Then again, Volvo apparently didn't think it'd make commercial sense to sell the V40 in the US...
you're not supposed to refill plastic water bottles
Yes, there was a Danish study of this. A repeatedly refilled water bottle has a much higher level of bacteria etc. than tap water.
It's still cleaner than regular bottled water, though.
Turns out, all that bottled water sitting still at room temperature for months before purchase doesn't do anything for the water quality. Being a Danish study, all of the above assumes you have clean tap water, of course. YMMV.
And indeed, Golden Rice has all the problems associated with GMO crops, which is why Greenpeace protests it.
- A biological monoculture, increasing the risk that a single pest can cause immense damage to subsistence farmers throughout the region.
- The possibility of unknown pleiotropic effects ("side effects") caused by the mutation.
- Gene privatization, with Monsanto and others already asserting their patents, requiring farmers to obtain a license to grow their crops.
Besides, malnutrition in the third world is the result of widespread poverty, which has numerous causes, none of which is Greenpeace GMO protests. Blaming Greenpeace for that is absurd.
Everyone who needs and has a good use for CSS variables, and other more advanced functionality has already moved to SASS or something similar
Maybe, but you're missing two things: 1) CSS variables are not semantically equivalent to SASS or LESS variables; 2) CSS variables are available for runtime JavaScript manipulation. Sure, you can run LESS (and maybe SASS) in the browser too, but it's a bit overkill.
In fact, CSS variables complement SASS/LESS nicely.
And why the hell can't I do width: 50% - 10px? What century are we living in again?
You mean width: calc(50% - 10px), using the standard CSS3 syntax which has been supported by Chrome and Safari since 2012, and Firefox and IE(!) since 2011?
Slashdot Mirror
if you look for older dates, you'll see that the route is much more to the south, almost above Crimea.
If you look further back, you'll see plenty of flights along the same route as the one used at the time of the crash. This was a quite ordinary flight route for MH17.
The real question is why it would ever fly over Crimea, when Crimean airspace has been closed since the Russian invasion in February.
It is a fundamental problem, that leads to the division of bulk (slow) hauling = railways, people & fast hauling = trucks/cars.
You're right about the division, but... In much of Europe, it's the other way around: trains carry passengers, trucks carry cargo. Because the higher speed trains have right-of-way vs. slow cargo trains. In the US, slow cargo trains have right-of-way, slowing down passenger trains.
Denmark doesn't even have real high-speed trains, but at a top-speed of 180 km/h it still exceeds anything you'd ever get away with on the highway. The few cargo trains we have mostly do their 40 km/h thing at night.
Long-distance bus lines like the American Greyhound are essentially non-existent in Denmark; the moment you need to travel more than maybe 30 km, it's by train or private car (or plane, for the longest distances).
When an interpreted language breaks backwards compatibility, everyone is affected. Users suddenly can't run the program when their interpreter is updated.
Which is why we have separate /usr/bin/python2 and /usr/bin/python3 interpreters. So that programs can specify which one they use. You can even install e.g. Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 side-by-side if you have an application that is finicky enough to only run on 2.6.
On Windows, the situation is messier, which is why serious Python applications (e.g. Mercurial) bundle Python on Windows.
There's a lot of moaning about Python 2 vs. Python 3, but having worked professionally in Python and with Python applications for years, I have yet to experience problems worse than "oh, it'd be nice if Paramiko supported Python 3, so we could upgrade". (Which it does as of this March, so there's a nice little summer project at work.) Fact is, by now, the Python community is over the hump. All the important libraries support Python 3, and new applications are targeted at Python 3, with Python 2 compatibility being optional. (That's my professional experience, anyway.)
No single court has been appointed the Supreme Court of the European Union, with jurisdiction of every legal matter in the EU. SCOTUS does have jurisdiction over pretty much every legal matter in the US.
The US Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over all legal matters in the US. Specifically, it has no jurisdiction over state law, unless that law conflicts with federal law. In this respect it resembles the European Court of Justice quite a bit.
Jurisdiction over federal law (including treaties to which the federation is a party)? Both. Jurisdiction over member state law not in conflict with federal law? Neither. Jurisdiction in disputes about federal law between member states? Both. Jurisdiction in other disputes between member states? No in the case of ECJ, and not applicable in the case of SCOTUS, since US states cannot enter treaties on their own and are hence only bound by federal law.
I'll grant you that SCOTUS has jurisdiction over all maritime matters and the ECJ does not (unless regulated by EU law or a treaty to which the EU is a party), as well as certain federal officials. (In the EU, officials are bound by national law, except for actions in an official capacity, which are under ECJ jurisdiction like all other EU institutions.)
The more you argue, the more I'm beginning to realize that the ECJ and the SCOTUS are in fact very similar; the biggest difference being that the EU still clings to the fantasy that it's not a federation. :-)
So no, the ECJ or ECHR are NOT an equivalent of the United States Supreme Court.
I never claimed that the ECJ was anything like the SCOTUS, only that it was a supreme court, as in "the highest judicial tribunal in a political unit" (Merriam-Webster), or specifically as in a court that makes final judicial decisions that bind lower courts and is not subject to any other court.
And no, I was not thinking about the ECHR. Even if this case might tangentially touch upon European human right law, I am well aware that the ECHR is not an EU court.
Did you even read the page you're quoting? The ECJ is not a Supreme Court, as national cases cannot be appealed to the ECJ.
You (as a citizen) cannot appeal a case to the ECJ, but you can challenge the law or intepretation of that law (under which the original case was decided) in a national court; the court may then direct the case to the ECJ. In other words, if you can make a reasonable case that GCHQ violates EU law, but is found in a UK court not to violate UK law, the case can certainly end up before the ECJ.
This has happened numerous times.
The [U.S.] Supreme Court has a much broader horizon when it comes to legal issues, most notably they can declare a national law to be unconstitutional.
The EU might not have a constitution, but the ECJ can certainly overturn EU law found to violate basic rights of citizens.
*cough* The European Court of Justice has ultimate jurisdiction if plaintiffs can show that GCHQ violated any EU ordinance.
(Whether that is the case I'll leave up to the lawyers, but it's certainly not unlikely that they can find something...)
For privacy reasons, phones should of course also randomize their MAC address before every association request. There are 46 bits available for randomization
I thought network interface makers were supposed to use only MACs from their own respective registered prefixes.
That goes for the statically assigned MAC addresses, yes. But if the first octet ends with the bits 01, it is a "locally administered unicast address", for which there are no assignment rules - you can pick whatever value you want. (Hence 46 bits, not 48 bits.)
In theory, the local system administrator is supposed to assign the MAC addresses. In practice, randomization is the optimal assignment strategy. These random addresses will never collide with a statically assigned address (which do not have a first octet ending in 01), and if they're picked at random, the odds are insignificant that they might collide with another random address.
... the problem is not "listening for beacons", you can do that without broadcasting your position to the whole world (NSA included...).
For some reasons, modern smartphones constantly yell in all directions, "Hear me! Hear me! My globally unique ID is 02:12:f6:12:8a:33! That said, any nice APs around that I might know?".
This despite the fact that standard APs broadcast beacons every 102.4 ms, obviating the need for the phone to send anything until it wants to actually associate.
Not sending beacons all the time would also save quite a bit of battery. Passively listening for beacons is almost free.
For privacy reasons, phones should of course also randomize their MAC address before every association request. There are 46 bits available for randomization; the risk of collisions is on the order of 1E-8 even if you have 1000 devices on the WLAN (which would be painful for other reasons).
Now, using the cell phone network without being tracked...
To be fair, there is a difference in water level of about 20 cm across the entire Panama canal, which was the grandparent's point. That is not the reason for the locks, though.
Please accept my apologies for the delayed reply. You appear to be lacking firsthand experience with interactions involving certain law enforcement agencies and persons who are subject to device examination. The first step will be production of a bit for bit copy of the digital media in question, followed by a quick analysis of the disk image. In many cases, said analysis will rapidly identify media regions which are likely to represent "hidden containers", and interesting interactions between the owner of the device and law enforcement personnel will commence shortly thereafter.
I may not have first-hand experience with police overreach, but then I have first-hand experience with cryptography, and therefore I know that an analysis of a TrueCrypt-encrypted disk will determine the presence of the outer, encrypted container. The hidden container, on the other hand, is mathematically indistinguishable from encrypted empty space, and there is no way to determine if a hidden container is present unless you 1) have the secret second key (which we assume you don't), 2) can brute-force the key (which you can't), 3) can learn about it from side channel attacks (of which several are known, but for which countermeasures exist) or 4) exploit bugs in the TrueCrypt software (of which none are known).
If they see a hard drive with only half its capacity in use yet the system reads full, they'll be wondering what's in the hidden container.
They won't see a hardrive that reads full, because they will only have the password to the outer container, and the hidden container will hence not be protected... writes to the outer container will simply overwrite the contents of the inner container, making it impossible to tell that it was ever there.
Whoever the Truecrypt developers are, they're not idiots.
Hidden containers are less useful than you might imagine in practice for a variety of reasons. Some of these points are relevant.
None of those points are relevant, except maybe "it's difficult to get right".
The first third of the thread, people are either not talking about hidden containers or don't know what a hidden container is, and instead go on about various steganographic methods of hiding the use of encryption. (E.g. "LUKS header, by design, is visible header."... that goes for TrueCrypt as well, and has nothing to do with hidden containers.)
In the middle third of the thread, they're discussing variations of "it's hard!" and "you can't protect the outer container" (though TrueCrypt does just that).
In the last third of the thread, random people are musing about their little pet-ideas and other off-topic tangents.
There are good arguments for not adding hidden containers to LUKS, most importantly the fact that nobody's stepping up to implement it, but no real arguments against hidden containers.
AFAIK, the TrueCrypt audit project has done no such thing. (Citations welcome.)
But this guy did: https://madiba.encs.concordia....
A microprocessor? Ha! In Denmark, we use PEN and PAPER, and it's still powerful enough!
Seriously, people. Pen and paper. Secure, secret voting doesn't need to be rocket science, please don't try to make it so.
According to the results of that Nature study, Wikipedia had, on average, 32% more errors per article than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
First of all, that "32 % more" is based on finding an average of 4 errors in Wikipedia articles and only 3 errors on average in EB articles.
Secondly, note that this is per article. Since Wikipedia articles are generally much longer than EB articles, the number of errors compared to the volume of information is less in Wikipedia than in EB.
For more information, see this page on the reliability of Wikipedia.
Only 4 serious errors were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in Encyclopædia Britannica. The study concluded: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries."
Also note that this study was done in 2005, before the Seigenthaler biography incident, which led to a great increase in quality control on the English Wikipedia, including a much harsher attitude towards unsourced statements.
Though Wooden was actually paraphrasing an earlier quote:
Empathy is understanding the feelings of another.
You might be thinking of sympathy.
No, he's thinking of empathy.
empathy [em-puh-thee] noun.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. (Dictionary.com Unabridged, my emphasis)
Empathy is more than just understanding another person's feelings; it's about intuitively sharing those feelings. The layman definition of psycopathy is a lack of empathy. (There is no medical definition of psycopathy; the medical terms are narcissistic and/or antisocial personality disorder.)
Or do we need more perspective? For those who prefer the typical journalistic approach to understanding numbers, it's a reduction from 872'000 Olympic pools to just under 37'200 Olympic pools.
For an even better perspective: It's a reduction from what the US consumes in 2 years, to what the US consumes in 1 month. [1]
Whichever estimate holds, one should probably start considering alternatives.
Heisenbugs: All experienced programmers have faced situations where the bug that crashed the software just disappears when the software is restarted
That's not a Heisenbug; that's just a plain old unreproducible bug. A Heisenbug is a bug that disappears when you look for it, and reappears when you stop looking. The classic example is a bug that appear in the release build, but disappears in the debug build where optimizations are disabled.
Why would anyone be inspired by the mutiny on the Bounty? As far as I know, the story goes like this:
16 escaped to Tahiti. A year later, one was killed by a fellow mutineer, who was subsequently killed by an angry mob. Within another year, the Royal Navy arrived and arrested them; 4 drowned. After lengthy trials, 3 were executed, 4 acquitted and 3 pardoned.
The 9 remaining mutineers marooned themselves (along with a group of kidnapped natives) on the deserted Pitcairn island, with all of 4.6 km to spend their remaining life on. Within 4 years, 5 mutineers died in a violent clash; the remaining mutineers began drinking heavily, with one suicide and another two killed in the following years.
But yeah, one of 25 managed to escape the law and survive long enough to even name a town after himself (populated entirely by the natives he and the other mutineers had raped, and their offspring).
...
Okay, scratch that; I realize that compared to the Royal Navy anno 1789, Pitcairn starts to look mighty swell.
It's not either/or. A car can protect its occupants and other people on the road. I'm pretty sure people looking to buy a car don't actively disregard the Volvo V40, just because it has external airbags to protect pedestrians. Unless they're sociopaths.
Then again, Volvo apparently didn't think it'd make commercial sense to sell the V40 in the US...
you're not supposed to refill plastic water bottles
Yes, there was a Danish study of this. A repeatedly refilled water bottle has a much higher level of bacteria etc. than tap water.
It's still cleaner than regular bottled water, though.
Turns out, all that bottled water sitting still at room temperature for months before purchase doesn't do anything for the water quality. Being a Danish study, all of the above assumes you have clean tap water, of course. YMMV.
And indeed, Golden Rice has all the problems associated with GMO crops, which is why Greenpeace protests it.
- A biological monoculture, increasing the risk that a single pest can cause immense damage to subsistence farmers throughout the region.
- The possibility of unknown pleiotropic effects ("side effects") caused by the mutation.
- Gene privatization, with Monsanto and others already asserting their patents, requiring farmers to obtain a license to grow their crops.
Besides, malnutrition in the third world is the result of widespread poverty, which has numerous causes, none of which is Greenpeace GMO protests. Blaming Greenpeace for that is absurd.
Everyone who needs and has a good use for CSS variables, and other more advanced functionality has already moved to SASS or something similar
Maybe, but you're missing two things: 1) CSS variables are not semantically equivalent to SASS or LESS variables; 2) CSS variables are available for runtime JavaScript manipulation. Sure, you can run LESS (and maybe SASS) in the browser too, but it's a bit overkill.
In fact, CSS variables complement SASS/LESS nicely.
And why the hell can't I do width: 50% - 10px? What century are we living in again?
You mean width: calc(50% - 10px), using the standard CSS3 syntax which has been supported by Chrome and Safari since 2012, and Firefox and IE(!) since 2011?