Now I have three entries for Bershidsky in my idiots file:
"Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion," Leonid Bershidsky writes in closing. "But it's more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don't understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does.
Good grief, the average user understands practically nothing of the business model of either company. And Apple changes the design or the usability or the usage terms of what you already possess with basically no warning or explanation all the damn time.
I can hardly think of any company more opposed to the smallest glimmer of visibility into their future intentions than Apple.
Here's the second paragraph on B. from my idiots file:
Manning spent seven years in prison (though she'd been sentenced to 35), but Snowden, Assange, Petraeus, the unknown Chinese mole, the people who stole the hacking tools and the army of recent anonymous leakers, many of whom probably still work for U.S. intelligence agencies, have escaped any kind of meaningful punishment.
A judge in Ecuador has ruled against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, rejecting his request to loosen new requirements that he says are meant to push him into leaving his asylum in the country's embassy in London.... Relations between Assange and Ecuador have grown increasingly prickly as the years have dragged on, with no resolution in sight.
Every young boy dreams of someday becoming an unwanted house guest in a foreign embassy with ten times more power over your daily conditions that a regular landlord or your 1 of 7 step mother.
Cooped up in near solitary confinement, and now he even has to pay for his own porn feed. The brilliant Bershidsky wants to file that under a mild downside.
Trump never had what it took to be a player in Russia — not when it was a land of limitless opportunity as it began its flirtation with capitalism, and not today. This may not be comforting to Americans. To have a leader incapable of negotiating with Russians is probably worse than having a president with business ties to the Kremlin-connected elite.
It's pointless doing a MAC in one cycle in your 5 GHz (0.2 ns cycle) processor if it takes 40 cycles to address a new column in your DRAM (first word on DDR4-4800 is 8 ns).
Good algorithms haven't been doing serialized demand load since the first CPU with sixteen whole lines of cache memory was attached to a split-transaction memory bus.
The first documented use of a data cache was on the IBM System/360 Model 85, introduced in 1969.
For the record, that was also one of the first microcoded CPUs.
With proper data orchestration, matrix multiply is far more of an aggregate bandwidth problem than a latency problem.
A pair of 64Ã--64 matrices fit into 64 kB of L1 cache. That's a good 250,000 MACs, right there (by the simple N^3 algorithm).
Suppose your 5 GHz core performs 4 double-precision MACs per clock cycle (40 GFLOPs).
2^18 / (40e9 Hz) = 6.55 microseconds
I don't regard streaming out your 32 kB answer to main memory (bypassing cache) in 6 us as straining at the latency bit.
Large, square matrices are rarely even a bandwidth problem.
The 1xN * Nx1 case (for large N) is a bandwidth problem, however. For this case you require two 8-byte memory bus reads and one 8-byte memory bus write per MAC. Probably not gonna happen at 20 GHz (though it might get close, on your single core i7 with three memory channels, running yesterday's AVX).
For skinny matrices, you need to keep your servers blade thin.
"It was hidden from us just because we didn't sample it right." This must have been the last remaining sampling error and from now on the science is settled.
Paradox of the missing clue: when you fix a glaring error, your Bayesian prior on the quality of your work as a whole goes down rather than up.
QED hasn't fixed a glaring error in fifty years. Victory, QED.
In the political philosophy of right-wing freedom, freedom below the belt extends to your wallet, but not your jewels—except as assessed an independent, government-certified authority, before you even gain the use of language.
Solution: anything that looks like a malformed testicle, or a malformed penis, should be expeditiously lopped off, while it's too small to matter.
Once this enlightened policy rolls out for fifteen years, washrooms should all be promptly relabeled "him" and "harem".
"People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals." If you're tired of hearing people jump to conclusions perhaps you should avoid the Internet?
All through the work day, we're forced to occupy the cognitive zone where we're least dumb, panicky, and dangerous (if not in the first job, in the second, or third, or fourth).
Then you come home, and you're tired, because that part of the brain was not meant to operate for eight solid hours. It was just meant to be wide enough awake to avoid lions while making a two hour hike through the Savanna, toward dinner (and again on the return trip).
So you plunk yourself down in front of the Internet, and Opposite George wants his dues: a great release of all the rabid bullshit you've been holding back floods to the surface.
It might only be 1% of your cognitive sphere, it's 50% of what you hang on your laundry line out there in anonymous public. An attentive xenobiologist might even conclude that half of Internet culture is a vent-hole Olympics.
Captain Puberty: "Spock, load that ignorant computer system into the torpedo tube."
No response.
Captain Puberty: "Crew, load that ignorant computer system into the torpedo tube."
No response.
Captain Puberty: [still watching a High School talent competition on YouTube] "Ha ha ha! She flubbed an entire note while playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" at 320 rpm."
Captain Puberty: "Computer, troll that clumsy, pathetic, incompetent human female!"
When black holes belch radiation out into space, the outflow can heat surrounding gas so much that it prevents it from cooling.
What do we have here?
* First, black holes radiate, almost like supernovae. * Second, radiation is a flow, not a flux. * Third, hot gas is naturally self-insulating.
Look, ma, no spectral emission envelope!
The flow/flux distinction is something a principled science writer would handle with thick, protective gloves.
Anyone else know the story about Feynman in the basement confronting the arithmetic average temperature of red and purple stars?
I think he should have let off some steam by rewriting the lyrics to "Purple Rain" as "Purple Hole", while improvising from the heart a raging bongo between verses.
Marx' argument falls apart when you realise not all employees are paid out of their own surplus value.
Marx assumed that all the gravitation effects in the solar system existed in (sun,planet) interactions. His theory falls apart as soon as you add a single moon. Even without moons, (planet,planet) interactions are often strong enough to really mess up space probe navigation.
Imagine if Newton was smart enough to figure out the inverse square law concerning (sun,planet) but wasn't smart enough to conclude that the same law applied to (planet,apple). Congratulations, you've got Marx, where the smallest scale of interaction is (overclass,underclass). My how the sun in the heavens exploits, exploits, exploits.
And this trick still works. Point to any sufficiently bright and shiny object ($34B will do nicely) and then cue the universal chorus of shade woo.
Plus, don't get me started about Mercury taking more than his share.
20 million folks die globally from hunger and thirst in a world where the only reason they have to die is logistics and getting people to pay for it.
The other reason is people who insist on putting the word "only" in front of political logistics, despite all evidence to the contrary—as in, the "only" reason we get cancer is because human metabolism sucks at self-repair.
You do realize that the phrase "all the king's horses and all the king's men" is satiric, don't you?
The "only" reason they couldn't put Humpty back together again is because no-one present had a diploma in egg reassembly.
Well, offer the course already!
If MOOC can't put Humpty back together again, no-one can.
Someone mentioned the Mini on the MacBook Air thread, and I responded there forgetting which thread I was on, even though I only discussed the 2014 Mac Mini catastrophe.
Because a small number of people read these threads months later, here's a link:
Meh...her current computer is from 2011. That's 7 years.
My wife's iMac is the iMac8,1 from 2008 with 4 GB of RAM, and an external Firewire SSD, which she boots from only when remoting into work. Otherwise, she boots from the very slow internal hard drive (running an out-of-date MacOS compatible with software we're not in a rush to replace).
She also has a second monitor, in portrait mode.
This is surprisingly usable for most purposes.
BUT, now that you need 2 GB to open 10 tabs in your web browser, because of all the shit Javascript (very little of which is enhancing your user experience, while much of it is actively disenhancing your user experience) you sort of wince if you need to open a web browser and any other heavy application at the same time.
I was all set to upgrade this to a Mac Mini roughly four years ago, but by the time I got around to it, the good Mac Mini had been replaced by a shitbox with solder RAM.
According to Primate Labs, makers of the popular cross-platform Geekbench tool, single-core performance for the 2014 Mac mini is up to about 11 percent better than the 2012 model in some configurations, but a staggering 40 percent worse in comparisons of the top-end models for each year. No wonder Apple hides the Mac mini on the second page of its online store listing.
Which really makes you feel good about shelling out an extra $300 to add an extra 8 GB of memory (which is then forever capped, for all time). $35/GB. Memory Prices (1957-2018) was showing the street price in 2014 at around $8/GB. A $20/GB marginal price from Apple I could have swallowed, even with the permanent memory cap.
Just who is going to upgrade a 4 GB system from 2008 with an 8 GB system in 2014? What happened to Moore's law? Since when did 18 months turns into 48 months? I know we hit the knee, but that's Tonya Harding territory.
So here we are, in 2018, and we've had the money set aside for this project for a good five years, but Apple wouldn't offer a product didn't make me puke in my mouth (as someone who knows the deep history).
On this one, I might even pony for the 10 gbit ethernet, to future-proof the box against further Apple missteps. Better safe than sorry. A model you're actually willing to purchase might only come along once per decade.
I get it. You print out the suspect word with your 3D printer, and then you use your sterling hand to trace around the printed artifact for bumps, hollows, ridges, descenders, and cisterns—which you simultaneously compare and contrast to the irregular outlines of your Mario Kart Kamikazi Kukmumbr as braced by your other fleshy mitt.
I just read a few things about VLAs in C99, and my god, it makes Stroustrup look like a rocket scientist.
Convenient while it works, then brutally unsafe the moment it doesn't work (recompile for a new platform, whole new stack-size ballgame—you do the math, except you can't, because the C standard is deaf-mute on the existence of the primary stack, and hence, perforce, also its size limits).
Of course, when you're compiling the Linux kernel, you are compiling the platform itself, so internally it can certainly sort things in a way that an ordinary C program probably couldn't.
But still, I can't recall C++ violating the type system / allocation sanity this badly since vector<bool> was originally defined as a specialization that didn't actually meet the vector<> container class conceptual requirements, or maybe some early, misguided implementations of smart pointers (who precise misfeatures I've now blissfully forgotten).
Additionally, Turner was informed of his life-long obligation to be lawfully registered as a sex offender and furthermore, ordered to complete a state approved rehabilitation program for sex offenders. ... In November 2016, Glamour named "Emily Doe" a woman of the year for "changing the conversation about sexual assault forever", citing that her statement has been read over 11 million times.
The case influenced the California legislature to toughen sexual assault laws by requiring prison terms for rapists whose victims were unconscious and including digital penetration in the penal code's definition of rape.
This isn't about punishing Brock. (The lifelong registration as a sex offender wasn't enough already? What remotely sane person would choose that door over a thousand other indignities?) No, this is about the penal code getting medieval on rape-culture's ass. Because the time is long overdue for unambiguous.
Brock would have been way better off facing involuntary manslaughter charges for drunk driving (say if he'd left tread marks on Emily Doe's corpse instead).
The base sentence for involuntary manslaughter under federal sentencing guidelines is a 10 to 16 month prison sentence, which increases if the crime was committed through an act of reckless conduct.
The minimum sentence for involuntary manslaughter committed with an automobile is higher still, although judges may use a certain amount discretion in those cases.
And no lifelong registration as the scum of the earth, either. Easy street. Sign me up.
While Brock almost certainly intended to initiate sexual activity with this girl, I don't think he intended to have her pass out (in fact, Cosby's sentence as a remorseless serial offender committing rape rape with the full Jabbywocky in sober calculation was hardly worse).
So Ana, if what you want is a Draconian penal code, say so (and your wish will be granted because the time is right). But don't pretend Brock was not punished enough in the first place, because any honest assessment of his life outcome would conclude the complete opposite.
That first time you go to the place in your new community where you publicly register as a sex offender.
I'm pretty sure every man who has ever done this remembers his first time.
Google gave Rubin a reported $90 million exit package in 2014, following an investigation into an allegation that he had coerced another employee to perform oral sex on him. That investigation reportedly found that allegation to be credible.
If you write it into every Google employment contract that compensation can withheld (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the quiet, little internal "investigation" now becomes a matter of civil tort, and all the parties involved (including the women who filed the original complaint) risk being hauled into open court, where the standards of evidence are much, much starker than #MeTooHonestToGod "women mostly tell the truth about these things".
So you can have the quiet, internal investigation which results in people losing their employment (in an at-will employment environment, this is hard to litigate), but not their compensation (in law, property is the giant bull's-eye cake, and all the rest is merely icing); or, all the women of Google can form a giant support group to collectively get their courtroom Anita Hill on.
Andy Rubin already lives in a world where his name will summon up allegations of sexual misdeeds for all time.
Unlike many overpaid executives, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that Andy Rubin delivered immense corporate value for that giant pay packet.
These women know they can't successfully sue Rubin in civil court (their largely anecdotal evidence is insufficient for that venue), or they would take their grievance there, and profit immensely.
So now they are trying to intimidate their employer, Google, to extract a huge financial penance on scant documentary evidence, in a ratio that no court in America would countenance.
Seriously, Ana Kasparian thinks that Brock Turner was "barely punished".
Actual outcome: Instantly demoted from a Stanford golden child, to a lifelong felon, having served a big chunk of actual jail time (six months in the slammer in the pink petticoat for a socially maladapted Stanford nerd is not small change), whose given name is now synonymous with "dumpster rape" on the Internet for all time, and is barely employable, anywhere, ever (except on false pretenses where he dishonestly conceals his sordid history) because the social media wrath of the Sorority Sisters against any "clean slate" employer who ever associates with this person for all time would be too vituperative to even contemplate. All this for an act committed as a socially mindless young male not yet brutally familiar with neither alcohol nor women.
That's a whole new definition of "barely punished" that would make a cross-dressing Spanish Inquisitor cackle with glee.
Women who complain about their PMS affecting their mood and behaviour have no freaking clue about the brain-cramping rampage of peak TSB in a young man's late teenage years.
We've known ever since Robert Trivers first wagged around the magic, sexual-emotion clue stick that the chips in male evolution are stacked far higher, and far narrower than for women, and thus it only stands to reason that the hormonal ravages are correspondingly more intense.
Every woman who has ever said "my eyes are up here" to a man under the age of twenty-five has noticed this herself, without bothering her pretty head to write down and solve the underlying reproductive equation.
[*] TSB = toxic sperm build-up
We get it. We're about 3000 years overdue for a sea change on society's general tolerance of sexual misbehaviour (which is predominantly, but not exclusively, a male crime).
Plenty of kids can make their own decisions without parents hovering over them. Not all kids need their parents to micromanage their social lives.{{citation needed}}
Optimism (n.)
– an inability to disentangle luck from good management, spread over every lens, to improve the soft focus
Furthermore, your micromanage is someone else's macromanage.
Setting up a clear boundary between my children (were I to have any) and addictive substances is definitely my idea of macromanagement.
There's plenty of ways to screw up one's life, without handing the solution to your children on a platter. There's way more value if your children earn their fuck-ups, instead of falling into the common trough. My view is that children are way smarter than adults (a slam dunk on any measure of unstructured learning), but less complete, and not terribly good at assessing what lurks in the gaps.
Laszlo Bock at Google makes a big deal out of how the highest performers in life exist on a Pareto distribution. But so does fuckupitude, at the other end.
Thou shall not expose one's children—no matter how clever—to Pareto distributions, unsupervised.
There's a simple low-hanging fruit here: simply pass a law that software products much support reversion to any version the user might have previously installed.
And if the manufacturer wants to scrub an old version from the face of the planet (say, for example, they infringed a patent), then they must provide the old version with only those fixes, or only those fixes with substantially the same performance profile, plug-in API, and UI layout, etc. (though it might be built on a later release which is more feature rich, at the manufacturer's choice).
Second, we repeal prohibitions against reverse engineering if the default install of the best-available older release can be rooted right out of the box by a known exploit that's more than a year old. (If you won't fix it, the government is providing no assistance through the legal system to help you prevent your customers from fixing it themselves; and if they publicise any of your trade secrets in the process, so be it, that cat is now forevermore out of the bag.)
Note that we're not making anyone fix anything.
We're making the corporations do precisely one thing: support older products by allowing original firmware to be reinstalled (original firmware, or narrowly patched original firmware, preserving operational characteristics and user experience).
And we're also saying: if you can't eff yourself to make your default install secure, and you also won't eff yourself to amend your mistakes once they come to light (surely there weren't so many that this instantly drives you out of business), don't come begging to the fiat power of government to shelter your half-ass trade secrets.
This would create an a much-needed incentive structure for companies with half trillion dollar market caps to tempt their customers to embrace the future with carrots rather than sticks.
The Wild West of the smartphone explosion is long over now.
It's high time for a more studied pace of product churn, one where security gets equal shrift.
Note also that leaves innumerable loopholes available for software corporations to continue to shit on their user bases. But the shenanigans will be a little bit more out in the open, and easier to ridicule, and hence more effectively policed by the court of public opinion (which is where this should and would be litigated, if the court of public opinion was lifted off the mat).
Slashdot Mirror
None of the links in the summary go to the article authored by Bershidsky. Instead, it doubles down on putting lipstick on a pig.
Here's the Bershidsky link:
Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It's Mainly a Landlord.
Now I have three entries for Bershidsky in my idiots file:
Good grief, the average user understands practically nothing of the business model of either company. And Apple changes the design or the usability or the usage terms of what you already possess with basically no warning or explanation all the damn time.
I can hardly think of any company more opposed to the smallest glimmer of visibility into their future intentions than Apple.
Here's the second paragraph on B. from my idiots file:
The U.S. Intelligence Ship Is Too Leaky To Sail — 25 May 2017
Meaningful to whom?
Assange must follow new Ecuador embassy rules, says judge — 29 October 2018
Every young boy dreams of someday becoming an unwanted house guest in a foreign embassy with ten times more power over your daily conditions that a regular landlord or your 1 of 7 step mother.
Cooped up in near solitary confinement, and now he even has to pay for his own porn feed. The brilliant Bershidsky wants to file that under a mild downside.
And here's strike three:
Trump's Business Record in Russia Is Humiliating — 29 August 2017
s/Kremlin-connected elite/Russian mafia/
Turns out, door #2 has a second name.
The first phrase extracted from the article for the blurb on a real nerd site would have been "folded Benes network".
Also, on a real nerd site, it would have rendered the S-with-caron properly, as well.
Why can't we have nice things?
Good algorithms haven't been doing serialized demand load since the first CPU with sixteen whole lines of cache memory was attached to a split-transaction memory bus.
For the record, that was also one of the first microcoded CPUs.
With proper data orchestration, matrix multiply is far more of an aggregate bandwidth problem than a latency problem.
A pair of 64Ã--64 matrices fit into 64 kB of L1 cache. That's a good 250,000 MACs, right there (by the simple N^3 algorithm).
Suppose your 5 GHz core performs 4 double-precision MACs per clock cycle (40 GFLOPs).
2^18 / (40e9 Hz) = 6.55 microseconds
I don't regard streaming out your 32 kB answer to main memory (bypassing cache) in 6 us as straining at the latency bit.
Large, square matrices are rarely even a bandwidth problem.
The 1xN * Nx1 case (for large N) is a bandwidth problem, however. For this case you require two 8-byte memory bus reads and one 8-byte memory bus write per MAC. Probably not gonna happen at 20 GHz (though it might get close, on your single core i7 with three memory channels, running yesterday's AVX).
For skinny matrices, you need to keep your servers blade thin.
My underlying joke was this: if this strikes you as a paradox, look no further for the missing clue.
File under whoosh sarcasm.
Paradox of the missing clue: when you fix a glaring error, your Bayesian prior on the quality of your work as a whole goes down rather than up.
QED hasn't fixed a glaring error in fifty years. Victory, QED.
In the political philosophy of right-wing freedom, freedom below the belt extends to your wallet, but not your jewels—except as assessed an independent, government-certified authority, before you even gain the use of language.
Solution: anything that looks like a malformed testicle, or a malformed penis, should be expeditiously lopped off, while it's too small to matter.
Once this enlightened policy rolls out for fifteen years, washrooms should all be promptly relabeled "him" and "harem".
Problem solved.
All through the work day, we're forced to occupy the cognitive zone where we're least dumb, panicky, and dangerous (if not in the first job, in the second, or third, or fourth).
Then you come home, and you're tired, because that part of the brain was not meant to operate for eight solid hours. It was just meant to be wide enough awake to avoid lions while making a two hour hike through the Savanna, toward dinner (and again on the return trip).
So you plunk yourself down in front of the Internet, and Opposite George wants his dues: a great release of all the rabid bullshit you've been holding back floods to the surface.
It might only be 1% of your cognitive sphere, it's 50% of what you hang on your laundry line out there in anonymous public. An attentive xenobiologist might even conclude that half of Internet culture is a vent-hole Olympics.
And he/she/it/they would be right.
Captain Puberty: "Computer, enable speech recognition module."
No response.
Captain Puberty: "Computer! Enable speech recognition module, captain's orders!"
No response.
Captain Puberty: "Spock, load that ignorant computer system into the torpedo tube."
No response.
Captain Puberty: "Crew, load that ignorant computer system into the torpedo tube."
No response.
Captain Puberty: [still watching a High School talent competition on YouTube] "Ha ha ha! She flubbed an entire note while playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" at 320 rpm."
Captain Puberty: "Computer, troll that clumsy, pathetic, incompetent human female!"
No response.
And the text is positively ghastly.
What do we have here?
* First, black holes radiate, almost like supernovae.
* Second, radiation is a flow, not a flux.
* Third, hot gas is naturally self-insulating.
Look, ma, no spectral emission envelope!
The flow/flux distinction is something a principled science writer would handle with thick, protective gloves.
Anyone else know the story about Feynman in the basement confronting the arithmetic average temperature of red and purple stars?
I think he should have let off some steam by rewriting the lyrics to "Purple Rain" as "Purple Hole", while improvising from the heart a raging bongo between verses.
That's a good half of what you paid for, already.
Maybe 90% if you still use your phone to tell the time.
Marx assumed that all the gravitation effects in the solar system existed in (sun,planet) interactions. His theory falls apart as soon as you add a single moon. Even without moons, (planet,planet) interactions are often strong enough to really mess up space probe navigation.
Imagine if Newton was smart enough to figure out the inverse square law concerning (sun,planet) but wasn't smart enough to conclude that the same law applied to (planet,apple). Congratulations, you've got Marx, where the smallest scale of interaction is (overclass,underclass). My how the sun in the heavens exploits, exploits, exploits.
And this trick still works. Point to any sufficiently bright and shiny object ($34B will do nicely) and then cue the universal chorus of shade woo.
Plus, don't get me started about Mercury taking more than his share.
Plutos, unite!
The other reason is people who insist on putting the word "only" in front of political logistics, despite all evidence to the contrary—as in, the "only" reason we get cancer is because human metabolism sucks at self-repair.
You do realize that the phrase "all the king's horses and all the king's men" is satiric, don't you?
The "only" reason they couldn't put Humpty back together again is because no-one present had a diploma in egg reassembly.
Well, offer the course already!
If MOOC can't put Humpty back together again, no-one can.
Funny story.
My wife named her 2008 iMac Idared.
But it can also be read as iDared.
Someone mentioned the Mini on the MacBook Air thread, and I responded there forgetting which thread I was on, even though I only discussed the 2014 Mac Mini catastrophe.
Because a small number of people read these threads months later, here's a link:
https://apple.slashdot.org/com...
My wife's iMac is the iMac8,1 from 2008 with 4 GB of RAM, and an external Firewire SSD, which she boots from only when remoting into work. Otherwise, she boots from the very slow internal hard drive (running an out-of-date MacOS compatible with software we're not in a rush to replace).
She also has a second monitor, in portrait mode.
This is surprisingly usable for most purposes.
BUT, now that you need 2 GB to open 10 tabs in your web browser, because of all the shit Javascript (very little of which is enhancing your user experience, while much of it is actively disenhancing your user experience) you sort of wince if you need to open a web browser and any other heavy application at the same time.
I was all set to upgrade this to a Mac Mini roughly four years ago, but by the time I got around to it, the good Mac Mini had been replaced by a shitbox with solder RAM.
The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster — 1 December 2014
Which really makes you feel good about shelling out an extra $300 to add an extra 8 GB of memory (which is then forever capped, for all time). $35/GB. Memory Prices (1957-2018) was showing the street price in 2014 at around $8/GB. A $20/GB marginal price from Apple I could have swallowed, even with the permanent memory cap.
Just who is going to upgrade a 4 GB system from 2008 with an 8 GB system in 2014? What happened to Moore's law? Since when did 18 months turns into 48 months? I know we hit the knee, but that's Tonya Harding territory.
So here we are, in 2018, and we've had the money set aside for this project for a good five years, but Apple wouldn't offer a product didn't make me puke in my mouth (as someone who knows the deep history).
On this one, I might even pony for the 10 gbit ethernet, to future-proof the box against further Apple missteps. Better safe than sorry. A model you're actually willing to purchase might only come along once per decade.
I get it. You print out the suspect word with your 3D printer, and then you use your sterling hand to trace around the printed artifact for bumps, hollows, ridges, descenders, and cisterns—which you simultaneously compare and contrast to the irregular outlines of your Mario Kart Kamikazi Kukmumbr as braced by your other fleshy mitt.
Phrenology, with benefits.
I just read a few things about VLAs in C99, and my god, it makes Stroustrup look like a rocket scientist.
Convenient while it works, then brutally unsafe the moment it doesn't work (recompile for a new platform, whole new stack-size ballgame—you do the math, except you can't, because the C standard is deaf-mute on the existence of the primary stack, and hence, perforce, also its size limits).
Of course, when you're compiling the Linux kernel, you are compiling the platform itself, so internally it can certainly sort things in a way that an ordinary C program probably couldn't.
But still, I can't recall C++ violating the type system / allocation sanity this badly since vector<bool> was originally defined as a specialization that didn't actually meet the vector<> container class conceptual requirements, or maybe some early, misguided implementations of smart pointers (who precise misfeatures I've now blissfully forgotten).
So I look at this again in Wikipedia.
This isn't about punishing Brock. (The lifelong registration as a sex offender wasn't enough already? What remotely sane person would choose that door over a thousand other indignities?) No, this is about the penal code getting medieval on rape-culture's ass. Because the time is long overdue for unambiguous.
Brock would have been way better off facing involuntary manslaughter charges for drunk driving (say if he'd left tread marks on Emily Doe's corpse instead).
Involuntary Manslaughter Penalties and Sentencing
And no lifelong registration as the scum of the earth, either. Easy street. Sign me up.
While Brock almost certainly intended to initiate sexual activity with this girl, I don't think he intended to have her pass out (in fact, Cosby's sentence as a remorseless serial offender committing rape rape with the full Jabbywocky in sober calculation was hardly worse).
So Ana, if what you want is a Draconian penal code, say so (and your wish will be granted because the time is right). But don't pretend Brock was not punished enough in the first place, because any honest assessment of his life outcome would conclude the complete opposite.
That first time you go to the place in your new community where you publicly register as a sex offender.
I'm pretty sure every man who has ever done this remembers his first time.
If you write it into every Google employment contract that compensation can withheld (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the quiet, little internal "investigation" now becomes a matter of civil tort, and all the parties involved (including the women who filed the original complaint) risk being hauled into open court, where the standards of evidence are much, much starker than #MeTooHonestToGod "women mostly tell the truth about these things".
So you can have the quiet, internal investigation which results in people losing their employment (in an at-will employment environment, this is hard to litigate), but not their compensation (in law, property is the giant bull's-eye cake, and all the rest is merely icing); or, all the women of Google can form a giant support group to collectively get their courtroom Anita Hill on.
Andy Rubin already lives in a world where his name will summon up allegations of sexual misdeeds for all time.
Unlike many overpaid executives, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that Andy Rubin delivered immense corporate value for that giant pay packet.
These women know they can't successfully sue Rubin in civil court (their largely anecdotal evidence is insufficient for that venue), or they would take their grievance there, and profit immensely.
So now they are trying to intimidate their employer, Google, to extract a huge financial penance on scant documentary evidence, in a ratio that no court in America would countenance.
I've seen this drama before.
Why the Stanford Judge Gave Brock Turner Six Months — 17 June 2016
Ana Kasparian: Stanford Rapist Barely Punished — 6 June 2016
Seriously, Ana Kasparian thinks that Brock Turner was "barely punished".
Actual outcome: Instantly demoted from a Stanford golden child, to a lifelong felon, having served a big chunk of actual jail time (six months in the slammer in the pink petticoat for a socially maladapted Stanford nerd is not small change), whose given name is now synonymous with "dumpster rape" on the Internet for all time, and is barely employable, anywhere, ever (except on false pretenses where he dishonestly conceals his sordid history) because the social media wrath of the Sorority Sisters against any "clean slate" employer who ever associates with this person for all time would be too vituperative to even contemplate. All this for an act committed as a socially mindless young male not yet brutally familiar with neither alcohol nor women.
That's a whole new definition of "barely punished" that would make a cross-dressing Spanish Inquisitor cackle with glee.
Women who complain about their PMS affecting their mood and behaviour have no freaking clue about the brain-cramping rampage of peak TSB in a young man's late teenage years.
We've known ever since Robert Trivers first wagged around the magic, sexual-emotion clue stick that the chips in male evolution are stacked far higher, and far narrower than for women, and thus it only stands to reason that the hormonal ravages are correspondingly more intense.
Every woman who has ever said "my eyes are up here" to a man under the age of twenty-five has noticed this herself, without bothering her pretty head to write down and solve the underlying reproductive equation.
[*] TSB = toxic sperm build-up
We get it. We're about 3000 years overdue for a sea change on society's general tolerance of sexual misbehaviour (which is predominantly, but not exclusively, a male crime).
The attitudes must change.
Nevertheles
Because getting the style wrong (especially at epic Stallman scale) actually matters, and ultimately contaminates the substance, too.
But you win. Your quaint, absolute division of style and substance is the freedom-fighter Exacto knife Stallman imports into every moral domain.
Steve Jobs: reality distortion field, reified.
Richard Stallman: nuance suppression field, reified.
On the high bluffs of Mt Rushmore, Extremistan, carved out of the same rock, despite one glaring difference.
MacOs: Lickable.
Emacs: Unlickable.
Optimism (n.)
– an inability to disentangle luck from good management, spread over every lens, to improve the soft focus
Furthermore, your micromanage is someone else's macromanage.
Setting up a clear boundary between my children (were I to have any) and addictive substances is definitely my idea of macromanagement.
There's plenty of ways to screw up one's life, without handing the solution to your children on a platter. There's way more value if your children earn their fuck-ups, instead of falling into the common trough. My view is that children are way smarter than adults (a slam dunk on any measure of unstructured learning), but less complete, and not terribly good at assessing what lurks in the gaps.
Laszlo Bock at Google makes a big deal out of how the highest performers in life exist on a Pareto distribution. But so does fuckupitude, at the other end.
Thou shall not expose one's children—no matter how clever—to Pareto distributions, unsupervised.
Once upon a time, IBM pretty much invented the monolith. Just goes to show, the wannabe doesn't fall far from the tree.
Not even Google search?
My Google search history alone would rival the 9.2 million words of the 8-volume Churchill biography Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
What they don't know about me, I barely know about myself.
Wait until you see what hides under the rug way down the pecking order as "expressed preference".
Whoever first said "ignorance is bliss" was a gifted census taker.
There's a simple low-hanging fruit here: simply pass a law that software products much support reversion to any version the user might have previously installed.
And if the manufacturer wants to scrub an old version from the face of the planet (say, for example, they infringed a patent), then they must provide the old version with only those fixes, or only those fixes with substantially the same performance profile, plug-in API, and UI layout, etc. (though it might be built on a later release which is more feature rich, at the manufacturer's choice).
Second, we repeal prohibitions against reverse engineering if the default install of the best-available older release can be rooted right out of the box by a known exploit that's more than a year old. (If you won't fix it, the government is providing no assistance through the legal system to help you prevent your customers from fixing it themselves; and if they publicise any of your trade secrets in the process, so be it, that cat is now forevermore out of the bag.)
Note that we're not making anyone fix anything.
We're making the corporations do precisely one thing: support older products by allowing original firmware to be reinstalled (original firmware, or narrowly patched original firmware, preserving operational characteristics and user experience).
And we're also saying: if you can't eff yourself to make your default install secure, and you also won't eff yourself to amend your mistakes once they come to light (surely there weren't so many that this instantly drives you out of business), don't come begging to the fiat power of government to shelter your half-ass trade secrets.
This would create an a much-needed incentive structure for companies with half trillion dollar market caps to tempt their customers to embrace the future with carrots rather than sticks.
The Wild West of the smartphone explosion is long over now.
It's high time for a more studied pace of product churn, one where security gets equal shrift.
Note also that leaves innumerable loopholes available for software corporations to continue to shit on their user bases. But the shenanigans will be a little bit more out in the open, and easier to ridicule, and hence more effectively policed by the court of public opinion (which is where this should and would be litigated, if the court of public opinion was lifted off the mat).