In this case though, no money was exchanged between the parties, so... no contract.
Wrong. The characteristic feature of a contract is agreement; money is commonly involved, but is definitely not required. What's more, the service terms of Google would constitute part of a contract of adhesion, and UK courts are very wary of those when they relate to consumers.
I still don't think that Google, even if it is a US/California based company, can make contracts with people in the UK which stipulate that Google opts out of UK law. Americans seem to have a rather inflated idea of what the validity of US law is beyond the borders of the US. I have seen interviews with US citizens in foreign jails who genuinely thought they'd be tried according to US laws... in places like Brazil... or Thailand....
What's more, a jurisdiction may well give additional protections to private individuals that businesses don't receive when it comes to contracts. I've no idea how it works in the US (or Brazil or Thailand) but in the UK, consumer protection law is quite strong and can only be opted out of by not providing products or services to consumers in the first place.
Given that Google has a corporate presence, and is actively marketing their products and services to UK consumers, it's quite likely that a UK court will decide that they do have jurisdiction.
What he proposes, best I can see, is moving website login away from strictly the domain of HTTP where it is separate from TLS, and instead making it part of the cryptographic authentication.
On one level, that's trivial to do: turn on requiring client certificates in the TLS negotiation. The hard part is that users — people really — really hate being exposed to having to know details of security. This was discovered in depth and at length during the fad for Grid Computing ten years ago: the biggest hurdle by far was setting up users with proper identities. You could theoretically transfer the responsibility for that to a separate service, but then that gives a point where it much easier for governments to subvert things.
In general? Because it discourages spending and encourages hoarding and speculation. Speculative bubbles can get people very badly burned, and currency speculation is a way to lose a lot of money.
There are vicious sharks in these waters, and nobody's going to bail you out.
Connecting that blade server to other Internet services and to customers and protecting your service from hardware or software failure can become a challenge. "The cloud" (someone else's computer) provides Internet connectivity, failover to a fresh instance, and managed backup.
Plus, if you buy the hardware yourself, you're responsible for sorting out utilisation levels and stuff like that. Clouds let you hire as much as you want for (almost) as short an amount of time as you want, which lets you do some really funky stuff. (Note that you don't have to put your entire infrastructure in the cloud, or in one vendor's cloud infrastructure. In fact, I'd expect some things to explicitly not go there...)
Radiation "suits" aren't really a thing. There are some out there, but the only one's I've seen are similar to EOD suits. You're probably thinking of Level A HazMat suits which are chemical protective suits. People toss around NBC or CBRNE, but not all the words really go together, it's more about grouping together a bunch of very rare - yet very dangerous - threats.
Chemical and Biological can be paired up pretty easily because a lot of the protective equipment can be used for either.
Where the hazard is from alpha and (to a lesser extent) beta emitters, the same gear will offer a lot of protection as the main hazards there are from ingestion (swallowing, breathing in) the emitters. Doubly so if the emitters are water-soluble or fat-soluble in typical biological conditions.
Gamma emitters are something else. You want them to stay well away from people normally because high-energy electromagnetic radiation is so penetrating.
North Korea doesn't have a death row. It's more like a death toboggan chute.
They sure took their time then. My impression of NK was that the accusation-execution interval was usually shorter than that. They must've really wanted to make an example of him.
Probably far far longer than you'd hope, if history is anything to go by. Alas. Unless he manages to irritate China too much or decides to invade South Korea, and then you'll get a nasty war.
pick a broadband solution and BUILD IT ALL THE WAY OUT. To every last house in the US
Getting broadband to every last shack in backwoods Montana is going to be expensive. Why not do something more sensible and pick a (local) population density that will mandate service, and ignore the rest? If people want to live out in the boonies, they need to accept that some infrastructure-heavy services aren't going to be very available.
The bad state of things in some cities is something else entirely, and a good reason for tarring and feathering some politicians...
They're not actually rare. China has a monopoly mainly by being a very cheap producer of something that requires a lot of messy processing to make; everyone else is happy to let them have a monopoly because it's expensive to do otherwise, not because they actually control all possible sources.
So tell Congress to order the IRS to not work that way. Right now, they're obviously not obligated to explain their decisions, but that's entirely changeable.
Doesn't mean that you will get out of paying your taxes though, and challenging a decision can in some cases make your tax situation worse overall, and that's with the IRS just enforcing the laws and regulations exactly as written. (Really. See an expert if you've got any real complexity. I know of a case where someone who insisted on getting a tax break of a quarter million ended up getting an extra tax bill of three quarters of a million because of it. Absolutely classic piece of causing trouble for oneself.)
If you're hiring that sort of service on the Cloud for months at a time, you're doing it wrong. The USP of the Cloud is very short hire times, say a few minutes or an hour. When you're hiring for longer periods, other types of service provider can be a better choice.
Of course doing lots of collaborations doesn't imply you're a better scientist. It just means you're better at networking.
While you're right that merely doing collaborations doesn't make you a good scientist, they're still good they let you work with people from outside your little circle. Being the biggest fish in a small pond doesn't make you a fish of any stature in a large lake. If you've got something or done some work with genuine widespread impact, working with others — collaborating — is a good way to maximise that impact. It can also help you take techniques from one area and apply them to another where the practitioners within either of those two areas would not normally communicate at all.
For example, I've done things taking techniques for computation for solar physics and applying them to biodiversity and computer-aided physiology. Those are areas where the scientists within them do not normally collaborate; they don't feel they have much in common at all. But computer science most certainly can cross over between these areas, and very usefully.
My personal experience is that there are bullies in stackoverflow that use the points system to extort code.
How the heck do you bully someone via SO? You might not always get the reputation rewards that you think you deserve, but if you do good questions and good answers then they will eventually rack up. (Hint: try answering things a bit off the beaten track rather than "competing" in the mega-tags. That's served me very well.)
A good question often shows code, as that makes it easier to see what the asker was really doing. A good answer often shows code as that makes it easier for the respondent to show what they mean. A really good question is one that others would want to ask too (and which can have a definite answer!), and a really good answer is one that helps many people to understand how to fix their problems in the area. "Do my homework" is never a good question, and answers which give the total worked problem answers for the homework are never good answers (too localized to just that particular problem).
In Python and other HLLs, you can do all the C binding in the HLL itself, allowing you to call most shared libraries directly. In Java, you always have an extra function call overhead and you need to distribute an extra native code library.
On the other hand, general function call overhead is higher in Python than in Java (for various good reasons!) so arguably what's actually happening is that you're just having to introduce the cost in Java that was there all along in a higher-level language.
If you're really worried about the cost of calling, measure it and see whether it really matters.
Best I remember, Brooks' explanation for why your suggestion above proved ineffective is a combination of two things: 1) amount of ammunition available and 2) fear and confusion.
In other words, he's a hack who's just making it up as he goes along and who doesn't want (for reasonable story purposes) to have "And then the military came along and blew up all the zombies. The End." as the second paragraph in his book.
Blame should be placed where it belongs; on the government hacks that put this tragic waste of tax-dollar money into service.
It Takes Two to Tango. Blame government for having no idea how to procure software, and blame the mega-contractors for doing everything they can to take advantage of this. The right thing to do is to sack some bureaucrats (possibly also politicians, though I'm more inclined to blame others as no politician actively wants a failure on their watch; it makes them look bad) and throw a bunch of corporate scumbags in jail.
Slashdot Mirror
But [async IO] is [still a problem] in Ruby, to my knowledge. And many other higher-level languages.
And to others, what node.js does still counts as "babby's first async system".
Java, as it appears, still matters!
Of course. Java is the new COBOL; we're going to be stuck with it for the next few decades.
In this case though, no money was exchanged between the parties, so... no contract.
Wrong. The characteristic feature of a contract is agreement; money is commonly involved, but is definitely not required. What's more, the service terms of Google would constitute part of a contract of adhesion, and UK courts are very wary of those when they relate to consumers.
I still don't think that Google, even if it is a US/California based company, can make contracts with people in the UK which stipulate that Google opts out of UK law. Americans seem to have a rather inflated idea of what the validity of US law is beyond the borders of the US. I have seen interviews with US citizens in foreign jails who genuinely thought they'd be tried according to US laws... in places like Brazil ... or Thailand....
What's more, a jurisdiction may well give additional protections to private individuals that businesses don't receive when it comes to contracts. I've no idea how it works in the US (or Brazil or Thailand) but in the UK, consumer protection law is quite strong and can only be opted out of by not providing products or services to consumers in the first place.
Given that Google has a corporate presence, and is actively marketing their products and services to UK consumers, it's quite likely that a UK court will decide that they do have jurisdiction.
Alex, I'll take 'Regulatory Capture for $800'.
The USPTO was 'Regulatory Capture'd by lawyers long ago.
My original reason for posting was to point out that no atom is "taking" anything.
When you've got "taking" of an electron, you've got ionisation.
Make sure everyone get basic gun safety
How dare you be so against people exercising their rights under the Second Amendment!!!
What he proposes, best I can see, is moving website login away from strictly the domain of HTTP where it is separate from TLS, and instead making it part of the cryptographic authentication.
On one level, that's trivial to do: turn on requiring client certificates in the TLS negotiation. The hard part is that users — people really — really hate being exposed to having to know details of security. This was discovered in depth and at length during the fad for Grid Computing ten years ago: the biggest hurdle by far was setting up users with proper identities. You could theoretically transfer the responsibility for that to a separate service, but then that gives a point where it much easier for governments to subvert things.
Why is the ever increasing value a problem?
In general? Because it discourages spending and encourages hoarding and speculation. Speculative bubbles can get people very badly burned, and currency speculation is a way to lose a lot of money.
There are vicious sharks in these waters, and nobody's going to bail you out.
Connecting that blade server to other Internet services and to customers and protecting your service from hardware or software failure can become a challenge. "The cloud" (someone else's computer) provides Internet connectivity, failover to a fresh instance, and managed backup.
Plus, if you buy the hardware yourself, you're responsible for sorting out utilisation levels and stuff like that. Clouds let you hire as much as you want for (almost) as short an amount of time as you want, which lets you do some really funky stuff. (Note that you don't have to put your entire infrastructure in the cloud, or in one vendor's cloud infrastructure. In fact, I'd expect some things to explicitly not go there...)
Radiation "suits" aren't really a thing. There are some out there, but the only one's I've seen are similar to EOD suits. You're probably thinking of Level A HazMat suits which are chemical protective suits. People toss around NBC or CBRNE, but not all the words really go together, it's more about grouping together a bunch of very rare - yet very dangerous - threats.
Chemical and Biological can be paired up pretty easily because a lot of the protective equipment can be used for either.
Where the hazard is from alpha and (to a lesser extent) beta emitters, the same gear will offer a lot of protection as the main hazards there are from ingestion (swallowing, breathing in) the emitters. Doubly so if the emitters are water-soluble or fat-soluble in typical biological conditions.
Gamma emitters are something else. You want them to stay well away from people normally because high-energy electromagnetic radiation is so penetrating.
North Korea doesn't have a death row. It's more like a death toboggan chute.
They sure took their time then. My impression of NK was that the accusation-execution interval was usually shorter than that. They must've really wanted to make an example of him.
The question is "how long can they keep it up".
Probably far far longer than you'd hope, if history is anything to go by. Alas. Unless he manages to irritate China too much or decides to invade South Korea, and then you'll get a nasty war.
It's called an "African-American Market" these days.
Not in the UK it isn't. "Market of Caribbean Extraction" might be more likely...
pick a broadband solution and BUILD IT ALL THE WAY OUT. To every last house in the US
Getting broadband to every last shack in backwoods Montana is going to be expensive. Why not do something more sensible and pick a (local) population density that will mandate service, and ignore the rest? If people want to live out in the boonies, they need to accept that some infrastructure-heavy services aren't going to be very available.
The bad state of things in some cities is something else entirely, and a good reason for tarring and feathering some politicians...
Their parents' basements.
That's the problem right there. They'd find launches much easier if they started from their parents' attics.
Too bad China has the monopoly on rare earths.
They're not actually rare. China has a monopoly mainly by being a very cheap producer of something that requires a lot of messy processing to make; everyone else is happy to let them have a monopoly because it's expensive to do otherwise, not because they actually control all possible sources.
This is a real problem.
So tell Congress to order the IRS to not work that way. Right now, they're obviously not obligated to explain their decisions, but that's entirely changeable.
Doesn't mean that you will get out of paying your taxes though, and challenging a decision can in some cases make your tax situation worse overall, and that's with the IRS just enforcing the laws and regulations exactly as written. (Really. See an expert if you've got any real complexity. I know of a case where someone who insisted on getting a tax break of a quarter million ended up getting an extra tax bill of three quarters of a million because of it. Absolutely classic piece of causing trouble for oneself.)
The problem is that Secret Santa is impossible during the holidays there.
You need Top Secret For-Your-Eyes-Only Santa.
SSDs cost thousands a month.
If you're hiring that sort of service on the Cloud for months at a time, you're doing it wrong. The USP of the Cloud is very short hire times, say a few minutes or an hour. When you're hiring for longer periods, other types of service provider can be a better choice.
Of course doing lots of collaborations doesn't imply you're a better scientist. It just means you're better at networking.
While you're right that merely doing collaborations doesn't make you a good scientist, they're still good they let you work with people from outside your little circle. Being the biggest fish in a small pond doesn't make you a fish of any stature in a large lake. If you've got something or done some work with genuine widespread impact, working with others — collaborating — is a good way to maximise that impact. It can also help you take techniques from one area and apply them to another where the practitioners within either of those two areas would not normally communicate at all.
For example, I've done things taking techniques for computation for solar physics and applying them to biodiversity and computer-aided physiology. Those are areas where the scientists within them do not normally collaborate; they don't feel they have much in common at all. But computer science most certainly can cross over between these areas, and very usefully.
My personal experience is that there are bullies in stackoverflow that use the points system to extort code.
How the heck do you bully someone via SO? You might not always get the reputation rewards that you think you deserve, but if you do good questions and good answers then they will eventually rack up. (Hint: try answering things a bit off the beaten track rather than "competing" in the mega-tags. That's served me very well.)
A good question often shows code, as that makes it easier to see what the asker was really doing. A good answer often shows code as that makes it easier for the respondent to show what they mean. A really good question is one that others would want to ask too (and which can have a definite answer!), and a really good answer is one that helps many people to understand how to fix their problems in the area. "Do my homework" is never a good question, and answers which give the total worked problem answers for the homework are never good answers (too localized to just that particular problem).
In Python and other HLLs, you can do all the C binding in the HLL itself, allowing you to call most shared libraries directly. In Java, you always have an extra function call overhead and you need to distribute an extra native code library.
On the other hand, general function call overhead is higher in Python than in Java (for various good reasons!) so arguably what's actually happening is that you're just having to introduce the cost in Java that was there all along in a higher-level language.
If you're really worried about the cost of calling, measure it and see whether it really matters.
Best I remember, Brooks' explanation for why your suggestion above proved ineffective is a combination of two things: 1) amount of ammunition available and 2) fear and confusion.
In other words, he's a hack who's just making it up as he goes along and who doesn't want (for reasonable story purposes) to have "And then the military came along and blew up all the zombies. The End." as the second paragraph in his book.
Blame should be placed where it belongs; on the government hacks that put this tragic waste of tax-dollar money into service.
It Takes Two to Tango. Blame government for having no idea how to procure software, and blame the mega-contractors for doing everything they can to take advantage of this. The right thing to do is to sack some bureaucrats (possibly also politicians, though I'm more inclined to blame others as no politician actively wants a failure on their watch; it makes them look bad) and throw a bunch of corporate scumbags in jail.