It's probably due to statistical variation in the early expansion of the universe.
Here's an analogy:
Suppose you throw 1 million coins and tally the results. You might expect to get 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails, but it's *more* probable that you would get a different ratio. The probability of being 1-off in either direction is higher: even though both individual probabilities are smaller there's two possible outcomes (one more head, or one more tail).
(In 8 tosses of the coin, there's 70 ways to make 4H/4T, 56 ways to make 3H/5T, and 56 ways to make 5H/3T. Even split has 70 ways, while 1-off has 112 ways.)
What you actually get is a bell curve of probability. Take a single sample and you expect to get "somewhere near" the mean value, but it's highly unlikely that you'll get exactly the mean.
So in the early universe, suppose position is quantized and there is exactly 1 place to be. Lots and lots of energy sitting on that one spot, some of it splitting into matter and antimatter and then annihilating back to energy.
The universe expands and there are now 2 positions. The energy and matter/antimatter distributes randomly.
Even though you'd expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter to go to both positions, it's statistically unlikely. Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 antimatter and 210,000 matter in the other. Both sides have 500,000 "coins", but with slightly different proportions, according to statistical chance.
Now suppose the universe continues to grow at a rate faster than the matter can keep up. There are suddenly 4 positions instead of 2, then 8, 16, and so on. The matter/anti-matter ratio in each side is now 210,000/290.000, which annihilates, leaving 80,000 matter particles and 420,000*MC^2 of energy. On each side.
This would only happen if the universe expands faster than the particles can travel across the available positions to annihilate.
As it happens, there's evidence that the early universe *did* expand faster than the speed of light, which is why the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but looks to be at least 93 billion years in diameter. This is the early inflation model.
So even if all known processes generate equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, it makes statistical sense that there might be an excess of one or another in different parts of the universe.
A children's hospital with 35 permanent residents?
Clearly, a site chosen at random for power restoration...
I see that you haven't proposed what would have been a *better* installation, just a comparison to a big nebulous "he could have done better". Where is your analysis? What alternatives were there, and why was his choice sub-optimal?
Can't we just say "bravo" or at least "congratulations" or something?
Elon didn't do it the way *you* would have liked, but note that he actually did something.
While true, one can easily see the reason for the problem.
Google API is trained to look for correlations in written text. If it sees a lot of negative text about something, then that's what it will believe.
I note that there's a lot of text that condemn jews for one reason or another, but there's not a lot that *praises* jews. We hear all the time about Christian charities, for example, but not a lot for the jewish ones(*).
There's also a lot of negative statements about gays, and although there's *some* text praising gayness, it's mostly either personal ("good on you for having the courage to believe in yourself") or neutral ("it's OK to be gay, it's normal"). I've never seen writing that *praises* gayness as a concept.
Compare with Christianity, where there is endless adulation of the Christian way of life. Democracy is probably the same way.
I'd be interested to see what the API thinks about Islam, or Trump, or Clinton, or a host of other controversial political subjects.
Google API is probably just giving us a reflection of the zeitgeist.
(*) Don't read anything into this, I'm only saying that Christians get better press.
Old programmers become ascended masters like St. Germain and live forever in the shadows, controlling the world. Or, they become greeters at Wal-Mart. Sometimes both.
Old programmers never die... they just smell that way.
What are Trello, Wrike and Asana and why would I want them (either for business or personal use)?
If only Google had a service that you could type this into and get more information about it....
If only Google would spend some time making their UI better.
Delete is a trashcan icon when reading, but different when viewing the inbox. "Select all" means "select the first 50" (have to do that numerous times to actually select/delete *all* messages), "reply" is down at the bottom of "conversation" mode so that you have to scroll down many pages to reach it, "cc" and "bcc" are hidden *until* you click in the "to" line...
Many, many confusing and inconsistent interface choices, there's no overriding theme or standard that can be used to find functions you need, and many useful things are inconveniently positioned and not easy to see. I count 8 dropdown boxes for various functions on the GMail page, normal rules for "selection" (click, and see item highlighted) are different from every other program on my computer, it's just a mess.
You're forced to "guess and look" to do just about anything.
To get a feel for what I mean: deleting an item from the inbox is a very common action, so why is it hidden (until I mark a checkbox) and why does (this really common feature) take several steps? For all the bad things we say about Apple, at least they know how to make a good interface.
In the case cited, fMRI scans were used to determine whether the plaintiff's "intent". IOW, they were using the scans to determine whether the doctor has "intent" to defraud the insurance agencies.
Firstly, we still use them because there's no reasonable replacement. Duh.
Secondly, there's no reasonable replacement because of the way our computers work.
Passwords are essentially information held in a system outside the computer (your head), that can be used for verification. The problem is that humans aren't really good at remembering passwords, and we need so many of them, and they are infrequently needed.
All attempts at using computers to solve this issue have run afoul of the "general purpose computer" problem: because our computers do not address security properly, we cannot guarantee what software is running on the local hardware. We cannot guarantee the security of passwords held on the computer, or in an encrypted file, because it's so easy to download and run malware. No one keeps track of all the things run on the computer, and we can't even trust the people who supposedly *do* keep track.
One reasonable solution is to use hardware specific to the purpose that's *not* a general purpose computer.
If you had a piece of hardware - a thumb drive, for example - that was *not* general purpose and could not download and execute code, then that could be made pretty secure. It could hold a person's private key, have functions to encrypt, decrypt, and sign documents, and also pass out the public key. It could also download and install new keys, with the understanding that the base functions could not be changed.
There's some details involved: you need a way to securely backup the data, and you need a way to securely recover the data in various situations. Mostly, you need to save the data somewhere safe and write down a master password (one, a PIN of sorts) somewhere else.
The Mooltipass is pretty close. It generates strong passwords for each web site registration, and will fill in the fields for you when you go to log in.
That's not the complete solution, however. It should *encrypt* the password with the user's private key and the site's public key so that no one can view it(*), or even better use a zero-knowledge authentication process.
If we could somehow begin using a fixed-program computer - say, something the size of a credit-card calculator that requires a pin and that holds the information for *all* the cards in your wallet - we could get away from passwords.
We would also have a single point on which we could put *all* our effort to make secure.
Hypothetically, that one card would reduce credit card fraud to near zero. When you use the card you enter your PIN on the keypad, and the card generates a ShopSafe number tied to your credit account, valid for one purchase.
Take a look at the badges at high-tech conferences these days. It seems like the hardware shouldn't be that hard or expensive.
Could this be the next killer product from Apple? A hand-held thingy that's secure and ultra-convenient, that you use for payments (IRL and online) and password entry?
(*) Yes, ssh is not absolutely secure. Did you think all those cert authorities in your browser have been properly vetted?
I look forward to seeing Antifa accounts suspended.
Good luck with that.
A fuckton of people are on Gab after getting kicked off of twitter, and are running a thread Not Allowed on Twitter.
I realize this is probably a biased sample, but there's a lot of "*this* got me kicked off, while *that* is allowed" posts that highlight the double-standard.
It would seem that left-leaning posts are taken with a wink and a smile, while right-leaning posts are censored with an overreaching iron fist. It's often completely mysterious what twitter standards are violated; apparently talking about and linking to someone twitter doesn't like (such as Milo) is enough to get you banned, even if the actual text is pedestrian such as "I saw this guy speak last night and he was OK".
There was one post that came out completely against Nazis (saying things like "Nazis are bad, I don't condone nazis, and the like) and apparently used the word "nazi" too many times and got banned. All from completely unexciting text.
Just like humans to go and dispossess a bunch of peaceful aliens that never even bothered us to begin with, just because we want a precious resource the lands they occupy have in abundance.
Not to mention we sent a probe to Mars with a deadly "heat ray" weapon.
While I agree with that sentiment, I have to wonder why this is such a big deal?
Assuming that mining is not actually harming me or my computer - destroying files, or leaking my information to someone - why should I care? If I visit a website and read an article, maybe a minute of my time, my computer is otherwise idle and the amount of energy spent is negligible.
We've always wanted a way to monetize visiting a site, could this be a way to do it?
Suppose we had a service where people could submit computationally intensive problems which can be broken down into smaller computational units. Such as "folding at home" or "seti at home".
The answers to some of those problems could be valuable, so we could imagine research institutions paying money to use the system to solve those problems, and pay out based on the amount of computation a website brings in.
This is proportional to the number of users who view the website, and for how long. This could be a user-friendly alternative to advertising.
In fact, one can imagine the *government* paying money to use the system as a make-work program: it would encourage people to make better, more meaningful websites overall. Would the sociological benefit outweigh the extra costs?
(Assuming that people don't game the system, but it seems reasonable that we could learn all the gaming techniques over time and avoid them. Sort of how we deal with advertizing clicks currently.)
I don't see what the problem here is, and look at it as an opportunity.
Could this be a user-friendly way to monetize a website, as an alternative to advertising?
Why are we even talking about a couple of Facebook ads when today's breaking news is the Obama administration was investigating Russian infiltration of the US nuclear material transport trucking company in 2009, by none other than Mueller of the FBI.
Fascinating to watch the Slashdot moderation system in action.
As I post this, there are three topically relevant and accurate stories modded down to 0 or -1. The one above this one reads "0 interesting", the "interesting" tag gets added for an upvote.
This one (and the others) are perfectly legitimate: Both news stories are in the current news cycle, and are largely what the writers say they are. (Clinton Uranium deal investigated by the FBI, and Comey wrote the Hillary conclusion months before interviewing Hillary.)
I have faith that the number of people with integrity far outweigh the trolls on this board.
We're the smart people in the room, the ones that others *should* look up to.
If we can't abide the truth, then we're no different from the media talking heads.
Why are we even talking about a couple of Facebook ads when today's breaking news is the Obama administration was investigating Russian infiltration of the US nuclear material transport trucking company in 2009, by none other than Mueller of the FBI. It eventually led to corruption, money laundering, kickbacks and extortion charges. Yet somehow at the same time, a $500k speaking fee to Bill Clinton and $145mil being donated to the Clinton Foundation, with Hillary Clinton as sec of state let the same Russian group by Uranium One and 20% of the US uranium supply. Obama himself said that there was nothing to be concerned about, but we know now the investigation was blocked by none other than Comey, and Dept of Justice Holder And the Russian involved had a plea deal and covered it up in 2014.
Dearie, don't you understand? Laws are for little people.
Not that Hilary is a spring chicken herself but it took a fundamental breakdown over just about everything to make a guy who used to be a Simpson's joke our actual president.
Here's a joke for you:
Q: How many reasons does Hillary have for not winning the election?
If you voted for the party of less regulation. Yes, there's a lot of silly laws on the books, but the really silly ones are ignored by everyone. When it comes time to cut regulations these are the ones that get cut.
This discussion came up about airport X-ray machines years ago, and sparked a debate about exposure safety.
There appears to be a linear relation between amount of exposure and number of cancers(*), but only for rather excessive levels of radiation. The debate centers on whether there is a "cutoff", where any exposure less than some amount is negligible.
It's hard to get quantitative information about this because the exposure levels are small, and the results won't be known for decades. IIRC, my calculations at the time indicated that 10 or 20 new cases of cancer *might* be caused by 9 billion airline flights. (Those 10-20 new cancers is not nothing, I'm just pointing out that finding the correlation in all that noise is all but impossible. Attention paid to more likely health threats would be a better way to spend effort and resources**.)
The prevailing opinion is that the body deals with and repairs all sorts of damage in it's day-to-day operation, so that damage smaller than a set level will get swept up along with all the other repairs.
Strangely, there is actually no menace in this recent decision, and the "party of less regulation" is doing what appears to be the right thing.
(*) I once wrote an article about airport X-ray systems, which required a bunch of research.
(**) Interestingly, that was then and this is now. Since everyone has to register to take a plane flight, we now have about 15 years of data that could be mined here. Take a cohort of plane travellers and divide them into 2 groups: people who take many flights per year, versus people who take few flights per year, and compare their rates of cancer later in life, against a similar cohort taken from the general population.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
NAFTA came into force in 1994, so most of the benefits from Grameen happened *before* the push towards globalization.
And for the record, bringing people out of poverty through globalism is temporary, because the root cause of poverty is corruption and globalism doesn't change that.
Most of the wealth to China went first to the people, then to the government. The government now has all the money, and the people would return to poverty in a heartbeat if the global demand dried up.
Not so much with the Grameen bank.
China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.
All that wealth coming from the US has gone to waste.
What's worse is that globalism is pulling us down into poverty. Highly trained Chinese can come to this country and get jobs, but highly trained Americans can't similarly go to China. You can't become a Chinese citizen even if you marry a Chinese citizen.
Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.
At any rate, the Grameen bank was an idea that actually worked.
Even if you are philosophically opposed to capitalism, you have to admit that the Grameen Bank, as an idea, works.
There's been a lot of controversy over the Peace prize of late.
Note that Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank which has reduced worldwide poverty by some insane amount - something like 40% of all poverty in the world has been eliminated by this one idea(*).
This guy deserves his medal, and perhaps his stature and accomplishments should be taken into account before people start dissing his opinions.
He's not just a random blogger that got an article in BuzzFeed.
(*) With significant follow-on benefits, such as increasing childrens' dietary protein, leading to better health.
If people actually understood the stock market from the game theoretic point of view that it is designed as, they would see that no order can be placed to the detriment of any other actor's orders, and that in fact, every order either increases the value of the market to *some* set of actors in that market or at worse has no effect at all.
This, and the resulting analysis, is completely bogus.
For an analogy, consider a town with a market in the center. Farmers come from far away to sell their wares at the market.
There is risk in farming: a farmer might decide to plant corn one year, or some other crop. If everyone plants the same crop, there will be a glut and the prices will be low, but if the farmer plants one crop and no one else does, his reward will be very high.
There is need in buying. Someone who is hungry for goods will pay more than the asking price. "Hunger" here only means a general need, and not physical hunger: a father purchasing flowers for his daughter's wedding might be willing to spend more money to outbid other people who want flowers for a lesser need.
A farmer takes risks, and sometimes those risks pay off. The buyer has needs, and sometimes is willing to pay more to satisfy them. The buyer also sometimes gets a good deal.
We've all done that - found a motivated seller (or buyer) on eBay and gotten a good deal, right?
Now suppose there are runners who can ask the farmer what his selling price is when they reach the edge of town, and the father what his buying price for the goods are. The runners are very fast and can get a sense of what the prices are before either party gets to the center market.
Here's the outcome: the runners will put themselves in the middle of the transaction *only* if the buying price is higher than the selling price. If the selling price is too high, the runners won't bother.
The end result is farmer never gets an occasional boon from his risks, and the buyer never gets a sweet deal on his purchases.
The seller is forced to take risks, but will only ever see the average return. The purchaser will always pay full price, and will never see a random good deal. The end result is that both the buyer and the seller are discouraged from entering the market.
This is completely analogous to the principle of unequal knowledge, which is why used cars have no value: A buyer cannot easily tell whether a used car is any good (it's difficult to tell whether the engine or transmission will need repair, for instance) so will only pay average price for a used car. A seller with a good car won't sell it for average price, which brings down the average, which means owners won't sell mediocre cars for the (lower) average, and the cycle continues. The end result is that used cars have almost no value.
It's the same for high-speed trading, using risk instead of knowledge. If making a product takes risk but you can't recoup any value from taking the risk - then you won't take the risk.
For both the seller and the purchaser, the market has reduced in value because of the runners.
Don't buy into the hype - it's only people making a lot of money off of "a good thing" trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
We know that the original dark-web protocol allowed state actors to pierce the veil of anonymity by traffic analysis. For example, even though packets were encrypted, you could follow packets of the same length to their destination. Do this multiple times, and you have a statistical certainty of the destination site.
That was fixed, and a similar technique with packet timing was also fixed.
I'm wondering now: can packet *volume* can be used to fingerprint a communication path?
Suppose you could flood a site through the Onion system, and also turn it on and off with a 1-sec resolution. Set up a pattern of on/off packet floods, then see which destinations get flooded during which seconds.
Can you then use traffic analysis to uncover the destination site?
This hack took place just before the US election in November 2016. Which puts a different context to all rocket test launches that have happened since then. It suggests North Korea isn't just rattling sabers at an untested administration. They might actually have a larger scale plan.
I'm probably being dense here, but... can you be more specific about what is suggested or what might be their plan, instead of the innuendo?
Innuendo is good when everyone is on the same page and the circumstances suggest something obvious, but I'm not getting it here.
Right before the election, Hillary was the overwhelming favourite to win. Trump's win couldn't have been reasonably predicted, so how could the "timing" of the data incident lead to the larger scale plan?
I would expect such a tremendous upset (the election) would cause NK to *change* their plans. Development and deployment of missiles doesn't happen overnight, so...
What does this suggest? Can you be more specific?
(Could it also be a crime of opportunity? Where some NK hacker "got lucky" and grabbed the data without being a targetted, planned and orchestrated event?)
Can anyone give me a coherent answer about why anyone needs a bump stock to convert a semi-automatic weapon into a fully automatic one? There is no legitimate reason for anyone to have bump stocks, and they need to be banned. It is truly remarkable to me that conservatives would resist a common sense measure like banning bump stocks.
Because you've already got most of the cake and you don't need more?
You're drinking the kool-aid served to you by the MSM in particular and liberals in general. They make money by selling outrage, and they do it without careful consideration of the consequences. Their intelligence horizon extends no further than "the next click".
The issue has been gone over in detail and there are about two dozen legitimate arguments why further gun control is wasteful, ineffective, and dangerous.
Get over it.
Start with rationality and premise: Describe the problem by stating how many people are killed, annually, using bump stocks. Then proceed to a rational comparison of how our civilization would be different with and without bump stocks, and include in your description the cost of implementing the ban versus the reward of having the ban.
If you really, *really* want to have "that conversation about gun control", then we can have that... but if we do, note that everything will be on the table for discussion, including relaxing gun restrictions. Would we be more safe if the entire country went to reciprocity?
Also that discussion will allow for "out of the box" potential solutions. For example, instead of blanket laws controlling guns, would the rewards be better served by banning moslems from owning guns? Or blacks? What do the statistics say?
If you honestly want to further restrict guns, you'll need to convince the smart population of the country. Evidence indicates that people are getting tired of ill-founded emotional arguments that don't work in practice, and our horizon for "giving it a chance" is shrinking to less than a senate term.
Convince a majority of the logic and benefits of your position, and stop making these inane emotional pleas.
Electricity isn't "sexy". Neither is city water or trash disposal services.
Common carriers are a necessary component driving many other services, and given the demand I'm failing to understand how or why any of them are struggling.
It's possibly because they're universal dicks.
They made answering machines obsolete by providing the service for free, and the service is now too awkward and unwieldy to use. Whereas before, you could say "this is Jeff, leave a message", it's now "the number you have dialed, digit... digit...... is not available. At the tone, please leave a message. To leave a callback number..."
It was a grab for billing, because if they could keep the caller beyond 1 minute, then they could charge for another full minute.
The result? Almost no one uses voicemail any more.
They let affiliates engage in "cramming" (putting unwanted charges on your phone bill), then argue with customers who want to take the charges off. They implemented "caller ID" and then made it trivial to spoof, they don't do a thing about spam calls, telemarketer calls, or fraud calls such as "This is Barbara from cardholder services...".
[Earlier in this century] They freely give out customer information and "who we called, and when" to the government without a warrant, then said "It's not a constitutional violation because we're not the government". They let the US government copy all call information and send it to the government, they give out location information without a warrant ("cell tower information is not on paper, so 4th amendment doesn't apply").
Their customer service has a reputation for being one of the worst, they took $200B to wire up "the rest of the country" for broadband, then sat on the money and did nothing, they don't bother to upgrade their equipment in areas with spotty coverage...
The list goes on, this is only off the top of my head.
The telcos have never considered the phone users to be their actual customers, so they never bothered to make their customers happy. This was the "you are not the customer, you're the product" modern business model.
By ignoring their customer base and not changing with the times, they're getting their lunch eaten by other companies.
This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields.
I'm sorry - why is it a problem?
What does anyone care what other people do with their money? They have implemented their own vision of trying to help, and it's not the same as *your* vision, so you want to change theirs?
People seem to feel that the point of the Nobels is the science, there's a sizeable psychological benefit. It's something to strive for, something to dream about, and it's a sort of lottery for geeks. Similar to an athlete's $10m salary.
For evenly-distributed awards for everyone who does work, consider government research grants. Those are given out evenly for anyone willing to do the work, with a little left over to pay the researchers for the time it takes, and when you are done you can apply for another one.
Government grants generate no romantic dreams to work towards, and no excitement when you're on the path or perhaps a potential recipient. If you distribute the Nobel prize money evenly, it'll be just a small year-end salary bonus. Welcome and pleasant, but also detached and irrelevant.
I'm in favour of keeping the Nobel prizes the way they are - it gives us something to strive for and dream about.
Also, that thing about caring what other people do with their money.
No matter what the provenance is of the comments, Ajit Pai and The Donald will use them in their favor as political cover for whatever they want to do.
It's unfortunate that the economy is going great, leadership had a strong response to 3 successive hurricanes, we got out of TPP and the Paris accord, and have cracked down on illegal immigration.
Otherwise, what you are moaning about could be construed as a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably due to statistical variation in the early expansion of the universe.
Here's an analogy:
Suppose you throw 1 million coins and tally the results. You might expect to get 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails, but it's *more* probable that you would get a different ratio. The probability of being 1-off in either direction is higher: even though both individual probabilities are smaller there's two possible outcomes (one more head, or one more tail).
(In 8 tosses of the coin, there's 70 ways to make 4H/4T, 56 ways to make 3H/5T, and 56 ways to make 5H/3T. Even split has 70 ways, while 1-off has 112 ways.)
What you actually get is a bell curve of probability. Take a single sample and you expect to get "somewhere near" the mean value, but it's highly unlikely that you'll get exactly the mean.
So in the early universe, suppose position is quantized and there is exactly 1 place to be. Lots and lots of energy sitting on that one spot, some of it splitting into matter and antimatter and then annihilating back to energy.
The universe expands and there are now 2 positions. The energy and matter/antimatter distributes randomly.
Even though you'd expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter to go to both positions, it's statistically unlikely. Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 antimatter and 210,000 matter in the other. Both sides have 500,000 "coins", but with slightly different proportions, according to statistical chance.
Now suppose the universe continues to grow at a rate faster than the matter can keep up. There are suddenly 4 positions instead of 2, then 8, 16, and so on. The matter/anti-matter ratio in each side is now 210,000/290.000, which annihilates, leaving 80,000 matter particles and 420,000*MC^2 of energy. On each side.
This would only happen if the universe expands faster than the particles can travel across the available positions to annihilate.
As it happens, there's evidence that the early universe *did* expand faster than the speed of light, which is why the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but looks to be at least 93 billion years in diameter. This is the early inflation model.
So even if all known processes generate equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, it makes statistical sense that there might be an excess of one or another in different parts of the universe.
A children's hospital with 35 permanent residents?
Clearly, a site chosen at random for power restoration...
I see that you haven't proposed what would have been a *better* installation, just a comparison to a big nebulous "he could have done better". Where is your analysis? What alternatives were there, and why was his choice sub-optimal?
Can't we just say "bravo" or at least "congratulations" or something?
Elon didn't do it the way *you* would have liked, but note that he actually did something.
Gay is neither good or bad. Gay is just a label.
While true, one can easily see the reason for the problem.
Google API is trained to look for correlations in written text. If it sees a lot of negative text about something, then that's what it will believe.
I note that there's a lot of text that condemn jews for one reason or another, but there's not a lot that *praises* jews. We hear all the time about Christian charities, for example, but not a lot for the jewish ones(*).
There's also a lot of negative statements about gays, and although there's *some* text praising gayness, it's mostly either personal ("good on you for having the courage to believe in yourself") or neutral ("it's OK to be gay, it's normal"). I've never seen writing that *praises* gayness as a concept.
Compare with Christianity, where there is endless adulation of the Christian way of life. Democracy is probably the same way.
I'd be interested to see what the API thinks about Islam, or Trump, or Clinton, or a host of other controversial political subjects.
Google API is probably just giving us a reflection of the zeitgeist.
(*) Don't read anything into this, I'm only saying that Christians get better press.
Old programmers become ascended masters like St. Germain and live forever in the shadows, controlling the world. Or, they become greeters at Wal-Mart. Sometimes both.
Old programmers never die... they just smell that way.
What are Trello, Wrike and Asana and why would I want them (either for business or personal use)?
If only Google had a service that you could type this into and get more information about it....
If only Google would spend some time making their UI better.
Delete is a trashcan icon when reading, but different when viewing the inbox. "Select all" means "select the first 50" (have to do that numerous times to actually select/delete *all* messages), "reply" is down at the bottom of "conversation" mode so that you have to scroll down many pages to reach it, "cc" and "bcc" are hidden *until* you click in the "to" line...
Many, many confusing and inconsistent interface choices, there's no overriding theme or standard that can be used to find functions you need, and many useful things are inconveniently positioned and not easy to see. I count 8 dropdown boxes for various functions on the GMail page, normal rules for "selection" (click, and see item highlighted) are different from every other program on my computer, it's just a mess.
You're forced to "guess and look" to do just about anything.
To get a feel for what I mean: deleting an item from the inbox is a very common action, so why is it hidden (until I mark a checkbox) and why does (this really common feature) take several steps? For all the bad things we say about Apple, at least they know how to make a good interface.
Give them this and in 10 years they'll be whining about how unfair it is that they need a warrant to read your mind.
You laugh, but this has been tried.
In the case cited, fMRI scans were used to determine whether the plaintiff's "intent". IOW, they were using the scans to determine whether the doctor has "intent" to defraud the insurance agencies.
The answers are pretty obvious.
Firstly, we still use them because there's no reasonable replacement. Duh.
Secondly, there's no reasonable replacement because of the way our computers work.
Passwords are essentially information held in a system outside the computer (your head), that can be used for verification. The problem is that humans aren't really good at remembering passwords, and we need so many of them, and they are infrequently needed.
All attempts at using computers to solve this issue have run afoul of the "general purpose computer" problem: because our computers do not address security properly, we cannot guarantee what software is running on the local hardware. We cannot guarantee the security of passwords held on the computer, or in an encrypted file, because it's so easy to download and run malware. No one keeps track of all the things run on the computer, and we can't even trust the people who supposedly *do* keep track.
One reasonable solution is to use hardware specific to the purpose that's *not* a general purpose computer.
If you had a piece of hardware - a thumb drive, for example - that was *not* general purpose and could not download and execute code, then that could be made pretty secure. It could hold a person's private key, have functions to encrypt, decrypt, and sign documents, and also pass out the public key. It could also download and install new keys, with the understanding that the base functions could not be changed.
There's some details involved: you need a way to securely backup the data, and you need a way to securely recover the data in various situations. Mostly, you need to save the data somewhere safe and write down a master password (one, a PIN of sorts) somewhere else.
The Mooltipass is pretty close. It generates strong passwords for each web site registration, and will fill in the fields for you when you go to log in.
That's not the complete solution, however. It should *encrypt* the password with the user's private key and the site's public key so that no one can view it(*), or even better use a zero-knowledge authentication process.
If we could somehow begin using a fixed-program computer - say, something the size of a credit-card calculator that requires a pin and that holds the information for *all* the cards in your wallet - we could get away from passwords.
We would also have a single point on which we could put *all* our effort to make secure.
Hypothetically, that one card would reduce credit card fraud to near zero. When you use the card you enter your PIN on the keypad, and the card generates a ShopSafe number tied to your credit account, valid for one purchase.
Take a look at the badges at high-tech conferences these days. It seems like the hardware shouldn't be that hard or expensive.
Could this be the next killer product from Apple? A hand-held thingy that's secure and ultra-convenient, that you use for payments (IRL and online) and password entry?
(*) Yes, ssh is not absolutely secure. Did you think all those cert authorities in your browser have been properly vetted?
I look forward to seeing Antifa accounts suspended.
Good luck with that.
A fuckton of people are on Gab after getting kicked off of twitter, and are running a thread Not Allowed on Twitter.
I realize this is probably a biased sample, but there's a lot of "*this* got me kicked off, while *that* is allowed" posts that highlight the double-standard.
It would seem that left-leaning posts are taken with a wink and a smile, while right-leaning posts are censored with an overreaching iron fist. It's often completely mysterious what twitter standards are violated; apparently talking about and linking to someone twitter doesn't like (such as Milo) is enough to get you banned, even if the actual text is pedestrian such as "I saw this guy speak last night and he was OK".
There was one post that came out completely against Nazis (saying things like "Nazis are bad, I don't condone nazis, and the like) and apparently used the word "nazi" too many times and got banned. All from completely unexciting text.
Here's an example of a post that's *allowed* on twitter.
Just like humans to go and dispossess a bunch of peaceful aliens that never even bothered us to begin with, just because we want a precious resource the lands they occupy have in abundance.
Not to mention we sent a probe to Mars with a deadly "heat ray" weapon.
Any day now, they will find the remains of an ant-creature civilization, and the skeletal of Mr. Cavor.
Right next to the giant see-saw crystal thingy that powered the selenite civilization.
Even more reason to disable Javascript.
While I agree with that sentiment, I have to wonder why this is such a big deal?
Assuming that mining is not actually harming me or my computer - destroying files, or leaking my information to someone - why should I care? If I visit a website and read an article, maybe a minute of my time, my computer is otherwise idle and the amount of energy spent is negligible.
We've always wanted a way to monetize visiting a site, could this be a way to do it?
Suppose we had a service where people could submit computationally intensive problems which can be broken down into smaller computational units. Such as "folding at home" or "seti at home".
The answers to some of those problems could be valuable, so we could imagine research institutions paying money to use the system to solve those problems, and pay out based on the amount of computation a website brings in.
This is proportional to the number of users who view the website, and for how long. This could be a user-friendly alternative to advertising.
In fact, one can imagine the *government* paying money to use the system as a make-work program: it would encourage people to make better, more meaningful websites overall. Would the sociological benefit outweigh the extra costs?
(Assuming that people don't game the system, but it seems reasonable that we could learn all the gaming techniques over time and avoid them. Sort of how we deal with advertizing clicks currently.)
I don't see what the problem here is, and look at it as an opportunity.
Could this be a user-friendly way to monetize a website, as an alternative to advertising?
The Russians were funding the protests. It all makes sense now.
I don't think people have quite realized the impact this new revelation has.
True or false, big [effect] or little, this revelation will taint all future protests.
The protests have just lost a fuckton of credibility, because now this will be raised as the reason people are protesting.
For all future protests.
And some previous protestors will come to examine their beliefs, saying "did I really believe that, or was I egged on"?
Future protests will be painted "fruit of the poison tree" with this new revelation.
Why are we even talking about a couple of Facebook ads when today's breaking news is the Obama administration was investigating Russian infiltration of the US nuclear material transport trucking company in 2009, by none other than Mueller of the FBI.
Fascinating to watch the Slashdot moderation system in action.
As I post this, there are three topically relevant and accurate stories modded down to 0 or -1. The one above this one reads "0 interesting", the "interesting" tag gets added for an upvote.
This one (and the others) are perfectly legitimate: Both news stories are in the current news cycle, and are largely what the writers say they are. (Clinton Uranium deal investigated by the FBI, and Comey wrote the Hillary conclusion months before interviewing Hillary.)
I have faith that the number of people with integrity far outweigh the trolls on this board.
We're the smart people in the room, the ones that others *should* look up to.
If we can't abide the truth, then we're no different from the media talking heads.
Why are we even talking about a couple of Facebook ads when today's breaking news is the Obama administration was investigating Russian infiltration of the US nuclear material transport trucking company in 2009, by none other than Mueller of the FBI. It eventually led to corruption, money laundering, kickbacks and extortion charges. Yet somehow at the same time, a $500k speaking fee to Bill Clinton and $145mil being donated to the Clinton Foundation, with Hillary Clinton as sec of state let the same Russian group by Uranium One and 20% of the US uranium supply. Obama himself said that there was nothing to be concerned about, but we know now the investigation was blocked by none other than Comey, and Dept of Justice Holder And the Russian involved had a plea deal and covered it up in 2014.
Dearie, don't you understand? Laws are for little people.
James Comey can admit to leaking, and gets to write a book about it.
Reality Winner can admit to leaking, and gets to sit in prison, denied bail.
Not that Hilary is a spring chicken herself but it took a fundamental breakdown over just about everything to make a guy who used to be a Simpson's joke our actual president.
Here's a joke for you:
Q: How many reasons does Hillary have for not winning the election?
A: 43
If you voted for the party of less regulation. Yes, there's a lot of silly laws on the books, but the really silly ones are ignored by everyone. When it comes time to cut regulations these are the ones that get cut.
This discussion came up about airport X-ray machines years ago, and sparked a debate about exposure safety.
There appears to be a linear relation between amount of exposure and number of cancers(*), but only for rather excessive levels of radiation. The debate centers on whether there is a "cutoff", where any exposure less than some amount is negligible.
It's hard to get quantitative information about this because the exposure levels are small, and the results won't be known for decades. IIRC, my calculations at the time indicated that 10 or 20 new cases of cancer *might* be caused by 9 billion airline flights. (Those 10-20 new cancers is not nothing, I'm just pointing out that finding the correlation in all that noise is all but impossible. Attention paid to more likely health threats would be a better way to spend effort and resources**.)
The prevailing opinion is that the body deals with and repairs all sorts of damage in it's day-to-day operation, so that damage smaller than a set level will get swept up along with all the other repairs.
Strangely, there is actually no menace in this recent decision, and the "party of less regulation" is doing what appears to be the right thing.
(*) I once wrote an article about airport X-ray systems, which required a bunch of research.
(**) Interestingly, that was then and this is now. Since everyone has to register to take a plane flight, we now have about 15 years of data that could be mined here. Take a cohort of plane travellers and divide them into 2 groups: people who take many flights per year, versus people who take few flights per year, and compare their rates of cancer later in life, against a similar cohort taken from the general population.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
The Grameen Bank was written up in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American.
NAFTA came into force in 1994, so most of the benefits from Grameen happened *before* the push towards globalization.
And for the record, bringing people out of poverty through globalism is temporary, because the root cause of poverty is corruption and globalism doesn't change that.
Most of the wealth to China went first to the people, then to the government. The government now has all the money, and the people would return to poverty in a heartbeat if the global demand dried up.
Not so much with the Grameen bank.
China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.
All that wealth coming from the US has gone to waste.
What's worse is that globalism is pulling us down into poverty. Highly trained Chinese can come to this country and get jobs, but highly trained Americans can't similarly go to China. You can't become a Chinese citizen even if you marry a Chinese citizen.
Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.
At any rate, the Grameen bank was an idea that actually worked.
Even if you are philosophically opposed to capitalism, you have to admit that the Grameen Bank, as an idea, works.
There's been a lot of controversy over the Peace prize of late.
Note that Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank which has reduced worldwide poverty by some insane amount - something like 40% of all poverty in the world has been eliminated by this one idea(*).
This guy deserves his medal, and perhaps his stature and accomplishments should be taken into account before people start dissing his opinions.
He's not just a random blogger that got an article in BuzzFeed.
(*) With significant follow-on benefits, such as increasing childrens' dietary protein, leading to better health.
If people actually understood the stock market from the game theoretic point of view that it is designed as, they would see that no order can be placed to the detriment of any other actor's orders, and that in fact, every order either increases the value of the market to *some* set of actors in that market or at worse has no effect at all.
This, and the resulting analysis, is completely bogus.
For an analogy, consider a town with a market in the center. Farmers come from far away to sell their wares at the market.
There is risk in farming: a farmer might decide to plant corn one year, or some other crop. If everyone plants the same crop, there will be a glut and the prices will be low, but if the farmer plants one crop and no one else does, his reward will be very high.
There is need in buying. Someone who is hungry for goods will pay more than the asking price. "Hunger" here only means a general need, and not physical hunger: a father purchasing flowers for his daughter's wedding might be willing to spend more money to outbid other people who want flowers for a lesser need.
A farmer takes risks, and sometimes those risks pay off. The buyer has needs, and sometimes is willing to pay more to satisfy them. The buyer also sometimes gets a good deal.
We've all done that - found a motivated seller (or buyer) on eBay and gotten a good deal, right?
Now suppose there are runners who can ask the farmer what his selling price is when they reach the edge of town, and the father what his buying price for the goods are. The runners are very fast and can get a sense of what the prices are before either party gets to the center market.
Here's the outcome: the runners will put themselves in the middle of the transaction *only* if the buying price is higher than the selling price. If the selling price is too high, the runners won't bother.
The end result is farmer never gets an occasional boon from his risks, and the buyer never gets a sweet deal on his purchases.
The seller is forced to take risks, but will only ever see the average return. The purchaser will always pay full price, and will never see a random good deal. The end result is that both the buyer and the seller are discouraged from entering the market.
This is completely analogous to the principle of unequal knowledge, which is why used cars have no value: A buyer cannot easily tell whether a used car is any good (it's difficult to tell whether the engine or transmission will need repair, for instance) so will only pay average price for a used car. A seller with a good car won't sell it for average price, which brings down the average, which means owners won't sell mediocre cars for the (lower) average, and the cycle continues. The end result is that used cars have almost no value.
It's the same for high-speed trading, using risk instead of knowledge. If making a product takes risk but you can't recoup any value from taking the risk - then you won't take the risk.
For both the seller and the purchaser, the market has reduced in value because of the runners.
Don't buy into the hype - it's only people making a lot of money off of "a good thing" trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
This leads to an interesting question.
We know that the original dark-web protocol allowed state actors to pierce the veil of anonymity by traffic analysis. For example, even though packets were encrypted, you could follow packets of the same length to their destination. Do this multiple times, and you have a statistical certainty of the destination site.
That was fixed, and a similar technique with packet timing was also fixed.
I'm wondering now: can packet *volume* can be used to fingerprint a communication path?
Suppose you could flood a site through the Onion system, and also turn it on and off with a 1-sec resolution. Set up a pattern of on/off packet floods, then see which destinations get flooded during which seconds.
Can you then use traffic analysis to uncover the destination site?
This hack took place just before the US election in November 2016. Which puts a different context to all rocket test launches that have happened since then. It suggests North Korea isn't just rattling sabers at an untested administration. They might actually have a larger scale plan.
I'm probably being dense here, but... can you be more specific about what is suggested or what might be their plan, instead of the innuendo?
Innuendo is good when everyone is on the same page and the circumstances suggest something obvious, but I'm not getting it here.
Right before the election, Hillary was the overwhelming favourite to win. Trump's win couldn't have been reasonably predicted, so how could the "timing" of the data incident lead to the larger scale plan?
I would expect such a tremendous upset (the election) would cause NK to *change* their plans. Development and deployment of missiles doesn't happen overnight, so...
What does this suggest? Can you be more specific?
(Could it also be a crime of opportunity? Where some NK hacker "got lucky" and grabbed the data without being a targetted, planned and orchestrated event?)
Can anyone give me a coherent answer about why anyone needs a bump stock to convert a semi-automatic weapon into a fully automatic one? There is no legitimate reason for anyone to have bump stocks, and they need to be banned. It is truly remarkable to me that conservatives would resist a common sense measure like banning bump stocks.
Because you've already got most of the cake and you don't need more?
You're drinking the kool-aid served to you by the MSM in particular and liberals in general. They make money by selling outrage, and they do it without careful consideration of the consequences. Their intelligence horizon extends no further than "the next click".
The issue has been gone over in detail and there are about two dozen legitimate arguments why further gun control is wasteful, ineffective, and dangerous.
Get over it.
Start with rationality and premise: Describe the problem by stating how many people are killed, annually, using bump stocks. Then proceed to a rational comparison of how our civilization would be different with and without bump stocks, and include in your description the cost of implementing the ban versus the reward of having the ban.
If you really, *really* want to have "that conversation about gun control", then we can have that... but if we do, note that everything will be on the table for discussion, including relaxing gun restrictions. Would we be more safe if the entire country went to reciprocity?
Also that discussion will allow for "out of the box" potential solutions. For example, instead of blanket laws controlling guns, would the rewards be better served by banning moslems from owning guns? Or blacks? What do the statistics say?
If you honestly want to further restrict guns, you'll need to convince the smart population of the country. Evidence indicates that people are getting tired of ill-founded emotional arguments that don't work in practice, and our horizon for "giving it a chance" is shrinking to less than a senate term.
Convince a majority of the logic and benefits of your position, and stop making these inane emotional pleas.
Do it the right way.
Electricity isn't "sexy". Neither is city water or trash disposal services.
Common carriers are a necessary component driving many other services, and given the demand I'm failing to understand how or why any of them are struggling.
It's possibly because they're universal dicks.
They made answering machines obsolete by providing the service for free, and the service is now too awkward and unwieldy to use. Whereas before, you could say "this is Jeff, leave a message", it's now "the number you have dialed, digit... digit... ... is not available. At the tone, please leave a message. To leave a callback number..."
It was a grab for billing, because if they could keep the caller beyond 1 minute, then they could charge for another full minute.
The result? Almost no one uses voicemail any more.
They let affiliates engage in "cramming" (putting unwanted charges on your phone bill), then argue with customers who want to take the charges off. They implemented "caller ID" and then made it trivial to spoof, they don't do a thing about spam calls, telemarketer calls, or fraud calls such as "This is Barbara from cardholder services...".
[Earlier in this century] They freely give out customer information and "who we called, and when" to the government without a warrant, then said "It's not a constitutional violation because we're not the government". They let the US government copy all call information and send it to the government, they give out location information without a warrant ("cell tower information is not on paper, so 4th amendment doesn't apply").
Their customer service has a reputation for being one of the worst, they took $200B to wire up "the rest of the country" for broadband, then sat on the money and did nothing, they don't bother to upgrade their equipment in areas with spotty coverage...
The list goes on, this is only off the top of my head.
The telcos have never considered the phone users to be their actual customers, so they never bothered to make their customers happy. This was the "you are not the customer, you're the product" modern business model.
By ignoring their customer base and not changing with the times, they're getting their lunch eaten by other companies.
This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields.
I'm sorry - why is it a problem?
What does anyone care what other people do with their money? They have implemented their own vision of trying to help, and it's not the same as *your* vision, so you want to change theirs?
People seem to feel that the point of the Nobels is the science, there's a sizeable psychological benefit. It's something to strive for, something to dream about, and it's a sort of lottery for geeks. Similar to an athlete's $10m salary.
For evenly-distributed awards for everyone who does work, consider government research grants. Those are given out evenly for anyone willing to do the work, with a little left over to pay the researchers for the time it takes, and when you are done you can apply for another one.
Government grants generate no romantic dreams to work towards, and no excitement when you're on the path or perhaps a potential recipient. If you distribute the Nobel prize money evenly, it'll be just a small year-end salary bonus. Welcome and pleasant, but also detached and irrelevant.
I'm in favour of keeping the Nobel prizes the way they are - it gives us something to strive for and dream about.
Also, that thing about caring what other people do with their money.
No matter what the provenance is of the comments, Ajit Pai and The Donald will use them in their favor as political cover for whatever they want to do.
It's unfortunate that the economy is going great, leadership had a strong response to 3 successive hurricanes, we got out of TPP and the Paris accord, and have cracked down on illegal immigration.
Otherwise, what you are moaning about could be construed as a bad thing.