Careful what you argue - there are regions on this world where kids are born into terrible conditions of abject poverty, famine and disease. This is arguably far worse than even the lowest level of poverty in the US or Europe.
I don't think living in a poor country is a fate worse than death. Being physically and mentally abused to death is far worse than being aborted. Living a short, painful life due to untreatable medical conditions is probably worse than being aborted. In cases where there is no clear advantage one way or the other it should obviously be a decision made by the mother.
What I would suggest is we treat abortion the same way. The fetus should be removed, without damaging it, and should be allowed a chance to live on its own. Before about 6 months there is essentially no chance that it will survive but after this its chances start to greatly increase. This gives the woman full control over her body - she can withdraw her life support services whenever she wants - but also respects the fetus' right to life because it gets a chance at survival.
Not a bad idea if it wasn't terribly expensive and a more invasive procedure with more risks to the mother. Do you want to impose the costs of a 3 or 4 month NICU stay on the victim of rape or poverty or should society just foot that bill? Rapists are generally either never found or spend the rest of their lives unproductively with no hope of paying for it. Poor people are not likely to have the income to pay for it either. Advances in medicine will only make it possible for younger fetuses to survive at greater costs.
Personally, I think reproduction should require a license if the government is going to get involved at all (either by preventing abortion or providing live extraction, a NICU, and lifelong treatment for any developmental disabilities). I don't want to pay the taxes required to raise unwanted 6-month gestation children and I don't particularly want fetuses to be aborted. It seems much more reasonable to require adequate planning and education before making new humans, and requiring frequent mandatory checkups as children are raised to prevent abuse. The costs of such a program would be far cheaper than NICU bills and far more ethical than abortion on demand. As soon as it's technically feasible (and cheaply and effectively reversible) I recommend vaccinating against pregnancy.
It seems like the biggest threat to the scientific method today is the apparent weakness of the peer review process that has allowed a growing number of falsified or incoherent papers to be published in fairly respectable journals (for instance C. Glenn Begley's meta-analysis of cancer studies). Do you think there is a limit to the effectiveness of peer review or is it perhaps a result of not enough funding given to reproducing studies? Or is it just a result of more publishers and journals? Or perhaps due to strong funding incentives to publish mostly studies that show interesting results instead of studies that have no evidence against the null hypothesis but which would nonetheless be useful for meta-analysis of similar studies?
Is there a threshold beyond which it will be difficult to perform science because there are too few experts in several domains to reliably judge the output of other fields? I can envision a future in which most research is highly specialized and it is very difficult even for members of the same branch of science (say biology) to verify each others' specialized results. What process or structure would allow science to continue flourishing in such an environment?
Also please sign up for a cage fight with the dirtiest, nastiest street fighter who doesn't obey any of the rules and flaunts this as an advantage. Please base your entire reputation on this cage fight, and claim that solely by the virtue of scientific honesty and fair play you can triumph. After you wipe the floor with Craig that should be easy!
Congratulations, you had a healthy pregnancy that wasn't caused by rape and you were apparently fully prepared to raise a child with sufficient resources so the kid's life won't be a living hell.
That is not the only environment in which fetuses exist. There are fates worse than death.
By "essentially a non-issue for any reasonable length of time", I'm assuming you mean for e^rt = "millions", which is only about e^13.8 for a million. So after a million of years of living on the Dyson sphere the yearly population growth would have to be tiny (less than 0.00138%) to not fill up the entire surface.
I'll take a 40% efficient coal plant generating electricity over a refining process that burns natural gas or crude to turn a fraction of the crude into diesel which is burned to move it to a tank in my neighborhood where I put it in my car and get 15% efficiency out of it. The carbon footprint for electrical generation is tiny compared to hydrocarbon fuels.
This is fairly strong evidence that the facial recognition software is a steaming pile of shit and rather easy to defeat in other ways, like smiling like an idiot while committing a crime on camera.
If you can trust your users to remember passwords, Truecrypt is much more secure. Similarly, Bitlocker can be made more secure as well if you set it up to require a passphrase during boot, without which it keeps the unencrypted key on the machine. The TPM chip is supposedly tamper-proof, but I bet there's at least one three-letter agency with a back door!
The TPM is worthless as long as the consumer hardware and operating system are piles of security vulnerabilities. Once the TPM has given up the keys to the OS it's usually trivial to find a privilege escalation or dump the RAM with a firewire/PCI device or just do a cold-boot attack.
No, the problem is users uploading content containing javascript. Then referencing this javascript from an external site. When a user who happens to also be logged into the popular site hosting my content views my page my javascript executes in the context of the other sites domain with access to the users credentials.
That's not really a valid complaint. Even if HTTP was like FTP and opened a second TCP/IP connection to transfer data the exact same problems would arise if browsers ignored mime-types and tried to interpret the data contents instead of trusting the control channel.
Unless you're talking about millions of individual files on each drive it should be relatively quick to mount each hard drive and set up symbolic links in one shared directory to the files on each of the mounted drives. Just make sure Samba has "follow symlinks" set to yes and the Windows clients will see just see normal files in the shared directory.
is post a detailed description of my elaborate escape plan to slashdot.
Some of you guys are pretty sharp and could probably point out a few minor problems and make some suggestions.
The main bitcoin protocol has been hacked once that I'm aware of. The cpu-majority of miners took care of it by abandoning the main hashchain and forking a new one with a patched client.
If a manger prefers X but engineering finds a 3% improvement going with Y, they go with Y. They have to. When you have billions on the line, huge public exposure, and everyone looking for who to blame for failures, prejudice gets shaken out rapidly.
Don't forget to stir some industrial gemstones or at least some carbide grit into your concrete (and optionally capsules of sarin or ricin...). And I think the GP thought you could just cut the hinges off a safe and the door would fall out, not that you needed to offset them for clearance. No wonder they can sell $15 "safe"s to people.
Which language would you choose to write a perfect VM? A suitable language for that kind of task presumably exists because Intel and AMD manage to produce chips that effectively implement a virtual machine in hardware with no bugs (most of the time). Why don't the authors of software virtual machines take the time to formally verify their software? It's unfortunate.
Same with a sort- the class would have a sort function. I would reluctantly not bounce using the sort function of the STL since it's so useful, but it's still not the right way of doing things. And it's much more complex than it should be, since the calling code has to worry about things like passing in comparators, when that should really be the job of the sort function.
template void sort ( RandomAccessIterator first, RandomAccessIterator last ) might be what you want with no comparison function as a parameter.
Yes, i would have container classes, they're useful. I wouldn't have any generic algorithms, they tend not to be useful, are easy to make wrong in subtle ways, and the "smarter" you try to be with them the less readable your code is. They're also much less readable- give me a loop over all the indices in an array over an ugly foreach that gets passed a function any day of the week.
Taking STL sort as an example; what you primarily need to care about is that swap() is efficient for objects of the type you're sorting. Overload it if you have to. for_each is much more readable (and powerful) when using anonymous functions. If anything, the verbosity of C++ function definition is your enemy, not generics. I think C++0x11's trailing-return-type declaration will help immensely.
Or more specifically, a GUI whose interactions can be modeled completely by a finite state machine. Need context sensitivity? Sorry, too much computer for you.
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Careful what you argue - there are regions on this world where kids are born into terrible conditions of abject poverty, famine and disease. This is arguably far worse than even the lowest level of poverty in the US or Europe.
I don't think living in a poor country is a fate worse than death. Being physically and mentally abused to death is far worse than being aborted. Living a short, painful life due to untreatable medical conditions is probably worse than being aborted. In cases where there is no clear advantage one way or the other it should obviously be a decision made by the mother.
What I would suggest is we treat abortion the same way. The fetus should be removed, without damaging it, and should be allowed a chance to live on its own. Before about 6 months there is essentially no chance that it will survive but after this its chances start to greatly increase. This gives the woman full control over her body - she can withdraw her life support services whenever she wants - but also respects the fetus' right to life because it gets a chance at survival.
Not a bad idea if it wasn't terribly expensive and a more invasive procedure with more risks to the mother. Do you want to impose the costs of a 3 or 4 month NICU stay on the victim of rape or poverty or should society just foot that bill? Rapists are generally either never found or spend the rest of their lives unproductively with no hope of paying for it. Poor people are not likely to have the income to pay for it either. Advances in medicine will only make it possible for younger fetuses to survive at greater costs.
Personally, I think reproduction should require a license if the government is going to get involved at all (either by preventing abortion or providing live extraction, a NICU, and lifelong treatment for any developmental disabilities). I don't want to pay the taxes required to raise unwanted 6-month gestation children and I don't particularly want fetuses to be aborted. It seems much more reasonable to require adequate planning and education before making new humans, and requiring frequent mandatory checkups as children are raised to prevent abuse. The costs of such a program would be far cheaper than NICU bills and far more ethical than abortion on demand. As soon as it's technically feasible (and cheaply and effectively reversible) I recommend vaccinating against pregnancy.
It seems like the biggest threat to the scientific method today is the apparent weakness of the peer review process that has allowed a growing number of falsified or incoherent papers to be published in fairly respectable journals (for instance C. Glenn Begley's meta-analysis of cancer studies). Do you think there is a limit to the effectiveness of peer review or is it perhaps a result of not enough funding given to reproducing studies? Or is it just a result of more publishers and journals? Or perhaps due to strong funding incentives to publish mostly studies that show interesting results instead of studies that have no evidence against the null hypothesis but which would nonetheless be useful for meta-analysis of similar studies?
Is there a threshold beyond which it will be difficult to perform science because there are too few experts in several domains to reliably judge the output of other fields? I can envision a future in which most research is highly specialized and it is very difficult even for members of the same branch of science (say biology) to verify each others' specialized results. What process or structure would allow science to continue flourishing in such an environment?
Also please sign up for a cage fight with the dirtiest, nastiest street fighter who doesn't obey any of the rules and flaunts this as an advantage. Please base your entire reputation on this cage fight, and claim that solely by the virtue of scientific honesty and fair play you can triumph. After you wipe the floor with Craig that should be easy!
Congratulations, you had a healthy pregnancy that wasn't caused by rape and you were apparently fully prepared to raise a child with sufficient resources so the kid's life won't be a living hell. That is not the only environment in which fetuses exist. There are fates worse than death.
By "essentially a non-issue for any reasonable length of time", I'm assuming you mean for e^rt = "millions", which is only about e^13.8 for a million. So after a million of years of living on the Dyson sphere the yearly population growth would have to be tiny (less than 0.00138%) to not fill up the entire surface.
Or they're just made out of/turned themselves into dark energy and matter to avoid the bother of conversion.
I'll take a 40% efficient coal plant generating electricity over a refining process that burns natural gas or crude to turn a fraction of the crude into diesel which is burned to move it to a tank in my neighborhood where I put it in my car and get 15% efficiency out of it. The carbon footprint for electrical generation is tiny compared to hydrocarbon fuels.
Hey now, don't encourage the barely-over-unity ethanol folks.
The solution is fairly simple; keep extra random passwords in KeePass or whatever else you use, one for each security question.
This is fairly strong evidence that the facial recognition software is a steaming pile of shit and rather easy to defeat in other ways, like smiling like an idiot while committing a crime on camera.
I would happily throw 90% of the human race under a bus for a working warp drive.
Including yourself?
If you can trust your users to remember passwords, Truecrypt is much more secure. Similarly, Bitlocker can be made more secure as well if you set it up to require a passphrase during boot, without which it keeps the unencrypted key on the machine. The TPM chip is supposedly tamper-proof, but I bet there's at least one three-letter agency with a back door!
The TPM is worthless as long as the consumer hardware and operating system are piles of security vulnerabilities. Once the TPM has given up the keys to the OS it's usually trivial to find a privilege escalation or dump the RAM with a firewire/PCI device or just do a cold-boot attack.
No, the problem is users uploading content containing javascript. Then referencing this javascript from an external site. When a user who happens to also be logged into the popular site hosting my content views my page my javascript executes in the context of the other sites domain with access to the users credentials.
I'm surprised no one else has pointed this out before. The domain security model is broken. Period. It's time to move beyond that and to an explicit capability system that is granular enough to reference individual URIs, and even *that* is probably insufficient. It is entirely reasonable that a trusted script at http://trusted.example.com/trusted_path/trusted_handler.js?script=1 should be able to *not trust* http://trusted.example.com/trusted_path/trusted_handler.js?script=2, and further that even http://trusted.example.com/trusted_path/trusted_handler.js?script=1 should not be trusted if any cookie available to trusted.example.com is added, modified, or deleted between the time the URIs are fetched.
That's not really a valid complaint. Even if HTTP was like FTP and opened a second TCP/IP connection to transfer data the exact same problems would arise if browsers ignored mime-types and tried to interpret the data contents instead of trusting the control channel.
Unless you're talking about millions of individual files on each drive it should be relatively quick to mount each hard drive and set up symbolic links in one shared directory to the files on each of the mounted drives. Just make sure Samba has "follow symlinks" set to yes and the Windows clients will see just see normal files in the shared directory.
is post a detailed description of my elaborate escape plan to slashdot. Some of you guys are pretty sharp and could probably point out a few minor problems and make some suggestions.
Please, show us this economy so that we may observe it as well.
I think you could just graph the world population composed with per-capita energy consumption over time.
Problem solved.
By solved you mean we've found a way to generate unlimited amounts of energy and dissipate unlimited amounts of waste heat?
Or maybe you've worked out 100%-efficient reversible computing? Even that won't fix our desire for ever more bits over time.
The main bitcoin protocol has been hacked once that I'm aware of. The cpu-majority of miners took care of it by abandoning the main hashchain and forking a new one with a patched client.
If a manger prefers X but engineering finds a 3% improvement going with Y, they go with Y. They have to. When you have billions on the line, huge public exposure, and everyone looking for who to blame for failures, prejudice gets shaken out rapidly.
They're planning to switch to Y Windows?
Don't forget to stir some industrial gemstones or at least some carbide grit into your concrete (and optionally capsules of sarin or ricin...). And I think the GP thought you could just cut the hinges off a safe and the door would fall out, not that you needed to offset them for clearance. No wonder they can sell $15 "safe"s to people.
Which language would you choose to write a perfect VM? A suitable language for that kind of task presumably exists because Intel and AMD manage to produce chips that effectively implement a virtual machine in hardware with no bugs (most of the time). Why don't the authors of software virtual machines take the time to formally verify their software? It's unfortunate.
Same with a sort- the class would have a sort function. I would reluctantly not bounce using the sort function of the STL since it's so useful, but it's still not the right way of doing things. And it's much more complex than it should be, since the calling code has to worry about things like passing in comparators, when that should really be the job of the sort function.
template void sort ( RandomAccessIterator first, RandomAccessIterator last ) might be what you want with no comparison function as a parameter.
Yes, i would have container classes, they're useful. I wouldn't have any generic algorithms, they tend not to be useful, are easy to make wrong in subtle ways, and the "smarter" you try to be with them the less readable your code is. They're also much less readable- give me a loop over all the indices in an array over an ugly foreach that gets passed a function any day of the week.
Taking STL sort as an example; what you primarily need to care about is that swap() is efficient for objects of the type you're sorting. Overload it if you have to. for_each is much more readable (and powerful) when using anonymous functions. If anything, the verbosity of C++ function definition is your enemy, not generics. I think C++0x11's trailing-return-type declaration will help immensely.
It's open source, so trust the many eyes I guess.
Or more specifically, a GUI whose interactions can be modeled completely by a finite state machine. Need context sensitivity? Sorry, too much computer for you.