Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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FDA Bans Trans Fat
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Free will is not just random noise introduced into our decision-making process. Quite the opposite: free will is responsiveness to moral reasoning. Free will is self-control, the ability to direct one's behavior according to what one judges to be right, rather than just whatever one happens to feel like doing. Free will is almost exactly synonymous with moral judgement, and beings with more perfect moral judgement, better able to correctly discern right from wrong, plus the ability to bring their own behavior into accordance with that, would have stronger free will, not weaker.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something; I never studied philosophy formally. But shouldn't free will also include the ability to judge which of two choices is the more moral—and then choose the other one? It sounds like you're saying that "free will" necessarily implies an increase in moral action, when it should imply nothing of the kind. (From my view of it, it should, in fact, imply less ability to predict whether someone will take a moral action when an immoral one is also an option.)
No, because I don't think it's a valid/relevant question. First of all, it was never about being in the same house, it's about being physically (if not legally) in a place where you are within and surrounded by the territory of the United States, which is governed by its laws, and thus, as I described, benefiting from its resources and infrastructure. (You'll note that I charitably assumed that you were, in fact, going to be taking your libertarian commune off to the wilds of Montana or some similar place where you would never actually interact directly with the people or infrastructure of the USA, since that would open up enormous additional ways in which you would be benefiting from the taxes we pay.)
To (perhaps obliquely) address the point you raise, yes, if you lived in Mexico or Canada you would, indeed, feel some of the same kinds of "halo" benefits from American laws on clean air and water, for instance. However, you would not benefit from them to the same degree as if you lived within the bounds of the country.
Now, if we take your original statement of the "experiment" at its face value, it indicates that you would not isolate yourselves from us: rather, you would live among us, simply "choosing to associate only with" those who agreed with you. In that case, you would benefit from all the physical infrastructure of the United States. Depending how strictly you define your association-by-choice (i.e., if you do not completely avoid all contact, including commerce, with those who do not share your values), you would also benefit from public schools, labor laws, restrictions on food and drug sales, and a plethora of other important benefits of living in the civilized society that is the modern United States of America.
I note that you haven't addressed a single one of the points I raised, instead replying only with a somewhat snarky attempt to deflect the criticism of your plan with a purely rhetorical quibble. If you do wish to continue this discussion, please address these points in a meaningful way. From where I sit, they indicate fatal flaws in any hypothetical attempt to have people who live in this country fairly "opt out" of any of its laws or taxes, whether due to libertarian principles or otherwise.
Problem is, by living in the same physical space as us
How do you define that? You're not here in my house; we don't live together. How is it that I occupy the same physical space as you (assuming you are in the U.S.) but I do not somehow occupy the same physical space as somebody in Mexico? Is it because there's a river between me and Mexico?
You benefit from the clean water and air that result from our environmental regulations. You benefit from the police and fire services—even if you personally never interact with them. You benefit from the defense offered by our military—imagine living your libertarian utopia on an island somewhere in the Pacific, and suddenly China says, "Nope, we own this island now!" What would you be able to do?
Just because you're not personally, directly benefitting in an obvious way from the services paid for by taxation doesn't mean you aren't benefitting from them at all. A lot of the things taxes get us in the USA are either subtle enough, or so much taken for granted, that they've become invisible to the average person.
I wish there was an island-continent for everyone that believed as he does. Honestly, I'd love to watch that experiment play out as long as I didn't have to participate
There's no reason not to let it play out here. You don't have to participate. I don't want to take away your federal government, your state government, your city and county government. I just want every individual to be free to create their own alternative. You can choose to associate only with people who follow your government's rules, if you wish, and ignore all the rat bastards like me who don't like it and want some other authority. If we try to hurt you, I support you and your government shooting or restraining us or whatever you think is necessary.
Problem is, by living in the same physical space as us, you benefit from what our tax dollars buy. This even extends to living out in the wilderness of Montana somewhere or a similar idea, even if it is to a lesser extent.
This is why such an experiment only works on an island-continent: because only there can you be truly isolated from the effects of other people's attempts to actually have a civilized society, rather than an anarchist free-for-all.
Sure, until insurance companies and governments start demanding access to it.
That's certainly something worth worrying about (it would really piss me off, that's for sure), but how does this make it significantly more likely? Who are they going to be demanding access from? The researchers? That's a huge no-no. People who happen to own iPhones with whatever accessory allows for DNA testing? How would they know?
No, the thing to worry about there is just that the general increase in ease of DNA testing and sequencing will lead to insurance companies deciding they need to have the genomes of all their insured on file. Once they decide that, it's possible that they would use a device like this to do the actual testing—or they could use any of the various other DNA testing/sequencing devices around.
Cue legions of anti-Apple posters and general conspiracy nuts ranting and raving that soon you won't be allowed to use an iPhone without having a sample of your DNA on file with Apple.
In reality, what this will do is enable amazing new kinds of distributed research. I'm not a scientist myself, but I do work for a bunch of them, and having the capability of taking a DNA sample on an iPhone would be an amazing new way to enhance the kinds of research available—both by scientists with an iPhone gathering data easily, and by soliciting (with appropriate legal consent forms and suchlike) DNA samples from a wide variety of research participants across the US and the world.
But nope, the important thing is APPLE EVUL! THEY GUNNA TAKE OUR DNAS!
Try this, "drivers are a threat to our road system." They clog it up and very often they crash into each other and cause serious issues to traffic. We need to protect the road system against *drivers*. Can we automate *cars* so they work without *drivers* as much as possible?"
Lo and behold, Google and any number of other entities are working on this very problem.
Except that that's not a valid analogy.
Automobile-based transportation systems (consisting of road, car, and car occupants) will, indeed, work just fine once we have made the cars run without drivers.
But if you remove the user from the equation of computer security, suddenly all you have is a bunch of perfectly secure computers that no longer have any purpose to their existence.
The reason we have computers is so that people can use them to perform a variety of tasks. It is fundamentally impossible to remove the user from the equation while still achieving the desired result—unless you have become so skewed with tunnel vision as to believe that the desired result is a perfectly secure computer.
The result we should all be aiming for is a computer that can perform the tasks required of it by its users without them running the risk of compromising security through their activities.
I would say it's unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that Comcast would ever accept the kinds of restrictions on the merger that would prevent things from getting worse than they are already, let alone start to reverse the merciless devastation of the public interest and regulatory capture that's already happened.
I think the most likely outcomes of this are the DoJ allowing the merger with some relatively superficial conditions (like the 5-year enforcement of net neutrality regulations that was imposed for the merger with NBC/Universal) or blocking it entirely. Much depends on how much the DoJ people in question actually value their role as regulators, versus their role as toll (aka bribe) collectors.
Hurricanes can strike essentially the entire southeast quarter of the country with devastating force, and can even hit further north along the Atlantic coast. They're possible on the Pacific coast, too, but much less likely, I believe.
Due to the temperature along the eastern Pacific, it is physically impossible for a hurricane to really hit the US West Coast (minor exceptions in CA, but they're mostly just strong rain by the time they hit the shore).
OK, thanks. All I was sure of was that I couldn't recall hearing of a meaningful hurricane hitting the Pacific coast.
Jokes aside, most of us live in areas that are not prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or Godzilla. If you do choose to live in such places, it is important to be prepared, and have an emergency kit. In which you can just pack in a good ole' FM battery.
I dunno, a large fraction of America is under threat from the first three of those natural disasters.
Hurricanes can strike essentially the entire southeast quarter of the country with devastating force, and can even hit further north along the Atlantic coast. They're possible on the Pacific coast, too, but much less likely, I believe.
Tornadoes are common in more or less the middle third.
Earthquakes are only highly common in California (that I know of offhand), but can be something of a threat in other areas as well (the more so with all the fracking that's been going on).
But there are other natural disasters to watch out for, too. The one that comes most readily to mind is wildfires, which affect the entire west, particularly now that it's been in a severe drought for years.
So that leaves the inland Northeast, and some of the northern Midwest and Rockies. I don't think "most of us" live in those areas.
(I do, though, and I'm very happy that the closest thing to a natural disaster I have to deal with is the occasional—read, about once every decade or so—2-4 foot snowstorm.)
I've used MySQL for almost 20 years for different projects of mine. In my professional life, I've also used ADABAS, Oracle and this and that other.
I was interested in Postgres some years ago but never went beyond reading one book. Then two years ago I decided to start a new project with Postgres from the start, because I wanted PostGIS.
I'm not looking back. Every future project I do will always use Postgres. Aside from the technical and functional and other rational arguments, the feeling you get is like graduating from BASIC to a real programming language.
Can you comment a little about some of the specifics of what makes it feel that way, for those of us who haven't had the opportunity to use it much, but are interested?
It is sort of unfair to nail MS too much for IE. The big problem was javascript and really javascript is still a big problem.
Nonsense. The big problem was the "not invented here" syndrome. I started writing HTML in about 1998 or so, maybe earlier, and IE has always been a PITA because it always had its quirks and wanted to be treated special. Everyone else was at least trying to implement the standard, MS attitude was basically to fuck it from both sides and approaching the Internet with a "you will write this stuff the way we want" attitude.
And from what I've seen of Microsoft since Nadella took over, I would be surprised (and disappointed) if they continued in that attitude with whatever they call the new browser—not just because they've been playing nicer with the civilized world, but because they seem to recognize that they have to if they don't want to just dry up and blow away over the next decade or so.
When they originally released IE, they could do that because as screwed-up and frustrating as it was for the rest of us, they were right with that attitude. Now? They're not the big dog on the browser block anymore. If they try to push random crap that neither Apple nor Google support (or refuse to support stuff that both Apple and Google are backing, that's actually in use), it's just not going to fly.
> Are they credible? There's no way to know. Because we don't know who's sending them. So they have to be treated as credible
I would arge that the exact opposite it true. Because we have no way of knowing if a threat is credible, the only logical approach is to assume that *none* of them are. Furthermore, there are very few cases where an anonymous threat could possibly be credible. Threats don't work if you can't back them up, and how do you prove you can back them up if nobody knows who you are? Terrorists don't send in anonymous bomb threats, they send in videotapes in which they have actual hostages, so that people will know they are serious.
But the difference in this case is that the death threats in question were sent by people claiming to be other (unspecified) students on campus, not random people somewhere halfway across the globe.
Terrorists take responsibility for crimes because their entire reason for existing isn't killing people or doing property damage—it's spreading terror. If a specific person wanted to kill another person for a specific thing they did on campus (which was the ostensible case in the death threats issued last fall), they have every reason for wanting to remain anonymous. Their purpose is the killing of the person and the message it sends.
It's not like the anonymity makes it harder for them to kill the person, or harder to have the killing send a racist or classist message (which were both part of the threats sent in this case). Not when they have a platform like YikYak on which to anonymously declare the reason for their murders.
From what I understand (and I have only sketchy information on this), the police were contacted, and YikYak was asked for an IP address.
However, either they refused to give one, or it ended up being some public computer (this is, after all, a university; there are hundreds of public computers on campus). Nothing the police can do about that. Even CSI's reality-bending tricks would have trouble figuring out which of dozens of people who sat at that computer might have sent the message.
On the campus I work for, there have been death threats posted on YikYak. Are they credible? There's no way to know. Because we don't know who's sending them. So they have to be treated as credible—and the university simply doesn't have the resources to provide even one person with 24/7 protection, let alone the half-dozen or so that the death threats were issued against.
So the administration's response was basically, "We cannot protect you if someone is determined to get at you. If you believe the threats are credible, then our best recommendation is for you to leave the campus." And some of them did. I believe they came back after winter break, but still, they missed final exams, and I have no idea how much hassle that's going to cause them in the long run.
Which all means that if you are a person who has a grudge against someone else on campus, and few scruples, you can get them more or less kicked off of campus by issuing an anonymous death threat against them on YikYak.
Is that the kind of "harsh reality" you think is appropriate? Where people who are just trying to get a decent education (and paying a pretty penny for it) can be forced to make the choice between abandoning it, and risking their lives by staying on campus, just because some asshole with an anonymous YikYak account wants them to?
I get the importance of anonymity in free speech, believe me. But free speech is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end, broadly, is a free society. And society works because bad actors can be called to account for their bad actions. If people can do bad things without threat of consequence, the whole thing starts to fall apart.
The fact that there is really no major entity working to keep our data safe for ourselves and ourselves alone
Apple does this. Look at HealthKit for example, all data is stored locally, Apple doesn't mine it. They allow you to control who has what access to specific parts of the data.
It's not exactly true of all data, but Apple tries to give you specific control of data where it can.
The reason why Apple does this and other companies do not is simple - Apple actually makes money selling hardware. Google and Facebook have no revenue except what they can extract from you data, so they have totally different motivations.
This is true—I tend not to think of Apple as "an entity working to keep our data safe," since I primarily think of them as a hardware/OS vendor. But yes, any data Apple does happen to hold of yours is as safe as they can make it from those who want to monetize it—and they don't care to do so themselves.
That's not what he said at all. I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you substantially, but that's completely separate from the actual point of the piece.
It's all about the fact that, in order to do many or most of the things we want to do today, we have no choice but to give someone access to our data—but that almost everyone we could give that access to wants to (ab)use it to make money.
More importantly, that's even true of those who actually want to help keep our data secure from others—even our governments.
The fact that there is really no major entity working to keep our data safe for ourselves and ourselves alone—and that there are so many, even those that theoretically should be trying to do so, working directly against that end—is definitely something we need to be concerned about, far beyond simply bemoaning the stupidity of all the "lusers" who will happily give away their data for free because they just don't know any better.
And if you want to learn programming, going to university is probably the worst way of doing it. You'll learn the most simply Java anyone can imagine, will be dissuaded from doing what good programmers should be doing - writing as little code as possible by yourself and using library functions wherever possible, and things like testing and frameworks you will - maybe - meet in higher semesters when your bad habits are already solid. Also, you'll learn a couple programming languages that are so obscure that your professor is one of 10 people submitting patches to the compiler and its Wikipedia page doesn't require you to scroll. On an iPad.
Broadly, I agree with this, but there is an important exception I think should be mentioned: Learning how to think like the computer. This isn't something that gets taught directly, but something that you can learn through exposure to multiple languages.
I think the best courses I took in my college CS degree were the couple that were essentially a survey of different types of programming languages. In a single semester, we learned the basics of Pascal, ML, Smalltalk, and Lisp (and probably 2-3 others I've forgotten about).
The important thing wasn't to retain the actual skill in each of the languages, though, and the professor knew that—it was to get a feel for several different types of programming. Before I took those courses, I knew how to write code in C and Javascript. After I took those courses, I had the fundamental modes of thought necessary to pick up nearly any programming language.
Absent the standing desk, I would suspect that normally standing implies some other measure of activity besides just not-sitting. I would suspect just-standing as you would at a standing desk is better than sitting, if only because of micro-movements involved in remaing standing. But I'm guessing that simply moving to standing desks won't fully erase the bad effects of too much sitting, it'll lessen them to the bad effects of too much just-standing.
When I'm standing at the GeekDesk, I move around a lot. Sometimes it's just shifting positions, but other times I'll be practically dancing as I'm reading something, or contemplating the next chunk of code, or even watching a video or playing some Hearthstone over lunchbreak.
Not being stuck in a chair really frees you to move around as much as you feel like you want to.
Can't comfortably type standing up (for some specific reason), or just have never tried to type standing up with the keyboard at a proper ergonomic height?
This is why I got my department to buy me a GeekDesk a couple of years ago. I don't stand all day every day, but it lets me stand quite a lot of the time.
Since then, my chronic low-grade upper-back stiffness has decreased a lot—but I find that on weekends, when I tend to sit on the couch with my laptop a lot, it frequently comes back. My legs still sometimes get tired from standing for a few hours at a time, but overall, I think it was a really, really good decision.
If you can't afford a GeekDesk, and think you can handle losing the chair cold turkey, there are much cheaper standing desks that can get you off your butt and on your feet—for your health!:-)
You're post implies that, if EFF agreed to Apple IOS dev's T&A, that they could change the way Apple does things w/ regard to it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I'd rather EFF not break it's principles, and show just where Apple stands with regard to its walled garden, than have them bow to a Corporate overlord.
No...you may have inferred that, but that's not what I was implying. What I was implying was that, since the app is designed to help people help the EFF achieve some of its goals, if the app were in the app store of one of the most breakout popular devices in the history of the entire world, it would thus make it possible for a significant number of additional people to help the EFF achieve the goals aimed at with this particular app.
But because they have decided that some of the principles behind what they want to achieve are utterly inviolable, and the Apple dev agreement conflicts with some of those inviolable principles, they clearly feel that they are therefore obligated to prevent anyone who owns an Apple device from using their app.
This is the kind of cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face behaviour that really hamstrings a lot of efforts to improve the world. I'm not saying the ends justify the means—far from it. Just that when you're living in a badly imperfect world, insisting that you, yourself be perfect at all times while trying to make the rest of the world better is very, very often going to prevent you from doing more good than it actually does in itself.
Well, I'm sorry for the EFF, then, but everyone knows what the terms are to get an app in the iOS App Store.
This sounds, to me, like the EFF allowing slavish adherence to their principles to prevent them from doing something that might actually help real people in the real world advance those principles in meaningful ways.
Either that, or they just realized they could use it as a publicity stunt.
And where I live, having cable is considered uncool and most people cover all of their video needs under $30 a month. Also, my gigabit Internet connection costs $22 per month so.... maybe it makes sense to move to a more developed area where you would not be raped by large corporations
Unfortunately, in order to get a deal that is even within 2 orders of magnitude of that, you can't live in the US. Anywhere.
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Free will is not just random noise introduced into our decision-making process. Quite the opposite: free will is responsiveness to moral reasoning. Free will is self-control, the ability to direct one's behavior according to what one judges to be right, rather than just whatever one happens to feel like doing. Free will is almost exactly synonymous with moral judgement, and beings with more perfect moral judgement, better able to correctly discern right from wrong, plus the ability to bring their own behavior into accordance with that, would have stronger free will, not weaker.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something; I never studied philosophy formally. But shouldn't free will also include the ability to judge which of two choices is the more moral—and then choose the other one? It sounds like you're saying that "free will" necessarily implies an increase in moral action, when it should imply nothing of the kind. (From my view of it, it should, in fact, imply less ability to predict whether someone will take a moral action when an immoral one is also an option.)
Dan Aris
So, no answer to my question?
No, because I don't think it's a valid/relevant question. First of all, it was never about being in the same house, it's about being physically (if not legally) in a place where you are within and surrounded by the territory of the United States, which is governed by its laws, and thus, as I described, benefiting from its resources and infrastructure. (You'll note that I charitably assumed that you were, in fact, going to be taking your libertarian commune off to the wilds of Montana or some similar place where you would never actually interact directly with the people or infrastructure of the USA, since that would open up enormous additional ways in which you would be benefiting from the taxes we pay.)
To (perhaps obliquely) address the point you raise, yes, if you lived in Mexico or Canada you would, indeed, feel some of the same kinds of "halo" benefits from American laws on clean air and water, for instance. However, you would not benefit from them to the same degree as if you lived within the bounds of the country.
Now, if we take your original statement of the "experiment" at its face value, it indicates that you would not isolate yourselves from us: rather, you would live among us, simply "choosing to associate only with" those who agreed with you. In that case, you would benefit from all the physical infrastructure of the United States. Depending how strictly you define your association-by-choice (i.e., if you do not completely avoid all contact, including commerce, with those who do not share your values), you would also benefit from public schools, labor laws, restrictions on food and drug sales, and a plethora of other important benefits of living in the civilized society that is the modern United States of America.
I note that you haven't addressed a single one of the points I raised, instead replying only with a somewhat snarky attempt to deflect the criticism of your plan with a purely rhetorical quibble. If you do wish to continue this discussion, please address these points in a meaningful way. From where I sit, they indicate fatal flaws in any hypothetical attempt to have people who live in this country fairly "opt out" of any of its laws or taxes, whether due to libertarian principles or otherwise.
Dan Aris
Problem is, by living in the same physical space as us
How do you define that? You're not here in my house; we don't live together. How is it that I occupy the same physical space as you (assuming you are in the U.S.) but I do not somehow occupy the same physical space as somebody in Mexico? Is it because there's a river between me and Mexico?
You benefit from the clean water and air that result from our environmental regulations. You benefit from the police and fire services—even if you personally never interact with them. You benefit from the defense offered by our military—imagine living your libertarian utopia on an island somewhere in the Pacific, and suddenly China says, "Nope, we own this island now!" What would you be able to do?
Just because you're not personally, directly benefitting in an obvious way from the services paid for by taxation doesn't mean you aren't benefitting from them at all. A lot of the things taxes get us in the USA are either subtle enough, or so much taken for granted, that they've become invisible to the average person.
Dan Aris
I wish there was an island-continent for everyone that believed as he does. Honestly, I'd love to watch that experiment play out as long as I didn't have to participate
There's no reason not to let it play out here. You don't have to participate. I don't want to take away your federal government, your state government, your city and county government. I just want every individual to be free to create their own alternative. You can choose to associate only with people who follow your government's rules, if you wish, and ignore all the rat bastards like me who don't like it and want some other authority. If we try to hurt you, I support you and your government shooting or restraining us or whatever you think is necessary.
Problem is, by living in the same physical space as us, you benefit from what our tax dollars buy. This even extends to living out in the wilderness of Montana somewhere or a similar idea, even if it is to a lesser extent.
This is why such an experiment only works on an island-continent: because only there can you be truly isolated from the effects of other people's attempts to actually have a civilized society, rather than an anarchist free-for-all.
Dan Aris
Hear hear :-)
Dan Aris
Sure, until insurance companies and governments start demanding access to it.
That's certainly something worth worrying about (it would really piss me off, that's for sure), but how does this make it significantly more likely? Who are they going to be demanding access from? The researchers? That's a huge no-no. People who happen to own iPhones with whatever accessory allows for DNA testing? How would they know?
No, the thing to worry about there is just that the general increase in ease of DNA testing and sequencing will lead to insurance companies deciding they need to have the genomes of all their insured on file. Once they decide that, it's possible that they would use a device like this to do the actual testing—or they could use any of the various other DNA testing/sequencing devices around.
Dan Aris
Cue legions of anti-Apple posters and general conspiracy nuts ranting and raving that soon you won't be allowed to use an iPhone without having a sample of your DNA on file with Apple.
In reality, what this will do is enable amazing new kinds of distributed research. I'm not a scientist myself, but I do work for a bunch of them, and having the capability of taking a DNA sample on an iPhone would be an amazing new way to enhance the kinds of research available—both by scientists with an iPhone gathering data easily, and by soliciting (with appropriate legal consent forms and suchlike) DNA samples from a wide variety of research participants across the US and the world.
But nope, the important thing is APPLE EVUL! THEY GUNNA TAKE OUR DNAS!
Dan Aris
Try this, "drivers are a threat to our road system." They clog it up and very often they crash into each other and cause serious issues to traffic. We need to protect the road system against *drivers*. Can we automate *cars* so they work without *drivers* as much as possible?"
Lo and behold, Google and any number of other entities are working on this very problem.
Except that that's not a valid analogy.
Automobile-based transportation systems (consisting of road, car, and car occupants) will, indeed, work just fine once we have made the cars run without drivers.
But if you remove the user from the equation of computer security, suddenly all you have is a bunch of perfectly secure computers that no longer have any purpose to their existence.
The reason we have computers is so that people can use them to perform a variety of tasks. It is fundamentally impossible to remove the user from the equation while still achieving the desired result—unless you have become so skewed with tunnel vision as to believe that the desired result is a perfectly secure computer.
The result we should all be aiming for is a computer that can perform the tasks required of it by its users without them running the risk of compromising security through their activities.
Dan Aris
I would say it's unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that Comcast would ever accept the kinds of restrictions on the merger that would prevent things from getting worse than they are already, let alone start to reverse the merciless devastation of the public interest and regulatory capture that's already happened.
I think the most likely outcomes of this are the DoJ allowing the merger with some relatively superficial conditions (like the 5-year enforcement of net neutrality regulations that was imposed for the merger with NBC/Universal) or blocking it entirely. Much depends on how much the DoJ people in question actually value their role as regulators, versus their role as toll (aka bribe) collectors.
Dan Aris
Hurricanes can strike essentially the entire southeast quarter of the country with devastating force, and can even hit further north along the Atlantic coast. They're possible on the Pacific coast, too, but much less likely, I believe.
Due to the temperature along the eastern Pacific, it is physically impossible for a hurricane to really hit the US West Coast (minor exceptions in CA, but they're mostly just strong rain by the time they hit the shore).
OK, thanks. All I was sure of was that I couldn't recall hearing of a meaningful hurricane hitting the Pacific coast.
Dan Aris
Jokes aside, most of us live in areas that are not prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or Godzilla. If you do choose to live in such places, it is important to be prepared, and have an emergency kit. In which you can just pack in a good ole' FM battery.
I dunno, a large fraction of America is under threat from the first three of those natural disasters.
Hurricanes can strike essentially the entire southeast quarter of the country with devastating force, and can even hit further north along the Atlantic coast. They're possible on the Pacific coast, too, but much less likely, I believe.
Tornadoes are common in more or less the middle third.
Earthquakes are only highly common in California (that I know of offhand), but can be something of a threat in other areas as well (the more so with all the fracking that's been going on).
But there are other natural disasters to watch out for, too. The one that comes most readily to mind is wildfires, which affect the entire west, particularly now that it's been in a severe drought for years.
So that leaves the inland Northeast, and some of the northern Midwest and Rockies. I don't think "most of us" live in those areas.
(I do, though, and I'm very happy that the closest thing to a natural disaster I have to deal with is the occasional—read, about once every decade or so—2-4 foot snowstorm.)
Dan Aris
I've used MySQL for almost 20 years for different projects of mine. In my professional life, I've also used ADABAS, Oracle and this and that other.
I was interested in Postgres some years ago but never went beyond reading one book. Then two years ago I decided to start a new project with Postgres from the start, because I wanted PostGIS.
I'm not looking back. Every future project I do will always use Postgres. Aside from the technical and functional and other rational arguments, the feeling you get is like graduating from BASIC to a real programming language.
Can you comment a little about some of the specifics of what makes it feel that way, for those of us who haven't had the opportunity to use it much, but are interested?
Dan Aris
It is sort of unfair to nail MS too much for IE. The big problem was javascript and really javascript is still a big problem.
Nonsense. The big problem was the "not invented here" syndrome. I started writing HTML in about 1998 or so, maybe earlier, and IE has always been a PITA because it always had its quirks and wanted to be treated special. Everyone else was at least trying to implement the standard, MS attitude was basically to fuck it from both sides and approaching the Internet with a "you will write this stuff the way we want" attitude.
And from what I've seen of Microsoft since Nadella took over, I would be surprised (and disappointed) if they continued in that attitude with whatever they call the new browser—not just because they've been playing nicer with the civilized world, but because they seem to recognize that they have to if they don't want to just dry up and blow away over the next decade or so.
When they originally released IE, they could do that because as screwed-up and frustrating as it was for the rest of us, they were right with that attitude. Now? They're not the big dog on the browser block anymore. If they try to push random crap that neither Apple nor Google support (or refuse to support stuff that both Apple and Google are backing, that's actually in use), it's just not going to fly.
Dan Aris
> Are they credible? There's no way to know. Because we don't know who's sending them. So they have to be treated as credible
I would arge that the exact opposite it true. Because we have no way of knowing if a threat is credible, the only logical approach is to assume that *none* of them are. Furthermore, there are very few cases where an anonymous threat could possibly be credible. Threats don't work if you can't back them up, and how do you prove you can back them up if nobody knows who you are? Terrorists don't send in anonymous bomb threats, they send in videotapes in which they have actual hostages, so that people will know they are serious.
But the difference in this case is that the death threats in question were sent by people claiming to be other (unspecified) students on campus, not random people somewhere halfway across the globe.
Terrorists take responsibility for crimes because their entire reason for existing isn't killing people or doing property damage—it's spreading terror. If a specific person wanted to kill another person for a specific thing they did on campus (which was the ostensible case in the death threats issued last fall), they have every reason for wanting to remain anonymous. Their purpose is the killing of the person and the message it sends.
It's not like the anonymity makes it harder for them to kill the person, or harder to have the killing send a racist or classist message (which were both part of the threats sent in this case). Not when they have a platform like YikYak on which to anonymously declare the reason for their murders.
Dan Aris
From what I understand (and I have only sketchy information on this), the police were contacted, and YikYak was asked for an IP address.
However, either they refused to give one, or it ended up being some public computer (this is, after all, a university; there are hundreds of public computers on campus). Nothing the police can do about that. Even CSI's reality-bending tricks would have trouble figuring out which of dozens of people who sat at that computer might have sent the message.
Dan Aris
Here's the harsh reality:
On the campus I work for, there have been death threats posted on YikYak. Are they credible? There's no way to know. Because we don't know who's sending them. So they have to be treated as credible—and the university simply doesn't have the resources to provide even one person with 24/7 protection, let alone the half-dozen or so that the death threats were issued against.
So the administration's response was basically, "We cannot protect you if someone is determined to get at you. If you believe the threats are credible, then our best recommendation is for you to leave the campus." And some of them did. I believe they came back after winter break, but still, they missed final exams, and I have no idea how much hassle that's going to cause them in the long run.
Which all means that if you are a person who has a grudge against someone else on campus, and few scruples, you can get them more or less kicked off of campus by issuing an anonymous death threat against them on YikYak.
Is that the kind of "harsh reality" you think is appropriate? Where people who are just trying to get a decent education (and paying a pretty penny for it) can be forced to make the choice between abandoning it, and risking their lives by staying on campus, just because some asshole with an anonymous YikYak account wants them to?
I get the importance of anonymity in free speech, believe me. But free speech is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end, broadly, is a free society. And society works because bad actors can be called to account for their bad actions. If people can do bad things without threat of consequence, the whole thing starts to fall apart.
Dan Aris
The fact that there is really no major entity working to keep our data safe for ourselves and ourselves alone
Apple does this. Look at HealthKit for example, all data is stored locally, Apple doesn't mine it. They allow you to control who has what access to specific parts of the data.
It's not exactly true of all data, but Apple tries to give you specific control of data where it can.
The reason why Apple does this and other companies do not is simple - Apple actually makes money selling hardware. Google and Facebook have no revenue except what they can extract from you data, so they have totally different motivations.
This is true—I tend not to think of Apple as "an entity working to keep our data safe," since I primarily think of them as a hardware/OS vendor. But yes, any data Apple does happen to hold of yours is as safe as they can make it from those who want to monetize it—and they don't care to do so themselves.
Dan Aris
That's not what he said at all. I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you substantially, but that's completely separate from the actual point of the piece.
It's all about the fact that, in order to do many or most of the things we want to do today, we have no choice but to give someone access to our data—but that almost everyone we could give that access to wants to (ab)use it to make money.
More importantly, that's even true of those who actually want to help keep our data secure from others—even our governments.
The fact that there is really no major entity working to keep our data safe for ourselves and ourselves alone—and that there are so many, even those that theoretically should be trying to do so, working directly against that end—is definitely something we need to be concerned about, far beyond simply bemoaning the stupidity of all the "lusers" who will happily give away their data for free because they just don't know any better.
Dan Aris
And if you want to learn programming, going to university is probably the worst way of doing it. You'll learn the most simply Java anyone can imagine, will be dissuaded from doing what good programmers should be doing - writing as little code as possible by yourself and using library functions wherever possible, and things like testing and frameworks you will - maybe - meet in higher semesters when your bad habits are already solid. Also, you'll learn a couple programming languages that are so obscure that your professor is one of 10 people submitting patches to the compiler and its Wikipedia page doesn't require you to scroll. On an iPad.
Broadly, I agree with this, but there is an important exception I think should be mentioned: Learning how to think like the computer. This isn't something that gets taught directly, but something that you can learn through exposure to multiple languages.
I think the best courses I took in my college CS degree were the couple that were essentially a survey of different types of programming languages. In a single semester, we learned the basics of Pascal, ML, Smalltalk, and Lisp (and probably 2-3 others I've forgotten about).
The important thing wasn't to retain the actual skill in each of the languages, though, and the professor knew that—it was to get a feel for several different types of programming. Before I took those courses, I knew how to write code in C and Javascript. After I took those courses, I had the fundamental modes of thought necessary to pick up nearly any programming language.
Dan Aris
Absent the standing desk, I would suspect that normally standing implies some other measure of activity besides just not-sitting. I would suspect just-standing as you would at a standing desk is better than sitting, if only because of micro-movements involved in remaing standing. But I'm guessing that simply moving to standing desks won't fully erase the bad effects of too much sitting, it'll lessen them to the bad effects of too much just-standing.
When I'm standing at the GeekDesk, I move around a lot. Sometimes it's just shifting positions, but other times I'll be practically dancing as I'm reading something, or contemplating the next chunk of code, or even watching a video or playing some Hearthstone over lunchbreak.
Not being stuck in a chair really frees you to move around as much as you feel like you want to.
Dan Aris
Can't comfortably type standing up (for some specific reason), or just have never tried to type standing up with the keyboard at a proper ergonomic height?
Dan Aris
This is why I got my department to buy me a GeekDesk a couple of years ago. I don't stand all day every day, but it lets me stand quite a lot of the time.
Since then, my chronic low-grade upper-back stiffness has decreased a lot—but I find that on weekends, when I tend to sit on the couch with my laptop a lot, it frequently comes back. My legs still sometimes get tired from standing for a few hours at a time, but overall, I think it was a really, really good decision.
If you can't afford a GeekDesk, and think you can handle losing the chair cold turkey, there are much cheaper standing desks that can get you off your butt and on your feet—for your health! :-)
Dan Aris
You're post implies that, if EFF agreed to Apple IOS dev's T&A, that they could change the way Apple does things w/ regard to it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I'd rather EFF not break it's principles, and show just where Apple stands with regard to its walled garden, than have them bow to a Corporate overlord.
No...you may have inferred that, but that's not what I was implying. What I was implying was that, since the app is designed to help people help the EFF achieve some of its goals, if the app were in the app store of one of the most breakout popular devices in the history of the entire world, it would thus make it possible for a significant number of additional people to help the EFF achieve the goals aimed at with this particular app.
But because they have decided that some of the principles behind what they want to achieve are utterly inviolable, and the Apple dev agreement conflicts with some of those inviolable principles, they clearly feel that they are therefore obligated to prevent anyone who owns an Apple device from using their app.
This is the kind of cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face behaviour that really hamstrings a lot of efforts to improve the world. I'm not saying the ends justify the means—far from it. Just that when you're living in a badly imperfect world, insisting that you, yourself be perfect at all times while trying to make the rest of the world better is very, very often going to prevent you from doing more good than it actually does in itself.
Dan Aris
Well, I'm sorry for the EFF, then, but everyone knows what the terms are to get an app in the iOS App Store.
This sounds, to me, like the EFF allowing slavish adherence to their principles to prevent them from doing something that might actually help real people in the real world advance those principles in meaningful ways.
Either that, or they just realized they could use it as a publicity stunt.
Dan Aris
And where I live, having cable is considered uncool and most people cover all of their video needs under $30 a month. Also, my gigabit Internet connection costs $22 per month so .... maybe it makes sense to move to a more developed area where you would not be raped by large corporations
Unfortunately, in order to get a deal that is even within 2 orders of magnitude of that, you can't live in the US. Anywhere.
Dan Aris