The issue could have been addressed by fiat from any one popular software package.
Thus solving it for users of one package.
Yes, solving it for one package. As mentioned in the post, there would be an incentive for other packages to implement the scheme in order to be compatible. As mentioned in the post. Perhaps enough incentive to form a Tipping point.
2) Add a field to the protocol
Which protocol? SMTP? POP? IMAP? UUCP?
The protocol allows for experimental fields
Same question.
Which one do you think? Do you need a complete spec, or will just an outline do? Google is your friend.
The mouseover for the button
Oh, this would solve the problem only for the people with GUI mail clients.
Did you really think I was advocating implementing this only on GUI clients?
The point was to get enough naive users into the system to make it a de-facto standard. Most naive users use a GUI client, so starting there would put the solution before a wide audience quickly.
could have said "use encryption if the recipient has a compatible client".
Sorry. How does my email client know what email client YOU are using and whether it supports this? Is there a new protocol you are proposing where one client asks another prior to sending an email? What happens if the recipient is offline?
If you have the public key for the recipient, then they have a compatible client. If you don't, you send the message in the clear and request the public key.
Really, this isn't rocket science - the first message I receive from the recipient would contain their public key. My first message to them would be in the clear, but would provoke a public-key sendback which my client would silently process.
(I've often wondered if the browser could automatically encrypt/decrypt the content of specific named text blocks from specific sites such as gmail. Then the content could be encrypted online, but show cleartext to the user.)
If you are limiting yourself to defining "email" as "gmail accessed via a web browser", you simplify the problem considerably. Of course Google could store all your email in an encrypted form and send you a javascript (if you have a js enabled/capable broswer) applet that decodes it on your system. If you send them your public key, they could even encrypt the stuff they store on their disks as it came in for you, if it wasn't already. You still have the problem of how you make sure every system you use to access that email has the key kept locally, and what happens for people who have gmail forwarded to some place else.
So, yes, the problem is rather trivial if you force everyone and everything through one mail server and ignore the huge diversity in protocols used to transport email and the kinds and types of clients/servers used to do it.
The protocol doesn't matter, since the message body can contain any text.
You could, for instance, encode public keys as part of the body of any message by wrapping it in a field delimiter which the client could pick out. If your browser isn't compatible, then the recipient would see the public key encoding as text.
This isn't so different from digital signatures, which are encodings of binary data attached to the bottom of a document body. I'm only suggesting that a similar method be used to attach the sender's public key, and have the client make note of the public keys as it gets them.
The sender uses the recipient's public key if it has one. Otherwise, it sends in the clear. The first messages will be in the clear, and encoded for all subsequent messages.
Really, this is not rocket science. Take a moment to think things through.
We could have fixed this whole privacy thing from the beginning, but for whatever reason we didn't.
There was a time when people read E-mail using local clients. Freeware programs such as Thunderbird and Pegasus Mail were common.
The issue could have been addressed by fiat from any one popular software package. It would only have required:
1) For each user, generate a default public and private key on install 2) Add a field to the protocol requesting the recipient's public key if they have one 3) Add a field advertizing the sender's public key 4) Add a button on the interface for "Prevent others from reading the content"
Done right, that's all it would have taken.
The protocol allows for experimental fields which can be ignored if the client doesn't understand, and there is already a mechanism for "delivery confirmation" which could be adapted for "public key confirmation". It would have taken very little to have the client intercept the public key response, process it, and not bother the user about it.
The mouseover for the button could have said "use encryption if the recipient has a compatible client".
At the time, this would have been a feature that mainstream clients didn't have (Outlook, Exchange, &c), so it would have been a selling point for open source. It would have led people to encourage the recipient to change to a more secure client. There would be an incentive to make other packages compatible, and soon the feature would be everywhere.
All of this could have been implemented transparently for the naive user, with a more sophisticated interface for advanced users who needed more control.
But for some reason we didn't do that, and now everyone reads their E-mail online. We didn't make this a de-facto standard, and now we've missed our chance. (I've often wondered if the browser could automatically encrypt/decrypt the content of specific named text blocks from specific sites such as gmail. Then the content could be encrypted online, but show cleartext to the user.)
We have the means and expertise to fix some of these problems, all it takes is the will to do it.
If your friend is running a successful business, then he's got a particularly useful and uncommon skill.
Some 80% of all first businesses fail, but only 20% of second businesses fail. That's because after the first business, you learn from your mistakes. Your friend has the skills and experience needed to start a new business - and that's what he should do.
So, what's trending on the map right now? What brick-and-mortar establishments are on the rise?
How about setting up a hackerspace? These seem to be popping up everywhere, and unlike McDonalds, there's still room for more.
While running the 'space, keep an eye out for things that might be products. With a hackerspace available it's easy to "test the waters" for a new tech product: you have access to people with skills for design, construction, [website] sales, and so on.
What they don't have is someone who can steer the ship, someone who has experience in things like incorporating, taxes, management, planning, accounting, and so on.
Consider starting a hackerspace. I hear that they can be successful and lots of fun.
An engineer uses his tools and techniques to solve problems.
A scientist invents new tools and techniques.
If you're just using your knowledge to build things for people, you're an engineer. Unless you're exploring the limits of knowledge, coming up with and testing new ideas, you're not a scientist. And publishing has nothing to do with it, it's a mindset.
Knuth is a scientist - by laying out algorithms and describing their merits and deficiencies, he's essentially publishing a box of tools that others can use. Bill Gates is an engineer - he implemented known algorithms and solutions into a unified package (nothing new there).
A visual editor is essentially a very program with many, many features. No one does the interface particularly well, so consider making an interface that is based on information complexity and brain theory rather than the current model.
The current model has features stuffed into every corner - the edges and corners of everything sprout features, a zillion toolbars stuffed with icons, tooltips are everywhere. It's gotten so complicated that I don't think anyone bothers with customization any more.
Do some data mining on the editing process and count the types of changes people make. Take the logarithm of that number and put that many icons and shortcuts for the most used operations on the front page. Make everything else available, but hide it.
Rather than making a zillion incomprehensible icons and using tooltips to clarify, consider using icons of 2-letter abbreviations. Use English abbreviations - no one cares that music notation is in Italian, no one cares that medical notation is in Latin, and no one will care that the interface notation is in English (...but translate the popup messages and help files into native, of course). With 2-letter abbreviations (and throw in a few extra symbols) you can make icons that remind the user of the function. (For comparison, consider the 2-letter abbreviations in Perl: $! means "What went bang?", $= means "number of lines in file", &c.)
If Icons can have 2 letters and other symbols such as dingbats or greek letters, you can have a large number of mnemonic functions such as <scissors>-2 meaning "cut to the 2nd cut buffer".
If you make some good conceptual design decisions you can make the interface intuitive and eliminate lots and lots of widgetry. For example, instead of considering the document a page of text with inserts of other things (as does Microsoft Word and HTML), consider going to an object/position model.
Suppose the page starts blank and requires the user to place objects before anything else. A text box is an object, as is an image or video. Once the user can create and size text boxes (rubber banding), you no longer need a complex "column layout" panel with all sorts of widgets to define columns - just have the user place text boxes where needed, and note how the text should flow from one to the other. Add in some group/distribute/z-order functions to tidy things up (common across all objects) and all the layout becomes intuitive - no complex interface needed.
Instead of making the help files a search in the linear manual, make the help into a tree structure. Start with "is your question about text, images, or video", let the user select one of these, then ask more clarifying questions until you get to the topic the user wants to know about. With 3 options per node, the user can drill down into the subject matter very quickly. This is especially useful when the user doesn't know how to properly describe what they want to do, or when the subject is some jargon word the user doesn't know like "Kerning", "Alpha transparency", and so on.
Include a long list of "How do I..." answers, and have this list be searchable.
It's incredibly useful to be able to leverage functionality externally, so consider making your editor in two pieces - a functional engine and an interface/display engine. Make the connection between these two pieces a socket interface and publish the API - this way other people can invoke your engine using external programs, and make automated scripts &c.
Also, people can make alternate interfaces to play around with different display techniques.
Paypal is exquisitely convenient to use for eBay purchases, and eBay is roundly superior to most other online shopping.
That's not to say that Paypal doesn't have its faults - it's like having an employee who will do things for you, but can't be trusted with anything important or valuable. If you give the employee a bunch of cash, he'll keep it and won't give it back.
Or alternately, it's like skating on a pond where you know the ice is unsafe at one end, but you don't readily know where the boundary is.
It would be nice if Paypal had a customer-oriented business model. Heck, even obeying banking regulations would be an improvement, but for some reason they decided that the utility and convenience of eBay and Paypal are so great that they can afford to be predatory and run their business under the "cost accounting" model. That's the one where an immediate gain in value (like siezing the money in your Paypal account) is worth more than the calculated value of keeping you as a customer.
Paypal is fine so long as you don't trust it. Make all paypal purchase payments through a credit card (which *does* have a customer-oriented business model), don't let Paypal keep any amount of cash, don't give it the keys to valuable resources such as your bank account or in-depth personal information, and it's fine.
Using Paypal is like trying to tame a feral dog: always be prepared for an attack.
The best will rise to the top
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MOOC Mania
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· Score: 2
I've been "tasting" the various online courses for the last 15 months or so: started with Dr. Thrun's online AI course, have contacts with people at edX, have taken or viewed courses from a half-dozen entities.
One salient aspect of all of the MOOCs is their overall poor quality.
The teachers are, as a general rule: smart, familiar with the subject, nice people, and well meaning.
The online courses are, as a general rule: boring, poorly presented, supported by poor online tools, and counter-instructive.
Everyone realizes that education is changing, and that in ten years or so there will only be a few players left. Everyone wants desperately to be one of those players, so you have everyone frantically recording lectures and putting them online in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.
Sebastian. Thrun's AI course never bothered to check or correct errors in content, resulting in massive frustration from the students. Anant Agarwal's electronics course had students drowning in directionless theory that suddenly uncovered a useful equation. Daphne Koller's presentation style makes the simplest concepts appear dense.
To give an representative example, Kristin Sainani over at Coursera is running a course on scientific writing (writing for purposes of a published paper, or review of said paper &c). The course content is very good, but the students edit and grade each others' homework.
Perhaps 80% of the students speak almost no English. The end result: 80% of the editing work is tediously instructing other students not on course content, but on basic English (when to use articles, which prepositions to use when, &c), while 80% of the corrections you receive for your work are utterly useless. The overall experience is "massive waste of time for a course of heavily diluted value".
There are occasional standout exceptions, but the overall quality is very low. No one has quite realized that you can't just videotape a lecture and put it up on the web - you have to plan things out ahead of time, add good production value, and have good support. It's not easy, and no one group so far is doing it particularly well.
Online learning is still in beta. Perhaps in a couple of years the technology will mature.
Yes, yes we do. We have the right to say "that is wrong, you should stop that." Everyone does, about the actions of any political group (although they may be wrong, they have the right to say it). That's one of the things that "freedom of speech" and it's very very close partner "freedom of conscience", is all about.
There's also this thing about "needing a right" before we're allowed to do anything.
Even supposing the OP is correct, we actually have no right to judge, it's completely irrelevant.
We can do whatever the fuck we want, we're not limited in our actions to some inclusive list of "rights". The OP has rights that we can't abridge, but beyond that we're free to do as we please.
We don't have the right to judge (according to the OP), but we will do it anyway. China is wrong, their actions are less effective than actions based on freedom, and the sum total of all their authoritarian moves will eventually cause their downfall. Free regimes will outcompete authoritarianism in the long run in every case. "The illogic of waste".
Allowing actions like this, even in the spirit of whistleblowing, would severely undermine the necessary order and discipline an effective military needs. It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
That's certainly true.
Now consider the relative values. You can have a well-disciplined and effective military, but is fascism more important than discipline?
Several recent armies were well disciplined and private, and yet committed numerous and long-term monstrous acts against humanity. At the time of the second world war, there were "rumors" (reports? whatever) of concentration camps and mass executions, but no actual proof.
Without checks and balances - without placing an armies actions in front of it's people - there's nothing to stop them from becoming a directed mob of savages. I'd certainly like to know what our military is doing, it speaks to our ethics as an American people. Our military represents us to the world.
And for the record, officers swear an oath to the constitution. Manning was bound by oath to obey a higher power than the military command. You might argue before the act whether something should be made public or not, but recent events has validated his decision.
Yes, he's a war hero. That he didn't act in the way you would have, or in a manner that you would have liked, is immaterial.
Photographic evidence is not admissible by itself - it requires a person who can testify that the image is an accurate representation of what happened.
Lots of people will point out counterexamples to this, but the sum total is that people aren't aware of their rights, don't want to make the hassle, and haven't pushed the issue.
Evidence can be forged - this is why forensics investigators have to keep a chain of custody, and this is why police aren't allowed to simply read from their notes when on the stand.
In your specific case, all it takes is for the person to state "Oh, I didn't take that. My boyfriend took it and E-mailed it to me". The boyfriend can say the same thing, so who then is guilty of the crime? Add as many people as you like to this - if you believe that a crime was committed by one of 5 (say) people, but you can't with certainty point to any one, who is responsible?
People don't realize that if they simply don't admit to anything, there is little the police can do.
Although posting your ballot may be illegal, it's unenforceable as a matter of law.
There's no way to prove that an image is your ballot.
The state has to prove chain of custody. Can they prove that you actually took the image (as opposed to, for example, downloading it off the internet)? Can they prove that you snapped your actual vote (as opposed to taking a picture and then changing the vote)? Can they prove that you didn't snap a picture of someone else's vote?
Can they prove that you didn't photoshop the image?
Even if they can make a good case for chain of custody (a video of you actually casting the vote would take a lot of effort to fake), would the state actually prosecute? The bad publicity for prosecuting this while taking time away from more serious crimes (murder, rape) would be a big disincentive.
There's also the personal freedoms angle. Certainly no one can be forced to prove their vote, but if someone wants to proudly show their vote, could this not be considered a freedom of speech issue?
There may be some grumbling from government about this, and some websites could be asked (without a warrant) to take some pictures down, but that's about all that will happen.
Government is powerless to prevent this, and they know it.
I'm not sure I understand the relevance to tech or geeks.
Sharp's position is entirely determined by the choices they make or have made. If they make bad decisions, their business will suffer and if they make good ones their business will prosper.
Unlike tech-oriented political news or tech-oriented situation reports ("such-and-so has a 0-day exploit"), we have no influence over the outcome. Our collective outrage can inform and influence political positions (maybe), and our judgement and expertise can influence technical decisions ("they never fixed the problem"), but can we really influence business decisions?
There are other LCD manufacturers, right? Does this even affect us?
Sharp might collapse? Um... OK, got it. Next article.
The health of the economy is measured by the "flow" of money. In essence, it's the value of the total GDP measured in a time period (usually a year). Compared year by year, you always want this number to increase - it drives innovation, efficiency, and progress.
Money flows from people to corporations. By taxing people and not corporations, you are inherently slowing the flow of money, and reducing the corporate incentive towards higher productivity.
Consider the extremes: if you tax people at 50% and businesses at 0%, commerce will be much reduced because people will only have enough money to purchase necessities. If you tax businesses at 50% and people at 0%, then people will spend money more freely and commerce would increase.
You can't tax businesses 100% because you still need an incentive for people to start and run businesses.
This is just part of the transition to the post-scarcity economy**. In the extreme case there is one big automated factory which takes orders from people and ships the results. Every person is given $1000 virtual currency to spend each month - this represents their "share" of the production capacity of the factory(*).
Everyone gets $1000 of virtual money, but if you like you can start a business and perhaps earn a bigger share by selling goods that the automated factory doesn't make.
But if you tax the people and not the business - eventually business will collect all the money in the system. You tax the business and distribute the gains to the people in order to keep the money flowing.
* It's hard to imagine a completely automated factory, but not a largely automated factory. It might only require only a few overseers and mechanics, which would be negligible in comparison to the available workforce.
**Note that we have reached the post-scarcity economy in several areas. Computers used to charge by the hour of compute time (IBM 360), nowadays compute time is just the cost of the electricity. Hard disk storage is largely post-scarcity. Phone service is close - it costs more to bill and track calls than the calls themselves. Food production is almost at post-scarcity - the number of people needed for farming is so low that it's virtually at the "automated factory" level already, and requires government subsidies to continue. Media distribution is essentially free, as is software. In the near future, solar panel recharging stations (a'la Tesla) will make energy essentially free.
so, tell me, romney fans, you think things would IMPROVE if that assclown gets in?
really?
funny how you'll throw insults at obama but you are strangely silent about the other guy. who, most believe, will CRUSH whatever civil liberties are still left hanging by a thread.
We don't know if things will improve with Romney, nobody knows.
What we do know is that things will not improve if we continue with Obama.
Many people here understand probability and statistics, so let's use a gambling analogy. If you know you will lose making a certain bet, but there are other bets where you don't know the outcome, what do you do?
Churning the pot, turning politics into a "one-term trial period" system is a reasonable choice. If your elected official is awful, keep trying new ones until you get someone better.
This sends a strong message to government: bad politics is not a viable career choice. Either do a good job, or find yourself out on the street after one term.
It's logical and emotionally compelling and seems to work under game theory. Do you have anything based on logic or reason?
I don't know how many times I've wanted to read a paper mentioned here that's essentially unavailable.
I think your method of cut/paste the text strikes a good compromise between giving out the information and preventing unauthorized copy. The information is available to motivated readers, but can't easily dilute the journal's copyright. A truly interested reader could then pay for the actual article from the Journal.
"Compare to" is used to find similarities, as in "shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". "Compare with" is used to find differences, as in "His time was 2:11:10 compared with 2:14 for his closest competitor." (Many sources on the net.)
So I have to ask, was he being compared to Jerry Sandusky, or compared with Jerry Sandusky?
Inquiring [Scientific writing] minds want to know:-)
The Kinect Gesture challenge over at Kaggle was a competition where the goal was to match gestures with a specified dictionary of previously-recorded gestures.
The problem isn't the resolution, it's the recognition algorithm.
A human looking at the videos could easily distinguish between gestures and interpret the meaning. The problem was even easier for a human because you only had to choose the closest match from within the dozen-or-so gestures in the dictionary. This leads me to believe that it's not a problem with the resolution, or the hardware in general.
Despite this, gesture recognition is a very difficult problem. Aspects which humans would naturally interpret as similar can be wildly different for the computer. Hold your hand up and wave - if the hand is in a different position (relative to the torso), the angle of waving is different, the body is waving back and forth instead of still, the number of waves is different, the time cadence of the waving is different... all of these confuse the heck out of a match algorithm.
(One video had curtains in the background, apparently waving ever so slightly in the breeze - causing lots of motion for the camera. Another video (color channel) contained an intricate flower pattern, which was very complex to match against.)
Finger position and motion have limited resolution (they form only a small part of the input field), but a human could still interpret various ASL hand signs to a large extent. Perhaps very similar hand signs would be difficult to discriminate, but certainly many of the ones shown were recognizable.
This is pretty-much an aspect of hard AI. We're not that close to solving this problem, and breakthroughs are not expected any time soon.
Ethics is about reducing suffering, not fairness or propriety.
Medical ethics deals with procedures which reduce suffering when the choice is not black-and-white, nuanced, or could possibly be abused. Medical ethics involves things like when to do organ harvesting, informed consent, DNR, and the like.
Whether drugs should be taken when not needed - that's not an issue of ethics. It's possibly an issue of honor (broken promises, such as in sports), definitely an issue of law, and most certainly a perceived issue of fairness and political correctness.
The principle layer which cuts through most of the bullshit is the "Doctrine of Individual Dissent", which states that people have the right to choose for themselves. We sometimes violate this fundamental right by forcing people to do things for their own good; nonetheless, it should trump all the other rights.
It's the layer that would keep someone from forcing a smoker to quit, or an obese person to exercise, or a driver to wear seat belts. When Asimov failed to make a robotics law about it, drama ensued.
The best we can hope for is to warn people of the dangers. Beyond that, self determination is a fundamental right.
Do you want a bigger house? Own your own business? Climb Kilimanjaro? Put frames that show those goals into it and let the photo frames remind you. This will make a powerful subconscious urge for you to achieve your goals.
Do you want to learn rote things, such as another language? How about showing word - translation flashcards for the language, or whatever information you need to know. Put them on your desk and occasionally glance over and try to guess which translation will follow the shown word. (Or the times tables, or whatever info you want.)
How about installing quick-reference sheets for work? (I personally have an ASCII chart hanging in my office since I can never remember the codes.) You can have a "perl quick reference sheet", "perl debugger sheet", "Cisco router quick reference sheet" and so on. Most of the frames have buttons to stop or flip through the images - find the reference sheet you need and freeze it.
The photo frame can hold all sorts of static information within limitations.
I dunno, you don't seem to know the first thing about what you are talking about. Perhaps you know the different risk rates between specific formulation adverse drug events and general formulation adverse drug events?
You raise a good point. How do we sort through techno-babble and hand-waving by experts?
Experts frequently get caught up in their own world and view everything as through blinders. I'm sure your view makes perfect sense to you and you don't see any problems locally.
Here's a question for you: Another poster pointed out that formulation is the only way to get child-sized doses of certain drugs - the drug companies simply don't want to produce child-sized portions because the market is too small.
Your solution would deprive children of potentially life-saving medicines and cause untold suffering for as long as your solution is in effect.
But please - do tell us about how the solution is for Congress to "close the formulation loophole" again.
You work for a drug company... right?
P.S. - Check the next response [to your post] down, which I believe elegantly puts the issue in perspective. Only 23 deaths in a population of 300 million, and this is the first one in many years. The risks are simply non-existant.
For comparison the USA around that many people die from wasp and bee strings every year.
The solution here is for Congress to close the formulation loophole, and for the Agency and the states to work together to create a unified standard of rules.
I always look to people with "the solution" with a bit of skepticism. In this case, I think you're confusing the possibility of a problem with its likelihood.
If Bruce Schneier is to be believed, risk is always a tradeoff. Let's compare the risk of meningitis with the practice of formulation.
Formulation for offlabel purposes and children's doses meets a need, and I would expect that the population benefits are enormous. This meningitis problem is the first one I've heard about in... ever. And the problem is limited to a small number of people because, as people have pointed out, the issue isn't as much the meningitis, it's not knowing how many people may be at risk.
It would seem to me that the risk of problems with formulation is vanishingly low.
If we "close the formulation loophole" as you suggest, that will put all offlabel and children's doses in the hands of the noble and reputable Big Pharma companies. Won't they choose to skip formulations for which there is no substantial market (children's doses, for instance)? Will they not raise prices mercilessly on a captive market?
I dunno... your solution seems formulaic and reflexive. Shouldn't we think through the ramifications first?
The point that everyone - manufacturers and users alike - seem to be missing is the toolchain.
The popularity of the original Arduino was entirely due to the free IDE released by Atmel for their chips. Since then many other companies have released micro boards hoping to hop on the bandwagon, mostly with little success.
Micro boards have been available since the 1980s. I've personally used 68HC11 single-board computers ($50 each) in that era for personal projects. They are programmed in assembler, because the C compiler can cost several thousands of dollars - upwards of $10,000 depending on vendor and capabilities.
Look through back-issues of Hackaday to see all the neat, new single-board computers which have been released - none of them rise to the popularity of the Arduino.
Open source enthusiasts may mention that you can use GCC, but that's a compiler not a toolchain. Open-source tools require an investment of learning and trial-and-error to get things working correctly, and most of the time it's a large investment that people don't want to make. The standard practice for open source is to find a tutorial, follow every step, and then google for answers when it doesn't work.
When the [whatever other board you happen to like] comes with a plug-and-play IDE that lets developers concentrate on the code instead of getting the code onto the board, then you'll have something.
The idea that "a little inflation is good, a lot is bad, and negative is very bad" is a well known gospel.
Can anyone here explain why this is without telling a story?
There are many ways to prove a point without story telling. For instance:
1) Show an equation whose function value measures economic health, and which takes inflation as an argument (perhaps one of many). Varying the inflation parameter in the equation will result in a healthy economy for small positive values.
2) Identify a simulation which, when run with different values of inflation, shows that small positive values give rise to a healthy economy and negative/large positive ones don't.
3) Identify a study comparing modern economies, using a sample space of more than two and which control for known differences, which concludes that negative and high positive inflation rates are bad, and small positive rates are healthy.
4) Some other way which I haven't thought of.
I'm tired of all this "if inflation were negative, your salary would go down over time and you might never be able to pay back your loans" nonsense. Loans are adjusted for inflation rate all the time, and there's no reason why the adjustment can't work in the borrower's favor.
I don't want to hear "this will happen, and that will cause this other thing" nonsense.
Folk tales are great, but I like some rigor in my economics.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue could have been addressed by fiat from any one popular software package.
Thus solving it for users of one package.
Yes, solving it for one package. As mentioned in the post, there would be an incentive for other packages to implement the scheme in order to be compatible. As mentioned in the post. Perhaps enough incentive to form a Tipping point.
2) Add a field to the protocol
Which protocol? SMTP? POP? IMAP? UUCP?
The protocol allows for experimental fields
Same question.
Which one do you think? Do you need a complete spec, or will just an outline do? Google is your friend.
The mouseover for the button
Oh, this would solve the problem only for the people with GUI mail clients.
Did you really think I was advocating implementing this only on GUI clients?
The point was to get enough naive users into the system to make it a de-facto standard. Most naive users use a GUI client, so starting there would put the solution before a wide audience quickly.
could have said "use encryption if the recipient has a compatible client".
Sorry. How does my email client know what email client YOU are using and whether it supports this? Is there a new protocol you are proposing where one client asks another prior to sending an email? What happens if the recipient is offline?
If you have the public key for the recipient, then they have a compatible client. If you don't, you send the message in the clear and request the public key.
Really, this isn't rocket science - the first message I receive from the recipient would contain their public key. My first message to them would be in the clear, but would provoke a public-key sendback which my client would silently process.
(I've often wondered if the browser could automatically encrypt/decrypt the content of specific named text blocks from specific sites such as gmail. Then the content could be encrypted online, but show cleartext to the user.)
If you are limiting yourself to defining "email" as "gmail accessed via a web browser", you simplify the problem considerably. Of course Google could store all your email in an encrypted form and send you a javascript (if you have a js enabled/capable broswer) applet that decodes it on your system. If you send them your public key, they could even encrypt the stuff they store on their disks as it came in for you, if it wasn't already. You still have the problem of how you make sure every system you use to access that email has the key kept locally, and what happens for people who have gmail forwarded to some place else.
So, yes, the problem is rather trivial if you force everyone and everything through one mail server and ignore the huge diversity in protocols used to transport email and the kinds and types of clients/servers used to do it.
The protocol doesn't matter, since the message body can contain any text.
You could, for instance, encode public keys as part of the body of any message by wrapping it in a field delimiter which the client could pick out. If your browser isn't compatible, then the recipient would see the public key encoding as text.
This isn't so different from digital signatures, which are encodings of binary data attached to the bottom of a document body. I'm only suggesting that a similar method be used to attach the sender's public key, and have the client make note of the public keys as it gets them.
The sender uses the recipient's public key if it has one. Otherwise, it sends in the clear. The first messages will be in the clear, and encoded for all subsequent messages.
Really, this is not rocket science. Take a moment to think things through.
We could have fixed this whole privacy thing from the beginning, but for whatever reason we didn't.
There was a time when people read E-mail using local clients. Freeware programs such as Thunderbird and Pegasus Mail were common.
The issue could have been addressed by fiat from any one popular software package. It would only have required:
1) For each user, generate a default public and private key on install
2) Add a field to the protocol requesting the recipient's public key if they have one
3) Add a field advertizing the sender's public key
4) Add a button on the interface for "Prevent others from reading the content"
Done right, that's all it would have taken.
The protocol allows for experimental fields which can be ignored if the client doesn't understand, and there is already a mechanism for "delivery confirmation" which could be adapted for "public key confirmation". It would have taken very little to have the client intercept the public key response, process it, and not bother the user about it.
The mouseover for the button could have said "use encryption if the recipient has a compatible client".
At the time, this would have been a feature that mainstream clients didn't have (Outlook, Exchange, &c), so it would have been a selling point for open source. It would have led people to encourage the recipient to change to a more secure client. There would be an incentive to make other packages compatible, and soon the feature would be everywhere.
All of this could have been implemented transparently for the naive user, with a more sophisticated interface for advanced users who needed more control.
But for some reason we didn't do that, and now everyone reads their E-mail online. We didn't make this a de-facto standard, and now we've missed our chance. (I've often wondered if the browser could automatically encrypt/decrypt the content of specific named text blocks from specific sites such as gmail. Then the content could be encrypted online, but show cleartext to the user.)
We have the means and expertise to fix some of these problems, all it takes is the will to do it.
If your friend is running a successful business, then he's got a particularly useful and uncommon skill.
Some 80% of all first businesses fail, but only 20% of second businesses fail. That's because after the first business, you learn from your mistakes. Your friend has the skills and experience needed to start a new business - and that's what he should do.
So, what's trending on the map right now? What brick-and-mortar establishments are on the rise?
How about setting up a hackerspace? These seem to be popping up everywhere, and unlike McDonalds, there's still room for more.
While running the 'space, keep an eye out for things that might be products. With a hackerspace available it's easy to "test the waters" for a new tech product: you have access to people with skills for design, construction, [website] sales, and so on.
What they don't have is someone who can steer the ship, someone who has experience in things like incorporating, taxes, management, planning, accounting, and so on.
Consider starting a hackerspace. I hear that they can be successful and lots of fun.
An engineer uses his tools and techniques to solve problems.
A scientist invents new tools and techniques.
If you're just using your knowledge to build things for people, you're an engineer. Unless you're exploring the limits of knowledge, coming up with and testing new ideas, you're not a scientist. And publishing has nothing to do with it, it's a mindset.
Knuth is a scientist - by laying out algorithms and describing their merits and deficiencies, he's essentially publishing a box of tools that others can use. Bill Gates is an engineer - he implemented known algorithms and solutions into a unified package (nothing new there).
A visual editor is essentially a very program with many, many features. No one does the interface particularly well, so consider making an interface that is based on information complexity and brain theory rather than the current model.
The current model has features stuffed into every corner - the edges and corners of everything sprout features, a zillion toolbars stuffed with icons, tooltips are everywhere. It's gotten so complicated that I don't think anyone bothers with customization any more.
Do some data mining on the editing process and count the types of changes people make. Take the logarithm of that number and put that many icons and shortcuts for the most used operations on the front page. Make everything else available, but hide it.
Rather than making a zillion incomprehensible icons and using tooltips to clarify, consider using icons of 2-letter abbreviations. Use English abbreviations - no one cares that music notation is in Italian, no one cares that medical notation is in Latin, and no one will care that the interface notation is in English (...but translate the popup messages and help files into native, of course). With 2-letter abbreviations (and throw in a few extra symbols) you can make icons that remind the user of the function. (For comparison, consider the 2-letter abbreviations in Perl: $! means "What went bang?", $= means "number of lines in file", &c.)
If Icons can have 2 letters and other symbols such as dingbats or greek letters, you can have a large number of mnemonic functions such as <scissors>-2 meaning "cut to the 2nd cut buffer".
If you make some good conceptual design decisions you can make the interface intuitive and eliminate lots and lots of widgetry. For example, instead of considering the document a page of text with inserts of other things (as does Microsoft Word and HTML), consider going to an object/position model.
Suppose the page starts blank and requires the user to place objects before anything else. A text box is an object, as is an image or video. Once the user can create and size text boxes (rubber banding), you no longer need a complex "column layout" panel with all sorts of widgets to define columns - just have the user place text boxes where needed, and note how the text should flow from one to the other. Add in some group/distribute/z-order functions to tidy things up (common across all objects) and all the layout becomes intuitive - no complex interface needed.
Instead of making the help files a search in the linear manual, make the help into a tree structure. Start with "is your question about text, images, or video", let the user select one of these, then ask more clarifying questions until you get to the topic the user wants to know about. With 3 options per node, the user can drill down into the subject matter very quickly. This is especially useful when the user doesn't know how to properly describe what they want to do, or when the subject is some jargon word the user doesn't know like "Kerning", "Alpha transparency", and so on.
Include a long list of "How do I..." answers, and have this list be searchable.
It's incredibly useful to be able to leverage functionality externally, so consider making your editor in two pieces - a functional engine and an interface/display engine. Make the connection between these two pieces a socket interface and publish the API - this way other people can invoke your engine using external programs, and make automated scripts &c.
Also, people can make alternate interfaces to play around with different display techniques.
Paypal is exquisitely convenient to use for eBay purchases, and eBay is roundly superior to most other online shopping.
That's not to say that Paypal doesn't have its faults - it's like having an employee who will do things for you, but can't be trusted with anything important or valuable. If you give the employee a bunch of cash, he'll keep it and won't give it back.
Or alternately, it's like skating on a pond where you know the ice is unsafe at one end, but you don't readily know where the boundary is.
It would be nice if Paypal had a customer-oriented business model. Heck, even obeying banking regulations would be an improvement, but for some reason they decided that the utility and convenience of eBay and Paypal are so great that they can afford to be predatory and run their business under the "cost accounting" model. That's the one where an immediate gain in value (like siezing the money in your Paypal account) is worth more than the calculated value of keeping you as a customer.
Paypal is fine so long as you don't trust it. Make all paypal purchase payments through a credit card (which *does* have a customer-oriented business model), don't let Paypal keep any amount of cash, don't give it the keys to valuable resources such as your bank account or in-depth personal information, and it's fine.
Using Paypal is like trying to tame a feral dog: always be prepared for an attack.
I've been "tasting" the various online courses for the last 15 months or so: started with Dr. Thrun's online AI course, have contacts with people at edX, have taken or viewed courses from a half-dozen entities.
One salient aspect of all of the MOOCs is their overall poor quality.
The teachers are, as a general rule: smart, familiar with the subject, nice people, and well meaning.
The online courses are, as a general rule: boring, poorly presented, supported by poor online tools, and counter-instructive.
Everyone realizes that education is changing, and that in ten years or so there will only be a few players left. Everyone wants desperately to be one of those players, so you have everyone frantically recording lectures and putting them online in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.
Sebastian. Thrun's AI course never bothered to check or correct errors in content, resulting in massive frustration from the students. Anant Agarwal's electronics course had students drowning in directionless theory that suddenly uncovered a useful equation. Daphne Koller's presentation style makes the simplest concepts appear dense.
To give an representative example, Kristin Sainani over at Coursera is running a course on scientific writing (writing for purposes of a published paper, or review of said paper &c). The course content is very good, but the students edit and grade each others' homework.
Perhaps 80% of the students speak almost no English. The end result: 80% of the editing work is tediously instructing other students not on course content, but on basic English (when to use articles, which prepositions to use when, &c), while 80% of the corrections you receive for your work are utterly useless. The overall experience is "massive waste of time for a course of heavily diluted value".
There are occasional standout exceptions, but the overall quality is very low. No one has quite realized that you can't just videotape a lecture and put it up on the web - you have to plan things out ahead of time, add good production value, and have good support. It's not easy, and no one group so far is doing it particularly well.
Online learning is still in beta. Perhaps in a couple of years the technology will mature.
You have no right to judge.
Yes, yes we do. We have the right to say "that is wrong, you should stop that." Everyone does, about the actions of any political group (although they may be wrong, they have the right to say it). That's one of the things that "freedom of speech" and it's very very close partner "freedom of conscience", is all about.
There's also this thing about "needing a right" before we're allowed to do anything.
Even supposing the OP is correct, we actually have no right to judge, it's completely irrelevant.
We can do whatever the fuck we want, we're not limited in our actions to some inclusive list of "rights". The OP has rights that we can't abridge, but beyond that we're free to do as we please.
We don't have the right to judge (according to the OP), but we will do it anyway. China is wrong, their actions are less effective than actions based on freedom, and the sum total of all their authoritarian moves will eventually cause their downfall. Free regimes will outcompete authoritarianism in the long run in every case. "The illogic of waste".
Allowing actions like this, even in the spirit of whistleblowing, would severely undermine the necessary order and discipline an effective military needs. It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
That's certainly true.
Now consider the relative values. You can have a well-disciplined and effective military, but is fascism more important than discipline?
Several recent armies were well disciplined and private, and yet committed numerous and long-term monstrous acts against humanity. At the time of the second world war, there were "rumors" (reports? whatever) of concentration camps and mass executions, but no actual proof.
Without checks and balances - without placing an armies actions in front of it's people - there's nothing to stop them from becoming a directed mob of savages. I'd certainly like to know what our military is doing, it speaks to our ethics as an American people. Our military represents us to the world.
And for the record, officers swear an oath to the constitution. Manning was bound by oath to obey a higher power than the military command. You might argue before the act whether something should be made public or not, but recent events has validated his decision.
Yes, he's a war hero. That he didn't act in the way you would have, or in a manner that you would have liked, is immaterial.
Photographic evidence is not admissible by itself - it requires a person who can testify that the image is an accurate representation of what happened.
Lots of people will point out counterexamples to this, but the sum total is that people aren't aware of their rights, don't want to make the hassle, and haven't pushed the issue.
Evidence can be forged - this is why forensics investigators have to keep a chain of custody, and this is why police aren't allowed to simply read from their notes when on the stand.
In your specific case, all it takes is for the person to state "Oh, I didn't take that. My boyfriend took it and E-mailed it to me". The boyfriend can say the same thing, so who then is guilty of the crime? Add as many people as you like to this - if you believe that a crime was committed by one of 5 (say) people, but you can't with certainty point to any one, who is responsible?
People don't realize that if they simply don't admit to anything, there is little the police can do.
Although posting your ballot may be illegal, it's unenforceable as a matter of law.
There's no way to prove that an image is your ballot.
The state has to prove chain of custody. Can they prove that you actually took the image (as opposed to, for example, downloading it off the internet)? Can they prove that you snapped your actual vote (as opposed to taking a picture and then changing the vote)? Can they prove that you didn't snap a picture of someone else's vote?
Can they prove that you didn't photoshop the image?
Even if they can make a good case for chain of custody (a video of you actually casting the vote would take a lot of effort to fake), would the state actually prosecute? The bad publicity for prosecuting this while taking time away from more serious crimes (murder, rape) would be a big disincentive.
There's also the personal freedoms angle. Certainly no one can be forced to prove their vote, but if someone wants to proudly show their vote, could this not be considered a freedom of speech issue?
There may be some grumbling from government about this, and some websites could be asked (without a warrant) to take some pictures down, but that's about all that will happen.
Government is powerless to prevent this, and they know it.
I'm not sure I understand the relevance to tech or geeks.
Sharp's position is entirely determined by the choices they make or have made. If they make bad decisions, their business will suffer and if they make good ones their business will prosper.
Unlike tech-oriented political news or tech-oriented situation reports ("such-and-so has a 0-day exploit"), we have no influence over the outcome. Our collective outrage can inform and influence political positions (maybe), and our judgement and expertise can influence technical decisions ("they never fixed the problem"), but can we really influence business decisions?
There are other LCD manufacturers, right? Does this even affect us?
Sharp might collapse? Um... OK, got it. Next article.
The health of the economy is measured by the "flow" of money. In essence, it's the value of the total GDP measured in a time period (usually a year). Compared year by year, you always want this number to increase - it drives innovation, efficiency, and progress.
Money flows from people to corporations. By taxing people and not corporations, you are inherently slowing the flow of money, and reducing the corporate incentive towards higher productivity.
Consider the extremes: if you tax people at 50% and businesses at 0%, commerce will be much reduced because people will only have enough money to purchase necessities. If you tax businesses at 50% and people at 0%, then people will spend money more freely and commerce would increase.
You can't tax businesses 100% because you still need an incentive for people to start and run businesses.
This is just part of the transition to the post-scarcity economy**. In the extreme case there is one big automated factory which takes orders from people and ships the results. Every person is given $1000 virtual currency to spend each month - this represents their "share" of the production capacity of the factory(*).
Everyone gets $1000 of virtual money, but if you like you can start a business and perhaps earn a bigger share by selling goods that the automated factory doesn't make.
But if you tax the people and not the business - eventually business will collect all the money in the system. You tax the business and distribute the gains to the people in order to keep the money flowing.
* It's hard to imagine a completely automated factory, but not a largely automated factory. It might only require only a few overseers and mechanics, which would be negligible in comparison to the available workforce.
**Note that we have reached the post-scarcity economy in several areas. Computers used to charge by the hour of compute time (IBM 360), nowadays compute time is just the cost of the electricity. Hard disk storage is largely post-scarcity. Phone service is close - it costs more to bill and track calls than the calls themselves. Food production is almost at post-scarcity - the number of people needed for farming is so low that it's virtually at the "automated factory" level already, and requires government subsidies to continue. Media distribution is essentially free, as is software. In the near future, solar panel recharging stations (a'la Tesla) will make energy essentially free.
so, tell me, romney fans, you think things would IMPROVE if that assclown gets in?
really?
funny how you'll throw insults at obama but you are strangely silent about the other guy. who, most believe, will CRUSH whatever civil liberties are still left hanging by a thread.
We don't know if things will improve with Romney, nobody knows.
What we do know is that things will not improve if we continue with Obama.
Many people here understand probability and statistics, so let's use a gambling analogy. If you know you will lose making a certain bet, but there are other bets where you don't know the outcome, what do you do?
Churning the pot, turning politics into a "one-term trial period" system is a reasonable choice. If your elected official is awful, keep trying new ones until you get someone better.
This sends a strong message to government: bad politics is not a viable career choice. Either do a good job, or find yourself out on the street after one term.
It's logical and emotionally compelling and seems to work under game theory. Do you have anything based on logic or reason?
Thank you!
I don't know how many times I've wanted to read a paper mentioned here that's essentially unavailable.
I think your method of cut/paste the text strikes a good compromise between giving out the information and preventing unauthorized copy. The information is available to motivated readers, but can't easily dilute the journal's copyright. A truly interested reader could then pay for the actual article from the Journal.
Keep up the good work, whoever you are.
The "Writing In the Sciences" online course over at Coursera says to distinguish between "compare to" and "compare with".
"Compare to" is used to find similarities, as in "shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". "Compare with" is used to find differences, as in "His time was 2:11:10 compared with 2:14 for his closest competitor." (Many sources on the net.)
So I have to ask, was he being compared to Jerry Sandusky, or compared with Jerry Sandusky?
Inquiring [Scientific writing] minds want to know :-)
The Kinect Gesture challenge over at Kaggle was a competition where the goal was to match gestures with a specified dictionary of previously-recorded gestures.
The problem isn't the resolution, it's the recognition algorithm.
A human looking at the videos could easily distinguish between gestures and interpret the meaning. The problem was even easier for a human because you only had to choose the closest match from within the dozen-or-so gestures in the dictionary. This leads me to believe that it's not a problem with the resolution, or the hardware in general.
Despite this, gesture recognition is a very difficult problem. Aspects which humans would naturally interpret as similar can be wildly different for the computer. Hold your hand up and wave - if the hand is in a different position (relative to the torso), the angle of waving is different, the body is waving back and forth instead of still, the number of waves is different, the time cadence of the waving is different... all of these confuse the heck out of a match algorithm.
(One video had curtains in the background, apparently waving ever so slightly in the breeze - causing lots of motion for the camera. Another video (color channel) contained an intricate flower pattern, which was very complex to match against.)
Finger position and motion have limited resolution (they form only a small part of the input field), but a human could still interpret various ASL hand signs to a large extent. Perhaps very similar hand signs would be difficult to discriminate, but certainly many of the ones shown were recognizable.
This is pretty-much an aspect of hard AI. We're not that close to solving this problem, and breakthroughs are not expected any time soon.
Ethics is about reducing suffering, not fairness or propriety.
Medical ethics deals with procedures which reduce suffering when the choice is not black-and-white, nuanced, or could possibly be abused. Medical ethics involves things like when to do organ harvesting, informed consent, DNR, and the like.
Whether drugs should be taken when not needed - that's not an issue of ethics. It's possibly an issue of honor (broken promises, such as in sports), definitely an issue of law, and most certainly a perceived issue of fairness and political correctness.
The principle layer which cuts through most of the bullshit is the "Doctrine of Individual Dissent", which states that people have the right to choose for themselves. We sometimes violate this fundamental right by forcing people to do things for their own good; nonetheless, it should trump all the other rights.
It's the layer that would keep someone from forcing a smoker to quit, or an obese person to exercise, or a driver to wear seat belts. When Asimov failed to make a robotics law about it, drama ensued.
The best we can hope for is to warn people of the dangers. Beyond that, self determination is a fundamental right.
Do you want a bigger house? Own your own business? Climb Kilimanjaro? Put frames that show those goals into it and let the photo frames remind you. This will make a powerful subconscious urge for you to achieve your goals.
Do you want to learn rote things, such as another language? How about showing word - translation flashcards for the language, or whatever information you need to know. Put them on your desk and occasionally glance over and try to guess which translation will follow the shown word. (Or the times tables, or whatever info you want.)
How about installing quick-reference sheets for work? (I personally have an ASCII chart hanging in my office since I can never remember the codes.) You can have a "perl quick reference sheet", "perl debugger sheet", "Cisco router quick reference sheet" and so on. Most of the frames have buttons to stop or flip through the images - find the reference sheet you need and freeze it.
The photo frame can hold all sorts of static information within limitations.
Good reply. Elegantly puts the risk in perspective.
I dunno, you don't seem to know the first thing about what you are talking about. Perhaps you know the different risk rates between specific formulation adverse drug events and general formulation adverse drug events?
You raise a good point. How do we sort through techno-babble and hand-waving by experts?
Experts frequently get caught up in their own world and view everything as through blinders. I'm sure your view makes perfect sense to you and you don't see any problems locally.
Here's a question for you: Another poster pointed out that formulation is the only way to get child-sized doses of certain drugs - the drug companies simply don't want to produce child-sized portions because the market is too small.
Your solution would deprive children of potentially life-saving medicines and cause untold suffering for as long as your solution is in effect.
But please - do tell us about how the solution is for Congress to "close the formulation loophole" again.
You work for a drug company... right?
P.S. - Check the next response [to your post] down, which I believe elegantly puts the issue in perspective. Only 23 deaths in a population of 300 million, and this is the first one in many years. The risks are simply non-existant.
For comparison the USA around that many people die from wasp and bee strings every year.
The solution here is for Congress to close the formulation loophole, and for the Agency and the states to work together to create a unified standard of rules.
I always look to people with "the solution" with a bit of skepticism. In this case, I think you're confusing the possibility of a problem with its likelihood.
If Bruce Schneier is to be believed, risk is always a tradeoff. Let's compare the risk of meningitis with the practice of formulation.
Formulation for offlabel purposes and children's doses meets a need, and I would expect that the population benefits are enormous. This meningitis problem is the first one I've heard about in... ever. And the problem is limited to a small number of people because, as people have pointed out, the issue isn't as much the meningitis, it's not knowing how many people may be at risk.
It would seem to me that the risk of problems with formulation is vanishingly low.
If we "close the formulation loophole" as you suggest, that will put all offlabel and children's doses in the hands of the noble and reputable Big Pharma companies. Won't they choose to skip formulations for which there is no substantial market (children's doses, for instance)? Will they not raise prices mercilessly on a captive market?
I dunno... your solution seems formulaic and reflexive. Shouldn't we think through the ramifications first?
The point that everyone - manufacturers and users alike - seem to be missing is the toolchain.
The popularity of the original Arduino was entirely due to the free IDE released by Atmel for their chips. Since then many other companies have released micro boards hoping to hop on the bandwagon, mostly with little success.
Micro boards have been available since the 1980s. I've personally used 68HC11 single-board computers ($50 each) in that era for personal projects. They are programmed in assembler, because the C compiler can cost several thousands of dollars - upwards of $10,000 depending on vendor and capabilities.
Look through back-issues of Hackaday to see all the neat, new single-board computers which have been released - none of them rise to the popularity of the Arduino.
Open source enthusiasts may mention that you can use GCC, but that's a compiler not a toolchain. Open-source tools require an investment of learning and trial-and-error to get things working correctly, and most of the time it's a large investment that people don't want to make. The standard practice for open source is to find a tutorial, follow every step, and then google for answers when it doesn't work.
When the [whatever other board you happen to like] comes with a plug-and-play IDE that lets developers concentrate on the code instead of getting the code onto the board, then you'll have something.
Here is how to know Obama is doing a pretty good job: Almost all major accusations against him are factually wrong, or nonsense.
Obama had an American killed without trial.
Care to explain the inaccuracy in that statement?
(Note: I don't care about "killed", we kill people all the time for good reason. The "without trial" part is illegal on its face.)
Here's a challenge for you economics wonks.
The idea that "a little inflation is good, a lot is bad, and negative is very bad" is a well known gospel.
Can anyone here explain why this is without telling a story?
There are many ways to prove a point without story telling. For instance:
I'm tired of all this "if inflation were negative, your salary would go down over time and you might never be able to pay back your loans" nonsense. Loans are adjusted for inflation rate all the time, and there's no reason why the adjustment can't work in the borrower's favor.
I don't want to hear "this will happen, and that will cause this other thing" nonsense.
Folk tales are great, but I like some rigor in my economics.