No, it really isn't. Modern day cloud computing isn't much more advanced than it was in the 1960's.
All except for the data volumes, timescales, connectivity and pricing. In the '60s, timesharing services didn't ever have to deal with anything like the volume of data that would be found on a modern PC. They'd have a turnaround time of a few days, and connectivity was by courier if you were in a hurry, or driving over there yourself with your stack of punched cards (or paper tape) otherwise. I suppose it would be possible to think that pricing was comparable, especially if you were to ignore inflation, but really there's no comparison at all.
The net effect of these things is that people use the concepts of a timesharing service differently to back then. Human activity is not time- or space-scale invariant.
We need those tape machines. Stick them in front of the real machines and get something hacked from a Raspberry Pi to spin them back and forth in an interesting pattern, with some extra blinkenlights for good measure, and we'll be able to once again prove to all the management types that we're doing serious computing so they can leave us alone and go back to their golf handicap.
Are you too stupid to research before spouting off? cutting "all the power" was rather difficult, as it came from two utilities and onsite generation.
Never underestimate the power of the universe to shit on you. It's still quite possible to get a perfect storm of problems that takes things offline, such as the main onsite generator being down for scheduled maintenance that overruns, the backup generator only having limited capacity, and a major storm wiping out the power grid completely for 20 miles. At that point, stuff will go down, and at some point it becomes cheaper to have insurance to deal with the losses arising (including reputational losses) instead of building the vastly complex infrastructure that can't fail in ever less likely scenarios.
The other big change is that the vast majority of work now requires that datacenter be online (in a network sense), and at that point you're vulnerable to someone else being the weakest link. Doing it all yourself is fantastically expensive, and incredibly hard too given the number of different skills involved.
Mind you, most of Amazon's service provision didn't even bat an eyelid. They can lose a whole datacenter and only some customers are affected, and those customers can (if they adequately prepared) get back up and going in minutes. They could even have arranged things so that their customers would have hardly seen a thing at all, but that is admittedly more easily done with some types of service than others. Still, it's not something that Amazon fixes for you (and they explicitly tell you they don't if you read their docs; you've got no excuse there). One of the genius things about the Cloud is that these things are not totally hidden from you (as a direct customer of the main service providers, of course); it allows prices to be lower and it allows you to deal with issues at the application level (usually the easiest place). It lets you get the benefits of having multiple globally-distributed datacenters without the hassle of physically building out all over the world, but it isn't magic. Just engineering and business.
I would wonder if removing commercials from their lives might actually be a negative in the long run.
No.
You must deny the power of the advertiser and the marketer over your mind (and that of your children as well) because they will not willingly ever cede it of their own free will. Their true goal is power over you, in particular the power to make you choose as they decide. How to spend, how to vote, how to live. That's what they wish to wrest from your free will. (Though I hate to use the term, only sheeple watch commercials.)
You seem to be making the common mistake of conflating an operating system and a distribution (as people general do, not only with linux).
You seem to think that a significant number of people care about the distinction. They care about the apps and the content and the integrated platform. The distinction between the pieces used to make the integrated platform is about as interesting to them as the details of electricity transmission: as long as it works when they turn on the switch, they don't want to know anything else.
More formally, the apps are programmed against an API. The implementation of that API is only partially done by the kernel (in iOS's case, a Darwin variant I believe) but it is the API that represents the operating system to the app, not the syscalls.
The wheel turns, but we stay in largely the same place. Sure, the Java fat client might be on the decline, but the Javascript fat client is bloating up rapidly. That'd be OK as it is far less fussy than Java and quite a lot higher level, but JS is a dratted awkward language to write well; it's got too many weird things in scoping that can trip you up horribly if you don't know the magic workaround idioms. (It's also coupled to the DOM and HTML in most peoples' minds, and that's certainly not nice.)
In any case, fat clients aren't going anywhere. They're just changing the details of their implementation. Similarly, cloud computing is very much the same as a much older concept, bureau computing, but cheaper and with faster networking so people don't notice as much. The IT industry has such a horribly short memory...
Actually, nobody was using the Julian calendar (as commonly understood) at the time anyway. Though month length rules were approximately the same as now (in the Roman empire) years were described in a completely different way, typically according to who was currently consul. Scholars of history used numbering, but they counted from the founding of the Rome. Dating according to AD rules was only proposed in the year 525, and took quite a long time to spread. Thus, arguably anyone talking about an AD year before 525 is inaccurate.
Or in other words, we can have 0 AD if we want. It's just a convention for our convenience, not the benefit of those two thousand years ago who wouldn't have known what we were talking about and would have cared even less.
Assuming that the show tries its best to catch all the shoplifters it can, it makes sense that if you steal something and the chance you'll get caught is 50% say, you'll have to pay twice the price. And you'll have to add in security costs as well, since otherwise it will come out of the pockets of actual paying customers.
That's not how it works at all, at least in English law. The costs of the prosecution may be recovered (if reasonable) but the costs of detecting the theft in the first place may not. Often, the thief will admit other thefts at the same time (which will be "taken into consideration" during sentencing) but they cannot be punished for that which they were not proved to have done or which they did not admit in court; to do so would be unjust, no matter how convenient for law enforcement and companies.
Fortunately, the vast majority of shoplifters don't just do it once and are thus relatively easy to catch. Most criminals are stupid.
all software has bugs. all software has always had bugs.
That's a stupid cop-out. It's entirely possible to write software that is wholly bug-free (though somewhat harder to make devices that are issue-free; hardware can have the weirdest glitches). It's just extremely rare that people wish to pay what it would cost to do.
The disk is something to hold your data when a backhoe cuts your datacenter power, and cuts the network connections that you use to replicate data to your remote site.... then your UPS runs out of battery after an hour of transactions have been applied to the database with no replication to the remote site.
We once had a "backhoe event" that cut the power cables between the point where the grid power and the UPS cables came together (our main UPS at the time was a 10MW diesel generator) and the point where they entered the datacenter building. There was about only 2 feet of cabling where they could have done this, but that's where someone put a jackhammer through. Aside from shutting us down in a great hurry, they also put themselves in the hospital, and at the same time blew the breakers on the grid substation that fed both us and that hospital. Fortunately for us, we'd just finished replicating key services to our other datacenter (on a different part of the grid, but without the monster UPS). After a quick mad scramble to reconfigure the failover system to not be a single point of failure (hah!) we were at least mostly operational, but that was definitely dodging a bullet.
The moral of this is that shit happens and you can't stop it, but you can be at least somewhat prepare for it. Committing transactions to disk to make them durable is a part of that.
I still think that the 2 missing courses from any CS degree program are 1) how to debug, and 2) history of computing.
Change "how to debug" to the somewhat-more-general "how to analyze programs" and I'd agree. Over and over, I see people who don't understand what code is doing and who reinvent things from the 1970s because they couldn't be bothered to know what happened and why.
Before anyone asks, SE courses are pretty much as bad. Too many people are "marooned in the now" and lack the mental tools to go truly forward.
One of the hallmarks of a great coder is a very keen sense for when he/she needs to be careful because something is more difficult than it appears to be. Those with really good memories regularly fail that test.
They're distinct; a good memory doesn't really help when pattern matching against "trouble", but it does make remembering types of trouble (and the relevant solution areas) easier. Yet just remembering things isn't enough if you can't apply that memory correctly, and knowing to be careful without remembering what kind of solution to look for is horribly inefficient. The very best coders are those who are good in all the component parts of "programmer thought" and who can integrate it into one whole.
No. Improved technology can allow individuals and society overall to increase productivity, as can increasing urbanization (because that stimulates creativity and innovation). This grows the economy for real. To see why, realize that mechanization can allow one person to do a job that 200 years ago would have required hundreds or thousands of people. That means that those people can do something else instead, either working or leisure, and that in turn means that the economy must be larger.
This is Slashdot. When arguing here, at least try to avoid obvious logic errors or factual mistakes...
Software patents are kind of dumb, though, because it's awfully hard to think of a series of programming lines as non-obvious.
Some software is definitely non-obvious — compression and encryption code are excellent examples — and those are cases where software patents actually make sense. Except that they've been around for long enough that very often the patents will have actually expired...
Either human beings are shits who only do the right thing when they have guns (metaphorical or not) to the back of their heads or they are angels...In which case they will always play by the rules and any political-economic system would succeed.
Personally, looking around at how the world is today, I'm opting on the "shits" side of the above two choices. Thus, libertarianism is just as hollow and as helpless in the face of human nature are socialism is.
Truth is more complex than that. Most people are in fact pretty good, and will try to get along nicely with their fellow humans with virtually no prompting on anyone's part, but some are scum who try to free-load. It's for the minority who are scum that you really need regulations and laws. (Also note that for quite a lot of people being good is a learned behavior; if the real scum are left to run roughshod over everyone else, the "learners" will join in. The net effect is that preventing bad behavior has a disproportionate effect to the number of people actually caught out and punished by the rules.)
But that doesn't make any particular rule automatically good; some scum like to try to use the rules themselves to enable their scumminess, as a kind of exploit of the system. People are complicated (and occasionally even smart...)
Reduce regulation, reduce the power the federal government wields and inherently big business only has the power of whatever intellect they have multiplied by the money they have on hand.
The smaller government is the more small businesses will thrive.
But you get non-linear effects with larger organizations, as people build off each others' work (or conspire to cause chaos; non-linear is complicated). In particular, it's been measured that larger organizations tend to be more productive overall because of this non-linearity; cities benefit from the same sort of thing as well, provided they can pull in sufficient resources to maintain themselves at all. Given that, removing regulation will still leave big business in place, and will indeed give it more ability to act in their own narrow interest rather than that of everyone else. While you might be right that we wouldn't have got to this point without some government regulations making it easy for corporations to grow large, any real change must start from where we're at and not from a hypothetical ideal.
Crudely put, you've got to have some laws and regulations, things like prohibitions against slavery, murder, arson and careless poisoning. Those are very great constraints on business! (After all, it would be very much more profitable if business was allowed to boost baby milk with cheap toxic additives like melamine. Or if a big corporation and their hired pinkertons could roll into town and burn out anyone who tried to disagree with their takeover.)
Oh, so you want to keep some regulations? Well that's a much more reasonable position. Which exact ones did you want to be rid of or to modify (and if so, in what way)?
No it doesn't. Person A pokes person B's eye out. Society pokes person A's eye out and it stops there. Two eyes are poked out and it is done. Everyone else's eyes are fine. That is a terrible quote and does nothing for your point.
Except that there's a real danger that then A's friends come round and take a baseball bat to B's kneecaps, and B's friends then shoot up A's neighborhood, and so on. Vengeance has a nasty way of escalating. The quote is actually saying that sometimes (possibly even often) you've got to take less than exact revenge precisely to stop things from getting out of hand over something initially small, leaving everyone worse off.
So UK Home Office, how the hell are you going to explain to the UNITED NATIONS that your little mail-snooping project violates ARTICLE 12 of the UDHR?
Two points. Firstly, they have to explain it to the UK Supreme Court first, since the UDHR is incorporated into UK law (though I forget as which Act). Secondly, it's the Home Office: they can't explain shit to anyone. It's the part of government where incompetent bureaucrats are shuffled off to in order to serve their time and get to collect their pensions. They've a history of being bad at proposing legislation proportionate to actual requirements, and they're always keen to have far more powers.
That said, they've got another problem: implementing the proposed act is going to require a lot of money at a time when the Treasury is exceptionally keen on departments cutting their spending and the public disinclined to be keen on further security restrictions. Getting the Act through Parliament without significant neutering is going to be very hard, and articles like TFA are going to encourage the emasculation process.
That and I've still not really seen many, if any convincing arguments where multiple inheritance is a good idea.
There is value in declaring that instances of a class can participate in a some pattern or other. The concept of interfaces is a way of doing this that is used in Java (and in variations in a number of other languages too). However, it uses a different dispatch model to direct inheritance: straight indexing into a vtable won't work (the point of dispatch doesn't have enough information at compile time, so a more complex — and somewhat slower — lookup is required).
Ontologically, multiple inheritance is not a problem either: it's just the is-a (well, strictly the is-a-specialization-of) relationship. The real problems come when people use it to model has-a relationships. If you ever see someone doing that, do us a favor and bitchslap them; you know it makes sense.
No doubt it's on it's way. Tuberculosis has been steadily growing in resistance, and there have been cases of TB now resistant to all antibiotics that were tried. And just recently, gonorrhea is also becoming multi-drug resistant
But there's no selection pressure on plague to become resistant. It's happily sitting in its wild reservoir, unexposed to antibiotics, and only very rarely jumps to humans (and when it does jump, it doesn't propagate far; transmission between people is very rare these days). Given that, while it is possible for a drug resistant version to evolve and become an epidemic strain, it's really unlikely and will continue to be so until some idiot farmer decides to dose all the rodents on his land with "growth promoters" on a long-term basis. I'd find something else to worry about instead, something more likely...
Biocurators are the people who annotate genes — find out what they do — through literature search and the supervised use of computational techniques.
Biocuration means that? I'd have never guessed from the name. Let's face it, literature searching is now something that is thoroughly practical by computer (it's pretty much just like using a web search engine, except over a different digitized corpora) and "supervised use of computational techniques" there makes it sound like they're a bunch of low-level lab technicians. No creativity required at all. Is it any wonder they're being replaced with little more than a shell script? What's more, the computer will be far faster as well. It won't get tired, it won't get bored, it'll just do exactly what it's been told to do. (The annotation of a genome with the consequences of the mutations it has should be trivial; I know this from having worked with code that did a whole genome's worth in well under an hour. Several years ago.)
Now if instead they were curating the actual samples, I'd have much more respect. Those can be quite tricky to work with, and they're often irreplaceable.
Its their network, they can make any rule they want.
Not necessarily. Doing this sort of thing can run afoul of laws in many jurisdictions, as employees often have some expectation of privacy. What they could do just fine is just block HTTPS to non-whitelisted sites from their network; that would be far simpler to implement, and wouldn't run the risk of hitting privacy laws (or employment protection laws, or any number of things that might be communicated privately).
Ultimately though, the approach in TFA smacks of a company that doesn't understand that they need to trust their users somewhat. Instead of recognizing that they need an approach that persuades their employees to keep the company's secrets, they seek to use technological means to do black-hat snooping. Trying to use a technical solution to deal with a fundamentally non-technical problem (management's failure to persuade employees to behave responsibly) is always a disaster. As it is, treating people this way encourages them to seek ways around it, and there are many creative things they could do that you've not thought of. For example, they could print the sensitive information, wrap it in plastic, and shove it up their asses; if your solution to that scenario is to immediately institute a full proctological examination of everyone leaving the company's site, you're doing it wrong. Or working in entirely the wrong industry.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it really isn't. Modern day cloud computing isn't much more advanced than it was in the 1960's.
All except for the data volumes, timescales, connectivity and pricing. In the '60s, timesharing services didn't ever have to deal with anything like the volume of data that would be found on a modern PC. They'd have a turnaround time of a few days, and connectivity was by courier if you were in a hurry, or driving over there yourself with your stack of punched cards (or paper tape) otherwise. I suppose it would be possible to think that pricing was comparable, especially if you were to ignore inflation, but really there's no comparison at all.
The net effect of these things is that people use the concepts of a timesharing service differently to back then. Human activity is not time- or space-scale invariant.
And 8-track tapes while we're at it.
We need those tape machines. Stick them in front of the real machines and get something hacked from a Raspberry Pi to spin them back and forth in an interesting pattern, with some extra blinkenlights for good measure, and we'll be able to once again prove to all the management types that we're doing serious computing so they can leave us alone and go back to their golf handicap.
Are you too stupid to research before spouting off? cutting "all the power" was rather difficult, as it came from two utilities and onsite generation.
Never underestimate the power of the universe to shit on you. It's still quite possible to get a perfect storm of problems that takes things offline, such as the main onsite generator being down for scheduled maintenance that overruns, the backup generator only having limited capacity, and a major storm wiping out the power grid completely for 20 miles. At that point, stuff will go down, and at some point it becomes cheaper to have insurance to deal with the losses arising (including reputational losses) instead of building the vastly complex infrastructure that can't fail in ever less likely scenarios.
The other big change is that the vast majority of work now requires that datacenter be online (in a network sense), and at that point you're vulnerable to someone else being the weakest link. Doing it all yourself is fantastically expensive, and incredibly hard too given the number of different skills involved.
Mind you, most of Amazon's service provision didn't even bat an eyelid. They can lose a whole datacenter and only some customers are affected, and those customers can (if they adequately prepared) get back up and going in minutes. They could even have arranged things so that their customers would have hardly seen a thing at all, but that is admittedly more easily done with some types of service than others. Still, it's not something that Amazon fixes for you (and they explicitly tell you they don't if you read their docs; you've got no excuse there). One of the genius things about the Cloud is that these things are not totally hidden from you (as a direct customer of the main service providers, of course); it allows prices to be lower and it allows you to deal with issues at the application level (usually the easiest place). It lets you get the benefits of having multiple globally-distributed datacenters without the hassle of physically building out all over the world, but it isn't magic. Just engineering and business.
XP SP 3 runs shittier than a stock Windows 7
You really didn't need to install all those "toolbars" into Explorer...
I would wonder if removing commercials from their lives might actually be a negative in the long run.
No.
You must deny the power of the advertiser and the marketer over your mind (and that of your children as well) because they will not willingly ever cede it of their own free will. Their true goal is power over you, in particular the power to make you choose as they decide. How to spend, how to vote, how to live. That's what they wish to wrest from your free will. (Though I hate to use the term, only sheeple watch commercials.)
You seem to be making the common mistake of conflating an operating system and a distribution (as people general do, not only with linux).
You seem to think that a significant number of people care about the distinction. They care about the apps and the content and the integrated platform. The distinction between the pieces used to make the integrated platform is about as interesting to them as the details of electricity transmission: as long as it works when they turn on the switch, they don't want to know anything else.
More formally, the apps are programmed against an API. The implementation of that API is only partially done by the kernel (in iOS's case, a Darwin variant I believe) but it is the API that represents the operating system to the app, not the syscalls.
The wheel turns, but we stay in largely the same place. Sure, the Java fat client might be on the decline, but the Javascript fat client is bloating up rapidly. That'd be OK as it is far less fussy than Java and quite a lot higher level, but JS is a dratted awkward language to write well; it's got too many weird things in scoping that can trip you up horribly if you don't know the magic workaround idioms. (It's also coupled to the DOM and HTML in most peoples' minds, and that's certainly not nice.)
In any case, fat clients aren't going anywhere. They're just changing the details of their implementation. Similarly, cloud computing is very much the same as a much older concept, bureau computing, but cheaper and with faster networking so people don't notice as much. The IT industry has such a horribly short memory...
There was no year zero.
Actually, nobody was using the Julian calendar (as commonly understood) at the time anyway. Though month length rules were approximately the same as now (in the Roman empire) years were described in a completely different way, typically according to who was currently consul. Scholars of history used numbering, but they counted from the founding of the Rome. Dating according to AD rules was only proposed in the year 525, and took quite a long time to spread. Thus, arguably anyone talking about an AD year before 525 is inaccurate.
Or in other words, we can have 0 AD if we want. It's just a convention for our convenience, not the benefit of those two thousand years ago who wouldn't have known what we were talking about and would have cared even less.
Assuming that the show tries its best to catch all the shoplifters it can, it makes sense that if you steal something and the chance you'll get caught is 50% say, you'll have to pay twice the price. And you'll have to add in security costs as well, since otherwise it will come out of the pockets of actual paying customers.
That's not how it works at all, at least in English law. The costs of the prosecution may be recovered (if reasonable) but the costs of detecting the theft in the first place may not. Often, the thief will admit other thefts at the same time (which will be "taken into consideration" during sentencing) but they cannot be punished for that which they were not proved to have done or which they did not admit in court; to do so would be unjust, no matter how convenient for law enforcement and companies.
Fortunately, the vast majority of shoplifters don't just do it once and are thus relatively easy to catch. Most criminals are stupid.
all software has bugs. all software has always had bugs.
That's a stupid cop-out. It's entirely possible to write software that is wholly bug-free (though somewhat harder to make devices that are issue-free; hardware can have the weirdest glitches). It's just extremely rare that people wish to pay what it would cost to do.
The disk is something to hold your data when a backhoe cuts your datacenter power, and cuts the network connections that you use to replicate data to your remote site.... then your UPS runs out of battery after an hour of transactions have been applied to the database with no replication to the remote site.
We once had a "backhoe event" that cut the power cables between the point where the grid power and the UPS cables came together (our main UPS at the time was a 10MW diesel generator) and the point where they entered the datacenter building. There was about only 2 feet of cabling where they could have done this, but that's where someone put a jackhammer through. Aside from shutting us down in a great hurry, they also put themselves in the hospital, and at the same time blew the breakers on the grid substation that fed both us and that hospital. Fortunately for us, we'd just finished replicating key services to our other datacenter (on a different part of the grid, but without the monster UPS). After a quick mad scramble to reconfigure the failover system to not be a single point of failure (hah!) we were at least mostly operational, but that was definitely dodging a bullet.
The moral of this is that shit happens and you can't stop it, but you can be at least somewhat prepare for it. Committing transactions to disk to make them durable is a part of that.
I still think that the 2 missing courses from any CS degree program are 1) how to debug, and 2) history of computing.
Change "how to debug" to the somewhat-more-general "how to analyze programs" and I'd agree. Over and over, I see people who don't understand what code is doing and who reinvent things from the 1970s because they couldn't be bothered to know what happened and why.
Before anyone asks, SE courses are pretty much as bad. Too many people are "marooned in the now" and lack the mental tools to go truly forward.
One of the hallmarks of a great coder is a very keen sense for when he/she needs to be careful because something is more difficult than it appears to be. Those with really good memories regularly fail that test.
They're distinct; a good memory doesn't really help when pattern matching against "trouble", but it does make remembering types of trouble (and the relevant solution areas) easier. Yet just remembering things isn't enough if you can't apply that memory correctly, and knowing to be careful without remembering what kind of solution to look for is horribly inefficient. The very best coders are those who are good in all the component parts of "programmer thought" and who can integrate it into one whole.
The economy is zero sum.
No. Improved technology can allow individuals and society overall to increase productivity, as can increasing urbanization (because that stimulates creativity and innovation). This grows the economy for real. To see why, realize that mechanization can allow one person to do a job that 200 years ago would have required hundreds or thousands of people. That means that those people can do something else instead, either working or leisure, and that in turn means that the economy must be larger.
This is Slashdot. When arguing here, at least try to avoid obvious logic errors or factual mistakes...
Software patents are kind of dumb, though, because it's awfully hard to think of a series of programming lines as non-obvious.
Some software is definitely non-obvious — compression and encryption code are excellent examples — and those are cases where software patents actually make sense. Except that they've been around for long enough that very often the patents will have actually expired...
Either human beings are shits who only do the right thing when they have guns (metaphorical or not) to the back of their heads or they are angels...In which case they will always play by the rules and any political-economic system would succeed.
Personally, looking around at how the world is today, I'm opting on the "shits" side of the above two choices. Thus, libertarianism is just as hollow and as helpless in the face of human nature are socialism is.
Truth is more complex than that. Most people are in fact pretty good, and will try to get along nicely with their fellow humans with virtually no prompting on anyone's part, but some are scum who try to free-load. It's for the minority who are scum that you really need regulations and laws. (Also note that for quite a lot of people being good is a learned behavior; if the real scum are left to run roughshod over everyone else, the "learners" will join in. The net effect is that preventing bad behavior has a disproportionate effect to the number of people actually caught out and punished by the rules.)
But that doesn't make any particular rule automatically good; some scum like to try to use the rules themselves to enable their scumminess, as a kind of exploit of the system. People are complicated (and occasionally even smart...)
Reduce regulation, reduce the power the federal government wields and inherently big business only has the power of whatever intellect they have multiplied by the money they have on hand.
The smaller government is the more small businesses will thrive.
But you get non-linear effects with larger organizations, as people build off each others' work (or conspire to cause chaos; non-linear is complicated). In particular, it's been measured that larger organizations tend to be more productive overall because of this non-linearity; cities benefit from the same sort of thing as well, provided they can pull in sufficient resources to maintain themselves at all. Given that, removing regulation will still leave big business in place, and will indeed give it more ability to act in their own narrow interest rather than that of everyone else. While you might be right that we wouldn't have got to this point without some government regulations making it easy for corporations to grow large, any real change must start from where we're at and not from a hypothetical ideal.
Crudely put, you've got to have some laws and regulations, things like prohibitions against slavery, murder, arson and careless poisoning. Those are very great constraints on business! (After all, it would be very much more profitable if business was allowed to boost baby milk with cheap toxic additives like melamine. Or if a big corporation and their hired pinkertons could roll into town and burn out anyone who tried to disagree with their takeover.)
Oh, so you want to keep some regulations? Well that's a much more reasonable position. Which exact ones did you want to be rid of or to modify (and if so, in what way)?
Can I change the channel? I want to watch something different.
You can change the channel, but you'll still be watching the same old shit. The color of the clothes will be a bit different, but that'll be about it.
The problem of joining two abstract concepts is long ago solved by inference engines.
Thank god for that! Most people can't join up abstract concepts even if their life depends on it.
No it doesn't. Person A pokes person B's eye out. Society pokes person A's eye out and it stops there. Two eyes are poked out and it is done. Everyone else's eyes are fine. That is a terrible quote and does nothing for your point.
Except that there's a real danger that then A's friends come round and take a baseball bat to B's kneecaps, and B's friends then shoot up A's neighborhood, and so on. Vengeance has a nasty way of escalating. The quote is actually saying that sometimes (possibly even often) you've got to take less than exact revenge precisely to stop things from getting out of hand over something initially small, leaving everyone worse off.
So UK Home Office, how the hell are you going to explain to the UNITED NATIONS that your little mail-snooping project violates ARTICLE 12 of the UDHR?
Two points. Firstly, they have to explain it to the UK Supreme Court first, since the UDHR is incorporated into UK law (though I forget as which Act). Secondly, it's the Home Office: they can't explain shit to anyone. It's the part of government where incompetent bureaucrats are shuffled off to in order to serve their time and get to collect their pensions. They've a history of being bad at proposing legislation proportionate to actual requirements, and they're always keen to have far more powers.
That said, they've got another problem: implementing the proposed act is going to require a lot of money at a time when the Treasury is exceptionally keen on departments cutting their spending and the public disinclined to be keen on further security restrictions. Getting the Act through Parliament without significant neutering is going to be very hard, and articles like TFA are going to encourage the emasculation process.
That and I've still not really seen many, if any convincing arguments where multiple inheritance is a good idea.
There is value in declaring that instances of a class can participate in a some pattern or other. The concept of interfaces is a way of doing this that is used in Java (and in variations in a number of other languages too). However, it uses a different dispatch model to direct inheritance: straight indexing into a vtable won't work (the point of dispatch doesn't have enough information at compile time, so a more complex — and somewhat slower — lookup is required).
Ontologically, multiple inheritance is not a problem either: it's just the is-a (well, strictly the is-a-specialization-of) relationship. The real problems come when people use it to model has-a relationships. If you ever see someone doing that, do us a favor and bitchslap them; you know it makes sense.
No doubt it's on it's way. Tuberculosis has been steadily growing in resistance, and there have been cases of TB now resistant to all antibiotics that were tried. And just recently, gonorrhea is also becoming multi-drug resistant
But there's no selection pressure on plague to become resistant. It's happily sitting in its wild reservoir, unexposed to antibiotics, and only very rarely jumps to humans (and when it does jump, it doesn't propagate far; transmission between people is very rare these days). Given that, while it is possible for a drug resistant version to evolve and become an epidemic strain, it's really unlikely and will continue to be so until some idiot farmer decides to dose all the rodents on his land with "growth promoters" on a long-term basis. I'd find something else to worry about instead, something more likely...
Biocurators are the people who annotate genes — find out what they do — through literature search and the supervised use of computational techniques.
Biocuration means that? I'd have never guessed from the name. Let's face it, literature searching is now something that is thoroughly practical by computer (it's pretty much just like using a web search engine, except over a different digitized corpora) and "supervised use of computational techniques" there makes it sound like they're a bunch of low-level lab technicians. No creativity required at all. Is it any wonder they're being replaced with little more than a shell script? What's more, the computer will be far faster as well. It won't get tired, it won't get bored, it'll just do exactly what it's been told to do. (The annotation of a genome with the consequences of the mutations it has should be trivial; I know this from having worked with code that did a whole genome's worth in well under an hour. Several years ago.)
Now if instead they were curating the actual samples, I'd have much more respect. Those can be quite tricky to work with, and they're often irreplaceable.
Its their network, they can make any rule they want.
Not necessarily. Doing this sort of thing can run afoul of laws in many jurisdictions, as employees often have some expectation of privacy. What they could do just fine is just block HTTPS to non-whitelisted sites from their network; that would be far simpler to implement, and wouldn't run the risk of hitting privacy laws (or employment protection laws, or any number of things that might be communicated privately).
Ultimately though, the approach in TFA smacks of a company that doesn't understand that they need to trust their users somewhat. Instead of recognizing that they need an approach that persuades their employees to keep the company's secrets, they seek to use technological means to do black-hat snooping. Trying to use a technical solution to deal with a fundamentally non-technical problem (management's failure to persuade employees to behave responsibly) is always a disaster. As it is, treating people this way encourages them to seek ways around it, and there are many creative things they could do that you've not thought of. For example, they could print the sensitive information, wrap it in plastic, and shove it up their asses; if your solution to that scenario is to immediately institute a full proctological examination of everyone leaving the company's site, you're doing it wrong. Or working in entirely the wrong industry.