You cannot say that someone else should die, without asking them, simply because **you** imagine you would want to in that situation. That would violate just about every single code of ethics imaginable.
Actually, one could argue it's supported by the moral codes of most religions, as they all tend to feature some form of reciprocity. Of course, this would be a simplistic argument since any one religion you look at will have other principals, philosophies, and fads affecting how this gets interpreted and applied.
Personally, while I think the Golden Rule has significant weaknesses as a moral guideline, I think it can be helpful in situations like this where you don't have the ability to communicate with the other person. Even if you feel uncomfortable answering the death question (as we all should), someone who is exercising power-of-attorney is going to have to use their own reactions to a judge/make guesses about the other person's thoughts and desires in how to deal with a specific situation.
Hmm.... let's see... fuse, rsync, openssh, git, command line tools and the hours/weeks of time needed to learn all of that VERSUS a pretty web interface that is accessible everywhere, has an app for your mobile, and is backed up automatically. Which one is the "self-proclaimed geek" solution and which is the ordinary people solution?
You don't have to like cloud (I certainly don't), but most folks are going to prefer it over roll-your-own-infrastucture.
If a government wants to prohibit abortion, they can just require that she give up her embryo or fetus for adoption when she terminates the pregnancy, with the state picking up the tab over and above the cost of an abortion.
This is a very naive view. Many would see an abortion at, say, 3 months into pregnancy as a much smaller "sin" than bringing the child to term and committing him/her to a state-run orphanage slum. Also, the cost per child per year would be HUGE (easily $30K) and when you multiply that by the sheer number of children (there's approximately 1 abortion for every 4 live births), you see that the economics just aren't feasible. Artificial wombs may change the debate somewhat, but I doubt pro-Choice advocates would see it as a serious solution.
And the USA is England colony. But now younger people in USA prefer to call themselves "Americans" rather than "British".
The situation is not analogous, as (1) Great Britain recognized the USA as an independent, sovereign nation starting in 1783, and (2) the USA does not claim sovereignty over the British homeland. By contrast, both the PRC and the ROC claim to be the one legitimate government for the whole of their two territories.
This is something for private industry to figure out.
Private industry R&D looks 5-10 years down the road. A great nation will look 20, 50, and even 100 years down the road.
Why are our tax dollars being wasted on stuff like this
Wasting? This stuff is peanuts for the federal budget, and it probably even saves money (e.g, allowing different missions to use a common communication infrastructure).
we have no mechanism to get men past the Moon for the next 20-30 years
We put man on the moon with less than a decade's worth of work using 60's technology. If we were motivated, we could put men on mars within a decade too.
All of which is beside the point... we're sticking unmanned infrastructure out there (in various orbits, at Lagrange points, on the Martian surface, etc.) and the amount of data we want to ship around is getting progressively larger and larger.
such as not being beholden to our #1 creditor, China
We can always print more dollars. The real worry with China, it seems to me, is that we gave them our manufacturing capacity and business know-how. Now their economic ascendency is putting a strain on world resources (e.g., see gas prices) and we have to fret over whether or not their hardware is spying on us. Credit isn't a big worry since we control our own currency (unlike Greece, for instance).
We don't need Internet connectivity near Saturn, we need to fix a deficit problem right here on Earth.
To fix it, you're going to have to find the political will to cut defense, cut entitlements, and raise taxes. Good luck.
What struck me about the headline was the loud hero worship of the almighty super special individual. No one, no matter how special, can change facts of nature. This hero worship also shows another huge hole in American thinking. We have a terrible tendency to pick out one "key" person for lionizing, when it actually took a large team to accomplish some feat.
Good call... I had a Randian once tell me that "only an individual can do something great/advance technology/bring about progress/whatever: groups of people can't". Since then, I've seen many examples of how this thinking is wrong. I think it's just that it's easiest to mentally grok the one man (Neil Armstrong, for instance) and ignore the whole (the army of engineers and analysts and so forth that put him on the moon).
There is no sane business case for taking a commercial compiler front end and a commercial compiler back end, filling it with extra bugs and shipping it.
Um, what about JIT'ing OpenGL shaders and writing efficient software fallbacks for them? Or what about IDE's (VisualStudio, Eclipse) where many awesome features rely on the editor having a rich API on top of the compiler? RMS put GCC on the wrong side of the future here... many products can be made better by leveraging a compiler API at runtime.
Can you put two and two together looking at this graph?
(Numbers and graph Courtesy of the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities).
The bad thing about the right's ideological radicalization over the past decade is that there is no such as thing as "non-partisan" anymore. Anyone who puts forth numbers, facts, arguments, etc, against them is automatically part of the liberal media conspiracy.
The example of the hour, of course, is the right's attack on Nate Silver. To be fair, Nate did support Obama in this election, but his analysis was based on raw number crunching, not wishful thinking (like these eight conservative pundits who predicted a Romney win), which is why he was able to correctly predict the outcome of all 50 states (assuming no FL surprises). Meanwhile, the Red States guys were predicting a 3.5% win for Mitt the day before election. (Not to mention their hilarious exit poll that favored Mitt 5.4% with a 1.44% margin of error!)
They just stripped away all statistical corrections that professional polling organizations normally use in order to get the result they want even when the underlying reality was completely different. Now that the cold light of day has shown them wrong, we'll see if an apology, methodology change, or indeed any indication of humility or self-growth is forthcoming, but I'm not holding my breath.
Unfortunately, most complex things (global warming, taxation policy, etc.) aren't resolved simply and quickly like this polling "controversy". Right-wing ideologues will continue to manufacture misinformation and attack anyone who disagrees with them, and because of that: truth is dead, in a sense. (This can apply to left-wing ideologues too, but it's right-wing ideologicalization that has been more prevalent over the past decade.)
Did I miss something? This seems to be a non-issue.
The 100ft restriction means that the observers cannot directly observe. How are ballot boxes locked/guarded/transported/counted? How are registration issues dealt with? How are disabled/non-English voters assisted? There's no point in having them if you don't let them do their job.
The land line you get from the teleco for your home can't be spoofed, but businesses usually get PRI service to hookup their own PBX to the phone company. Whoever runs that PBX can send whatever caller ID info they want (typically). This is useful when you want to include each employee's name in their outgoing caller ID, or if you have multiple firms using the same PBX. So it's not so much an ISDN hack as it is an ISDN feature.
In a residential setting, however, the general whole-house power factor corrector isn't helpful: most loads aren't the type that need tuning
That, and I've heard that residential customers don't have to pay the power company for reactive load (e.g., imaginary power), just resistive load (e.g., real power). Industrial customers have to pay for both, which is why they build those capacitor banks.
Not perfect, but they last and have ready supply of replacement ink, all the great colors... Just need pocket protector.
Awesome! I love the 0.5 mm and did not know they made a 0.38. Will have to give it a try. Do the color pens still have the dry-out-and-become-useless-quickly issue?
What reality are they denying? The reality that either we will take world-wide coordinated action against carbon-induced climate change or we will extinguish human civilization. That's pretty much the definition of a terrorist.
Nope. Terrorism is the use of mass murder, industrial sabotage, and threats of same to achieve political ends, usually calculated to promote fear in a target population. We can refine it further, distinguishing the term from "war", "assassin", "murder", "freedom fighter", "mass shooter", etc., and enjoy the rich contradictions and ambiguities we would undoubtedly discover.
What we can't do is stretch the term to apply to everything that we disagree with... at that point, you're just trying to manipulate people in the same dirty way that FOX and other pundits do.
Here's a different idea: tell the truth. Viz., "think tanks and marketing firms that concoct lies to discredit global warming ARE NOT engaged in terrorism, they are engaged in something MUCH WORSE". Maybe it's not as catchy, but it still has a little bit of a hook while remaining honest.
Even better--in my view of these matter--would be not to focus your attack on tearing down the opposition, but on building a positive case. That tends to "play" better to undecided audiences, and too much vitriol (even if deserved) makes you look like the unreasonable party. Even better if you can inject humor, like this famous cartoon did. There's no shortage of emphatic opinions on the internet; honest, insightful wit on the other hand...
And um, yeah, potato==squirrel. Just because the GOP has been taken over by ideologically-crazed individuals is no excuse for the rest of to start doing it too.
Because having large tanks of diesel fuel dozens of stories above ground isn't a good solution either?
Can you imagine the headline? "Thunderstorm punctures diesel storage tank on hospital roof. Lightning ignites 2,000 gallons spilling down side of hospital"
And, to top of it off, the very same parade of internet know-it-alls would be asking "Why would anyone in their right mind place generators and tanks above ground where lightning would be an issue?"
It's a culture built on shameless plagiarism and copyright abuse.
Um, I think the usual explanation is that, in China, knowledge is seen as something that is received from an authority, and the goal of an educational exercise is to regurgitate that knowledge faithfully. Wheras, in the West, knowledge is a skill that is built by personal practice (like sports). Or something like that...
However, copyright abuse is not necessarily an outgrowth of this: it seems more like the logical consequence of everyone being able to forge a "currency".
Seriously, what the fuck? "Legal niceties" is another term for these rules are in place because we don't want to get fucked over again by someone we trusted. They're there for a reason.
I hate this mindset. Rules are there for a reason, yes, but what is that reason? Maybe it's an ironclad principal of human nature ("people with credit problems are easily bribed"); maybe it originates from a once-applicable idea that is now obsolete ("homosexuals are easily blackmailed"); maybe it originated from prudish mindsets or political agendas that never had any validity to begin with ("marijuana smokers are less trustworthy"); maybe it was meant to appease stakeholders whose concerns or opinions no longer hold sway ("art students are more likely to be communist sympathizers"); maybe you're more desperate than before ("sh*t we need a lot of custom code... isn't there some non-critical stuff that we can let non-cleared programmers work on?").
Rules are not so eternal as you seem to think... they are but one of many structural elements in complex human systems, and an organization that is poor at reevaluating and changing rules is doomed to ossification.
BTW, if you RTFA, you'd see that's he's specifically talking about people with AD(H)D, autism, OCD, and perhaps soft drug use. He's also talking about redesigning clearances and pushing back on overweighted HR/legal interests, not outright circumvention of existing rules. (And if he's seen the HR departments that I've seen, he knows they frequently block any meaningful evaluation of a candidate's technical proficiencies and prefer to judge people on their ability to smile, deliver a firm handshake, and make smalltalk with a stranger. Part of it is legal... can't ask that candidate to write a SQL statement like he or she will have to do every damn day on the job because we don't know for sure that it isn't some subtle proxy test to discriminate on race.)
YES!! It seems like there is a secret cabal of mathematicians who try to make anything even partially math-related as dense as possible.
Take, for instance, Wikipedia's article on Grundy Numbers. It looks like there's some good technical stuff there, but what's lacking is a less technical walkthru for an educated general audience. Contrast with this page, which takes a little while to get there but is MUCH more accessible.
Maybe this is off-topic, but I (and many others) believe that publicly funded research should be freely available to the public.
Yes, obviously. That means data sets, methods, apparatus, experiment outcomes, results, conclusions, papers (which shouldn't be limited to paywalled journals I.M.O.), and intellectual property (though these currently go to the university). I'm sure it means other things as well, such as transparency on funding.
That doesn't mean that you can record every aspect of one's job and hand it over to people on a witchhunt. The whole CRU email thingy itself shows why this is the case: it's easy to pick a few lines out of complex scientific dialog and distort them with a quick media blitz designed to portray someone as dishonest, or crooked, or biased, or incompetent, or silly. (As the saying goes, a lie gets half way around the world before the truth can get its shoes on.)
Moreover, doing so destroys the ability of people and organizations to think and act creatively. If this hasn't happened to you already, I am sure that one day you will be in a meeting, get-together, or other discussion where the team needs to figure out a difficult problem, and you'll see the entire conversation shut down by the negative attitude and comments of one person. That's why the first rule of any brainstorming session is to save critique until brainstorming is finished. It's also why the FOIA protects (under exemption 5) what the courts term "deliberative processes" so as to "prevent injury to the quality of agency decisions."
You're right: it probably is just scaremongering to get an economic advantage for someone. Well, maybe not all of it. The U.S. has certainly done its share of espionage tricks, including delivery of a spiked Boeing for China's version of Air Force One. Suspicions tends to mirror one's own tactics.
However, if you really don't trust Huawei, there's no way for them to prove it to you: the backdoor could be hidden in the software, in the compiler, in the CPU microcode, in the BIOS, in some axillary firmware, or in some subtle combination of all of these. You'd have to build it yourself, compile it yourself, install it yourself, update it yourself, and you still wouldn't have great confidence because these things can be really damn subtle. Classy of them to reveal the source, but it's a meaningless gesture.
If you've never driven on the left side of the road, go to England and rent a car. Drive all over London.
It's scary, because it's different.
Having done this (in Ireland), I have to chime in that driving on the left side of the road is the easy part. It gets "only a little scary" pretty quickly. What remains terrifying is that the older roads are so damn narrow, with no shoulder and insufficient room for oncoming traffic, especially the tour buses.
That and, when you come back to a right-side-of-the-road country, it's easy to slip up and drive on the left by accident.
It's still indicative of a general decline in personal responsibility.
It's indicative of the of legal systems not keeping up with technology, as well as the American trend toward hyper-legalization.
You don't agree to an EULA for every magazine you pick up, every service center you call, or every store you enter. With a few exceptions (such as an in-store contract you sign as part of a transaction), all of these activities (which are good pre-internet analogues to the web) are conducted within an existing societal/legal framework. For instance, a magazine owner does not need the publisher's permission to give his copy to someone else [but would need it to photocopy an article, per copyright law], [some] state laws prohibit recording phone conversations w/o consent of one or both parties, and other state laws determines if and how a shopkeeper may detain you on suspicion of shoplifting.
With a proper legal framework, it wouldn't be worth the effort to have EULA for the majority of transactions (including purchases, forum signups, paywalls, etc.), and that would be a good thing. Not because we want to discourage personal responsibility, but because the extra complexity is unnecessary to the functioning of society.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot say that someone else should die, without asking them, simply because **you** imagine you would want to in that situation. That would violate just about every single code of ethics imaginable.
Actually, one could argue it's supported by the moral codes of most religions, as they all tend to feature some form of reciprocity. Of course, this would be a simplistic argument since any one religion you look at will have other principals, philosophies, and fads affecting how this gets interpreted and applied.
Personally, while I think the Golden Rule has significant weaknesses as a moral guideline, I think it can be helpful in situations like this where you don't have the ability to communicate with the other person. Even if you feel uncomfortable answering the death question (as we all should), someone who is exercising power-of-attorney is going to have to use their own reactions to a judge/make guesses about the other person's thoughts and desires in how to deal with a specific situation.
Hmm.... let's see... fuse, rsync, openssh, git, command line tools and the hours/weeks of time needed to learn all of that VERSUS a pretty web interface that is accessible everywhere, has an app for your mobile, and is backed up automatically. Which one is the "self-proclaimed geek" solution and which is the ordinary people solution?
You don't have to like cloud (I certainly don't), but most folks are going to prefer it over roll-your-own-infrastucture.
If a government wants to prohibit abortion, they can just require that she give up her embryo or fetus for adoption when she terminates the pregnancy, with the state picking up the tab over and above the cost of an abortion.
This is a very naive view. Many would see an abortion at, say, 3 months into pregnancy as a much smaller "sin" than bringing the child to term and committing him/her to a state-run orphanage slum. Also, the cost per child per year would be HUGE (easily $30K) and when you multiply that by the sheer number of children (there's approximately 1 abortion for every 4 live births), you see that the economics just aren't feasible. Artificial wombs may change the debate somewhat, but I doubt pro-Choice advocates would see it as a serious solution.
And the USA is England colony. But now younger people in USA prefer to call themselves "Americans" rather than "British".
The situation is not analogous, as (1) Great Britain recognized the USA as an independent, sovereign nation starting in 1783, and (2) the USA does not claim sovereignty over the British homeland. By contrast, both the PRC and the ROC claim to be the one legitimate government for the whole of their two territories.
This is something for private industry to figure out.
Private industry R&D looks 5-10 years down the road. A great nation will look 20, 50, and even 100 years down the road.
Why are our tax dollars being wasted on stuff like this
Wasting? This stuff is peanuts for the federal budget, and it probably even saves money (e.g, allowing different missions to use a common communication infrastructure).
we have no mechanism to get men past the Moon for the next 20-30 years
We put man on the moon with less than a decade's worth of work using 60's technology. If we were motivated, we could put men on mars within a decade too.
All of which is beside the point... we're sticking unmanned infrastructure out there (in various orbits, at Lagrange points, on the Martian surface, etc.) and the amount of data we want to ship around is getting progressively larger and larger.
such as not being beholden to our #1 creditor, China
We can always print more dollars. The real worry with China, it seems to me, is that we gave them our manufacturing capacity and business know-how. Now their economic ascendency is putting a strain on world resources (e.g., see gas prices) and we have to fret over whether or not their hardware is spying on us. Credit isn't a big worry since we control our own currency (unlike Greece, for instance).
We don't need Internet connectivity near Saturn, we need to fix a deficit problem right here on Earth.
To fix it, you're going to have to find the political will to cut defense, cut entitlements, and raise taxes. Good luck.
What struck me about the headline was the loud hero worship of the almighty super special individual. No one, no matter how special, can change facts of nature. This hero worship also shows another huge hole in American thinking. We have a terrible tendency to pick out one "key" person for lionizing, when it actually took a large team to accomplish some feat.
Good call... I had a Randian once tell me that "only an individual can do something great/advance technology/bring about progress/whatever: groups of people can't". Since then, I've seen many examples of how this thinking is wrong. I think it's just that it's easiest to mentally grok the one man (Neil Armstrong, for instance) and ignore the whole (the army of engineers and analysts and so forth that put him on the moon).
Meant to include link to what Apple did with LLVM and OpenGL: http://llvm.org/pubs/2007-03-12-BossaLLVMIntro.html
There is no sane business case for taking a commercial compiler front end and a commercial compiler back end, filling it with extra bugs and shipping it.
Um, what about JIT'ing OpenGL shaders and writing efficient software fallbacks for them? Or what about IDE's (VisualStudio, Eclipse) where many awesome features rely on the editor having a rich API on top of the compiler? RMS put GCC on the wrong side of the future here... many products can be made better by leveraging a compiler API at runtime.
Can you put two and two together looking at this graph?
(Numbers and graph Courtesy of the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities).
The bad thing about the right's ideological radicalization over the past decade is that there is no such as thing as "non-partisan" anymore. Anyone who puts forth numbers, facts, arguments, etc, against them is automatically part of the liberal media conspiracy.
The example of the hour, of course, is the right's attack on Nate Silver. To be fair, Nate did support Obama in this election, but his analysis was based on raw number crunching, not wishful thinking (like these eight conservative pundits who predicted a Romney win), which is why he was able to correctly predict the outcome of all 50 states (assuming no FL surprises). Meanwhile, the Red States guys were predicting a 3.5% win for Mitt the day before election. (Not to mention their hilarious exit poll that favored Mitt 5.4% with a 1.44% margin of error!)
They just stripped away all statistical corrections that professional polling organizations normally use in order to get the result they want even when the underlying reality was completely different . Now that the cold light of day has shown them wrong, we'll see if an apology, methodology change, or indeed any indication of humility or self-growth is forthcoming, but I'm not holding my breath.
Unfortunately, most complex things (global warming, taxation policy, etc.) aren't resolved simply and quickly like this polling "controversy". Right-wing ideologues will continue to manufacture misinformation and attack anyone who disagrees with them, and because of that: truth is dead, in a sense. (This can apply to left-wing ideologues too, but it's right-wing ideologicalization that has been more prevalent over the past decade.)
Did I miss something? This seems to be a non-issue.
The 100ft restriction means that the observers cannot directly observe. How are ballot boxes locked/guarded/transported/counted? How are registration issues dealt with? How are disabled/non-English voters assisted? There's no point in having them if you don't let them do their job.
How can you spoof the caller ID anyway?
The land line you get from the teleco for your home can't be spoofed, but businesses usually get PRI service to hookup their own PBX to the phone company. Whoever runs that PBX can send whatever caller ID info they want (typically). This is useful when you want to include each employee's name in their outgoing caller ID, or if you have multiple firms using the same PBX. So it's not so much an ISDN hack as it is an ISDN feature.
In a residential setting, however, the general whole-house power factor corrector isn't helpful: most loads aren't the type that need tuning
That, and I've heard that residential customers don't have to pay the power company for reactive load (e.g., imaginary power), just resistive load (e.g., real power). Industrial customers have to pay for both, which is why they build those capacitor banks.
Not perfect, but they last and have ready supply of replacement ink, all the great colors... Just need pocket protector.
Awesome! I love the 0.5 mm and did not know they made a 0.38. Will have to give it a try. Do the color pens still have the dry-out-and-become-useless-quickly issue?
What reality are they denying? The reality that either we will take world-wide coordinated action against carbon-induced climate change or we will extinguish human civilization. That's pretty much the definition of a terrorist.
Nope. Terrorism is the use of mass murder, industrial sabotage, and threats of same to achieve political ends, usually calculated to promote fear in a target population. We can refine it further, distinguishing the term from "war", "assassin", "murder", "freedom fighter", "mass shooter", etc., and enjoy the rich contradictions and ambiguities we would undoubtedly discover.
What we can't do is stretch the term to apply to everything that we disagree with... at that point, you're just trying to manipulate people in the same dirty way that FOX and other pundits do.
Here's a different idea: tell the truth. Viz., "think tanks and marketing firms that concoct lies to discredit global warming ARE NOT engaged in terrorism, they are engaged in something MUCH WORSE". Maybe it's not as catchy, but it still has a little bit of a hook while remaining honest.
Even better--in my view of these matter--would be not to focus your attack on tearing down the opposition, but on building a positive case. That tends to "play" better to undecided audiences, and too much vitriol (even if deserved) makes you look like the unreasonable party. Even better if you can inject humor, like this famous cartoon did. There's no shortage of emphatic opinions on the internet; honest, insightful wit on the other hand...
I fail to see how this is informative; It's patently obvious that electricity and water doesn't mix, cloud or no cloud.
Comment #41832161, meet comment #41832323.
When it's wet, the clouds go down even where it's dry.
Denier == terrorist.
And um, yeah, potato==squirrel. Just because the GOP has been taken over by ideologically-crazed individuals is no excuse for the rest of to start doing it too.
Because having large tanks of diesel fuel dozens of stories above ground isn't a good solution either?
Can you imagine the headline? "Thunderstorm punctures diesel storage tank on hospital roof. Lightning ignites 2,000 gallons spilling down side of hospital"
And, to top of it off, the very same parade of internet know-it-alls would be asking "Why would anyone in their right mind place generators and tanks above ground where lightning would be an issue?"
It's a culture built on shameless plagiarism and copyright abuse.
Um, I think the usual explanation is that, in China, knowledge is seen as something that is received from an authority, and the goal of an educational exercise is to regurgitate that knowledge faithfully. Wheras, in the West, knowledge is a skill that is built by personal practice (like sports). Or something like that...
However, copyright abuse is not necessarily an outgrowth of this: it seems more like the logical consequence of everyone being able to forge a "currency".
Seriously, what the fuck? "Legal niceties" is another term for these rules are in place because we don't want to get fucked over again by someone we trusted. They're there for a reason.
I hate this mindset. Rules are there for a reason, yes, but what is that reason? Maybe it's an ironclad principal of human nature ("people with credit problems are easily bribed"); maybe it originates from a once-applicable idea that is now obsolete ("homosexuals are easily blackmailed"); maybe it originated from prudish mindsets or political agendas that never had any validity to begin with ("marijuana smokers are less trustworthy"); maybe it was meant to appease stakeholders whose concerns or opinions no longer hold sway ("art students are more likely to be communist sympathizers"); maybe you're more desperate than before ("sh*t we need a lot of custom code... isn't there some non-critical stuff that we can let non-cleared programmers work on?").
Rules are not so eternal as you seem to think... they are but one of many structural elements in complex human systems, and an organization that is poor at reevaluating and changing rules is doomed to ossification.
BTW, if you RTFA, you'd see that's he's specifically talking about people with AD(H)D, autism, OCD, and perhaps soft drug use. He's also talking about redesigning clearances and pushing back on overweighted HR/legal interests, not outright circumvention of existing rules. (And if he's seen the HR departments that I've seen, he knows they frequently block any meaningful evaluation of a candidate's technical proficiencies and prefer to judge people on their ability to smile, deliver a firm handshake, and make smalltalk with a stranger. Part of it is legal... can't ask that candidate to write a SQL statement like he or she will have to do every damn day on the job because we don't know for sure that it isn't some subtle proxy test to discriminate on race.)
Solution: Supply and demand
Not a very good solution if the supply is monopolized.
especially in mathematics
YES!! It seems like there is a secret cabal of mathematicians who try to make anything even partially math-related as dense as possible.
Take, for instance, Wikipedia's article on Grundy Numbers. It looks like there's some good technical stuff there, but what's lacking is a less technical walkthru for an educated general audience. Contrast with this page, which takes a little while to get there but is MUCH more accessible.
Maybe this is off-topic, but I (and many others) believe that publicly funded research should be freely available to the public.
Yes, obviously. That means data sets, methods, apparatus, experiment outcomes, results, conclusions, papers (which shouldn't be limited to paywalled journals I.M.O.), and intellectual property (though these currently go to the university). I'm sure it means other things as well, such as transparency on funding.
That doesn't mean that you can record every aspect of one's job and hand it over to people on a witchhunt. The whole CRU email thingy itself shows why this is the case: it's easy to pick a few lines out of complex scientific dialog and distort them with a quick media blitz designed to portray someone as dishonest, or crooked, or biased, or incompetent, or silly. (As the saying goes, a lie gets half way around the world before the truth can get its shoes on.)
Moreover, doing so destroys the ability of people and organizations to think and act creatively. If this hasn't happened to you already, I am sure that one day you will be in a meeting, get-together, or other discussion where the team needs to figure out a difficult problem, and you'll see the entire conversation shut down by the negative attitude and comments of one person. That's why the first rule of any brainstorming session is to save critique until brainstorming is finished. It's also why the FOIA protects (under exemption 5) what the courts term "deliberative processes" so as to "prevent injury to the quality of agency decisions."
You're right: it probably is just scaremongering to get an economic advantage for someone. Well, maybe not all of it. The U.S. has certainly done its share of espionage tricks, including delivery of a spiked Boeing for China's version of Air Force One. Suspicions tends to mirror one's own tactics.
However, if you really don't trust Huawei, there's no way for them to prove it to you: the backdoor could be hidden in the software, in the compiler, in the CPU microcode, in the BIOS, in some axillary firmware, or in some subtle combination of all of these. You'd have to build it yourself, compile it yourself, install it yourself, update it yourself, and you still wouldn't have great confidence because these things can be really damn subtle. Classy of them to reveal the source, but it's a meaningless gesture.
If you've never driven on the left side of the road, go to England and rent a car. Drive all over London.
It's scary, because it's different.
Having done this (in Ireland), I have to chime in that driving on the left side of the road is the easy part. It gets "only a little scary" pretty quickly. What remains terrifying is that the older roads are so damn narrow, with no shoulder and insufficient room for oncoming traffic, especially the tour buses.
That and, when you come back to a right-side-of-the-road country, it's easy to slip up and drive on the left by accident.
It's still indicative of a general decline in personal responsibility.
It's indicative of the of legal systems not keeping up with technology, as well as the American trend toward hyper-legalization.
You don't agree to an EULA for every magazine you pick up, every service center you call, or every store you enter. With a few exceptions (such as an in-store contract you sign as part of a transaction), all of these activities (which are good pre-internet analogues to the web) are conducted within an existing societal/legal framework. For instance, a magazine owner does not need the publisher's permission to give his copy to someone else [but would need it to photocopy an article, per copyright law], [some] state laws prohibit recording phone conversations w/o consent of one or both parties, and other state laws determines if and how a shopkeeper may detain you on suspicion of shoplifting.
With a proper legal framework, it wouldn't be worth the effort to have EULA for the majority of transactions (including purchases, forum signups, paywalls, etc.), and that would be a good thing. Not because we want to discourage personal responsibility, but because the extra complexity is unnecessary to the functioning of society.