They enlisted Obama to state (incorrectly, it turns out) that the UK would be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal
They enlisted the IMF to state (incorrectly, it turns out) that a Leave vote would result in a recession by 2017
Serious consideration is being given to a second referendum to overturn the first, which would never have happened if the result had been the other way — even if the EU continued its rapid evolution into a superstate
What does it say about the NSA, if lone security researcher finds and activates a kill switch before they do?
So they can snoop on and store an entire nation's web traffic and email, but they can't analyse a small piece of malware, notice it queries some domain name, and then discover (in a test environment) that the existence of the domain stops the malware from propagating? And then activate the domain to give the world a few hours respite?
Sure, now there's a new version without a kill switch, but the brief respite will have given millions of people the opportunity to secure their machines. It seems a pretty pathetic state of affairs when the NSA pours vast sums of money into nefarious snooping, yet can't keep pace with a single security researcher when it comes to *actually* helping keeping the nation secure.
Same goes for other countries' intelligence agencies, e.g. GCHQ.
It's more complicated than that. The judgement accepts that the so-called "royal prerogative" (which really means government power) includes making and unmaking treaties. But it argues that since the EU treaties (uniquely) can override UK legislation, they must be immune to the royal prerogative (else the royal prerogative can override UK legislation, which they think is a contradiction).
Personally I think that argument is fallacious (e.g. the government has repeatedly voted in the Council of Ministers to accept new EU members, which has overridden UK legislation too). But the judges are trying to choose which constitutional principles to uphold in the face of the European Communities Act 1972 which radically altered the UK constitution without specifying how to resolve such contradictions. So I think it's hard to predict whether the Supreme Court will overturn the judgement on appeal — but in any case, we shouldn't attack the judges, because the legislative situation is contradictory enough that there's no very clean way to rule on this.
For the uninformed, the EU is undemocratic: no legislation can be passed without the say-so of unelected bureaucrats (the European Commission) which voters cannot feasibly remove from power (because the system for appointing them is highly indirect and opaque). Much opposition to the EU stems from this.
UK democracy isn't perfect (e.g. voting isn't proportional, and the unelected House of Lords can delay legislation) but voters can and do change the government and change policy direction through the ballot box.
2. Therefore a "character" in Java, C#, Javascript sometimes only holds half a Unicode character
3. Even a whole unicode character may be only part of a grapheme cluster, which means that taking arbitrary substrings may not result in readable text.
The article is based on three huge false premises:
1. That languages become simpler as they're spread by adult learners. This is false because the simplifications (say, loss of Old English case endings) trigger new complexities (in this instance, new word order rules).
2. That tonal languages are especially hard for learners. Actually, many features of English are equally hard if your language doesn't have them: consonant clusters, tenses, stress timing etc.
3. That Mandarin cannot dominate because Chinese characters are too hard. But Pinyin romanization (i.e. Latin letters) is simple, easy, and known by native speakers and learners alike. so it could be that Chinese written in Pinyin comes to dominate outside China.
UK = England + Scotland + Wales + Northern Ireland. The central government only controls education policy for England, not for the rest of the UK.
State-funded schools in Scotland and Wales were never permitted to teach creationism. I don't know the situation in Northern Ireland but it may be different.
A data centre in Hong Kong would have been a turnaround for Google, since it very publicly pulled out of the country after attacks on Gmail which it blamed on the Chinese government in 2010.
This is incorrect -- Google pulled out of Mainland China, not Hong Kong. The author seems unaware, but Hong Kong has different laws from the Mainland, including data privacy and free speech. In fact, since Google pulled out of mainland China, www.google.cn actually shows a redirect link to www.google.com.hk.
It was equally ineffective in Wales until they (a) required all shops to charge, and (b) required them to donate the proceeds to charity. Now it's normal to carry reusable bags and few people seem to object.
My father remembers sending food parcels in the 1970s from the UK to relatives in mainland China. Now, starvation is almost unknown there. Yet, China was a more equal society in the 1970s -- virtually everyone was extremely poor.
A central reason that Mosley won the original privacy case in the High Court in London is that the judge rejected News Group Newspapers' claim that it was a "Nazi" scenario because they were speaking German (see paragraph 72 of the judgment). The judge found that there was no reason to think the orgy was Nazi-themed, and therefore there was no public interest to justify the privacy violation.
should be more widely understood than it is. Even English-only programmers need to know enough to avoid security holes.
You can't normally be sure you're writing safe software unless you know a little about Unicode. In this sense, it's like structured programming, and unlike most other things on the original list.
Here's a big hint for Tim: on iOS, you can't write a custom keyboard. On Android you can. This is a really big deal in Hong Kong, because iOS has no support for Cantonese-based Chinese input. The best you can do is a kludgy app where you have to copy and paste the result (see https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canton-guang-dong-pin-yin/id385519764?mt=8).
Therefore, the Cantonese user is hamstrung by Apple's lack of support for the Cantonese-speaking market, together with their locked-down approach which prevents third party developers from filling the hole.
Compare this with the situation on Android, where there are at least five Cantonese-based keyboard input methods, together with Cantonese voice recognition. Why is it surprising if Hong Kongers find iOS seriously deficient?
This seems to be an interesting example of a court case being fought for the publicity it generates. It's surely cheaper to file this suit than to advertise his film in conventional ways. However unlike cases such as SCO v. IBM, the litigant probably believes he would win the case if it came to trial. The newsworthiness of the suit lies in the audacity of the defendants in aggressively asserting the copyright in the first place.
The essence of Tor is that your message passes through multiple nodes (say 3), none of which knows your message's origin and destination (and indeed content). But this breaks down if all the nodes are controlled by the same sysadmin.
Surely if we end up with a high proportion of nodes on Amazon, then some communications will be routed entirely between Amazon nodes. Then this breaks the anonymity model, allowing the secret policeman to log (or subpoena) the user's traffic.
On a not unrelated note, what's the general view of the current state of Perl 6? I can look at http://planet6.perl.org/ for the view of those close to the project, but what's the word on the street?
I think "word on the street" is a really important metric as to how well a project is doing. Trends are a major determiner of which product potential new users will find. Rather like bank runs: it can be irrational to trigger one but nevertheless rational to follow one.
"You're an idiot. You signed something under threat of prison / arrest without bothering to consult a lawyer. No amount of mention of poverty, trust, or even just plain intimidation should have made you do such a thing without first consulting a lawyer."
Hmmm, threatening to go to the police if someone doesn't sign a contract. I'm pretty sure that would constitute blackmail in the UK under the Theft Act (making aan unwarranted demand with menaces), which is a serious offence with a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment; see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/21. Anyone know what the law on blackmail is in his jurisdiction?
You'll find Python very easy to learn if you're already experienced in Perl. By experienced, I mean you understand the kind of Perlish programming patterns involving lists, hashes and complex data structures, and you understand object orientation in Perl, and you have a good feel about when to code something yourself versus when to start looking for a third-party module. All these things are very similar in the two languages, and different from other popular non-scripting languages such as Java. Indeed, if you understand that a Perl object is really just a hashref "bless"-ed with a class name, then you'll have a deeper understanding than most Python programmers of Python objects (which are essentially the same thing underneath, but with more "classy" syntax when you're defining them).
One major difference is reference types: Whereas Perl has both @a = (1, 2, 3) and $a = [1, 2, 3], Python effectively only has the latter. Similarly, Python does not have something like %a = (one => 'un', two => 'deux'), only $a = {one => 'un', two => 'deux'} . Also, strings and numbers don't magically behave like each other: you need to do str(123) or int("456") or float("7.89"). Since you appear to be in the USA, differences in Unicode handling probably won't matter too much.
Don't worry about the syntactical superficialities regarding semicolons, dollar sigils, whitespace etc; if you can already program productively in some language then it won't take you long to adjust. Get a good book on Python and spend a few days working through it solidly from cover to cover, or at least until you feel you don't need to continue. That way you'll crack all those minor surface-level differences in one maximally productive chunk of time.
Finally, don't waste time worrying about whether Python or Perl (or any other language) is "better" or "worse" overall -- too many lifetimes have been wasted that way:-)
Is this just the case where members can sometimes cast a vote both for and against something, effectively cancelling their vote?
This happens all the time in the UK Parliament - the MP just walks through the Aye lobby and then the Nay lobby (or the other way round), then the two votes cancel each other. It's a long-winded way of abstaining. Given how fast MEPs have to vote, maybe they do it when they've made a voting mistake. In which case, you could certainly question the value of such rapid voting, but it wouldn't be an example of fraud.
I work on Welsh-English machine translation, and have looked at doing this in the browser with a bookmarklet so that comments in Welsh can be read by non-Welsh speakers. The trouble is that people tend to use non-standard spelling etc in informal postings such as facebook, whereas the majority of parallel text available to train a statistical machine translation model tends to be formal language (government documents, press releases from business, etc).
Possibly this could be solved with two stages of translation, i.e. (Lang1 with informal spelling -> Lang1 with standard spelling -> Lang2). If this mapping is relatively straightforward (e.g. common spelling substitutions such as 'ough' -> 'u' or 'uff') then a statistical model might work quite well, if you could first split words into syllables with some rule-based algorithm.
Just a totally trivial, obvious thought about the application of statistical machine translation (sorry if I've pissed on some patent troll's livelihood, heh)
Firefox is an open-source platform which is independent of any significant content provider. Chrome, like IE, is a project controlled by one company with a vested interest in directing users to particular content. I think we should find it concerning if Chrome is succeeding at the expense of Firefox.
Now I understand that many people really, really like Google, for important reasons such as their track record of being pro-standards and pro-freedom. But we should always support or oppose individual actions on their own grounds -- wherever possible, we should avoid depending on long-term trust of particular individuals or organisations, because there is no guarantee that we will still support their actions at some point in the future. We believe in political systems which have checks and balances. The same principle should apply here. A situation where the dominant search provider is also the dominant browser provider is one where we miss out on important checks and balances.
The situation is different from the phone market, where Android is squeezing a variety of closed platforms, thereby giving manufacturers and individuals more choice. In this case, there was already a viable and independent open platform, Firefox, and Google's offering is preventing it from becoming dominant.
These people could be paying £30 to let a salesman into his house to try and fleece them for all he can.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- my girlfriend got a £10 Groupon with some con artist photographers called Fusion Studios. They insisted on a "deposit" of £75 which took weeks of legal threats to get back ("the manager's in America this week and nobody else can sign cheques", etc). Some of her friends ended up paying £300 due to the high pressure sales tactics.
The moral: don't buy Groupons unless you're happy to experience con artists from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to keep pro-Brexit Facebook ads in perspective:
This level of gaming the system clearly dwarfs a few Facebook ads
What does it say about the NSA, if lone security researcher finds and activates a kill switch before they do?
So they can snoop on and store an entire nation's web traffic and email, but they can't analyse a small piece of malware, notice it queries some domain name, and then discover (in a test environment) that the existence of the domain stops the malware from propagating? And then activate the domain to give the world a few hours respite?
Sure, now there's a new version without a kill switch, but the brief respite will have given millions of people the opportunity to secure their machines. It seems a pretty pathetic state of affairs when the NSA pours vast sums of money into nefarious snooping, yet can't keep pace with a single security researcher when it comes to *actually* helping keeping the nation secure.
Same goes for other countries' intelligence agencies, e.g. GCHQ.
It's more complicated than that. The judgement accepts that the so-called "royal prerogative" (which really means government power) includes making and unmaking treaties. But it argues that since the EU treaties (uniquely) can override UK legislation, they must be immune to the royal prerogative (else the royal prerogative can override UK legislation, which they think is a contradiction).
Personally I think that argument is fallacious (e.g. the government has repeatedly voted in the Council of Ministers to accept new EU members, which has overridden UK legislation too). But the judges are trying to choose which constitutional principles to uphold in the face of the European Communities Act 1972 which radically altered the UK constitution without specifying how to resolve such contradictions. So I think it's hard to predict whether the Supreme Court will overturn the judgement on appeal — but in any case, we shouldn't attack the judges, because the legislative situation is contradictory enough that there's no very clean way to rule on this.
For the uninformed, the EU is undemocratic: no legislation can be passed without the say-so of unelected bureaucrats (the European Commission) which voters cannot feasibly remove from power (because the system for appointing them is highly indirect and opaque). Much opposition to the EU stems from this. UK democracy isn't perfect (e.g. voting isn't proportional, and the unelected House of Lords can delay legislation) but voters can and do change the government and change policy direction through the ballot box.
There were already 113K characters in Unicode version 7.0. Which is more than 2^16 characters, so remember:
The article is based on three huge false premises: 1. That languages become simpler as they're spread by adult learners. This is false because the simplifications (say, loss of Old English case endings) trigger new complexities (in this instance, new word order rules). 2. That tonal languages are especially hard for learners. Actually, many features of English are equally hard if your language doesn't have them: consonant clusters, tenses, stress timing etc. 3. That Mandarin cannot dominate because Chinese characters are too hard. But Pinyin romanization (i.e. Latin letters) is simple, easy, and known by native speakers and learners alike. so it could be that Chinese written in Pinyin comes to dominate outside China.
UK = England + Scotland + Wales + Northern Ireland. The central government only controls education policy for England, not for the rest of the UK. State-funded schools in Scotland and Wales were never permitted to teach creationism. I don't know the situation in Northern Ireland but it may be different.
This is incorrect -- Google pulled out of Mainland China, not Hong Kong. The author seems unaware, but Hong Kong has different laws from the Mainland, including data privacy and free speech. In fact, since Google pulled out of mainland China, www.google.cn actually shows a redirect link to www.google.com.hk .
It was equally ineffective in Wales until they (a) required all shops to charge, and (b) required them to donate the proceeds to charity. Now it's normal to carry reusable bags and few people seem to object.
India, he "I" in BRICS, has a high proportion of vegetarians. This is true in the prosperous areas as well as the poorest.
My father remembers sending food parcels in the 1970s from the UK to relatives in mainland China. Now, starvation is almost unknown there. Yet, China was a more equal society in the 1970s -- virtually everyone was extremely poor.
A central reason that Mosley won the original privacy case in the High Court in London is that the judge rejected News Group Newspapers' claim that it was a "Nazi" scenario because they were speaking German (see paragraph 72 of the judgment). The judge found that there was no reason to think the orgy was Nazi-themed, and therefore there was no public interest to justify the privacy violation.
should be more widely understood than it is. Even English-only programmers need to know enough to avoid security holes. You can't normally be sure you're writing safe software unless you know a little about Unicode. In this sense, it's like structured programming, and unlike most other things on the original list.
Here's a big hint for Tim: on iOS, you can't write a custom keyboard. On Android you can. This is a really big deal in Hong Kong, because iOS has no support for Cantonese-based Chinese input. The best you can do is a kludgy app where you have to copy and paste the result (see https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canton-guang-dong-pin-yin/id385519764?mt=8).
Therefore, the Cantonese user is hamstrung by Apple's lack of support for the Cantonese-speaking market, together with their locked-down approach which prevents third party developers from filling the hole.
Compare this with the situation on Android, where there are at least five Cantonese-based keyboard input methods, together with Cantonese voice recognition. Why is it surprising if Hong Kongers find iOS seriously deficient?
Sorry, I tried to hold it in but it just burst out
This seems to be an interesting example of a court case being fought for the publicity it generates. It's surely cheaper to file this suit than to advertise his film in conventional ways. However unlike cases such as SCO v. IBM, the litigant probably believes he would win the case if it came to trial. The newsworthiness of the suit lies in the audacity of the defendants in aggressively asserting the copyright in the first place.
The essence of Tor is that your message passes through multiple nodes (say 3), none of which knows your message's origin and destination (and indeed content). But this breaks down if all the nodes are controlled by the same sysadmin.
Surely if we end up with a high proportion of nodes on Amazon, then some communications will be routed entirely between Amazon nodes. Then this breaks the anonymity model, allowing the secret policeman to log (or subpoena) the user's traffic.
On a not unrelated note, what's the general view of the current state of Perl 6? I can look at http://planet6.perl.org/ for the view of those close to the project, but what's the word on the street? I think "word on the street" is a really important metric as to how well a project is doing. Trends are a major determiner of which product potential new users will find. Rather like bank runs: it can be irrational to trigger one but nevertheless rational to follow one.
"You're an idiot. You signed something under threat of prison / arrest without bothering to consult a lawyer. No amount of mention of poverty, trust, or even just plain intimidation should have made you do such a thing without first consulting a lawyer." Hmmm, threatening to go to the police if someone doesn't sign a contract. I'm pretty sure that would constitute blackmail in the UK under the Theft Act (making aan unwarranted demand with menaces), which is a serious offence with a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment; see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/21. Anyone know what the law on blackmail is in his jurisdiction?
1. Spark a hunting spree that has no hope of eradicating them.
2. Apply selective pressure to breed unhuntable pythons.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Or am I missing something?
You'll find Python very easy to learn if you're already experienced in Perl. By experienced, I mean you understand the kind of Perlish programming patterns involving lists, hashes and complex data structures, and you understand object orientation in Perl, and you have a good feel about when to code something yourself versus when to start looking for a third-party module. All these things are very similar in the two languages, and different from other popular non-scripting languages such as Java. Indeed, if you understand that a Perl object is really just a hashref "bless"-ed with a class name, then you'll have a deeper understanding than most Python programmers of Python objects (which are essentially the same thing underneath, but with more "classy" syntax when you're defining them).
One major difference is reference types: Whereas Perl has both @a = (1, 2, 3) and $a = [1, 2, 3], Python effectively only has the latter. Similarly, Python does not have something like %a = (one => 'un', two => 'deux'), only $a = {one => 'un', two => 'deux'} . Also, strings and numbers don't magically behave like each other: you need to do str(123) or int("456") or float("7.89"). Since you appear to be in the USA, differences in Unicode handling probably won't matter too much.
Don't worry about the syntactical superficialities regarding semicolons, dollar sigils, whitespace etc; if you can already program productively in some language then it won't take you long to adjust. Get a good book on Python and spend a few days working through it solidly from cover to cover, or at least until you feel you don't need to continue. That way you'll crack all those minor surface-level differences in one maximally productive chunk of time.
Finally, don't waste time worrying about whether Python or Perl (or any other language) is "better" or "worse" overall -- too many lifetimes have been wasted that way :-)
Is this just the case where members can sometimes cast a vote both for and against something, effectively cancelling their vote?
This happens all the time in the UK Parliament - the MP just walks through the Aye lobby and then the Nay lobby (or the other way round), then the two votes cancel each other. It's a long-winded way of abstaining. Given how fast MEPs have to vote, maybe they do it when they've made a voting mistake. In which case, you could certainly question the value of such rapid voting, but it wouldn't be an example of fraud.
I work on Welsh-English machine translation, and have looked at doing this in the browser with a bookmarklet so that comments in Welsh can be read by non-Welsh speakers. The trouble is that people tend to use non-standard spelling etc in informal postings such as facebook, whereas the majority of parallel text available to train a statistical machine translation model tends to be formal language (government documents, press releases from business, etc).
Possibly this could be solved with two stages of translation, i.e. (Lang1 with informal spelling -> Lang1 with standard spelling -> Lang2). If this mapping is relatively straightforward (e.g. common spelling substitutions such as 'ough' -> 'u' or 'uff') then a statistical model might work quite well, if you could first split words into syllables with some rule-based algorithm.
Just a totally trivial, obvious thought about the application of statistical machine translation (sorry if I've pissed on some patent troll's livelihood, heh)
Firefox is an open-source platform which is independent of any significant content provider. Chrome, like IE, is a project controlled by one company with a vested interest in directing users to particular content. I think we should find it concerning if Chrome is succeeding at the expense of Firefox.
Now I understand that many people really, really like Google, for important reasons such as their track record of being pro-standards and pro-freedom. But we should always support or oppose individual actions on their own grounds -- wherever possible, we should avoid depending on long-term trust of particular individuals or organisations, because there is no guarantee that we will still support their actions at some point in the future. We believe in political systems which have checks and balances. The same principle should apply here. A situation where the dominant search provider is also the dominant browser provider is one where we miss out on important checks and balances.
The situation is different from the phone market, where Android is squeezing a variety of closed platforms, thereby giving manufacturers and individuals more choice. In this case, there was already a viable and independent open platform, Firefox, and Google's offering is preventing it from becoming dominant.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- my girlfriend got a £10 Groupon with some con artist photographers called Fusion Studios. They insisted on a "deposit" of £75 which took weeks of legal threats to get back ("the manager's in America this week and nobody else can sign cheques", etc). Some of her friends ended up paying £300 due to the high pressure sales tactics.
The moral: don't buy Groupons unless you're happy to experience con artists from time to time.