Looking at the partial Hailstone tree as a network, it's interesting that the tree can fork only at every other node, even for nodes that aren't on the "power of 2" limb. There's no case in which forks occur in neighboring nodes.
That would be a useful property to have in practical situations such as the generation of clock trees in digital integrated circuits. It would be interesting to see if similar rules could be applied to CAD systems.
Why not be civil and help him move past the idiot stage of his life?
...because there's no guarantee that he'll have only one idiot stage of his life. Suppose he reverts to his old ways, and the future mark discovers (belatedly) that the GP had information that could have warned him, but made it hard to find out of some sense of fair play (or whatever we're calling it). The future mark, I suspect, would not be amused by this revisionist history.
(The fact that one never knows what someone will do in the future is the reason wise public institutions do not name their buildings after living persons, preferring to wait a few years after the Honorable So-and-so has passed just to make sure that no embarrassing dirt turns up.)
I would also note that the GP did not say the guy was a kid when the swindle was done, so we're not talking about juvenile developmental issues. We're all adults here.
Of course, people are free to do as they wish with their own web sites, but IMO it is best if the holders of historical information (archivists, in the broadest sense) do not make these kinds of value judgements. I would rather see historical researchers (historians in the broadest sense, including people like hiring managers, credit researchers, potential spouses, and the like) have all information in the historical record, so that they can make the best possible value judgements for their particular situation. If, in the intervening years, they guy has a record that makes him some sort of Father Theresa (or something), and the position for which the guy is being investigated has a low risk for fraud, the investigator can conclude that he's fine. If the researcher personally believes, based on the same information that convinced the GP, that the guy has turned over a new leaf, he is free to discount the old scam, as the GP did. But if the guy is applying for a job at a gaming (i.e., gambling) company, I think the hiring manager would be unhappy with the GP's decision if a second scam were to occur and a detailed criminal investigation turned up the previous fraud.
After all, actions have consequences, and all of us have to live with the consequences of the decisions we've made in the past -- for better or worse.
to hell with being in what appears to be a shitty building otherwise. Though I'm unfamiliar with Hong Kong so maybe this is the good part of town.
Hong Kong residential apartment buildings are often very old, and not in the best of condition. Land is very expensive, and most new construction is devoted to commercial buildings.
Not to worry, I am quite familiar with logic, and I find science quite convincing. Your argument, however...
Of course many studies have done C-sections on mice. I didn't suggest a study with mice out of chance, even though they are not the ideal subject: The heads of newborn mice are not their widest part at birth. I've looked for the kind of research on the evolutionary effect of C-sections you suggest exists, and have not found it -- if you find a citation I would be pleased to learn of it. Without such evidence, however, please recognize that your response is just as speculative as my original question. Being "sure" such evidence exists was the same state I was in, when I started looking. It turns out to be much more difficult to find than you'd think.
Interestingly, I was actually afraid my original comment would generate a big negative response from Intelligent Design advocates, and was pleased, if somewhat surprised, to find the response coming from other quarters. Who knew?
I actually got into this line of inquiry from a discussion in an Ethics class some years ago. Many of our most difficult problems today have arisen due to the popularity of relatively simple yet important inventions made years ago to solve specific problems. For example, plastic drink bottles, now filling our landfills and oceans. These were a great advance when first introduced; they were lighter and more inexpensive to distribute than the glass bottles they replaced, they didn't break, etc. However, they were not reusable, as the glass bottles they replaced were, and we now have this massive trash problem. Question: Is the plastic trash problem someone's "fault"? If the inventor of the plastic drink bottle knew of the problem he was creating, should he still have invented it? Should he have realized that by replacing millions of reusable glass drink bottles by billions of disposable plastic bottles, he was creating a trash nightmare, and also developed recycling technology before putting the plastic bottle on the market? Said another way, should an inventor trade the short-term, foreseeable benefit of his invention against the long-term, probably-much-more-difficult-to-foresee long-term problems he may be creating? Or is in inevitable that we be presented with problems before solving them?
Most -- almost all -- inventions are not commercial successes. Given that fact, isn't it too much to ask that an inventor (or, more broadly, a developer) be responsible to consider the effect of his invention if it is mass-produced on a global scale? Should the inventor be held totally blameless for the problems resulting from his invention's success? Just how much responsibility does an inventor have?
I thought this was a pretty interesting line of inquiry and, when someone mentioned the C-section question in the discussion, it seemed particularly intriguing -- dramatic short-term benefit, possible long-term problem. I had no idea what a rat-hole I would be led down . . . ^_^
You're missing my point: I'm not arguing why Cesarians are performed. The reasons are irrelevant. The point is, while they were not possible during the evolutionary history of the species, they are now possible, and are being performed in a significant fraction of births. Over time, this releases the natural selection pressure requiring the child's head to be smaller than the woman's birth canal at birth. The question remains, what effect will that have? Will the average woman's pelvis narrow, to be more similar to that of a man? Will the average baby's head size increase? Will the average gestation period increase, since the limitation on head size is removed?
Let me put the question in testable form: Suppose one were to take two breeding pairs of some fast-reproducing mammal (e.g., a lab mouse, since the genetics are known) and perform Cesarians on, say, the next 20 generations of live births of one pair, while leaving the next 20 generations of the other pair as a control. (Yes, that's a lot of mice. I didn't say it would be an inexpensive test.) (a) Perform detailed anatomical measurements of the latest generation of both groups. Are there any statistically significant differences between them? (b) Allow both groups to generate the 21st generation, and have both groups give birth naturally. Is there a statistically significant difference in the rates of successful live birth between the two groups?
As to my "story", I don't have any particular interest in birth methods; I'm just interested in unintended consequences. Another example: If you told the early car developers (Benz, Ford, etc.) back in the late 19th and early 20th Century that pollution from their inventions would be detected in Antarctica, that their inventions would lead to wars over sources of oil, and that their inventions would lead to massive social upheavals, like the flight of residents out of U.S. cities and into the suburbs (just to name three unintended consequences), what would they have said? Would they have believed you? What would they have done differently with this knowledge? What should they have done differently? Discuss.
The "C" suffix stood for "continuous memory", meaning that programs and data did not disappear when the calculator was shut off. Like what every calculator does today. Before then, however...
My first HP was the HP-25, a glorious invention when it came out in 1975. It had 49 programming steps, and the program had to be re-entered from the keyboard, line-by-line, every time the calculator was turned off. My first real programming success came when a high school math teacher, trying to show how hard it was to determine whether a given number was prime or composite, asked my class to determine whether the number 300,000,007 was prime or not. (Thirty-five years later, I have not forgotten that number, and don't think I ever will.)
I was able to program a test for primality into the HP-25. It was brute-force, of course -- checked for an integer result when the argument was divided by two, and then every odd number from three up to the square root of the argument -- but it worked, and I was able to show that 300,000,007 was prime. The teacher was impressed, both with the calculator and with the fact that such a large number that she picked out of the air at random turned out to be prime. (I don't think she new or cared about programming.)
I love that calculator. The HP-25C came out the following year, and the HP-25 became an orphan, but I still have it -- along with an HP-48G+ purchased about 12 years ago. (Finding a new calculator with RPN turned out to be harder than I thought.)
But that's the point -- if you don't store your home address in your GPS, you don't have to worry about theft at all. (I don't.) Without the tie to your house and the rest of your life, theft of your GPS is a trivial loss. With the tie, however, one needs to consider the implications more seriously.
Risk is (likelihood of loss) times (value of loss). Without storing your address, this is the multiplication of two small numbers and the result (we agree) is negligible. With your address stored, this is a small number times a potentially much larger number, and one has to perform the calculation to see if the result is still negligible.
Why would a thief who stole my GPS care where I live? Does possession of my GPS make my house any more valuable then any of the tens of thousands of other random houses in the city?
*sigh* Kids these days...
A partial list of the dangers:
1. Since we assume you're away from home when the theft took place, the thief has increased confidence that if he goes directly to your home, you won't be there. (This is especially true if the theft were surreptitious, like something a pickpocket would do, and if the thief follows you for a few minutes and sees you enter a theater, concert venue, classroom, train station, or other place at which you likely will be occupied for some time. Or if your GPS were stolen from, say, your car in an airport parking lot.) He can ring your doorbell and, if no one answers, break in and rob your home at his leisure. If someone answers, he can ask for you, because he knows you're not home; when told you're not home, he can then say he'll come back later, and leave. Either way, he's safe. Being certain that at least one of the residents of the home is away is a powerful inducement to a thief.
2. Especially if you're female, he can go to your home, break in, and wait for you (or your kids) to return. He knows what you look like -- just the fantasy he's been dreaming of -- and now he knows where you live (and how to get there). With your GPS, he doesn't have to follow you all day to find out where you live, and risk being noticed. The rest of this scenario you can fill in for yourself.
3. If you've stored your home address, you probably haven't deleted any of the recent addresses you've visited, either. Looked for directions to any place (swingers club, girl/boyfriend's house, job interview with a competitor of your current employer, etc.) you don't want anyone (e.g., your estranged spouse's private investigator) to know about? With so many street addresses directly relevant to your life stored in one place, identity theft -- or stalking, or blackmail -- could hardly be easier.
Need I go on? I'm not a criminal by profession, so I'm afraid I can't provide a complete list of the dangers. If you still want to store your home address in your GPS, do so in peace, with my blessing, but don't live under the misconception that there's no risk involved in doing so.
Maternal deaths were typically due to 1) hemorrhage and 2) infection - neither one due much to genetics.
... but hemorrhages and infections are more likely in difficult births, which can be caused by a narrow birth canal.
Due to the size of the human head relative to the birth canal, human births are significantly more difficult than those of other apes: There are in fact theories that complex human societies developed because of the advantage of having experienced midwives nearby to assist women in labor, thereby giving an increased probability of success to births in human groups, as opposed to single mothers giving birth alone (the "Grandmother Hypothesis").
Obviously there are many reasons for having a Cesarian section, and sure, having a genetically narrow birth canal is pretty far down the list. The point was not to ascribe evolutionary fitness to a wide birth canal, necessarily. The point was rather the reverse -- that the common use of Cesarian sections changes the evolutionary pressure on the female anatomy, in a very explicit and direct way: Before C-sections became common, it was (quite literally) physically impossible for a woman with a genetically narrow birth canal to pass that trait onto her daughters. Now, she can.
The natural selection pressure against narrow birth canals has been released. The original question was, "In future generations, how much effect will this have on the anatomy of the average woman?". None of us knows, of course, but the phrase "anything not expressly forbidden is guaranteed to occur," does seem relevant.
You have your home's location stored in your GPS? So that if it were ever stolen, the thief would not only know where you live, but be directed to your door?!?
One thing that I wonder about is how medical technology will affect the human genome. For example, in earlier centuries, women with narrow birth canals, and their babies, frequently died in childbirth. Now, the lives of such women (and their babies) are saved via Cesarian section, and the selection pressure against genetic variations (mutations) that produce narrow birth canals has been reduced. In future generations, how much effect will this have on the anatomy of the average woman? After ten, or fifty, or five hundred generations, might we be in a situation in which childbirth without Cesarian section is no longer possible?
Actually, I'm concerned about both, since I consider them to be the same issue. A thoughtful person minimizes the amount of his personal data he makes public not only for the reasons he knows about, but also because he can reasonably expect that making his data public may be to his detriment in ways of which he is unaware: He knows that he is not omniscient, and that technology advances over time, so that things impractical or uneconomic today may be both trivial and profitable (if only to a criminal) tomorrow.
One reason not to share data is that you cannot be certain just what data is being shared (even with a packet-sniffer in one hand and a stack of communication and file standards in the other) from a closed-source device. Note that this risk is not limited to the Internet; for example, color printers leave a tracking code on their prints, of which most users are unaware.
Of course, I'm not arguing not to put anything on the Internet, or not to print anything. The point is that, like every other activity, these activities have advantages and disadvantages, and one should first be sure that the benefit one receives is worth the risk one runs.
The lack of interest in personal privacy is probably the 21st Century's social movement that most surprised me. If someone had told me in 1991 that in 20 years people would want to publish their personal photographs to the world, and announce to everyone literate when they would be out of town, I would have said they were nuts: They're obviously risky behaviors in which no thinking person would engage.
It's not very often that I'm in such agreement with an AC, but also having lived through the time, well, yeah. What he said. Indeed, imagine what the US might have done with the Bay of Pigs invasion (which took place the week after Gagarin's flight) if it had been, say, John Glenn -- a Marine Corps officer -- on that orbital flight, instead of Gagarin. Intriguing.
Slashdot Mirror
Definition of snarled.
The rest of the world has lower regulations, often 400 W.
I have no problems.
...except with the FCC, which limits amateur radio transmissions to a maximum of 1500 watts.
And after the dev cycle is complete, production no longer requires intellect.
I know a lot of industrial and manufacturing engineers who would disagree with you.
There's a gesture I often make to MS products, but it's been done so often by so many people that the prior art makes it unpatentable.
Looking at the partial Hailstone tree as a network, it's interesting that the tree can fork only at every other node, even for nodes that aren't on the "power of 2" limb. There's no case in which forks occur in neighboring nodes.
That would be a useful property to have in practical situations such as the generation of clock trees in digital integrated circuits. It would be interesting to see if similar rules could be applied to CAD systems.
Why not be civil and help him move past the idiot stage of his life?
...because there's no guarantee that he'll have only one idiot stage of his life. Suppose he reverts to his old ways, and the future mark discovers (belatedly) that the GP had information that could have warned him, but made it hard to find out of some sense of fair play (or whatever we're calling it). The future mark, I suspect, would not be amused by this revisionist history.
(The fact that one never knows what someone will do in the future is the reason wise public institutions do not name their buildings after living persons, preferring to wait a few years after the Honorable So-and-so has passed just to make sure that no embarrassing dirt turns up.)
I would also note that the GP did not say the guy was a kid when the swindle was done, so we're not talking about juvenile developmental issues. We're all adults here.
Of course, people are free to do as they wish with their own web sites, but IMO it is best if the holders of historical information (archivists, in the broadest sense) do not make these kinds of value judgements. I would rather see historical researchers (historians in the broadest sense, including people like hiring managers, credit researchers, potential spouses, and the like) have all information in the historical record, so that they can make the best possible value judgements for their particular situation. If, in the intervening years, they guy has a record that makes him some sort of Father Theresa (or something), and the position for which the guy is being investigated has a low risk for fraud, the investigator can conclude that he's fine. If the researcher personally believes, based on the same information that convinced the GP, that the guy has turned over a new leaf, he is free to discount the old scam, as the GP did. But if the guy is applying for a job at a gaming (i.e., gambling) company, I think the hiring manager would be unhappy with the GP's decision if a second scam were to occur and a detailed criminal investigation turned up the previous fraud.
After all, actions have consequences, and all of us have to live with the consequences of the decisions we've made in the past -- for better or worse.
If it can tell if someone is awake or asleep it should have wider application in workplace uniforms.
But when remembered about the software a couple days later, he set about to track his computer down.
Are there no editors left in Canada? Who writes this stuff?
to hell with being in what appears to be a shitty building otherwise. Though I'm unfamiliar with Hong Kong so maybe this is the good part of town.
Hong Kong residential apartment buildings are often very old, and not in the best of condition. Land is very expensive, and most new construction is devoted to commercial buildings.
Not to worry, I am quite familiar with logic, and I find science quite convincing. Your argument, however ...
Of course many studies have done C-sections on mice. I didn't suggest a study with mice out of chance, even though they are not the ideal subject: The heads of newborn mice are not their widest part at birth. I've looked for the kind of research on the evolutionary effect of C-sections you suggest exists, and have not found it -- if you find a citation I would be pleased to learn of it. Without such evidence, however, please recognize that your response is just as speculative as my original question. Being "sure" such evidence exists was the same state I was in, when I started looking. It turns out to be much more difficult to find than you'd think.
Interestingly, I was actually afraid my original comment would generate a big negative response from Intelligent Design advocates, and was pleased, if somewhat surprised, to find the response coming from other quarters. Who knew?
I actually got into this line of inquiry from a discussion in an Ethics class some years ago. Many of our most difficult problems today have arisen due to the popularity of relatively simple yet important inventions made years ago to solve specific problems. For example, plastic drink bottles, now filling our landfills and oceans. These were a great advance when first introduced; they were lighter and more inexpensive to distribute than the glass bottles they replaced, they didn't break, etc. However, they were not reusable, as the glass bottles they replaced were, and we now have this massive trash problem. Question: Is the plastic trash problem someone's "fault"? If the inventor of the plastic drink bottle knew of the problem he was creating, should he still have invented it? Should he have realized that by replacing millions of reusable glass drink bottles by billions of disposable plastic bottles, he was creating a trash nightmare, and also developed recycling technology before putting the plastic bottle on the market? Said another way, should an inventor trade the short-term, foreseeable benefit of his invention against the long-term, probably-much-more-difficult-to-foresee long-term problems he may be creating? Or is in inevitable that we be presented with problems before solving them?
Most -- almost all -- inventions are not commercial successes. Given that fact, isn't it too much to ask that an inventor (or, more broadly, a developer) be responsible to consider the effect of his invention if it is mass-produced on a global scale? Should the inventor be held totally blameless for the problems resulting from his invention's success? Just how much responsibility does an inventor have?
I thought this was a pretty interesting line of inquiry and, when someone mentioned the C-section question in the discussion, it seemed particularly intriguing -- dramatic short-term benefit, possible long-term problem. I had no idea what a rat-hole I would be led down . . . ^_^
You're missing my point: I'm not arguing why Cesarians are performed. The reasons are irrelevant. The point is, while they were not possible during the evolutionary history of the species, they are now possible, and are being performed in a significant fraction of births. Over time, this releases the natural selection pressure requiring the child's head to be smaller than the woman's birth canal at birth. The question remains, what effect will that have? Will the average woman's pelvis narrow, to be more similar to that of a man? Will the average baby's head size increase? Will the average gestation period increase, since the limitation on head size is removed?
Let me put the question in testable form: Suppose one were to take two breeding pairs of some fast-reproducing mammal (e.g., a lab mouse, since the genetics are known) and perform Cesarians on, say, the next 20 generations of live births of one pair, while leaving the next 20 generations of the other pair as a control. (Yes, that's a lot of mice. I didn't say it would be an inexpensive test.) (a) Perform detailed anatomical measurements of the latest generation of both groups. Are there any statistically significant differences between them? (b) Allow both groups to generate the 21st generation, and have both groups give birth naturally. Is there a statistically significant difference in the rates of successful live birth between the two groups?
As to my "story", I don't have any particular interest in birth methods; I'm just interested in unintended consequences. Another example: If you told the early car developers (Benz, Ford, etc.) back in the late 19th and early 20th Century that pollution from their inventions would be detected in Antarctica, that their inventions would lead to wars over sources of oil, and that their inventions would lead to massive social upheavals, like the flight of residents out of U.S. cities and into the suburbs (just to name three unintended consequences), what would they have said? Would they have believed you? What would they have done differently with this knowledge? What should they have done differently? Discuss.
The "C" suffix stood for "continuous memory", meaning that programs and data did not disappear when the calculator was shut off. Like what every calculator does today. Before then, however ...
My first HP was the HP-25, a glorious invention when it came out in 1975. It had 49 programming steps, and the program had to be re-entered from the keyboard, line-by-line, every time the calculator was turned off. My first real programming success came when a high school math teacher, trying to show how hard it was to determine whether a given number was prime or composite, asked my class to determine whether the number 300,000,007 was prime or not. (Thirty-five years later, I have not forgotten that number, and don't think I ever will.)
I was able to program a test for primality into the HP-25. It was brute-force, of course -- checked for an integer result when the argument was divided by two, and then every odd number from three up to the square root of the argument -- but it worked, and I was able to show that 300,000,007 was prime. The teacher was impressed, both with the calculator and with the fact that such a large number that she picked out of the air at random turned out to be prime. (I don't think she new or cared about programming.)
I love that calculator. The HP-25C came out the following year, and the HP-25 became an orphan, but I still have it -- along with an HP-48G+ purchased about 12 years ago. (Finding a new calculator with RPN turned out to be harder than I thought.)
... theft is even further from my thoughts.
But that's the point -- if you don't store your home address in your GPS, you don't have to worry about theft at all. (I don't.) Without the tie to your house and the rest of your life, theft of your GPS is a trivial loss. With the tie, however, one needs to consider the implications more seriously.
Risk is (likelihood of loss) times (value of loss). Without storing your address, this is the multiplication of two small numbers and the result (we agree) is negligible. With your address stored, this is a small number times a potentially much larger number, and one has to perform the calculation to see if the result is still negligible.
Why would a thief who stole my GPS care where I live? Does possession of my GPS make my house any more valuable then any of the tens of thousands of other random houses in the city?
*sigh* Kids these days ...
A partial list of the dangers:
1. Since we assume you're away from home when the theft took place, the thief has increased confidence that if he goes directly to your home, you won't be there. (This is especially true if the theft were surreptitious, like something a pickpocket would do, and if the thief follows you for a few minutes and sees you enter a theater, concert venue, classroom, train station, or other place at which you likely will be occupied for some time. Or if your GPS were stolen from, say, your car in an airport parking lot.) He can ring your doorbell and, if no one answers, break in and rob your home at his leisure. If someone answers, he can ask for you, because he knows you're not home; when told you're not home, he can then say he'll come back later, and leave. Either way, he's safe. Being certain that at least one of the residents of the home is away is a powerful inducement to a thief.
2. Especially if you're female, he can go to your home, break in, and wait for you (or your kids) to return. He knows what you look like -- just the fantasy he's been dreaming of -- and now he knows where you live (and how to get there). With your GPS, he doesn't have to follow you all day to find out where you live, and risk being noticed. The rest of this scenario you can fill in for yourself.
3. If you've stored your home address, you probably haven't deleted any of the recent addresses you've visited, either. Looked for directions to any place (swingers club, girl/boyfriend's house, job interview with a competitor of your current employer, etc.) you don't want anyone (e.g., your estranged spouse's private investigator) to know about? With so many street addresses directly relevant to your life stored in one place, identity theft -- or stalking, or blackmail -- could hardly be easier.
Need I go on? I'm not a criminal by profession, so I'm afraid I can't provide a complete list of the dangers. If you still want to store your home address in your GPS, do so in peace, with my blessing, but don't live under the misconception that there's no risk involved in doing so.
Maternal deaths were typically due to 1) hemorrhage and 2) infection - neither one due much to genetics.
... but hemorrhages and infections are more likely in difficult births, which can be caused by a narrow birth canal.
Due to the size of the human head relative to the birth canal, human births are significantly more difficult than those of other apes: There are in fact theories that complex human societies developed because of the advantage of having experienced midwives nearby to assist women in labor, thereby giving an increased probability of success to births in human groups, as opposed to single mothers giving birth alone (the "Grandmother Hypothesis").
Obviously there are many reasons for having a Cesarian section, and sure, having a genetically narrow birth canal is pretty far down the list. The point was not to ascribe evolutionary fitness to a wide birth canal, necessarily. The point was rather the reverse -- that the common use of Cesarian sections changes the evolutionary pressure on the female anatomy, in a very explicit and direct way: Before C-sections became common, it was (quite literally) physically impossible for a woman with a genetically narrow birth canal to pass that trait onto her daughters. Now, she can.
The natural selection pressure against narrow birth canals has been released. The original question was, "In future generations, how much effect will this have on the anatomy of the average woman?". None of us knows, of course, but the phrase "anything not expressly forbidden is guaranteed to occur," does seem relevant.
You have your home's location stored in your GPS? So that if it were ever stolen, the thief would not only know where you live, but be directed to your door?!?
I continue to be amazed.
One thing that I wonder about is how medical technology will affect the human genome. For example, in earlier centuries, women with narrow birth canals, and their babies, frequently died in childbirth. Now, the lives of such women (and their babies) are saved via Cesarian section, and the selection pressure against genetic variations (mutations) that produce narrow birth canals has been reduced. In future generations, how much effect will this have on the anatomy of the average woman? After ten, or fifty, or five hundred generations, might we be in a situation in which childbirth without Cesarian section is no longer possible?
Death by GPS was the first example that came to mind.
...the skill-to-pay ratio for engineering is so high that you must be really dedicated to stay with it.
FTFY.
Law is another lousy choice (non-top 15) right now. But that's a whole 'nother can of worms....
Quite literally.
I've always said that I'd support putting someone on Mars -- if I could choose who it would be. (At the moment, I have several candidates in mind.)
Actually, I'm concerned about both, since I consider them to be the same issue. A thoughtful person minimizes the amount of his personal data he makes public not only for the reasons he knows about, but also because he can reasonably expect that making his data public may be to his detriment in ways of which he is unaware: He knows that he is not omniscient, and that technology advances over time, so that things impractical or uneconomic today may be both trivial and profitable (if only to a criminal) tomorrow.
One reason not to share data is that you cannot be certain just what data is being shared (even with a packet-sniffer in one hand and a stack of communication and file standards in the other) from a closed-source device. Note that this risk is not limited to the Internet; for example, color printers leave a tracking code on their prints, of which most users are unaware.
Of course, I'm not arguing not to put anything on the Internet, or not to print anything. The point is that, like every other activity, these activities have advantages and disadvantages, and one should first be sure that the benefit one receives is worth the risk one runs.
The lack of interest in personal privacy is probably the 21st Century's social movement that most surprised me. If someone had told me in 1991 that in 20 years people would want to publish their personal photographs to the world, and announce to everyone literate when they would be out of town, I would have said they were nuts: They're obviously risky behaviors in which no thinking person would engage.
How wrong I was.
It's not very often that I'm in such agreement with an AC, but also having lived through the time, well, yeah. What he said. Indeed, imagine what the US might have done with the Bay of Pigs invasion (which took place the week after Gagarin's flight) if it had been, say, John Glenn -- a Marine Corps officer -- on that orbital flight, instead of Gagarin. Intriguing.