Ingestion is a serious danger with cadmium. There was a case of mass Cd poisonings in Japan in the first half of the 20th century, caused by contaminated rice irrigated with water downstream from mines. Any application where Cd comes into contact with the hands -- especially children's hands -- is suspect.
With respect to Cd plated tools -- I don't remember them. I do remember fasteners with Cd plating. I suppose if you don't disturb the plating it's not likely to leach. However that says nothing about the items in the article which *did* leach. You can't compare plating to something like paint, which is an entirely different thing. If it weren't, you'd never have to plate anything, you'd get by with paint.
In any case I don't buy the whole "we used to use such and so and it ain't harmed me none" argument. When I was young people still carbon tetrachloride to clean circuit boards. Let me tell you it was da bomb. It was cheap, worked like a charm, left no residue, and you could put out fires with it. I knew lots of people who used it and never saw any adverse reactions. That doesn't mean it didn't hurt some people. For one thing I haven't followed those people for thirty years and don't know how many ended up with liver damage.
I've studied the issue of privacy. By that I mean I've studied the various definitions of privacy used in philosophy and law. I've read Focault and Brandeis. I've pondered question like whether privacy is alienable, or whether personal information is property.
I don't claim to have answers for *all* the questions of privacy, but I do think I've gained at least one morsel of insight: all issues of privacy boil down to questions of self-determination and fairness.
Consider the neighbor who plays his stereo obnoxiously loud. Why is that lumped into "privacy" along with the neighbor who stands in the azalea bush and looks in your window? Because it is a restriction of your right to direct your own attention, just as the peeping tom restricts your right to walk around your house naked if you want.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose there was a law that forbade you from telling anyone that you cheated on your spouse. That law is a violation of privacy, *even though it restricts the dissemination of personal information*.
Now norms and standards change. If you live in a society where public nudity is the norm, you might not care so much about peeping tom. But that doesn't mean you've stopped caring about control your life, that you aren't concerned with a fair distribution of power between yourself and "the public", or even that you don't mind if peeping tom sees *other* things (like your bank account numbers).
Asimov was not by in large a writer concerned with the human condition in the way, say, Hemingway was. He was not a mordant social critic like, say, Mark Twain. He was not even an extrapolator of current trends to future dystopia (too numerous to name, but Wells to name one), nor was he an imaginer of future advances in technology (also too numerous to name, count Jules Verne among their number).
What Asimov was, in my opinion, was a philosopher of narrow questions. That's why he also dabbled in mystery writing, where that kind of thing is quite common. What are the unspoken, wrong assumptions in an "impossible" locked room murder? If a being had morality wired in (Asimov's robots) could it still be used to harm people? Those are epistemological questions. How do we know what we "know"? How do we justify it?
By "narrow" I mean not grounded in universal human experiences -- feelings and thoughts we've all had. By that standard, even the question of psychohistory is "narrow". It's a technical question, in a way: "if history were put on an equally scientific basis with chemistry, would there *be* any more history?" That's not at all like, "How to people deal with the fact that they will inevitably die?" That's a universal question.
The usual answer to all those "narrow" questions turns out to be, "it's more complicated than you think." Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting. Nobody was better at Asimov at spotting the flaw in the obvious answer to a narrow question.
In any case, in many of Asimov's stories, the characters are quite two dimensional. They're given enough individuality to perform their function in the story, and that's that. Does that mean Asimov is a *bad* writer? Not at all. In fact where it is necessary to explore his theme he does all those things I just said are not characteristic of him. But you can explore the question of robot murder without having fully realized human characters. You can't explore the issue of human mortality that way.
In fact, psychohistory is a clear example of this. The entire notion starts with the assumption that individual characters are insignificant. Of course since "things are more complicated than you think", he goes on to undermine this assumption, but need only go so far as necessary to carry his point.
I feel strongly that there is one and only one valid measure of a writer's worth: does he repay the time you spend reading him? Payment in any coin imaginable is valid: entertainment, enlightenment, guilty pleasure, even feelings of contemptuous superiority to the author (many a person of taste has devoured _The Da Vinci Code_ in pursuit of that peculiar literary fetish). Any other measure than repayment is somebody trying to sell you their pet literary theory (e.g., "characters should be plausible according to my understanding of Freud.").
Peer review happens *before* the article is distributed in dead tree form. Sure, eventually things that don't have a quality control process like that up front (e.g. Internet hoaxes, urban legends) *do* get debunked, but not up front.
You know, the kind that plans gambits with the assumption the opposition isn't paying attention to what you're up to.
Suppose Oracle decides to kill PostGres by hiring *all* of the top developers. Getting 40% or 50% of them is probably feasible at a reasonable price, but not the nail-in-the-coffin Evil Ellison is looking for. He needs 100% of the key developers or as-near-as-dammit. The closer you need to get to 100%, the higher the cost goes, and it's not linear.
It'd be easy to hire four or five of the top 20, but to get sixteen or seventeen you'd have to make the offer so amazingly good that only a fool would refuse. How much would that cost? A cool million apiece?
Here's the flaw. Let's say I'm a competitor, and I see that Oracle has just dropped twenty or thirty million to get these exact persons on the team. But there are lots of good programmers in the world. I could hire some darn good ones with a hiring bonus of, say, a hundred thousand plus a good salary and a chance to work on an interesting, high profile project. So after Oracle spends its twenty, I spend two million and replace the lost talent with equally good talent.
Why?
Because it's a serious setback Oracle's plan to become the de facto owner of database technology. Well worth it, to me, even if I compete *myself* against Postgres. Also, because it socks Oracle where it lives -- in the cash flow. That could hurt it in other ways. We could have management turnover, maybe even a purge at Oracle for doing something so stupid with twenty million bucks. Cue the "Mwa-ha-ha-ha" in my boardroom. And once Oracle gives up, I *still* have these twenty top notch systems programmers I can use on any mf my projects.
I suspect that's a case of shrewed analysis of their target market, not a technical endorsement of SQLite as an enterprise platform.
Of course, you can architect around *anything*; ultimately when you build a reliably concurrent system it's on top of hardware which doesn't guarantee any logical consistency for your data when it manipulated concurrently. It's a matter of where in the software stack you make that magic happen. The database layer is very important, but there's more than one way to do it and they don't work equally well in every case. What works for a handful of developers posting a dozen or so updates to a bug database a day isn't going to work for a high volume, low latency commodities trading system.
Choosing SQLite as a default makes lots of sense for a product like Trac because the vast majority of installations are probably small, low volume affairs without a lot of IT support bandwidth. Making them configure something like Oracle (which is on the other end of the feature and complexity scale) just to use Trac would more than double the effort needed to bring the system up. Many projects probably don't even have anybody who knows more than the most rudimentary thing about databases, and few have any real expertise in database administration.
On the other end of the scale might be a project that has real need of high performance, ACID compliant database for their bug tracking. If there is such a project, they would have to hire a database admin anyway, who will be perfectly capable of configuring Trac to use whatever meets their needs -- if they are supporting an RDBMS in their product, it'd probably be whatever that is.
So in the end, everyone can be happy with this choice of default, even people who don't use it. the majority of installations are spared the inconvenience of dealing with a platform that is overkill for their needs. The few installations that need more than that are free to use whatever they're familiar and comfortable with, knowing that the Trac folks are focused on making their product better, not support thousands of users who are over their heads with database administration.
If doctor takes a picture of a child's genitals in order to diagnose and track what appears to be a tumor, that is not indecent. When Uncle Feely takes the same picture because he gets off on it, it *is*.
I wouldn't call it a case of mission creep. Research is needed to confirm that the database is suitable for the purposes it was created for.
These issues were identified as early as 1969, in a landmark HEW report on computer records and the rights of citizens. It boils down to this: inferences drawn from data that affect the lives of people ought to be rationally justifiable. This means not using data until its suitability can be established. Mission creep can lead to data being used outside the context it is reliable in; but we can also run afoul of privacy and due process concerns by collecting data in the first place without establishing it means what he hope it means.
I've been concerned for years about the reasoning used in DNA screening. It entails a long chain of assumptions, and while all the assumptions *seem* plausible, the chance that one or more of them is wrong or has some unknown wrinkle is not negligible.
Suppose that DNA can *rule out* suspects, but not convict them. In the interest of preventing miscarriages of justice, DNA screening should *still* be routinely done. I have a feeling that if that were the case, it wouldn't be done very widely.
It'd be a litmus test of a law enforcement agency: how interested is the agency in getting the right answer, as opposed to *an* answer?
If you take a brilliant, highly educated person out of a country with political freedom and put him a politically repressive country, he doesn't stop being brilliant or highly educated. But does it affect his productivity?
I don't think it does. However, the chances of something stupid being done with him and his work is higher. There's a wonderfully ironic example of this from the US Red Scare in the late 40s, when our government engaged in political witch hunts of intellectuals.
Qian Xuesen was a brilliant young rocket scientist, one of the founders of the JPL, one of the key brains behind early US rocketry, and a giant in the field of aerodynamics and jet propulsion theory. When he applied for citizenship in 1949 he was turned down, on fears that he might be Communist. The only evidence: he was Chinese. At one point he was arrested by the FBI for carrying a table of logarithms on a trip outside the US. His security clearance was revoked, making it impossible for him to continue his crucial rocketry work for the US.
Unable to work in the homeland he'd wanted to adopt, Qian would have been forced to move back to China, which would have been delighted to take him back. But this wasn't a case of some low level researcher who might smuggle the crown jewels of America's defense technology out of the country. Qian's brains *were* the crown jewels. High level defense department officials immediately realized this was a horrible mistake. Unfortunately, it wasn't politically possible to back away from that mistake at the height of the Red Scare. Qian was put under house arrest for five years, for no other crime than applying to become an American citizen.
Eventually he was allowed to return to China, which welcomed him with open arms even though he was not a Communist. After several years there the self-fulfilling prophecy came true and Qian joined the party. He was allowed to pursue his work unfettered by political interference, training a new generation of Chinese rocket engineers and advancing Chinese ICBM capabilities by decades. With Qian's help, China went from having no modern domestic rocketry technology to designing and building its own ICBMs in ten years. In fifteen years China was able to put payloads into orbit.
Note the abundant ironies here. The supposedly "free" US government oppresses a brilliant individual, but the supposedly "oppressive" one welcomes him with open arms and lets him do the kind of work he's born to do. The US government, by catering to fear and paranoia, provided a bitter enemy with the ability to strike US soil with nuclear weapons.
You could argue that the secretive, non-democratic government was actually at an advantage here, not having to worry about being re-elected and able to simply squelch any kind of organized public scare mongering by its political enemies. Qian apparently sailed through the Cultural Revolution because he was obviously too valuable to mess with. Too bad the FBI wasn't able to realize that during *our* Cultural Revolution.
That's why in the US the power of the federal judiciary to be a check on the elected branches is so important. If the executive branch, for example, is allowed to define it's own para-judicial system for politically sensitive cases, it *will* screw up, even though it *knows* at the time it's screwing up. Had Qian had been able contest the accusation in a forum that was not charged with political calculation, his clearance would have been restored and citizenship granted, to the enormous benefit of the United States. Instead his destiny was put in the hands of politics, and the politicians *knowingly* caused all the bad things they were ostensibly preventing, just to get through the next elections.
Why not just do things in web forms and live with the consequences?
Because the consequences are not acceptable. I agree it's *better* than living with the consequences of living with Acrobat, but that's not saying much.
It gets worse if you can't run your system off a single web server that you can secure with TLS then watch like a hawk. In many of these forms applications, one of the key requirements is to be able to fill in forms without having Internet access. Maybe in a few years ubiquitous wireless Internet access with VPN will make that requirement negligible, but we aren't there yet. Until then, you've got to deal with users having copies of sensitive data.
There's still a lot to be said for a special purpose tool just for this purpose with two factor security and local data encryption. Notes showed that this was quite feasible with early 1990s technology. It should be possible to do an even better job today, but from a crypto standpoint I haven't seen that happen yet.
And as for the the admin who might have told you the Notes dog ate your homework -- I have my doubts about him.
Only? It's *mainly* defects in the rest of the system that tend to bring things down.
Algorithms, once they get to the point where the experts trust them, are very seldom broken in the everything-laid-completely-bare way that faulty system design gets you. It's usually more like "could be broken with a week of supercomputing time ten years from now" or "can calculate a hash collision for certain specially constructed messages" variety of crack.
Of course once you get to that point, you have to assume that some really bright people will find a way to generalize the fault in the algorithm. If they'd broken AES, or even found an unexpected weakness in it, that'd be *huge* news. Instead, what they've found appears to be a classic case of plain old brain damaged design.
If the article is to be believed, the researchers found a really, really stupid flaw, the kind a non-expert like I could understand and probably exploit with not much effort. I would paraphrase this way: all these drives *effectively* have exactly the same key, but that fact is obscured by the software.
This is pretty much what Lotus Notes did better in the early 1990s -- and did with pretty darn good crypto built in too. It even got stuff like key revocation right.
The problem was you needed at least a few people who had above room temperature IQ to administer. I remember sitting in class with guys who just couldn't wrap their brains around the idea around signing keys. They treated it as a cargo cult ritual they had to do in order to get the system to work, but they'd much rather have had plain old account names and passwords. By the time we got to delegating signing authority, most of the class had mentally checked out.
Oh, that and the fact it was ugly a sin.
And marketed by a company that couldn't explain what the product *did*, so they mis-positioned it as an email system.
But for the kinds of asynchronous and distributed form entry / review / approval kinds of applications it did an amazing job for a piece of early 90s software.
Actually, I've got a Kindle and an iPod with the Amazon reader software, and it's not so cut and dry as you make it out.
Yes, in many, many situations the Kindle is ergonomically better. Bright ambient light is on obvious example (although an anti-glare coating would have been nice). There's battery life perhaps, which may be marginally better on the Kindle, although I usually don't run into that limit. Truthfully, I think much of the Kindles advantage is that it has more text area.
There is the flip side, which is that the iPod is better in low light. It's better for reading in bed, for example. The Kindle's buttons are stiff and *loud*, which annoys your spouse. And there is the inexplicable design fault of the Kindle which is that it's just a PITA to page through documents. The iPod finger swipe is just a lot nicer. In part that's enabled by the LCD touch screen, but the whole next page/previous page/back button layout on the Kindle is awkward and unintuitive. If they'd only adopted a convention, like "the next page is left and the previous page is right", then laid their buttons out accordingly, that'd be a lot cleaner. Then you'd have "next document/previous document keys laid out analogously but in a distinct location so you couldn't mix them up.
I find that mathematics tends to render more correctly on the iPod. I have some documents with matrices, and the kindle puts the rows and columns of the matrices all over the place, where the very same document on the iPod is correctly rendered.
In any case, the software makes a big difference in the experience, it's just when it gets it right it you don't notice it.
The whole ASCII only thing was one of the most brain dead decisions the Gutenberg ever made.
Many books go through the ASCII lobotomy relatively unscathed, of course, but there's lots of things ASCII just can't do. That's not just peripheral things like italics, boldface or underline. I'm talking about things you absolutely need to represent what is being said. It's foreign scripts like Greek. It's mathematical symbols -- no classic math books for Gutenberg. It's currency symbols other than '$'. It's common typographic symbols that didn't make the cut back in 1963 when they only had 128 code points and the main concern was driving low res dot matrix printers writing on 14" greenbar.
Basically Michael Hart conflated "non-ASCII" with proprietary document formats like WordPerfect. ASCII is literally incapable of representing the *information* in a wide variety of books without the adoption of some kind of ad hoc encoding scheme. That's in fact what a lot of Gutenberg texts do, which means they're somewhat unintelligible, which is the exact opposite of the policy's intent.
To be fair, PG came almost twenty years before Unicode. But the only reasonable solution would be to specify a simple file format that would have the following properties:
(1) If printed as 7 bit ASCII, most texts would be intelligible.
(2) Has a standard extension mechanism for specifying symbols, the way XML has character entities.
(3) Has standard representations for common typographic effects like boldface or document structure like footnotes.
It's not that hard to do, you just can't have 100% of everything. Maximizing the prettiness of ASCII printouts is not consistent with maximizing the intelligibility of documents. So you make the documents as intelligible as possible, and then as pretty as possible consistent with that.
Restructured Text does a pretty good job of representing a number of document structures and markup features found in HTML, while retaining a plain text representation that looks like what it means.
Your point 1: If your point is that all things being equal, an animal fighting infection will tend to lose weight or gain weight more slowly than an uninfected one, that's a straw argument. Obviously I have no interest in disagreeing with that. It's a long way from that to *equating* animal health with weight. By that definition a person whose weight goes from two hundred pounds to four hundred pounds over the course of a year would be "gaining health".
Any reasonable definition of health is based on the organism's capacity to maintain homeostasis. Stress per se is not bad or good for an organism; the issue is whether the parameters of the stress are within the limits the organism can tolerate. In that case, stress is often beneficial.
I won't bother addressing your other points, because you're clearly spoiling for an argument, which I'm not. I mainly wanted to say that two to five years difference in human disease emergence (which is your figure) is not as insignificant as you claim. I've actually having worked in the public health field on an emergent human infection, so I know this from experience. Of course that its dependent on having the surveillance systems to detect an infectious agent before it becomes endemic. If you don't have those systems, it doesn't matter, you won't know until it is too late.
I agree with much of what you say. However a five year delay in introducing a new antibiotic resistant strain of pathogen is nothing to be sneezed at.
In general we're better at reacting to things than preventing them. Unfortunately, we're best at reacting to things when its too late to do anything cost effective.
I was involved with the reaction to the whole West Nile Virus emergence. Obscene amounts of money were spent reacting to a virus that had established itself itself as an endemic infection in vast migratory bird populations. By the time that money was spent, the new situation could no longer be described as a crisis: it was a new status quo. The public benefited from some additional investment in mosquito control, but they'd have benefited from that if we'd just decided to spend that money. The bulk of the emergency spending might well have been shoveled into the furnace. There was *no* way the pathogen could have been contained by the time it had been detected, no matter how much money we spent.
The thing about a two to five year delay isn't the delay per se, but the lag between the point where a pathogen becomes detectable in a population and the point where it becomes permanently established. With surveillance networks in place, it may be possible to to contain a pathogen that's going to take two years to establish itself but not possible to contain one that will take one year.
Also, this isn't a one-off game. It's not "gee we could get a two year reprieve on pathogen X, is it worth it?" It's "Is it worth the investment to reduce the number of emergent pathogens per decade from X to X - 1?"
I don't know a lot about the veterinary use of antibiotics, but I wouldn't be surprised if feedlots represented a disproportionate share of both antibiotic use and risk to humans. You have crowding, stress, and diets intended to maximize animal weight rather than health. I personally try to buy free range meat when it's available, because I figure (a) it's a healthier animal, (b) it's more humane and (c) it costs more but more of my dollar goes to the farmer, not some industrial feeding operation.
Thank you for your post. It's important to show that experiences in these matters vary widely. But we should be careful about making the same mistake: extrapolating from personal experience.
The theory may well be sound without having much predictive value in any individual case. The whole point of sexual reproduction is to increase offspring variability; the species spreads its bets over many strategies. The robust person who laughs at minor infections might suddenly be brought low by a bug that a sickly one with a hypersensitive immune system would survive.
Or not.
It remains the case that in developing countries lower respiratory infections are the second leading cause of death after HIV. You're 45% less likely to die of that in the first world. Those robust third world guts which shrug off local intestinal bugs also succumb fatally to diarrhea at an alarming rate. It's the fourth leading cause of death in those countries, but doesn't even make the top 10 list in developed countries.
It's also possible that (a) the theory is correct, (b) the differences in immune responses in different kinds of countries are optimal from an evolutionary standpoint, (c) nonetheless this is not a pleasant experience for every individual and (d) many individuals are atypical for their environment.
Well, people in the news business, even the tech news business, think in terms of black and white. They'd prefer a story that means all iPhones and prior Android phones have been turned into junk by a new device that shows was a crappy P.O.S. they really are. That kind of story is good for the news business because that drives the need to follow the media slavishly so you know when you have to run out and buy a new device.
I have a Droid, and it's both a very good phone, a very good PDA, and a very good mobile computing platform. It does the fundamentals pretty well: it pulls in signal, it runs for a long time on a charge, it's stable so that when an app starts misbehaving it doesn't compromise anything else.
In comparison to an iPhone, I'd say the iPhone has two advantages from a UI standpoint: the hardware "Home" button you can find quickly without hunting for it (sometimes I pick up my Droid upside down and have to look or feel for the asymmetrical edge) and better polished core applications. As an example of the latter, if you are reading an email and delete it, the Droid returns you to the *prior* email, the iPhone shows you the *next* email. This is the kind of superior task oriented design Apple used to be justly famous for (but seems to have forgotten in the iTunes interface).
The UI advantages for the iPhone shell and core applications are real, but not "blow the doors off the competition" territory. The fact that Verizon's network works better near my house far outweighs any marginal advantage in the user shell or core apps user interface.
What I've learned from a lifetime of working in technology is you can't look to one aspect of a product in order to make that a killer product. Back in the 1980s, you could make a the argument that the lower training and support costs of MacOS should make Macs the dominant corporate computing platform, but we all know that didn't happen. We were ordering computers by the truckload, replacing the typewriters in entire departments with computers. The capital cost advantage of a PC outweighed it's TCO. It meant that a department could be equipped *this* year instead of over a two or two and a half years. And many of us weren't all that adverse to the notion that we'd have to build our empires... er, *departments* larger next year to support those PCs.
The advantages of the iPhone over Android are much slighter than the 1980s advantages of MacOS over DOS, and they are more shallow. Any developer could replace the standard Android shell and core apps with better ones (in fact shell replacements are popular), and having multiple carriers to choose from is a *huge* plus. Having competing manufacturers will drive the price down as well.
I think Android *is* an iPhone killing platform, if by "kill" you mean that the iPhone will lose it's market leadership position eventually. But Android is just not a "throw your iPhone in the trash and eat the termination fee, *right now*" kind of killer. The effects aren't going to be seen immediately on the share of installed base figures, but rather in something like the second time derivative of that figure. In five years time not many people are going to select AT&T so they can get an iPhone. Not unless Apple finds some new secret sauce that drives that.
Well, I think part of the problem is the model of education turning out a "finished product" at the age of 23 or so.
Once upon a time, you could get a pretty good overview of all the knowledge in the world in a few years. If you were a gentleman of means, you could buy a library that was a reasonable cross section of the at knowledge and take it back home from you. You could even pass it on to your heirs and it would be practically as good as the day you bought it.
The things that a liberal arts education is supposed to do for you are extremely unlikely to seem meaningful to somebody who's nineteen or twenty years old. I'm not denigrating the intellectual abilities of young people. A young person can master mathematics and mechanics, which only depends on having mastered prior lessons in mathematics and mechanics. I'm talking about life experience, which is something worth looking forward to obtaining.
If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about society, I would change this: the assumption that education is only for the young. In the ages between 18 and 65, you are expected to spend four years (about 8.5%) getting an education. I'd make it more like eight, and spread it out after the first three. Say something like five weeks out of every year would be devoted to self-improvement. You could improve your technical skills, of course, but as you get older you'd be able to make better use of what would seem like "fluff" to a twenty year old.
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Ingestion is a serious danger with cadmium. There was a case of mass Cd poisonings in Japan in the first half of the 20th century, caused by contaminated rice irrigated with water downstream from mines. Any application where Cd comes into contact with the hands -- especially children's hands -- is suspect.
With respect to Cd plated tools -- I don't remember them. I do remember fasteners with Cd plating. I suppose if you don't disturb the plating it's not likely to leach. However that says nothing about the items in the article which *did* leach. You can't compare plating to something like paint, which is an entirely different thing. If it weren't, you'd never have to plate anything, you'd get by with paint.
In any case I don't buy the whole "we used to use such and so and it ain't harmed me none" argument. When I was young people still carbon tetrachloride to clean circuit boards. Let me tell you it was da bomb. It was cheap, worked like a charm, left no residue, and you could put out fires with it. I knew lots of people who used it and never saw any adverse reactions. That doesn't mean it didn't hurt some people. For one thing I haven't followed those people for thirty years and don't know how many ended up with liver damage.
I've studied the issue of privacy. By that I mean I've studied the various definitions of privacy used in philosophy and law. I've read Focault and Brandeis. I've pondered question like whether privacy is alienable, or whether personal information is property.
I don't claim to have answers for *all* the questions of privacy, but I do think I've gained at least one morsel of insight: all issues of privacy boil down to questions of self-determination and fairness.
Consider the neighbor who plays his stereo obnoxiously loud. Why is that lumped into "privacy" along with the neighbor who stands in the azalea bush and looks in your window? Because it is a restriction of your right to direct your own attention, just as the peeping tom restricts your right to walk around your house naked if you want.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose there was a law that forbade you from telling anyone that you cheated on your spouse. That law is a violation of privacy, *even though it restricts the dissemination of personal information*.
Now norms and standards change. If you live in a society where public nudity is the norm, you might not care so much about peeping tom. But that doesn't mean you've stopped caring about control your life, that you aren't concerned with a fair distribution of power between yourself and "the public", or even that you don't mind if peeping tom sees *other* things (like your bank account numbers).
Asimov was not by in large a writer concerned with the human condition in the way, say, Hemingway was. He was not a mordant social critic like, say, Mark Twain. He was not even an extrapolator of current trends to future dystopia (too numerous to name, but Wells to name one), nor was he an imaginer of future advances in technology (also too numerous to name, count Jules Verne among their number).
What Asimov was, in my opinion, was a philosopher of narrow questions. That's why he also dabbled in mystery writing, where that kind of thing is quite common. What are the unspoken, wrong assumptions in an "impossible" locked room murder? If a being had morality wired in (Asimov's robots) could it still be used to harm people? Those are epistemological questions. How do we know what we "know"? How do we justify it?
By "narrow" I mean not grounded in universal human experiences -- feelings and thoughts we've all had. By that standard, even the question of psychohistory is "narrow". It's a technical question, in a way: "if history were put on an equally scientific basis with chemistry, would there *be* any more history?" That's not at all like, "How to people deal with the fact that they will inevitably die?" That's a universal question.
The usual answer to all those "narrow" questions turns out to be, "it's more complicated than you think." Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting. Nobody was better at Asimov at spotting the flaw in the obvious answer to a narrow question.
In any case, in many of Asimov's stories, the characters are quite two dimensional. They're given enough individuality to perform their function in the story, and that's that. Does that mean Asimov is a *bad* writer? Not at all. In fact where it is necessary to explore his theme he does all those things I just said are not characteristic of him. But you can explore the question of robot murder without having fully realized human characters. You can't explore the issue of human mortality that way.
In fact, psychohistory is a clear example of this. The entire notion starts with the assumption that individual characters are insignificant. Of course since "things are more complicated than you think", he goes on to undermine this assumption, but need only go so far as necessary to carry his point.
I feel strongly that there is one and only one valid measure of a writer's worth: does he repay the time you spend reading him? Payment in any coin imaginable is valid: entertainment, enlightenment, guilty pleasure, even feelings of contemptuous superiority to the author (many a person of taste has devoured _The Da Vinci Code_ in pursuit of that peculiar literary fetish). Any other measure than repayment is somebody trying to sell you their pet literary theory (e.g., "characters should be plausible according to my understanding of Freud.").
Peer review happens *before* the article is distributed in dead tree form. Sure, eventually things that don't have a quality control process like that up front (e.g. Internet hoaxes, urban legends) *do* get debunked, but not up front.
You know, the kind that plans gambits with the assumption the opposition isn't paying attention to what you're up to.
Suppose Oracle decides to kill PostGres by hiring *all* of the top developers. Getting 40% or 50% of them is probably feasible at a reasonable price, but not the nail-in-the-coffin Evil Ellison is looking for. He needs 100% of the key developers or as-near-as-dammit. The closer you need to get to 100%, the higher the cost goes, and it's not linear.
It'd be easy to hire four or five of the top 20, but to get sixteen or seventeen you'd have to make the offer so amazingly good that only a fool would refuse. How much would that cost? A cool million apiece?
Here's the flaw. Let's say I'm a competitor, and I see that Oracle has just dropped twenty or thirty million to get these exact persons on the team. But there are lots of good programmers in the world. I could hire some darn good ones with a hiring bonus of, say, a hundred thousand plus a good salary and a chance to work on an interesting, high profile project. So after Oracle spends its twenty, I spend two million and replace the lost talent with equally good talent.
Why?
Because it's a serious setback Oracle's plan to become the de facto owner of database technology. Well worth it, to me, even if I compete *myself* against Postgres. Also, because it socks Oracle where it lives -- in the cash flow. That could hurt it in other ways. We could have management turnover, maybe even a purge at Oracle for doing something so stupid with twenty million bucks. Cue the "Mwa-ha-ha-ha" in my boardroom. And once Oracle gives up, I *still* have these twenty top notch systems programmers I can use on any mf my projects.
I suspect that's a case of shrewed analysis of their target market, not a technical endorsement of SQLite as an enterprise platform.
Of course, you can architect around *anything*; ultimately when you build a reliably concurrent system it's on top of hardware which doesn't guarantee any logical consistency for your data when it manipulated concurrently. It's a matter of where in the software stack you make that magic happen. The database layer is very important, but there's more than one way to do it and they don't work equally well in every case. What works for a handful of developers posting a dozen or so updates to a bug database a day isn't going to work for a high volume, low latency commodities trading system.
Choosing SQLite as a default makes lots of sense for a product like Trac because the vast majority of installations are probably small, low volume affairs without a lot of IT support bandwidth. Making them configure something like Oracle (which is on the other end of the feature and complexity scale) just to use Trac would more than double the effort needed to bring the system up. Many projects probably don't even have anybody who knows more than the most rudimentary thing about databases, and few have any real expertise in database administration.
On the other end of the scale might be a project that has real need of high performance, ACID compliant database for their bug tracking. If there is such a project, they would have to hire a database admin anyway, who will be perfectly capable of configuring Trac to use whatever meets their needs -- if they are supporting an RDBMS in their product, it'd probably be whatever that is.
So in the end, everyone can be happy with this choice of default, even people who don't use it. the majority of installations are spared the inconvenience of dealing with a platform that is overkill for their needs. The few installations that need more than that are free to use whatever they're familiar and comfortable with, knowing that the Trac folks are focused on making their product better, not support thousands of users who are over their heads with database administration.
Indecency is a matter of intent and usage.
If doctor takes a picture of a child's genitals in order to diagnose and track what appears to be a tumor, that is not indecent. When Uncle Feely takes the same picture because he gets off on it, it *is*.
I wouldn't call it a case of mission creep. Research is needed to confirm that the database is suitable for the purposes it was created for.
These issues were identified as early as 1969, in a landmark HEW report on computer records and the rights of citizens. It boils down to this: inferences drawn from data that affect the lives of people ought to be rationally justifiable. This means not using data until its suitability can be established. Mission creep can lead to data being used outside the context it is reliable in; but we can also run afoul of privacy and due process concerns by collecting data in the first place without establishing it means what he hope it means.
I've been concerned for years about the reasoning used in DNA screening. It entails a long chain of assumptions, and while all the assumptions *seem* plausible, the chance that one or more of them is wrong or has some unknown wrinkle is not negligible.
Now you raise an interesting question.
Suppose that DNA can *rule out* suspects, but not convict them. In the interest of preventing miscarriages of justice, DNA screening should *still* be routinely done. I have a feeling that if that were the case, it wouldn't be done very widely.
It'd be a litmus test of a law enforcement agency: how interested is the agency in getting the right answer, as opposed to *an* answer?
It's an interesting thought experiment.
If you take a brilliant, highly educated person out of a country with political freedom and put him a politically repressive country, he doesn't stop being brilliant or highly educated. But does it affect his productivity?
I don't think it does. However, the chances of something stupid being done with him and his work is higher. There's a wonderfully ironic example of this from the US Red Scare in the late 40s, when our government engaged in political witch hunts of intellectuals.
Qian Xuesen was a brilliant young rocket scientist, one of the founders of the JPL, one of the key brains behind early US rocketry, and a giant in the field of aerodynamics and jet propulsion theory. When he applied for citizenship in 1949 he was turned down, on fears that he might be Communist. The only evidence: he was Chinese. At one point he was arrested by the FBI for carrying a table of logarithms on a trip outside the US. His security clearance was revoked, making it impossible for him to continue his crucial rocketry work for the US.
Unable to work in the homeland he'd wanted to adopt, Qian would have been forced to move back to China, which would have been delighted to take him back. But this wasn't a case of some low level researcher who might smuggle the crown jewels of America's defense technology out of the country. Qian's brains *were* the crown jewels. High level defense department officials immediately realized this was a horrible mistake. Unfortunately, it wasn't politically possible to back away from that mistake at the height of the Red Scare. Qian was put under house arrest for five years, for no other crime than applying to become an American citizen.
Eventually he was allowed to return to China, which welcomed him with open arms even though he was not a Communist. After several years there the self-fulfilling prophecy came true and Qian joined the party. He was allowed to pursue his work unfettered by political interference, training a new generation of Chinese rocket engineers and advancing Chinese ICBM capabilities by decades. With Qian's help, China went from having no modern domestic rocketry technology to designing and building its own ICBMs in ten years. In fifteen years China was able to put payloads into orbit.
Note the abundant ironies here. The supposedly "free" US government oppresses a brilliant individual, but the supposedly "oppressive" one welcomes him with open arms and lets him do the kind of work he's born to do. The US government, by catering to fear and paranoia, provided a bitter enemy with the ability to strike US soil with nuclear weapons.
You could argue that the secretive, non-democratic government was actually at an advantage here, not having to worry about being re-elected and able to simply squelch any kind of organized public scare mongering by its political enemies. Qian apparently sailed through the Cultural Revolution because he was obviously too valuable to mess with. Too bad the FBI wasn't able to realize that during *our* Cultural Revolution.
That's why in the US the power of the federal judiciary to be a check on the elected branches is so important. If the executive branch, for example, is allowed to define it's own para-judicial system for politically sensitive cases, it *will* screw up, even though it *knows* at the time it's screwing up. Had Qian had been able contest the accusation in a forum that was not charged with political calculation, his clearance would have been restored and citizenship granted, to the enormous benefit of the United States. Instead his destiny was put in the hands of politics, and the politicians *knowingly* caused all the bad things they were ostensibly preventing, just to get through the next elections.
Now, I don't know about you, but that feels extraordinarily unlikely to me, given the frequency of large meteorite strikes.
On the other hand, that same infrequency doesn't seem to have prevented geologists from European cultures from figuring it out.
Why not just do things in web forms and live with the consequences?
Because the consequences are not acceptable. I agree it's *better* than living with the consequences of living with Acrobat, but that's not saying much.
It gets worse if you can't run your system off a single web server that you can secure with TLS then watch like a hawk. In many of these forms applications, one of the key requirements is to be able to fill in forms without having Internet access. Maybe in a few years ubiquitous wireless Internet access with VPN will make that requirement negligible, but we aren't there yet. Until then, you've got to deal with users having copies of sensitive data.
There's still a lot to be said for a special purpose tool just for this purpose with two factor security and local data encryption. Notes showed that this was quite feasible with early 1990s technology. It should be possible to do an even better job today, but from a crypto standpoint I haven't seen that happen yet.
And as for the the admin who might have told you the Notes dog ate your homework -- I have my doubts about him.
Only? It's *mainly* defects in the rest of the system that tend to bring things down.
Algorithms, once they get to the point where the experts trust them, are very seldom broken in the everything-laid-completely-bare way that faulty system design gets you. It's usually more like "could be broken with a week of supercomputing time ten years from now" or "can calculate a hash collision for certain specially constructed messages" variety of crack.
Of course once you get to that point, you have to assume that some really bright people will find a way to generalize the fault in the algorithm. If they'd broken AES, or even found an unexpected weakness in it, that'd be *huge* news. Instead, what they've found appears to be a classic case of plain old brain damaged design.
If the article is to be believed, the researchers found a really, really stupid flaw, the kind a non-expert like I could understand and probably exploit with not much effort. I would paraphrase this way: all these drives *effectively* have exactly the same key, but that fact is obscured by the software.
This is pretty much what Lotus Notes did better in the early 1990s -- and did with pretty darn good crypto built in too. It even got stuff like key revocation right.
The problem was you needed at least a few people who had above room temperature IQ to administer. I remember sitting in class with guys who just couldn't wrap their brains around the idea around signing keys. They treated it as a cargo cult ritual they had to do in order to get the system to work, but they'd much rather have had plain old account names and passwords. By the time we got to delegating signing authority, most of the class had mentally checked out.
Oh, that and the fact it was ugly a sin.
And marketed by a company that couldn't explain what the product *did*, so they mis-positioned it as an email system.
But for the kinds of asynchronous and distributed form entry / review / approval kinds of applications it did an amazing job for a piece of early 90s software.
Actually, I've got a Kindle and an iPod with the Amazon reader software, and it's not so cut and dry as you make it out.
Yes, in many, many situations the Kindle is ergonomically better. Bright ambient light is on obvious example (although an anti-glare coating would have been nice). There's battery life perhaps, which may be marginally better on the Kindle, although I usually don't run into that limit. Truthfully, I think much of the Kindles advantage is that it has more text area.
There is the flip side, which is that the iPod is better in low light. It's better for reading in bed, for example. The Kindle's buttons are stiff and *loud*, which annoys your spouse. And there is the inexplicable design fault of the Kindle which is that it's just a PITA to page through documents. The iPod finger swipe is just a lot nicer. In part that's enabled by the LCD touch screen, but the whole next page/previous page/back button layout on the Kindle is awkward and unintuitive. If they'd only adopted a convention, like "the next page is left and the previous page is right", then laid their buttons out accordingly, that'd be a lot cleaner. Then you'd have "next document/previous document keys laid out analogously but in a distinct location so you couldn't mix them up.
I find that mathematics tends to render more correctly on the iPod. I have some documents with matrices, and the kindle puts the rows and columns of the matrices all over the place, where the very same document on the iPod is correctly rendered.
In any case, the software makes a big difference in the experience, it's just when it gets it right it you don't notice it.
The whole ASCII only thing was one of the most brain dead decisions the Gutenberg ever made.
Many books go through the ASCII lobotomy relatively unscathed, of course, but there's lots of things ASCII just can't do. That's not just peripheral things like italics, boldface or underline. I'm talking about things you absolutely need to represent what is being said. It's foreign scripts like Greek. It's mathematical symbols -- no classic math books for Gutenberg. It's currency symbols other than '$'. It's common typographic symbols that didn't make the cut back in 1963 when they only had 128 code points and the main concern was driving low res dot matrix printers writing on 14" greenbar.
Basically Michael Hart conflated "non-ASCII" with proprietary document formats like WordPerfect. ASCII is literally incapable of representing the *information* in a wide variety of books without the adoption of some kind of ad hoc encoding scheme. That's in fact what a lot of Gutenberg texts do, which means they're somewhat unintelligible, which is the exact opposite of the policy's intent.
To be fair, PG came almost twenty years before Unicode. But the only reasonable solution would be to specify a simple file format that would have the following properties:
(1) If printed as 7 bit ASCII, most texts would be intelligible.
(2) Has a standard extension mechanism for specifying symbols, the way XML has character entities.
(3) Has standard representations for common typographic effects like boldface or document structure like footnotes.
It's not that hard to do, you just can't have 100% of everything. Maximizing the prettiness of ASCII printouts is not consistent with maximizing the intelligibility of documents. So you make the documents as intelligible as possible, and then as pretty as possible consistent with that.
Restructured Text does a pretty good job of representing a number of document structures and markup features found in HTML, while retaining a plain text representation that looks like what it means.
Your point 1: If your point is that all things being equal, an animal fighting infection will tend to lose weight or gain weight more slowly than an uninfected one, that's a straw argument. Obviously I have no interest in disagreeing with that. It's a long way from that to *equating* animal health with weight. By that definition a person whose weight goes from two hundred pounds to four hundred pounds over the course of a year would be "gaining health".
Any reasonable definition of health is based on the organism's capacity to maintain homeostasis. Stress per se is not bad or good for an organism; the issue is whether the parameters of the stress are within the limits the organism can tolerate. In that case, stress is often beneficial.
I won't bother addressing your other points, because you're clearly spoiling for an argument, which I'm not. I mainly wanted to say that two to five years difference in human disease emergence (which is your figure) is not as insignificant as you claim. I've actually having worked in the public health field on an emergent human infection, so I know this from experience. Of course that its dependent on having the surveillance systems to detect an infectious agent before it becomes endemic. If you don't have those systems, it doesn't matter, you won't know until it is too late.
I agree with much of what you say. However a five year delay in introducing a new antibiotic resistant strain of pathogen is nothing to be sneezed at.
In general we're better at reacting to things than preventing them. Unfortunately, we're best at reacting to things when its too late to do anything cost effective.
I was involved with the reaction to the whole West Nile Virus emergence. Obscene amounts of money were spent reacting to a virus that had established itself itself as an endemic infection in vast migratory bird populations. By the time that money was spent, the new situation could no longer be described as a crisis: it was a new status quo. The public benefited from some additional investment in mosquito control, but they'd have benefited from that if we'd just decided to spend that money. The bulk of the emergency spending might well have been shoveled into the furnace. There was *no* way the pathogen could have been contained by the time it had been detected, no matter how much money we spent.
The thing about a two to five year delay isn't the delay per se, but the lag between the point where a pathogen becomes detectable in a population and the point where it becomes permanently established. With surveillance networks in place, it may be possible to to contain a pathogen that's going to take two years to establish itself but not possible to contain one that will take one year.
Also, this isn't a one-off game. It's not "gee we could get a two year reprieve on pathogen X, is it worth it?" It's "Is it worth the investment to reduce the number of emergent pathogens per decade from X to X - 1?"
I don't know a lot about the veterinary use of antibiotics, but I wouldn't be surprised if feedlots represented a disproportionate share of both antibiotic use and risk to humans. You have crowding, stress, and diets intended to maximize animal weight rather than health. I personally try to buy free range meat when it's available, because I figure (a) it's a healthier animal, (b) it's more humane and (c) it costs more but more of my dollar goes to the farmer, not some industrial feeding operation.
Thank you for your post. It's important to show that experiences in these matters vary widely. But we should be careful about making the same mistake: extrapolating from personal experience.
The theory may well be sound without having much predictive value in any individual case. The whole point of sexual reproduction is to increase offspring variability; the species spreads its bets over many strategies. The robust person who laughs at minor infections might suddenly be brought low by a bug that a sickly one with a hypersensitive immune system would survive.
Or not.
It remains the case that in developing countries lower respiratory infections are the second leading cause of death after HIV. You're 45% less likely to die of that in the first world. Those robust third world guts which shrug off local intestinal bugs also succumb fatally to diarrhea at an alarming rate. It's the fourth leading cause of death in those countries, but doesn't even make the top 10 list in developed countries.
It's also possible that (a) the theory is correct, (b) the differences in immune responses in different kinds of countries are optimal from an evolutionary standpoint, (c) nonetheless this is not a pleasant experience for every individual and (d) many individuals are atypical for their environment.
Don't be silly. It would only be "abuse" if it were a bad thing!
That's right. we "exercise" our power by using our "abs". My abs are so enormous I had to buy a longer belt.
Well, people in the news business, even the tech news business, think in terms of black and white. They'd prefer a story that means all iPhones and prior Android phones have been turned into junk by a new device that shows was a crappy P.O.S. they really are. That kind of story is good for the news business because that drives the need to follow the media slavishly so you know when you have to run out and buy a new device.
I have a Droid, and it's both a very good phone, a very good PDA, and a very good mobile computing platform. It does the fundamentals pretty well: it pulls in signal, it runs for a long time on a charge, it's stable so that when an app starts misbehaving it doesn't compromise anything else.
In comparison to an iPhone, I'd say the iPhone has two advantages from a UI standpoint: the hardware "Home" button you can find quickly without hunting for it (sometimes I pick up my Droid upside down and have to look or feel for the asymmetrical edge) and better polished core applications. As an example of the latter, if you are reading an email and delete it, the Droid returns you to the *prior* email, the iPhone shows you the *next* email. This is the kind of superior task oriented design Apple used to be justly famous for (but seems to have forgotten in the iTunes interface).
The UI advantages for the iPhone shell and core applications are real, but not "blow the doors off the competition" territory. The fact that Verizon's network works better near my house far outweighs any marginal advantage in the user shell or core apps user interface.
What I've learned from a lifetime of working in technology is you can't look to one aspect of a product in order to make that a killer product. Back in the 1980s, you could make a the argument that the lower training and support costs of MacOS should make Macs the dominant corporate computing platform, but we all know that didn't happen. We were ordering computers by the truckload, replacing the typewriters in entire departments with computers. The capital cost advantage of a PC outweighed it's TCO. It meant that a department could be equipped *this* year instead of over a two or two and a half years. And many of us weren't all that adverse to the notion that we'd have to build our empires ... er, *departments* larger next year to support those PCs.
The advantages of the iPhone over Android are much slighter than the 1980s advantages of MacOS over DOS, and they are more shallow. Any developer could replace the standard Android shell and core apps with better ones (in fact shell replacements are popular), and having multiple carriers to choose from is a *huge* plus. Having competing manufacturers will drive the price down as well.
I think Android *is* an iPhone killing platform, if by "kill" you mean that the iPhone will lose it's market leadership position eventually. But Android is just not a "throw your iPhone in the trash and eat the termination fee, *right now*" kind of killer. The effects aren't going to be seen immediately on the share of installed base figures, but rather in something like the second time derivative of that figure. In five years time not many people are going to select AT&T so they can get an iPhone. Not unless Apple finds some new secret sauce that drives that.
Well, I think part of the problem is the model of education turning out a "finished product" at the age of 23 or so.
Once upon a time, you could get a pretty good overview of all the knowledge in the world in a few years. If you were a gentleman of means, you could buy a library that was a reasonable cross section of the at knowledge and take it back home from you. You could even pass it on to your heirs and it would be practically as good as the day you bought it.
The things that a liberal arts education is supposed to do for you are extremely unlikely to seem meaningful to somebody who's nineteen or twenty years old. I'm not denigrating the intellectual abilities of young people. A young person can master mathematics and mechanics, which only depends on having mastered prior lessons in mathematics and mechanics. I'm talking about life experience, which is something worth looking forward to obtaining.
If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about society, I would change this: the assumption that education is only for the young. In the ages between 18 and 65, you are expected to spend four years (about 8.5%) getting an education. I'd make it more like eight, and spread it out after the first three. Say something like five weeks out of every year would be devoted to self-improvement. You could improve your technical skills, of course, but as you get older you'd be able to make better use of what would seem like "fluff" to a twenty year old.
It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion.
Why not? We often enough have blind faith in methodologies, so why not *mythologies*?
The correct technical terms here is "caryatid".
"other".