The files are also pretty readable plain text, vaguely inspired by markdown. So even if org mode somehow disappears, you will still be able to read the damn things, whereas that's less likely to be the case if some day you're stuck with some decades-old janky binary format for a discontinued piece of software.
On the other hand, the learning curve is a bit steep if you've never used Emacs.
As a researcher (patient) studying the social practices of doctors (visiting their offices), my tentative conclusions are that the industry-standard note-taking practices are currently: 1) a web browser; 2) open to WebMD.
The article was about tracking by third party cookies, and the associated worries about privacy intrusion. In that I agree with Mozilla, and the new default is only what I have had for years.
Yes, I think it's worth remembering that this move is not about ad-blocking, just third-party-cookie blocking. Mozilla is not going to ship AdBlock by default or anything. A site can show whatever ads they want, 1st-party or 3rd-party. They can also store 1st-party cookies. What will no longer work by default is 3rd-party cookies, because they are used to track people around the 'net as they browse between different sites, which lets companies build centralized dossiers of people's browsing habits. Those are used for multiple things, and ad-targeting is only one of them. Some of the companies also act as data brokers and outright sell the collected profiles, without anonymizing the data.
That particular example is specific to the military, though; soldiers have never been considered to have the same freedoms as civilians, even in the early years of the US.
Civilian government employees do have some degree of free-speech protection. The main caveat is that any employer (including a private-sector employer) can fire employees for speech criticizing the employer, in some cases, and that is also true when the government is acting in its role as an employer. However the government is somewhat more limited than a private-sector employer in how it uses this power.
His defense for that seems to be that the IRA never attacked America. I guess that's true, but they did attack one of our allies. I wonder if King would apply that argument to mean that any other terrorist group is fine as long as they don't launch attacks in the USA (or against American embassies, maybe). For example, the Kurdish PKK has only attacked Turkey, not the USA.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act treats both "unauthorized access" and "exceeding authorized access" as essentially equivalent. The second case is where you had an account but used it in unauthorized ways. This has some obvious vagueness and overreach problems. Did the CFAA drafters really mean to criminalize ToS violations, for example?
Here [pdf] is a proposed amendment to the law from law professor Orin Kerr.
There are a few different categories of sports fans. The armchair sports fans who catch a few games while drinking a beer on the weekend are indeed not a likely target audience for this. But there are also more 'hardcore' sports fans who keep track of reams of statistics, want replays from as many angles as possible, are willing to pay for $200+ subscriptions that let them frame-by-frame step through past games, etc. There's probably a market for premium services for that segment.
You can stop drinking and that is what you need to do, but the addictive nature is still there. If you start again, you'll overdo it and spiral down the addict path. If your brain/body is such that it will get addicted to alcohol, then it will always be that way, and no amount of time will change that.
That's commonly true, although alcohol is a strange drug because of how it figures in so many social situations. There's a segment of what you might call "problem drinkers" who do successfully change from drinking excessively to drinking moderately, mostly caused by a significant change in their social setting. For example they change cities and have a different group of friends with different activities.
This strongly depends on the person and the nature of their excessive alcohol use, though. It's "easier" in a sense to be cured if it has a large socially situated psychological component, such as people who drink too much basically because their social life revolves around spending 5-6 hours each evening at the pub, and drinking is what you do at the pub. In that case, a change in social setting can significantly cut down on the amount they drink. But you could argue that these people were not truly addicted; rather they were drinking more than they wanted to because of social/peer/environmental pressure to do so, and then stopped doing so when the external pressure disappeared.
It's also worth noting that this was his full-time day job at Google (possibly more than full-time, if it went as this kind of project often goes). That's sometimes a good situation, because you're getting paid rather than putting in unpaid nights/weekends on the project. But sometime it can actually be worse, and more stressful, because it's your real job and you have to work on it daily. At least if you get burned out on a volunteer open source project, you can ignore it for a bit, step back from the mailing list and bug tracker for a little while things settle down, and then come back to it later with some fresh energy. But if it's your actual day job that is harder to do, unless you have an exceptionally flexible boss.
Re:It's Qualcomm's decision to make
on
AOSP Maintainer Quits
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It'd be one thing if this was in a third-party android device; nobody is insisting that Google must require every Android device to have open drivers, too. But this is Google's flagship device that's supposed to show off their platform. If they really "encourage everyone to make devices that are open and modifiable", they could lead by example by making sure that's true of their own device!
As opposed to the U.S., where you can just walk in and get anything done instantly? That wasn't my experience. I had to wait a long time for anything nonessential, even minor outpatient stuff. When I had a 5-minute "operation" to remove a mole, Kaiser Permanente couldn't find me anywhere in the schedule less than 4 months out.
The effective income tax rate (i.e. taking into account exclusions and the different brackets) is more like 35-40% for a middle-class family. You don't pass even a 50% effective rate until you're making well north of €200k/yr.
And note that this rate includes health-care, which in the U.S. is billed separately. It also includes university education, which in the U.S. is billed separately. If you add up what a typical American pays for [federal income tax + state income tax + payroll tax + student-loan payments + healthcare premiums/copays], it's higher than what most Danes pay if you're in a middle-class bracket. The comparison is even more favorable to Denmark if you're an entrepreneur: once you add in that self-employed Americans have to pay double payroll taxes (15.3%) and have to buy individual health insurance, Denmark starts to look a lot cheaper!
Amusingly, despite the government=bureaucracy equation that many people seem to assume, one of the big benefits is how much less bureaucratic it is, too. When I moved from the US to Denmark, my health care got immensely simpler. In the US, I had to read tons of fine print to buy insurance in the first place; then fill out claim forms, separate ones for each provider (if you end up in a hospital you will be billed separately for the hospital bed, for the anesthesiologist, for the laboratory work, etc.), then lawyer about these on the phone as they were inevitably filled out incorrectly and various claims were denied until the second or third try.
Now everything Just Works and I don't have to fill out a damn piece of paper ever. Well, I had to fill out one: when I moved to the country I had to fill out an application for the health-insurance card. It took about 15 minutes, and came in the mail two days later.
Copenhagen's city center was shut for a few hours today because of one of them fancy road-powered electric vehicles being treated as a potential bomb. This one seems to have been built in a garage by a Swedish mad scientist, though.
OpenX makes an interesting example of a technically open-source project that fails to benefit from open-source much at all. It's GPL'd, but they don't support any kind of public development (no public revision-control systems or anything), and they even make you register to download the source. The page where you do so mostly just tries to convince you not to do so. A third-party site mirrors the open-source version for no-login downloads, but it seems just out of personal interest, since he's the developer of a predecessor to OpenX. It's not clear there is anybody who cares about this codebase or ever looks at it outside the company. Hence, technically open-source, but trying as hard as possible not to be.
It could just be a particularly poor JBIG implementation: the format and decompressor is standardized, but the standard doesn't specify how to find the matches, so various companies have their own proprietary versions.
Ran some numbers to check, and with some assumptions your estimate seems pretty close.
The modern standard "postscript point" is 1/72 in, so a 7-point font has a height 7/72 inches. The stroke distinguishing the 6 from the 8 is maybe 1/4 of the height, so let's say ~0.025 inches. If the print/scan cycle roundtrips at somewhere in the range 75-150 dpi, that's 2-4 pixels. If you can manage a professional-standard 300 dpi, you get more like 7-8 pixels, but that's a fairly optimistic case.
Yeah, it's not OCR per se, but it operates on a somewhat similar principle to OCR, identifying which numbers are which and consolidating things it thinks are the same glyph. I agree it's much worse, because it alters the actual image. And it does so in a way that still looks plausible and "clean". Really bad lossy compression that just produced a lot of artifacts so that certain numbers were unreadable would at least telegraph that you shouldn't trust the result, but the numbers here look clean and artifact-free, they just happen to be wrong.
Some of these machines have been used for digitizing documents whose originals were later shredded, so some people now have subtly wrong "original" digitals. It's particularly problematic because of the nature of degradation; usual lossy degradation of images is in a non-semantic way, just produces blurring or blocking or other kinds of artifacts, not OCR-error style mistakes.
The issue here seems to be the lossy mode of JBIG2, which tries to find patches of the image that approximately match, and consolidates them. The idea seems to be that if the letter "e" appears 5000 times in a document in the same typeface, you just store some version of it once, and then reference it everywhere it appears. But now you get OCR-style errors, if you end up matching some patches to incorrect partners. You have your lightly printed "8" replaced by the "0" patch now and then, that kind of thing. And unlike people doing OCR, who know they need to take this into account, the operators of these machines likely had no idea this was even a possible failure mode to watch for, so who knows how many numbers are wrong in miscellaneous documents (letters are a little less problematic, because most random letter mutations don't destroy meaning).
Slashdot seems very excited about Samsung NAND lately but I don't really get it. Is this really anything but an expected incremental improvement? Is there something I'm missing that makes this super-futuristic NAND OF THE FUTURE live up to the hype?
Yeah, that's happened in Denmark too unfortunately; where you set the threshold matters quite a bit for whether it works. The "pay limit scheme" that gives priority to highly paid job offers now has a threshold of €50,000, which is an ok but not particularly high salary for Denmark, especially for professional jobs in Copenhagen.
Slashdot Mirror
The files are also pretty readable plain text, vaguely inspired by markdown. So even if org mode somehow disappears, you will still be able to read the damn things, whereas that's less likely to be the case if some day you're stuck with some decades-old janky binary format for a discontinued piece of software.
On the other hand, the learning curve is a bit steep if you've never used Emacs.
As a researcher (patient) studying the social practices of doctors (visiting their offices), my tentative conclusions are that the industry-standard note-taking practices are currently: 1) a web browser; 2) open to WebMD.
Yes, I think it's worth remembering that this move is not about ad-blocking, just third-party-cookie blocking. Mozilla is not going to ship AdBlock by default or anything. A site can show whatever ads they want, 1st-party or 3rd-party. They can also store 1st-party cookies. What will no longer work by default is 3rd-party cookies, because they are used to track people around the 'net as they browse between different sites, which lets companies build centralized dossiers of people's browsing habits. Those are used for multiple things, and ad-targeting is only one of them. Some of the companies also act as data brokers and outright sell the collected profiles, without anonymizing the data.
That particular example is specific to the military, though; soldiers have never been considered to have the same freedoms as civilians, even in the early years of the US.
Civilian government employees do have some degree of free-speech protection. The main caveat is that any employer (including a private-sector employer) can fire employees for speech criticizing the employer, in some cases, and that is also true when the government is acting in its role as an employer. However the government is somewhat more limited than a private-sector employer in how it uses this power.
Possibly, but the FISA statute probably supersedes the CFAA.
His defense for that seems to be that the IRA never attacked America. I guess that's true, but they did attack one of our allies. I wonder if King would apply that argument to mean that any other terrorist group is fine as long as they don't launch attacks in the USA (or against American embassies, maybe). For example, the Kurdish PKK has only attacked Turkey, not the USA.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act treats both "unauthorized access" and "exceeding authorized access" as essentially equivalent. The second case is where you had an account but used it in unauthorized ways. This has some obvious vagueness and overreach problems. Did the CFAA drafters really mean to criminalize ToS violations, for example?
Here [pdf] is a proposed amendment to the law from law professor Orin Kerr.
You could look at what the share is among the top N domains, for N=1000 or N=10,000 or whatever, at least as a sanity check.
Are there any solid open standards already in existence for this problem?
There are a few different categories of sports fans. The armchair sports fans who catch a few games while drinking a beer on the weekend are indeed not a likely target audience for this. But there are also more 'hardcore' sports fans who keep track of reams of statistics, want replays from as many angles as possible, are willing to pay for $200+ subscriptions that let them frame-by-frame step through past games, etc. There's probably a market for premium services for that segment.
That's commonly true, although alcohol is a strange drug because of how it figures in so many social situations. There's a segment of what you might call "problem drinkers" who do successfully change from drinking excessively to drinking moderately, mostly caused by a significant change in their social setting. For example they change cities and have a different group of friends with different activities.
This strongly depends on the person and the nature of their excessive alcohol use, though. It's "easier" in a sense to be cured if it has a large socially situated psychological component, such as people who drink too much basically because their social life revolves around spending 5-6 hours each evening at the pub, and drinking is what you do at the pub. In that case, a change in social setting can significantly cut down on the amount they drink. But you could argue that these people were not truly addicted; rather they were drinking more than they wanted to because of social/peer/environmental pressure to do so, and then stopped doing so when the external pressure disappeared.
I assume this message is coming to Slashdot via time-travel, from before Canada was ruled by Stephen Harper.
P.S. Their environmental record is even worse than the U.S.'s, too, as sad as that is to contemplate.
It's also worth noting that this was his full-time day job at Google (possibly more than full-time, if it went as this kind of project often goes). That's sometimes a good situation, because you're getting paid rather than putting in unpaid nights/weekends on the project. But sometime it can actually be worse, and more stressful, because it's your real job and you have to work on it daily. At least if you get burned out on a volunteer open source project, you can ignore it for a bit, step back from the mailing list and bug tracker for a little while things settle down, and then come back to it later with some fresh energy. But if it's your actual day job that is harder to do, unless you have an exceptionally flexible boss.
It'd be one thing if this was in a third-party android device; nobody is insisting that Google must require every Android device to have open drivers, too. But this is Google's flagship device that's supposed to show off their platform. If they really "encourage everyone to make devices that are open and modifiable", they could lead by example by making sure that's true of their own device!
As opposed to the U.S., where you can just walk in and get anything done instantly? That wasn't my experience. I had to wait a long time for anything nonessential, even minor outpatient stuff. When I had a 5-minute "operation" to remove a mole, Kaiser Permanente couldn't find me anywhere in the schedule less than 4 months out.
The effective income tax rate (i.e. taking into account exclusions and the different brackets) is more like 35-40% for a middle-class family. You don't pass even a 50% effective rate until you're making well north of €200k/yr.
And note that this rate includes health-care, which in the U.S. is billed separately. It also includes university education, which in the U.S. is billed separately. If you add up what a typical American pays for [federal income tax + state income tax + payroll tax + student-loan payments + healthcare premiums/copays], it's higher than what most Danes pay if you're in a middle-class bracket. The comparison is even more favorable to Denmark if you're an entrepreneur: once you add in that self-employed Americans have to pay double payroll taxes (15.3%) and have to buy individual health insurance, Denmark starts to look a lot cheaper!
Amusingly, despite the government=bureaucracy equation that many people seem to assume, one of the big benefits is how much less bureaucratic it is, too. When I moved from the US to Denmark, my health care got immensely simpler. In the US, I had to read tons of fine print to buy insurance in the first place; then fill out claim forms, separate ones for each provider (if you end up in a hospital you will be billed separately for the hospital bed, for the anesthesiologist, for the laboratory work, etc.), then lawyer about these on the phone as they were inevitably filled out incorrectly and various claims were denied until the second or third try.
Now everything Just Works and I don't have to fill out a damn piece of paper ever. Well, I had to fill out one: when I moved to the country I had to fill out an application for the health-insurance card. It took about 15 minutes, and came in the mail two days later.
Copenhagen's city center was shut for a few hours today because of one of them fancy road-powered electric vehicles being treated as a potential bomb. This one seems to have been built in a garage by a Swedish mad scientist, though.
OpenX makes an interesting example of a technically open-source project that fails to benefit from open-source much at all. It's GPL'd, but they don't support any kind of public development (no public revision-control systems or anything), and they even make you register to download the source. The page where you do so mostly just tries to convince you not to do so. A third-party site mirrors the open-source version for no-login downloads, but it seems just out of personal interest, since he's the developer of a predecessor to OpenX. It's not clear there is anybody who cares about this codebase or ever looks at it outside the company. Hence, technically open-source, but trying as hard as possible not to be.
It could just be a particularly poor JBIG implementation: the format and decompressor is standardized, but the standard doesn't specify how to find the matches, so various companies have their own proprietary versions.
Ran some numbers to check, and with some assumptions your estimate seems pretty close.
The modern standard "postscript point" is 1/72 in, so a 7-point font has a height 7/72 inches. The stroke distinguishing the 6 from the 8 is maybe 1/4 of the height, so let's say ~0.025 inches. If the print/scan cycle roundtrips at somewhere in the range 75-150 dpi, that's 2-4 pixels. If you can manage a professional-standard 300 dpi, you get more like 7-8 pixels, but that's a fairly optimistic case.
Yeah, it's not OCR per se, but it operates on a somewhat similar principle to OCR, identifying which numbers are which and consolidating things it thinks are the same glyph. I agree it's much worse, because it alters the actual image. And it does so in a way that still looks plausible and "clean". Really bad lossy compression that just produced a lot of artifacts so that certain numbers were unreadable would at least telegraph that you shouldn't trust the result, but the numbers here look clean and artifact-free, they just happen to be wrong.
Some of these machines have been used for digitizing documents whose originals were later shredded, so some people now have subtly wrong "original" digitals. It's particularly problematic because of the nature of degradation; usual lossy degradation of images is in a non-semantic way, just produces blurring or blocking or other kinds of artifacts, not OCR-error style mistakes.
The issue here seems to be the lossy mode of JBIG2, which tries to find patches of the image that approximately match, and consolidates them. The idea seems to be that if the letter "e" appears 5000 times in a document in the same typeface, you just store some version of it once, and then reference it everywhere it appears. But now you get OCR-style errors, if you end up matching some patches to incorrect partners. You have your lightly printed "8" replaced by the "0" patch now and then, that kind of thing. And unlike people doing OCR, who know they need to take this into account, the operators of these machines likely had no idea this was even a possible failure mode to watch for, so who knows how many numbers are wrong in miscellaneous documents (letters are a little less problematic, because most random letter mutations don't destroy meaning).
Blargh.
Slashdot seems very excited about Samsung NAND lately but I don't really get it. Is this really anything but an expected incremental improvement? Is there something I'm missing that makes this super-futuristic NAND OF THE FUTURE live up to the hype?
Yeah, that's happened in Denmark too unfortunately; where you set the threshold matters quite a bit for whether it works. The "pay limit scheme" that gives priority to highly paid job offers now has a threshold of €50,000, which is an ok but not particularly high salary for Denmark, especially for professional jobs in Copenhagen.