Yeah I could increase my income by moving to the San Francisco office from the European office (doubling it, tops). However, the mortgage on my house is currently ~12% of my pre-tax income (2% fixed rate on 20 years)... there's no way I could find a house for a similar fraction of my salary 1h from the office. Most of my colleagues from the SF office drop 50% of their paycheck on accommodation outside the 1h commute belt. Once I throw in health services, pension, the cost of quality food, the cost of good education if I get kids, PTO... moving to SF is at very best status-quo and most likely a losing proposition.
There are several places in the US which are not San Francisco. In fact San Francisco comprises a minority of places in the US!
My main house is a 2400 sq.ft. historic Queen Anne on 1/3 acre in a small city, surrounded by small family farms, forests,[1] and lakes. Mortgage plus property taxes come to less than $1500 a month. My vacation home is a 1000 sq.ft. cabin in the mountains on 1 1/3 acres, and that mortgage + taxes is less than $800 a month.
Neither are mansions, but we have more rooms than we know what to do with.
My salary... compares well with those mentioned in the survey, shall we say.
[1] Possibly the occasional witch, but I'm not a big gingerbread fan anyway.
To whom is this "we" supposed to refer, and what is a "mainstream" operating system?
Even leaving aside the GNU/Linux-versus-Android debate above, and the fragmentation of both of those camps... Apple's various flavors of iOS / MacOS have around a billion combined users, and they're close enough that they could be considered an OS family like Windows. I regularly deal with a number of UNIX flavors and zOS. Some people treat the various zOS personalities (batch, TSO, CICS, IMS, CMS) as distinct OSes; certainly they have different APIs and UXes. IBM's i OS (the current descendant of OS/400) still has a significant presence too. FreeRTOS, uC/OS, and VxWorks are big in embedded computing.
Let me guess. There's only one true Scotsman - or two, in this case.
Sure. Particularly if, say, one kid's in college. Or the parents have student loans. Or there are medical expenses. And so on.
$100000 / year is really not that much money in the US today. Take off Federal and state income tax and deductions for FICA, 401(k) plans, health insurance, etc. The average monthly mortgage payment in the US is over $1000, and in some places much, much higher. Add to that home insurance, property taxes, and for recent buyers PMI. Figure a few hundred a month for a car payment (and if there are kids, for many families it's practically impossible to get by without two vehicles), and quite possibly several hundred a month for car insurance.
Now you could easily be down to under $1000 a week, and we haven't even considered occasional expenses like car repairs or equipment for school and other activities. Money for recurring necessities - food, clothing, utility bills - is already looking tight.
A little disposable income does not make you a 1%er
No, though depending on how you define it, it's not that hard to reach the 1% bracket in most parts of the US. Not long ago I looked up income distributions for both of the states where I maintain residences, and my wife and I make enough to put us in the 1% bracket (by household income) in both.
Now, we're both professionals in advanced positions in our respective lines of work, but our joint income is still at six orders of magnitude. We're not "rich" by any popular definition. (Yeah, I just said we have two houses, but one of the is really a cabin and the other is in an area with very low housing prices by industrialized-nation standards. As in "buy a house for less than the price of a car".) Our lifestyle is firmly middle-class. Our toilets aren't even gold-plated. But at least by the household-income-by-state measure we're 1%ers.
Well yeah, but it's still only a cleaning bucket. You don't expect it to last forever
The hell you say. There's no reason why a cleaning bucket shouldn't last for decades. I have a number of buckets that are over 20 years old.
It's not just the price of the bucket (or buckets, in the case of the cheap one). There's the opportunity cost when a bucket breaks. There's my time spent purchasing another one - and if I group purchases to amortize that (as pretty much everyone does), that's more opportunity cost. There's the psychological friction when the damn bucket breaks as I'm trying to clean something up. There's the lousy old bucket going to the landfill, as part of our wonderful "throwaway culture".
But then I don't buy Walmart crap, so I don't accrue any of those costs.
The lack of apps wouldn't bother me. I have an Android phone, but I've de-Googled it, so I don't have access to the Play Store. I have a few apps installed courtesy of F-Droid, but for the most part I don't have much need for them.
But I'd still go with Android over Windows because it's far more hackable. My rooted Android phone, with Terminal for a command line[1] and SuperSU, does pretty much whatever I get it in my head to tell it to do.
Is that a niche requirement? It sure as hell is, alongside my requirements of physical keyboard, removable battery,[2] SD card slot, proper physical micro-SIM that's easy to swap,[3] conventional USB charging point, earphone jack,...
And that's why I sympathize with you and the other WinPhone fans. I too prefer an unpopular sort of phone, even if it runs the dominant smartphone OS. And the market is not kind to unpopular phones.
I can seriously see myself in 10 years carrying a featurephone instead of a smartphone, because there simply won't be any smartphones I'm interested in using. If there were a featurephone with a querty keyboard I'd be tempted today.
[1] My phone also has a physical qwerty keyboard, which makes command-line use a lot more palatable. And that's another reason I wouldn't get a Windows phone - no physical qwerty keyboard models available, AFAIK.
[2] Haven't had to replace the battery yet, but there's a few times I've pulled it to reboot the phone when it was unresponsive. Why would I want to use a computer where you can't pull the goddamed plug? I'll never own a phone that doesn't have a removable battery if I can possibly avoid it.
[3] Dual SIMs would be nice but not a must-have for me.
This case is not even vaguely similar to the Swartz one. The comparison is spurious. Vivace either isn't a very careful thinker and writer (note he couldn't even get Swartz's name right, something that would have taken all of five seconds to look up), or is being deliberately provocative.
The prosecution of Swartz was outrageously heavy-handed and excessive, though the portion of blame for his death that can be assigned to Heymann, Ortiz et al. is endlessly debatable.
The present case is deplorable, but for the state of Georgia's asinine, money-grubbing attitude toward their legislative IP. This was a straightforward civil suit over copyright. The defendant obtained his original copies legally. Yes, he didn't face criminal charges; neither was he assassinated in a drone strike, or extraordinarily renditioned, or shipped blankets infected with smallpox, or made to suffer a voodoo curse, or any of a thousand other things.
In the fallout from Watergate, conservatives got into bed with fundamentalists, taking over both the Republican Party and the evangelical church. The previous wedge issue, segregation, was no longer viable, so to get Catholics onside, abortion was chosen as the new wedge issue.
Yes. Of course, the choice of abortion as the issue wasn't random. Obviously Roe v Wade (1973) helped it crystalize as a rallying point. But the US had also been working through a gradual expansion of the "franchise of personhood" for a couple of centuries, including abolitionism and anti-segregation, expanding the voting franchise to women and lowering the age limit, etc. Under that cultural regime, fetal personhood was an obvious candidate for the expansion of the personhood franchise - though of course it's not an obvious conclusion, since proponents and opponents remain fiercely divided.
The personhood franchise lets anti-abortion arguments piggyback on the long and powerful history of Civil Rights battles in the US. That distinguishes it from, say, "traditional marriage" (or other anti-LGBT planks).
Lauren Berlant's '94 article "America, 'Fat,' the Fetus" in boundary 2 is one version of this analysis, if anyone's interested.
Blackburn I understand - I wouldn't trust her to open a door for me, much less propose legislation. And her financial ties to telecom are well-known.
Flake, on the other hand, is a disappointment. I'm not broadly a fan, and I have mixed feelings about his fiscal policies (sure, earmarks are out of control, but if it fits on a bumper sticker it's too simplistic). But he's been a significant proponent of reasonable immigration reform in a number of cases, which is particularly impressive given his constituency.[1] He has a mixed but mildly favorable record on GLBT rights. He's in favor of normalizing relations with Cuba. He pushed a couple of minor restrictions into some of the privacy-invading aspects of the Patriot Act renewal.
In short, he's one of the Senators who doesn't simply toe the party line, and manages to piss pretty much everyone off on some matter or another.
In 2008 Esquire named him "a strong privacy-rights ally", according to the 'pedia. What a difference eight years makes, eh?
[1] Yes, he voted against the DREAM Act, but he had proposed a number of other immigrant-friendly reforms, and he said he might support DREAM if it came up again. Small potatoes, perhaps, but it counts for something.
Justin Amash voted against it, and 3rd Michigan has been Republican since 1993. Amash is in his fourth term, and the consensus prior to the election was that his seat was safe.
Amash is a pro-privacy centrist who's best known for posting explanations of all his votes on his Facebook page. While I certainly don't agree with him on everything (and I'm not in his district anyway), he's frequently been willing to break with the party on contentious points. He voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act and opposed renewing FISA.
A thousand times yes. Or they use the US order with hyphen separators, increasing the confusion. Or they mix formats in the same application. Just the other day I was dealing with a web page that used MM-DD-YY and DD-MM-YYYY for different fields.
Sometimes I think ISO 8601 should be required by law. Everywhere.
(Of course, I'd also like to see everyone required to use UTC for all non-specialty applications. What do I care if the sun reaches its zenith locally at 17:00 or 19:00 rather than 12:00?)
Yes. I suspect many of us have cried wolf about the compiler once or twice, only to be proven wrong.
I still remember the time I found an actual silent code-generation bug (for standard-conforming source) in the Hi C compiler, verified by the vendor. It was around 1990. I've looked at a lot of compiler output over the years, and caught the occasional noisy bug (where the compiler issues a diagnostic indicating it's detected an internal error); but I don't know that I've ever seen another genuine silent code generation error for conforming input.
I found a bug in a commercial C library implementation once, too (also verified by that vendor). That's out of dozens of implementations, and hundreds of versions of them, that I've used. Again, it may have happened more than once, but I'm not recalling any other instances at the moment.
I haven't counted errors in code I've written, but a reasonable estimate puts it somewhat greater than 1. These days, while I'm open to the possibility of hardware, OS, library, and compiler errors, I start with the assumption that It's My Fault.
they always ask you to power on notebooks, tablets and even cameras to verify that they're real
A fairly pointless measure. I travel with a "desktop replacement" laptop, which is quite large and has a bay for a removable drive, currently occupied by a DVD-R drive (remember those?). Someone with such a machine could easily remove that drive, stuff an Infernal Device into the bay, and put a blank bezel over the opening. The laptop would still operate normally.
Is that enough for a useful Infernal Device? If we pretend Wikipedia is accurate and my arithmetic is right, C-4 masses about 1g / cm^3. Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid had 283g of C-4 in his boot. A Samsung laptop internal DVD-R I just looked up has a volume of about 200 cm^3. So we have room for at least 0.71 Reids[1] of Infernal Device.
That might be enough to blow a hole in the fuselage. The rest of the laptop would help direct the force of the explosion (say, put it on the floor with the drive bay against the side of the plane, and brace it with feet), and aircraft aren't generally designed to withstand sudden high-pressure interior forces against a small area. At any rate, it would cause Consternation and Excitement among the passengers, thereby achieving at least some measure of the desired "terror".
And, I might note, many people in the security field were discussing this possibility at least as far back as when airport security screenings in some places first instituted the "turn the laptop on" rule. It was obvious then that it was still quite possible to hide a bomb even in a minimally-modified functioning laptop; it remains obvious now.
The fact that, as far as we know, no one's successfully deployed such an Infernal Device on a passenger flight points once again to Wojcik's Observation Regarding Terrorism: Most terrorists are terrible at their job. It apparently just isn't a field that attracts particularly competent people.
They wouldn't even have to be clever; there's a wealth of literature on possible and actual successful terrorist operations. But instead what we see are people attempting overly-complicated, expensive, risky operations with relatively low payoff - and generally failing through technical error, poor planning and preparation, or poor operational security.
On the other hand, they've provided justification for a steady stream of boondoggles and profiteering, not to mention general inconvenience and annoyance. Alas (for them), these are not the foes of Decadent Western Society but its very bedrock.
[1] I have just decided this is the unit of Infernal Device infernality.
Ah. There's always some ignorant or bull-headed prescriptivist available to spread rubbish in any discussion on English usage. Thanks to you and the idiots who upvoted you for providing that mandatory function.
These guys are not criminal masterminds, nor are they particularly crafty or intelligent. Something this simple wouldn't stop all of them, but it would at least flag some of them.
Indeed. What we have seen so far is a run of shockingly low-quality terrorists, and we should applaud Tillerson's efforts to get us a better class of them.
Some combination of incompetence and mendacity. I'm betting on more of the latter. This is May's pet we're talking about; I can't see her having a Home Secretary who isn't looking for every opportunity to snoop into everyone's business.
Being unaware of the existence of SAS is like being unaware of the existence of Oracle, or Microsoft.
Similar in kind, certainly. I don't know if it's comparable in degree.
SAS Institute is of the same vintage as Microsoft and Oracle, one of the surviving software firms founded in the 1970s. But it's an order of magnitude smaller than those two by revenue or employees. Unlike those two it's privately held, so it doesn't often show up in the financial news. its products are much more specialized, so it doesn't often show up in the general press, and less often in the industry press, and the average practitioner is less likely to have encountered them.
Micro Focus is the same age as SAS, and while it has lower gross revenue it has a much wider product base. But plenty of people in the industry aren't immediately familiar with MF, even if they recognize some of our brands, like SUSE and Novell. Lots of people simply don't have that kind of widespread knowledge about their industry, outside the area they work in.
I dare say I'm ignorant of some software firms of similar size, simply because I've never encountered them (or have forgotten if I have).
Yep, but the idea you can recommend a particular configuration by a simple percentage is just silly.
Damn straight. Anyone with sense can see that you need a complex percentage. Otherwise you have no idea how much of your imaginary software should be proprietary.
My 4th grade English teacher used to say, "A bad workman blames his tools."
Did your English teacher also explain the concept of the cliché?
This particularly tiresome one, of dubious provenance (wikiquote sites numerous variations from a host of sources), is surely mentioned at least a few times in the comments for any thread about deficiencies in a product. It seems terribly unlikely that anyone is reading it here for the first time.
It's a splendid example of sophomoric thinking. Yes. poor workers often blame tools. So do good ones, with reason. It's as uncompelling a maxim as I've heard.
Or to put it another way: There are better ways to determine someone's understanding of wheels than asking them to make one.
If I were interviewing a candidate and wanted, for some reason, some sense of that person's understanding of hash functions, I'd hope for more than "just use a library", but I also wouldn't be looking for a Introduction to Algorithms exposition on them. gweihir's original post comes pretty close to the sweet spot: it shows an understanding of the problem domain, some sense of approaches that have proven useful for particular situations, and a degree of experience. I could ask for expansion if I wanted it.
I don't understand the Google hagiographers, personally. Yes, they have a good R&D department: they manage both solid primary research and a steady rate of applying it to their various businesses and projects. But a lot of it is overrated in the general and industry press.
Splinter is very good work, for example. The GoogLeNet architecture, particularly the concept of Inception layers, is quite good (though already arguably surpassed by competing approaches to enhancing ConvNets). But the essential concepts of MapReduce should be obvious to any competent CS undergrad. The original PageRank was just "hey, here's a proxy for site quality": it's more (basic) economics than CS. And that's true of a lot of what comes out of Google: perfectly good, but not some sort of astounding new idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I could increase my income by moving to the San Francisco office from the European office (doubling it, tops). However, the mortgage on my house is currently ~12% of my pre-tax income (2% fixed rate on 20 years)... there's no way I could find a house for a similar fraction of my salary 1h from the office. Most of my colleagues from the SF office drop 50% of their paycheck on accommodation outside the 1h commute belt. Once I throw in health services, pension, the cost of quality food, the cost of good education if I get kids, PTO... moving to SF is at very best status-quo and most likely a losing proposition.
There are several places in the US which are not San Francisco. In fact San Francisco comprises a minority of places in the US!
My main house is a 2400 sq.ft. historic Queen Anne on 1/3 acre in a small city, surrounded by small family farms, forests,[1] and lakes. Mortgage plus property taxes come to less than $1500 a month. My vacation home is a 1000 sq.ft. cabin in the mountains on 1 1/3 acres, and that mortgage + taxes is less than $800 a month.
Neither are mansions, but we have more rooms than we know what to do with.
My salary ... compares well with those mentioned in the survey, shall we say.
[1] Possibly the occasional witch, but I'm not a big gingerbread fan anyway.
We only have two mainstream operating systems
To whom is this "we" supposed to refer, and what is a "mainstream" operating system?
Even leaving aside the GNU/Linux-versus-Android debate above, and the fragmentation of both of those camps... Apple's various flavors of iOS / MacOS have around a billion combined users, and they're close enough that they could be considered an OS family like Windows. I regularly deal with a number of UNIX flavors and zOS. Some people treat the various zOS personalities (batch, TSO, CICS, IMS, CMS) as distinct OSes; certainly they have different APIs and UXes. IBM's i OS (the current descendant of OS/400) still has a significant presence too. FreeRTOS, uC/OS, and VxWorks are big in embedded computing.
Let me guess. There's only one true Scotsman - or two, in this case.
I think 100% of the universe exists.
You existists may have the upper hand now, but history will vindicate nonexistencism.
Imaginary creatures unite against ontological oppression! We're not here! Get used to it!
Sure. Particularly if, say, one kid's in college. Or the parents have student loans. Or there are medical expenses. And so on.
$100000 / year is really not that much money in the US today. Take off Federal and state income tax and deductions for FICA, 401(k) plans, health insurance, etc. The average monthly mortgage payment in the US is over $1000, and in some places much, much higher. Add to that home insurance, property taxes, and for recent buyers PMI. Figure a few hundred a month for a car payment (and if there are kids, for many families it's practically impossible to get by without two vehicles), and quite possibly several hundred a month for car insurance.
Now you could easily be down to under $1000 a week, and we haven't even considered occasional expenses like car repairs or equipment for school and other activities. Money for recurring necessities - food, clothing, utility bills - is already looking tight.
A little disposable income does not make you a 1%er
No, though depending on how you define it, it's not that hard to reach the 1% bracket in most parts of the US. Not long ago I looked up income distributions for both of the states where I maintain residences, and my wife and I make enough to put us in the 1% bracket (by household income) in both.
Now, we're both professionals in advanced positions in our respective lines of work, but our joint income is still at six orders of magnitude. We're not "rich" by any popular definition. (Yeah, I just said we have two houses, but one of the is really a cabin and the other is in an area with very low housing prices by industrialized-nation standards. As in "buy a house for less than the price of a car".) Our lifestyle is firmly middle-class. Our toilets aren't even gold-plated. But at least by the household-income-by-state measure we're 1%ers.
Well yeah, but it's still only a cleaning bucket. You don't expect it to last forever
The hell you say. There's no reason why a cleaning bucket shouldn't last for decades. I have a number of buckets that are over 20 years old.
It's not just the price of the bucket (or buckets, in the case of the cheap one). There's the opportunity cost when a bucket breaks. There's my time spent purchasing another one - and if I group purchases to amortize that (as pretty much everyone does), that's more opportunity cost. There's the psychological friction when the damn bucket breaks as I'm trying to clean something up. There's the lousy old bucket going to the landfill, as part of our wonderful "throwaway culture".
But then I don't buy Walmart crap, so I don't accrue any of those costs.
The lack of apps wouldn't bother me. I have an Android phone, but I've de-Googled it, so I don't have access to the Play Store. I have a few apps installed courtesy of F-Droid, but for the most part I don't have much need for them.
But I'd still go with Android over Windows because it's far more hackable. My rooted Android phone, with Terminal for a command line[1] and SuperSU, does pretty much whatever I get it in my head to tell it to do.
Is that a niche requirement? It sure as hell is, alongside my requirements of physical keyboard, removable battery,[2] SD card slot, proper physical micro-SIM that's easy to swap,[3] conventional USB charging point, earphone jack, ...
And that's why I sympathize with you and the other WinPhone fans. I too prefer an unpopular sort of phone, even if it runs the dominant smartphone OS. And the market is not kind to unpopular phones.
I can seriously see myself in 10 years carrying a featurephone instead of a smartphone, because there simply won't be any smartphones I'm interested in using. If there were a featurephone with a querty keyboard I'd be tempted today.
[1] My phone also has a physical qwerty keyboard, which makes command-line use a lot more palatable. And that's another reason I wouldn't get a Windows phone - no physical qwerty keyboard models available, AFAIK.
[2] Haven't had to replace the battery yet, but there's a few times I've pulled it to reboot the phone when it was unresponsive. Why would I want to use a computer where you can't pull the goddamed plug? I'll never own a phone that doesn't have a removable battery if I can possibly avoid it.
[3] Dual SIMs would be nice but not a must-have for me.
This case is not even vaguely similar to the Swartz one. The comparison is spurious. Vivace either isn't a very careful thinker and writer (note he couldn't even get Swartz's name right, something that would have taken all of five seconds to look up), or is being deliberately provocative.
The prosecution of Swartz was outrageously heavy-handed and excessive, though the portion of blame for his death that can be assigned to Heymann, Ortiz et al. is endlessly debatable.
The present case is deplorable, but for the state of Georgia's asinine, money-grubbing attitude toward their legislative IP. This was a straightforward civil suit over copyright. The defendant obtained his original copies legally. Yes, he didn't face criminal charges; neither was he assassinated in a drone strike, or extraordinarily renditioned, or shipped blankets infected with smallpox, or made to suffer a voodoo curse, or any of a thousand other things.
In the fallout from Watergate, conservatives got into bed with fundamentalists, taking over both the Republican Party and the evangelical church. The previous wedge issue, segregation, was no longer viable, so to get Catholics onside, abortion was chosen as the new wedge issue.
Yes. Of course, the choice of abortion as the issue wasn't random. Obviously Roe v Wade (1973) helped it crystalize as a rallying point. But the US had also been working through a gradual expansion of the "franchise of personhood" for a couple of centuries, including abolitionism and anti-segregation, expanding the voting franchise to women and lowering the age limit, etc. Under that cultural regime, fetal personhood was an obvious candidate for the expansion of the personhood franchise - though of course it's not an obvious conclusion, since proponents and opponents remain fiercely divided.
The personhood franchise lets anti-abortion arguments piggyback on the long and powerful history of Civil Rights battles in the US. That distinguishes it from, say, "traditional marriage" (or other anti-LGBT planks).
Lauren Berlant's '94 article "America, 'Fat,' the Fetus" in boundary 2 is one version of this analysis, if anyone's interested.
Blackburn I understand - I wouldn't trust her to open a door for me, much less propose legislation. And her financial ties to telecom are well-known.
Flake, on the other hand, is a disappointment. I'm not broadly a fan, and I have mixed feelings about his fiscal policies (sure, earmarks are out of control, but if it fits on a bumper sticker it's too simplistic). But he's been a significant proponent of reasonable immigration reform in a number of cases, which is particularly impressive given his constituency.[1] He has a mixed but mildly favorable record on GLBT rights. He's in favor of normalizing relations with Cuba. He pushed a couple of minor restrictions into some of the privacy-invading aspects of the Patriot Act renewal.
In short, he's one of the Senators who doesn't simply toe the party line, and manages to piss pretty much everyone off on some matter or another.
In 2008 Esquire named him "a strong privacy-rights ally", according to the 'pedia. What a difference eight years makes, eh?
[1] Yes, he voted against the DREAM Act, but he had proposed a number of other immigrant-friendly reforms, and he said he might support DREAM if it came up again. Small potatoes, perhaps, but it counts for something.
And they were those in "swing" districts.
Patently false. Try a little research, eh?
Justin Amash voted against it, and 3rd Michigan has been Republican since 1993. Amash is in his fourth term, and the consensus prior to the election was that his seat was safe.
Amash is a pro-privacy centrist who's best known for posting explanations of all his votes on his Facebook page. While I certainly don't agree with him on everything (and I'm not in his district anyway), he's frequently been willing to break with the party on contentious points. He voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act and opposed renewing FISA.
A thousand times yes. Or they use the US order with hyphen separators, increasing the confusion. Or they mix formats in the same application. Just the other day I was dealing with a web page that used MM-DD-YY and DD-MM-YYYY for different fields.
Sometimes I think ISO 8601 should be required by law. Everywhere.
(Of course, I'd also like to see everyone required to use UTC for all non-specialty applications. What do I care if the sun reaches its zenith locally at 17:00 or 19:00 rather than 12:00?)
Yes. I suspect many of us have cried wolf about the compiler once or twice, only to be proven wrong.
I still remember the time I found an actual silent code-generation bug (for standard-conforming source) in the Hi C compiler, verified by the vendor. It was around 1990. I've looked at a lot of compiler output over the years, and caught the occasional noisy bug (where the compiler issues a diagnostic indicating it's detected an internal error); but I don't know that I've ever seen another genuine silent code generation error for conforming input.
I found a bug in a commercial C library implementation once, too (also verified by that vendor). That's out of dozens of implementations, and hundreds of versions of them, that I've used. Again, it may have happened more than once, but I'm not recalling any other instances at the moment.
I haven't counted errors in code I've written, but a reasonable estimate puts it somewhat greater than 1. These days, while I'm open to the possibility of hardware, OS, library, and compiler errors, I start with the assumption that It's My Fault.
The whole point of air travel is that it operates in three dimensions. Obviously what we want are spherical runways.
... is the one I work in. Because all software developers are identical, and therefore my preferences are everyone's preferences.
Software developers aren't a fungible resource? With thinking like that, you'll never be CEO of a major corporation.
they always ask you to power on notebooks, tablets and even cameras to verify that they're real
A fairly pointless measure. I travel with a "desktop replacement" laptop, which is quite large and has a bay for a removable drive, currently occupied by a DVD-R drive (remember those?). Someone with such a machine could easily remove that drive, stuff an Infernal Device into the bay, and put a blank bezel over the opening. The laptop would still operate normally.
Is that enough for a useful Infernal Device? If we pretend Wikipedia is accurate and my arithmetic is right, C-4 masses about 1g / cm^3. Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid had 283g of C-4 in his boot. A Samsung laptop internal DVD-R I just looked up has a volume of about 200 cm^3. So we have room for at least 0.71 Reids[1] of Infernal Device.
That might be enough to blow a hole in the fuselage. The rest of the laptop would help direct the force of the explosion (say, put it on the floor with the drive bay against the side of the plane, and brace it with feet), and aircraft aren't generally designed to withstand sudden high-pressure interior forces against a small area. At any rate, it would cause Consternation and Excitement among the passengers, thereby achieving at least some measure of the desired "terror".
And, I might note, many people in the security field were discussing this possibility at least as far back as when airport security screenings in some places first instituted the "turn the laptop on" rule. It was obvious then that it was still quite possible to hide a bomb even in a minimally-modified functioning laptop; it remains obvious now.
The fact that, as far as we know, no one's successfully deployed such an Infernal Device on a passenger flight points once again to Wojcik's Observation Regarding Terrorism: Most terrorists are terrible at their job. It apparently just isn't a field that attracts particularly competent people.
They wouldn't even have to be clever; there's a wealth of literature on possible and actual successful terrorist operations. But instead what we see are people attempting overly-complicated, expensive, risky operations with relatively low payoff - and generally failing through technical error, poor planning and preparation, or poor operational security.
On the other hand, they've provided justification for a steady stream of boondoggles and profiteering, not to mention general inconvenience and annoyance. Alas (for them), these are not the foes of Decadent Western Society but its very bedrock.
[1] I have just decided this is the unit of Infernal Device infernality.
Ah. There's always some ignorant or bull-headed prescriptivist available to spread rubbish in any discussion on English usage. Thanks to you and the idiots who upvoted you for providing that mandatory function.
Onion or cake layers?
What do you have against brick?
These guys are not criminal masterminds, nor are they particularly crafty or intelligent. Something this simple wouldn't stop all of them, but it would at least flag some of them.
Indeed. What we have seen so far is a run of shockingly low-quality terrorists, and we should applaud Tillerson's efforts to get us a better class of them.
I admire billionaires. I seek to be rich like they are. Why wouldn't you? Do you like being a poor chump?
Yes, there's a valid dichotomy. My four-year-old granddaughter constructs more-nuanced arguments than that.
Do you like being a poor thinker?
Why the focus on the communication technology?
Some combination of incompetence and mendacity. I'm betting on more of the latter. This is May's pet we're talking about; I can't see her having a Home Secretary who isn't looking for every opportunity to snoop into everyone's business.
Being unaware of the existence of SAS is like being unaware of the existence of Oracle, or Microsoft.
Similar in kind, certainly. I don't know if it's comparable in degree.
SAS Institute is of the same vintage as Microsoft and Oracle, one of the surviving software firms founded in the 1970s. But it's an order of magnitude smaller than those two by revenue or employees. Unlike those two it's privately held, so it doesn't often show up in the financial news. its products are much more specialized, so it doesn't often show up in the general press, and less often in the industry press, and the average practitioner is less likely to have encountered them.
Micro Focus is the same age as SAS, and while it has lower gross revenue it has a much wider product base. But plenty of people in the industry aren't immediately familiar with MF, even if they recognize some of our brands, like SUSE and Novell. Lots of people simply don't have that kind of widespread knowledge about their industry, outside the area they work in.
I dare say I'm ignorant of some software firms of similar size, simply because I've never encountered them (or have forgotten if I have).
Yep, but the idea you can recommend a particular configuration by a simple percentage is just silly.
Damn straight. Anyone with sense can see that you need a complex percentage. Otherwise you have no idea how much of your imaginary software should be proprietary.
My 4th grade English teacher used to say, "A bad workman blames his tools."
Did your English teacher also explain the concept of the cliché?
This particularly tiresome one, of dubious provenance (wikiquote sites numerous variations from a host of sources), is surely mentioned at least a few times in the comments for any thread about deficiencies in a product. It seems terribly unlikely that anyone is reading it here for the first time.
It's a splendid example of sophomoric thinking. Yes. poor workers often blame tools. So do good ones, with reason. It's as uncompelling a maxim as I've heard.
Or to put it another way: There are better ways to determine someone's understanding of wheels than asking them to make one.
If I were interviewing a candidate and wanted, for some reason, some sense of that person's understanding of hash functions, I'd hope for more than "just use a library", but I also wouldn't be looking for a Introduction to Algorithms exposition on them. gweihir's original post comes pretty close to the sweet spot: it shows an understanding of the problem domain, some sense of approaches that have proven useful for particular situations, and a degree of experience. I could ask for expansion if I wanted it.
I don't understand the Google hagiographers, personally. Yes, they have a good R&D department: they manage both solid primary research and a steady rate of applying it to their various businesses and projects. But a lot of it is overrated in the general and industry press.
Splinter is very good work, for example. The GoogLeNet architecture, particularly the concept of Inception layers, is quite good (though already arguably surpassed by competing approaches to enhancing ConvNets). But the essential concepts of MapReduce should be obvious to any competent CS undergrad. The original PageRank was just "hey, here's a proxy for site quality": it's more (basic) economics than CS. And that's true of a lot of what comes out of Google: perfectly good, but not some sort of astounding new idea.