A person determined to use passwords in a sane way (every password unique, with 60+ bits of true entropy) enjoys at least a modicum of confidence that the password implementation itself is simple enough to actually work as implied.
I'm about fifty years away from believing than any biometric security solution can be trusted without inspection (we still need some astounding advances in proof-of-correctness technology).
And I don't really feel like reading all that code, anyway. Theo and his crowd probably won't do it for me, on principle.
Every problem in computer science can be solved by adding another layer of indirection, except for too many layers of indirection.
Every problem in computer security can be solved by adding another trust authority, except for the proliferation of trust authorities you already have no compelling reason to trust.
The mac mini used to have a reason to exist, back when it had four cores. That was the only time, though. Nobody is quite sure why Apple expected to sell the cost-reduced version.
Yes, and that's the irony here, because if Apple were still selling an even more outdated version at exactly same price as it's original price (with the accessible RAM slots), it would still be a vastly better value than their current offering.
Before it became merely unloved and neglected, upon its design was inflicted grievous bodily harm.
I had a contract in an office with a manufacturing floor that was due to replace every PC in the building (the COO's hard drive was ten years old), I had management approval to purchase Minis for the entire second floor (management and embedded developers) until we discovered the shocking iMac downgrade (the company was in reboot mode with limited seed financing).
By the time the dust settled, we were a Windows shop again, with used CDN $50 CoreDuo Linux crash boxes (maxed out to 8 GB) here and there and everywhere.
Apple is no longer in the business of delivering value. It's in the business of satisfying need, which it goes to great efforts to cultivate. The more one uses the Apple drug, the more ones need increases (almost the only intended effect of any Apple product these days).
One doesn't become needy operating in a joint Windows/Linux environment, but it does exact a cost.
I recall faffing away four hours trying to find a Windows console that didn't break some function under tmux or screen that I was highly accustomed to using.
There would have been different faffing with the Mini, though less in total, a differential which would have easily justified the price difference except a) two cores, and b) solder RAM.
By the time we configured each Mini with 16 GB (at Apple's truly astounding mark-up of close to 4x street) the COO started to object to the total cash outlay (and I agreed).
So you configure some with 16 GB and some with 8 GB. And then you faff around putting the fat units on the right desks, and people come and go and roles change.
Yeah, so I faffed around for half a day trying to find a way to make this project work as a pure "simplifying" Apple refresh.
Another component of the plan was to install a FreeNAS server with 10 TB of usable space (80% of (6-2)*3 TB) in RAID-Z2 for network time machine. A very good idea in the age of ransomware and untraceable cryptocoin, because you can regularly snapshot the entire time machine dataset, and then no rogue client has a chance in hell of taking our your backing store—no matter how much it tries to overwrite (requires FreeNAS root).
I have this working at home with my Wife's iMac from 2008 (we are actually running a desperately old OS on the internal HD because one of Apple's updates killed an important application attached to a $500 piece of hardware, and a current OS on external FireWire SSD to meet the security requirements of her remote desktop at work).
The 4 GB RAM limit though is starting to kill us, as every damn Chrome tab now seems to require 100 MB.
We'd have transitioned onto the Mini three years ago (the funds are already earmarked in her home budget), but for Apple's brilliance. Instead, we decided on belt and suspenders time machine (local SSD and FreeNAS network) and to JIT the replacement when her machine finally fails, reasoning that there's no way the Mini can possibly get worse, and remain a viable product in Apple's product lineup.
Let's just hope this ten-year-old machine can outlast Cook's intransigence, so that at least one product delivers more value than our preference from any random Apple catalogue five to ten years ago.
I think the smarter you are, the more you end up disappointed by the human animal. They hide it, but it shows.
This is so wrong I hardly know where to begin.
And damn fool can solve the world's problems with a generous application of "if everyone would just...".
For those who lack imagination and drive the continuation is inevitably "behave the same way that I behave." (With drive, the continuation becomes "drink this special Kool-Aid.")
I concede that grotesque distortion of the problem domain displays a certain genius, but only if a) it serves your interests—usually as projected onto the slangy, self-serving axis of T, A, H, and S-class—and b) you are charismatic enough to convince many followers to go along with your views.
Also, head-up-ass IQ generally tests well. That would change if more of the tests involved actually pointing the guy who just mounted dual Evinrude V8s on the back of a birch bark canoe in the general direction of Polynesia.
In theory, it should be a short voyage.
Deep thinkers are less inclined to side-step the problem domain. Deep thinkers tend to spend most of their lives attempting to more accurately define the underlying problem domain, while their "sharper" peers futz around with ever more cylinders complexed.
Before Einstein: Assume time and space are separable.
Einstein: Why would we assume that, if light itself doesn't seem to have gotten the memo?
The coprolite breadcrumbs of head-up-ass IQ is to feign puzzlement over the origin of sex, since, after all, "asexual reproduction is more efficient". Duh! Of course. Right, because before sex, organisms could only compete, but after sex, it became possible to compete and cooperate at the same time. Competing and cooperating at the same time sure doesn't sound efficient (especially if your hearing is muffled by your liver and kidneys), yet here we are.
Yet. Here. We. Are.
Then: Eureka! Some dewy thinker leaps out of the bathtub to solve all of humanity's problems. "If only everyone would just..."
That wet slapping sound you hear? That's the sound of some wet wizened wanker trying to uninvent sex (the oft attempted, yet rarely successful genie-returns-to-bottle reverse orgasm).
All competition and no cooperation makes Jack a dull boy.
Sex: the original, unruly mess (which somehow has never stopped humanity from reducing male vitality down to one number, and female vitality down to three—turns out, sex is inherently nostalgic about its far simpler prelude).
Yea, I say unto you, imagine if numbers in the "real" world were not just a single value, but two different values, magically bound together? How crazy would that be?
Well, for starters, it would be z->z^3-1 crazy.
And who would want that in a universe far easier to conceptualize without invoking spinors? (Sorry, Einstein, we tried, we really did.)
I don't know what IQ is deep down, but it certainly exists in some brittle forms ("sex is an aberration") which are far easier to stereotype than the real thing (the almost completely stymied "sex is not an aberration" crowd).
Hence a lot of flipping bullshit about how "intelligent" people really think.
——— [ed: GEB bonus prize for spotting the half-crab ass hat.]
The alternative is "Hey I found a flaw in your OS six months ago and told shittons of other people about it. I'm publishing it tomorrow. I didn't tell you earlier because you don't honor embargoes."
Only not if five months beforehand, Theo already issues a patch without having been on the original distribution list, via a thumb-sized hole in the shitton dike.
He can't be the only security professional out there convinced to his very marrow that six months is a total crock.
You get real chemistry as soon as you're clever enough to construct Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's simple microscope.
By placing the middle of a small rod of soda lime glass in a hot flame, van Leeuwenhoek could pull the hot section apart to create two long whiskers of glass. Then, by reinserting the end of one whisker into the flame, he could create a very small, high-quality glass sphere. These spheres became the lenses of his microscopes, with the smallest spheres providing the highest magnifications.
The Greeks had glass BCE. And the Antikythera mechanism.
If they had managed to make a sufficiently clear glass bead, they would have soon discovered yeast, thence carbon dioxide, and soon the entire periodic table (soon enough to rewrite a thousand years of human history).
There were many potential paths to legitimate chemistry. The whole alchemy thing was a sad freak show. Call it the un-Einstein affair. Without Einstein, the geometric properties of space-time could have remained a freak show of the blind leading the blind down vaguely promising alleys for another half century.
What I find more interesting about LIGO is that we've basically got an intermittent, universe-scale GPS entirely for free.
To any alien civilization with their own LIGO observation database, we can now pretty precisely convey our galactic coordinate in space-time, just from the precise time ratios of the intervals between various observations, perhaps uniquely identified by participant mass (though time-stamps alone might be enough to uniquely resolve this, too—yay, metadata!).
It would be an interesting math exercise to image that some alien civilization broadcasts to us their own measured timestamps for a set of shared gravitational cymbal crashes (and suitable primer), from say 1000 light-years away (which means we need to wait a minimum of one thousand years to achieve the shared condition with the events we've presently measured) and then calculate how accurately we could pinpoint the location in space-time of the distant aliens (the co-linear events observed from our own near side would be of little utility, unless there passes another thousand years before we receive the alien coordinate list).
This is GPS on such a grand scale it's hard to even comprehend.
Since there is no known crypto where an attack can't break a reduced version, this is pretty much tautologically true everywhere and always.
I think this actually functions as a form of tipping-point porn: when some crack finally scars the low-end of what you might actually care about, however little (e.g. 1024 bits), it's declared as having broken over the New Orleans flood control system and now the water is really coming, as if the deluge hadn't started ages ago, on a misty planet where the sun is never seen.
so why add complexity and a bunch more points of potential failure
You nailed it.
Why add complexity and a bunch more points of potential failure which Apple is responsible for, when the user who consistently needs these features can simply clutter his or her rucksack (and packing reminder list) with unreliable knock-off port adaptors which Apple can forever disavow?
As if anyone would want Apple quality control end to end.
Windows 8 and Windows 10 were successes. Linux's inability to capture anything more than maybe 3% of the desktop market after two decades of trying is the real failure here.
Of the 10% of the population who were willing to fight constant battles with DRM and game-proof their hardware, Linux on the desktop captured nearly 30% of the market.
The first 6m30 are disposable, that's as far as I made it so far.
This was via a failure forum where Seagate employees gather to trash Seagate management. Wow, what a potent reminder of the Y2K post-bubble apocalypse.
2m30 Finally, a useful question. Answer mentions head process "Damascene".
3m30 three enabling technologies for last three to four years: helium, microactuation, Damascene process.
Then, effectively "this new thing today makes things better blah blah blah track density blah blah blah linear density blah blah blah".
4m50 guest decries "host-side modifications" and notes that HARM requires wear-levelling, which introduces host-side modifications.
Then a truly inane comment from Frick, "heat is bad, isn't it, for everything in electronics?", which causes Collins to chuckle nervously, before he vigorously redirects, managing to instantly step in it himself noting "an order of magnitude heat difference".
Hmmm. HAMR runs circa 900 degrees K, so that would place MAMR around 90 degrees K (we'll exclude 9000 degrees K). If true, could require innovations involving liquid nitrogen. I think he meant "differential heat change", but he realizes he's talking to a Wharton MBA, so he kindly lays up.
6m30 MBA-style "more, more, more" masturbation. Ack! Thppt! (Bill the Cat saying "gag me with a spoon, and I mean right now".)
The very first hard drive, the IBM 350 RAMAC, had fifty 24-inch platters. If we went back to that form factor, with this new technology you could pack over 130,000 TB into a single drive!
Sigh.
When you're trying to recover a spinning-rust ZFS volume, what you really care about is independent head-servos per terabyte, if you want your mean-time-to-recover to be a smaller number than your mean-time-to-cascading-failure.
Sure, you could build a viable ZFS storage system using multi-petabyte hard drives, so long as you can perform a complete drive read (semi-sequential) in under 24 hours (for a 24 PB drive, that works out to a sustained per-drive semi-sequential bandwidth of 280 GB/s).
And then you'd need a really stiff platter axle, and fluid dynamic bearings able to support a 5 kg platter assembly, spinning extremely fast, with no wobble whatsoever, unmaintained, for years and years.
On top of reports that Singleton and Jackson had many disagreements on the set, there were stories that neither of them much liked the Price screenplay, maybe because it nailed the small moments but missed the broader Shaftian strokes. (source)
fake russia-gate narrative is reaching absurdist proportions
Hmmm, "is reaching". Passive verb phrase anchoring your lead sentence.
As Pinker points out in more than one book, the principle advantage of the passive voice is to avoid naming the subject conducting the action.
The subject of your sentence is "fake russia-gate narrative", which in this construction effectively behaves as topic, not subject. And it's already wrong, because "-gate" is a suffix that principally denotes criminal coverup (Nixon's more serious crime). Not a single item in your list concerns any kind of cover up (though a few that might warrant a cover up).
Does your adjective "fake" then apply to your misapplication of "-gate"? Well, it could, but it probably doesn't, as most readers would sort your intent here.
If there wasn't the possibility here of criminal collusion with the Russians on the part of several tight-lipped members of the Trump family (Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner) and prominent tight-lipped officials within the Trump administration (in the first row, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael T. Flynn; in the second row Roger Stone, Rick Dearborn, George Papadopoulos, and Wilbur Ross; in the third row, Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer via Cambridge Analytica) this would not be a "gate" narrative whatsoever.
I use the modifier "tight-lipped" because—despite norms and procedures designed to strongly encourage or legally require full disclosure concerning interactions with foreign nationals—we had to learn about these connections the hard way in almost every case.
Who, then, is the subject engaged in spinning this "fake russia-gate narrative" willfully elided from your opening sentence?
It is nearly a universal principle of tradecraft that no narrative about anything important is allowed to exist uncorrupted. If the opposing interests don't corrupt it automatically in the normal course of events, then interests benefitting from a general climate of less clarity are sure to step into the breach.
All joint narratives are fake narratives. To discriminate the true from the false, the valid from the invalid, one has to break some eggs.
Nameless eggs, in your case.
The vast majority of responsible news reporting has operated since the beginning on the heuristic of "where there's smoke, there's fire". Usually a hunch or vague suspicion precedes discovery of a smoking gun. Maddow bends over backwards to frame "smoke" stories in language such as "what this would seem to suggest". Like the Y Combinator, a fair number of these early smoke stories graduated to attain full unicorn status—and loving it.
The main exception to this rule are the more "salacious" aspects of the Steele dossier. Short of serving a subpoena to the Kremlin, these wilder allegations from the standard-issue shit stew of raw intelligence will probably remain unconfirmed. Colbert is by far the worst offender here, leaning on the pee tapes over and over again for cheap laughs, despite this having the least prospect of demonstrated credibility. Whenever the dossier comes up, Maddow keeps repeating "and other salacious allegations" and then refuses to go there.
Next, the whole point of the Mueller investigation is to assign responsibility where responsibility belongs, despite certain cretins fervently wishing otherwise.
Non-fake narrative (subtype "gate"): a worrisome number of people in the Trump administration had ties to Russia which they systematically concealed, criminally concealed, downplayed, covered up, neglected to recall, or lied about. Once discovered, most of these ties were directly confirmed by the person responsible. Snopes verdict: 100% confirmed.
Non-fake narrative (subtype "tradecraft"): the Russians are engaged in a global disinformation strategy to undermine democratic norms and thereby weaken their democratic adversaries. Snopes verdict: W
The Cubans are *super keen* to not piss off the Americans right now, other than a few nationalistic grumbles, because post-Fidel Cuba knows that's how it gets out of its rut, but normalizing trade with its wealthy neighbor.
Clearly, any weapon this mysterious is backed by a resolved, national consensus. That much we know.
We also know that incompetence bests malice in the post season every damn time. So my guess is that they were targetting Canadians, but got a few passports mixed up, and ended up angering the Americans completely by accident.
Why Canada? Because the Cuban national consensus is *not* super keen right now to avoid pissing off Canadians.
Note: I wrote this without having noticed that Richard Brody was mentioned in the story submission.
For me nearly every movie with a very bad rotten tomato score (below 30%) is not worth going to the theater.
Here's my personal calibration of Tomatoes: _5 95-100___superb _4 90-95____great _3 85-90____good _2 80-85____weak _1 60-80____meh _0 30-60____double meh -1 _0-30____barrel bottom
If I had to engage in a Netflix-style 1-5 rating system (triple meh), then these would be my assigned numerical scores.
Since I agree with Tomatoes about half the time, I would lump 50% of all movies with a score less than 80 on Tomatoes into my "1" bucket , which would encompass everything from beyond terrible to pleasant (but shallow) time wasters.
I have a list of 600 movies I've previously seen, and close to another 400 on deck. Around 75% of my combined lists would score 3 or better on the system above.
I know there are plenty of worthwhile movies (to my own taste) scored by Tomatoes between 40 and 70 percent. The problem is that the filtering gets way harder, and I've got no shortage of options on deck less shrouded in doubt.
These are both movies I've watched recently, movies that don't settle into the mind easily, which is more likely to send me scurrying back to Tomatoes to plum various reviews than when I picked the movie in the first place.
Last night we finished The Reader, yet another movie packed with WFT? moments, though in The Reader these "moments" sometimes stretched into dreary 15-minute long siestas. I can usually tell what I really think by whether I read all the green splats or all the red tomatoes first (confirmation bias as dowsing rod FTW). For The Reader I read the splats first. Case closed.
So after looking at the film, I checked out IMDb's "external reviews" section and discovered that, good lord, 221 reviews had been written on "The Fountain." On other sites I discovered that its Metacritic rating was 51 (out of 100) and it scored exactly the same on the Tomatometer. ... Can a typical aud member be expected to do the heavy parsing that would figure all this out? I doubt it. Most movies, you like to have them all parsed before you buy the ticket. Did I have it figured out? It didn't take me long, and here was my thinking... ... That said, I will concede the film is not a great success. Too many screens of blinding lights. Too many transitions for their own sake. Abrupt changes of tone.
And yet I believe we have not seen the real film. When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director's Cut of this movie, and that's the cut I want to see.
So, the gutted carcass of what might have been a challenging, engrossing film, which—for someone who is not a professional critic—probably requires one pass for all the complex parsing, and then another pass to imagine the movie it was really trying to be. That's a big investment. A
The explanations there are clear and concise, but simpler than Wikipedia.
Wolfram doesn't have the OR problem (original research).
I've added intermediate-level "translation" text to a few Wikipedia articles, and every time I do this I know I'm at risk of being reverted for OR.
QED for the Layman is a masterpiece of original explanation—and forbidden territory for Wikipedia contributors.
Second, it's very hard to avoid saying something false when interpolating between the basic and the advanced material.
When I've tried this myself, I've estimated that I was hitting around a 90% truthfulness, with the other 10% ranging from vaguely correct to outright howlers (and me not being able to discern the difference).
I consider myself a fairly severe fussbudget in matters of accuracy, which means I trust my estimate that I'm falling short. Except for the experts who wrote the expert material—some of whom are no good at any other level—I'd rate myself fairly high. And I still don't think my intermediate contributions are quite up to encyclopedic standards (and so I mostly only dive in when the article starts out in a pretty bad place).
Unlike the simple level, the intermediate level is precise enough to get yourself into real trouble, here and there, if you're not a subject expert.
The editors who contributed the advanced material, so far as I've noticed, tended to be the 2005-2007 heyday crowd making highly substantive main edits, and not necessarily sticking around for editorial maintenance, or even to assist a less expert author trying to step in and fill the expository gaps.
First and foremost, Wikipedia is process driven, not outcome driven. People need to bear that in mind, and be happy it's as good as it is.
My least favourite articles are the mathematics-heavy articles where 90% of the text is derivational, to the degree where the main points are encoded in lemmas. What I've noticed on these pages is that it's very hard to dive in in any kind of small way. You almost have to first break the existing page's back to steer the page in a different direction.
The final class of pages I've noticed are pages that were basically abandoned 75% finished in the first place. These can often be improved with a quick effort. But if you try to add too much text, you'll fail to provide enough cites (that requires real research). In my experience, one cite attached to a few added sentences usually survives.
And then if you get reverted, the page goes back to the same state, with no warning for the next fool who comes along and tries to make the same edit.
That's what I hate most. Many editors revert a contribution aimed at fixing a problem where they view the fix as problematic, with little concern that the original state was also problematic, while taking no ownership whatsoever of the pre-existing problem.
Now I don't care if 10% of my edits get reverted (be bold), but above that level it begins to feel like a giant waste of time, so I'm careful not to be so bold as to ruin my will to participate in the first place. (One sees many bitter former editors show up in these threads who didn't figure this out soon enough.)
Free country, free to exchange goods and services, and free to engage in known workplace risks for such, yadda yadda yadda.
Not even hard-core neoliberal economists believe this tripe.
There are many categories of market that capitalist democracies prohibit universally and unconditionally, such as selling your children, burial remains (but I dug them up on my property!), endangered-species penis powders (as in "made from" rather than "made for"), consumer products under a severe-hazard safety recall, and Oscar statuettes.
I added that last one just to get your bile up, but before you do, take heed that it's the only one on my short list imposed by the market itself, rather than government fiat.
Around 51m11 Shirky talks about duplicity on the part of the Chinese government in allowing corporate VPNs to bypass the firewall, but not personal firewalls. Somewhere else in that talk, he talks about the (large) category of activities which are "illegal, yet allowed" (until further notice—which will arrive abruptly, if it arrives at all).
Most societies "allow" the dopamine trade (sex, drugs, alcohol) but make substantial efforts to push it to the dark margins. (This compromise vastly predates neoliberal ideology, which hasn't changed a damn thing about how this part of the economy works.)
The one dopamine trade, fructose/sucrose, that historically escaped the heavy thumb, having recently been identified as such (the American metabolic syndrome epidemic is impossible not to notice in the healthcare spending balloon) has actually gone mano a mano in public debate in the way you seem to think this whole sphere operates.
What this rule amounts to is not having more than half a liter of dangerously sweet liquid show up on your receipt as a single line item (no-one is stopping anyone from ordering a six-pack of 12-ouncers, all for personal consumption; I don't even think the rules prevented McSodaCorp from offering three for the price of two).
Because homo economicus is a giant myth, the inability of McSodaCorp to list the 50-ounce portion on their display menu changes the purchasing behaviour of people who never in their wildest dreams would have purchased a 50-ounce portion (this effect is known as the framing effect). The putative "cap" doesn't stop you from arriving in the same place, supposing you were choosing on such a rational basis in the first place (which most people are not, in small affairs).
I'm legitimately torn and I see both sides. On this issue, I think either path is viable. A society might choose more nudge or less nudge, and then experience different pros and cons (please note when adding up the utilitarian total that the prematurely dead fail to exercise much big-f Freedom during the imprudently excised portion of their otherwise naturally allotted span).
Society also regulates alcohol portion size, but this rarely prevents anyone determined to do so from getting entirely slozzled. Fructose eventually kills through one of the same metabolic pathways by which excess alcohol consumption leads to fatty liver disease. Both chemicals lead to dependency loops, but only one causes people to slur their words. There's even a perspective that alcohol is ultimately less dangerous for many people, because you can only get shit-faced once per evening, rather th
Well, it looks like security was a systemic failure at Equifax, so perhaps it's actually time to suggest that someone with a music degree wasn't qualified for the job?
Wow, congratulations on discovering social engineering!
Yeah, no. Whoosh. What we're debating here is social engineering engineering, the kind of engineering a responsible corporation engages in if they're up to speed with the former.
I'm pretty sure this is why Apple wants to include a living retina eye scanner in every phone.
Personally, if I had the option (and an iPhone), I'd set things up so my smart watch's accelerometer first had to detect my left hand performing a sinister Catholic cross before the official password dialog accepted any secure input.
I don't even get the question. Microsoft is already—to a first and second approximation—Lotus Notes 2.0.
Their primary lock on the enterprise is their proprietary document format, and its extensive integration ecosystem—the many of COBOL-grade regoliths of Jericho—extending from BASIC to Visual Basic to Visual Studio to.NET to SharePoint and beyond.
Windows 10 these days is barely more than a cash register on a busy toll bridge (with a special, express lane for native DirectX 12).
Aside from a legacy investment lock-in (self-inflicted), the four surviving reasons to run Windows 10: you don't care (it came with the damn machine), you play immersive games, you work for a tired corporation, or you exchange documents with a tired corporation.
Make no mistake, this giant pile of dusty rock is built to last. But Microsoft's active relevance is already 80% in the rear-view mirror.
The one thing I will say, though it pains me, is that I've heard it said on more than one machine learning podcast that Microsoft Research is considered among the very best and most progressive of all giant, cutting-edge research labs.
The company has one of the leading centers for research into computational Bayesian systems at its Redmond, Washington, campus. It is also launching a Bayesian research group at its new Cambridge research center.
The company employs three of the leading researchers in the field: Jack Breese, David Heckerman and Eric Horvitz.
"They are three of the best of their generation," D'Ambrosio said. "They are clearly right at the top. They are all world-class people, not only in their theoretical capabilities but in how to inject technology into real-world products."
So we've seen this movie before.
In the mid-90s, the lab built a sophisticated Bayesian prototype called Lumiere that included a "deep" model of user confusion. Microsoft is using the software to help build a smart-help system that knows when to jump in and offer people assistance. ... But thanks to time constraints, this unfinished component hasn't made its way into any version of Microsoft Office, including the soon-to-be-released Office XP. ... Horvitz recommended that users should be able to control when Clippy comes forward —advice that was also ignored by the decision makers at Microsoft.
How much of this generation's cutting-edge work coming out of Microsoft Research will also be Clippified?
Stay tune for the next soul-crushing chapter.
Or perhaps their new embrace of the Linux ecosystem portends that they've finally learned from their past mistakes (someone remind me to check back again in another five years).
If a person (or a machine) overhears a private conversation, and then later—in a completely different context—betrays any understanding of such—name one animated, 3D-chessboard villain who can't sniff betrayal off a single, misplaced syllable—what you've got is a side channel that needs to sleep with the fishes.
The only reason Cortana snoops is to later betray its gleanings though autocorrelated "suggestions".
How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on, That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, With arms encumber'd thus, or this headshake, Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, As 'Well, well, we know,' or 'We could, an if we would,' Or 'If we list to speak,' or 'There be, an if they might,' Or such ambiguous giving out, to note That you know aught of me: this not to do, So grace and mercy at your most need help you, Swear.
Same for me. It's perched on an small, wooden stereo cabinet with a DVD player I deliberated purchased with no BluRay support.
[*] As soon as they sell a feature to you, they count you as a user—see Google+—and then that statistic is rolled out to the studios to pressure them into dropping the format you actually use.
Our minimal yet adequate television resides in the corner of the room. Once a week we roll the stand very close to the couch, and pogo both of the speaker stands up close, as well. Then, when we're done watching (one or two movies which I procured on DVD days ahead of time) we send the court jester back to the corner where it belongs. _____
Hitchens was fond of repeating the line that "alcohol is a good servant and a bad master".
Lustig, in his new book The Hacking of the American Mind, pretty much lays out the case that everydopaminic daemon needs to be kept on a short leash. To run this through the not-so-brainy left/right cheese greater: dopamine is the neurotransmitter of reward, and serotonin is the neurotransmitter of accomplishment. _____
I basically read the whole of Chaos Monkeys straight through the other day. The Wolf of Wall Street strand is the usual dopamine, dopamine, dopamine narrative. Antonio goes so far as to moot with a faint toot Facebook's binge-drinking IPO as a vestage of moderation because he didn't notice many dishevelled revellers in unusually close consultation doing lines of coke off the nearest conference-room table. _____
Convenience. More than half the time it means: won't get between your and your next dopamine hit. Back in serotonin world, I consider my television "convenient" because it stays in the corner when I put it there, and demands little to no attention when I'm better occupied by other life pursuits. Dopamine is a high-maintenance hobby. And now we've essentially proved that this is no accident: its core biological function: to keep you going back to the well for high-maintenance things.
In modern parlance the original meaning has morphed somewhat, and it has come to be used as a metaphor for an addict's constant pursuit of the feelings of their first high. The "dragon" being mythical represents a goal that can never be achieved, because it does not exist.
Compared to heroine, video resolution is a relatively cute dragon, the Draco vulgaris that Pratchett mocks in Guards! Guards!.
Nowadays, there is a trend among nobles and other rich people to keep swamp dragons as pets.
Yeah, in their living rooms and bedrooms. Unlike the household squealer from the European middle ages, dragons whisper ever so slyly.
Those who did not wish to be compromised by a dragon's speech did never give directly information, but talked vaguely and in riddles, since denying an answer, would anger it to violence.
The dragon dictates, and, lately, it also listens.
Having dialects, semantic ambiguity, or whatever a 'phonology' of a programming language could be is bad, because a programming language is created to speak to a computer/compiler, not to a human.
You're probably not as aware of the ambiguities of the C language at the machine level as you ought to be.
Logic is underappreciated and overvalued. Few programmers are really good at logic (the underappreciated part), and it isn't the whole story, either (the overvalued part). I assure you, Larry understands that permissible ambiguities in programming languages are orders of magnitude smaller than for human language.
To quote Moneyball: it's a metaphor.
I'll be happy if Perl 6 is someday redeemed as an important, if eccentric, stepping stone on the path forward. At my age, though, I'm less optimistic about still being alive to see this happen.
While this is an interesting argument, I'd like to point out, as someone who has been using BT headphones for the last 3 years, that I have to replace headphones way more often than cellular devices. I think I'm on my 3rd set with this phone, and the right bud on this one has a short, so the third is not long for this world either.
Seriously, your inability to identify a quality vendor after three long years is germane to this discussion?
What you actually mean is that the replacement cycle for the bud is by no means guaranteed to be any longer than for the phone if you're too lazy to do proper homework.
Of course, proper homework is also a cost, and it might (in some cases) be rational not to bother with this, except for that little phrase "high end DAC", because I've never bought a "high end" anything where I didn't do proper research beforehand.
So you argument boils down to: assume you're already trapped in the disposable technology mindset, then this too is not a free lunch.
For the rest of us, much of the debate here concerns our resentment about being nickel and dimed into the disposable technology mindset against our established preferences.
I also own a Sony voice recorder, very high quality microphones, good enough for the highest certification of speech recognition, since before speech recognition was worth shit. I could dictate on my phone, but I prefer this. It also has rock solid pitch and playback speed adjustments, using buttons that always stay put.
However, it doesn't have Bluetooth and never will.
Great, now I get to carry both kinds.
Whatever happened to tools that were good for one thing only with convenient, baseline interoperability?
Slashdot Mirror
A person determined to use passwords in a sane way (every password unique, with 60+ bits of true entropy) enjoys at least a modicum of confidence that the password implementation itself is simple enough to actually work as implied.
I'm about fifty years away from believing than any biometric security solution can be trusted without inspection (we still need some astounding advances in proof-of-correctness technology).
And I don't really feel like reading all that code, anyway. Theo and his crowd probably won't do it for me, on principle.
Every problem in computer science can be solved by adding another layer of indirection, except for too many layers of indirection.
Every problem in computer security can be solved by adding another trust authority, except for the proliferation of trust authorities you already have no compelling reason to trust.
Yes, and that's the irony here, because if Apple were still selling an even more outdated version at exactly same price as it's original price (with the accessible RAM slots), it would still be a vastly better value than their current offering.
Before it became merely unloved and neglected, upon its design was inflicted grievous bodily harm.
I had a contract in an office with a manufacturing floor that was due to replace every PC in the building (the COO's hard drive was ten years old), I had management approval to purchase Minis for the entire second floor (management and embedded developers) until we discovered the shocking iMac downgrade (the company was in reboot mode with limited seed financing).
By the time the dust settled, we were a Windows shop again, with used CDN $50 CoreDuo Linux crash boxes (maxed out to 8 GB) here and there and everywhere.
Apple is no longer in the business of delivering value. It's in the business of satisfying need, which it goes to great efforts to cultivate. The more one uses the Apple drug, the more ones need increases (almost the only intended effect of any Apple product these days).
One doesn't become needy operating in a joint Windows/Linux environment, but it does exact a cost.
I recall faffing away four hours trying to find a Windows console that didn't break some function under tmux or screen that I was highly accustomed to using.
There would have been different faffing with the Mini, though less in total, a differential which would have easily justified the price difference except a) two cores, and b) solder RAM.
By the time we configured each Mini with 16 GB (at Apple's truly astounding mark-up of close to 4x street) the COO started to object to the total cash outlay (and I agreed).
So you configure some with 16 GB and some with 8 GB. And then you faff around putting the fat units on the right desks, and people come and go and roles change.
Yeah, so I faffed around for half a day trying to find a way to make this project work as a pure "simplifying" Apple refresh.
Another component of the plan was to install a FreeNAS server with 10 TB of usable space (80% of (6-2)*3 TB) in RAID-Z2 for network time machine. A very good idea in the age of ransomware and untraceable cryptocoin, because you can regularly snapshot the entire time machine dataset, and then no rogue client has a chance in hell of taking our your backing store—no matter how much it tries to overwrite (requires FreeNAS root).
I have this working at home with my Wife's iMac from 2008 (we are actually running a desperately old OS on the internal HD because one of Apple's updates killed an important application attached to a $500 piece of hardware, and a current OS on external FireWire SSD to meet the security requirements of her remote desktop at work).
The 4 GB RAM limit though is starting to kill us, as every damn Chrome tab now seems to require 100 MB.
We'd have transitioned onto the Mini three years ago (the funds are already earmarked in her home budget), but for Apple's brilliance. Instead, we decided on belt and suspenders time machine (local SSD and FreeNAS network) and to JIT the replacement when her machine finally fails, reasoning that there's no way the Mini can possibly get worse, and remain a viable product in Apple's product lineup.
Let's just hope this ten-year-old machine can outlast Cook's intransigence, so that at least one product delivers more value than our preference from any random Apple catalogue five to ten years ago.
This is so wrong I hardly know where to begin.
And damn fool can solve the world's problems with a generous application of "if everyone would just ...".
For those who lack imagination and drive the continuation is inevitably "behave the same way that I behave." (With drive, the continuation becomes "drink this special Kool-Aid.")
I concede that grotesque distortion of the problem domain displays a certain genius, but only if a) it serves your interests—usually as projected onto the slangy, self-serving axis of T, A, H, and S-class—and b) you are charismatic enough to convince many followers to go along with your views.
Also, head-up-ass IQ generally tests well. That would change if more of the tests involved actually pointing the guy who just mounted dual Evinrude V8s on the back of a birch bark canoe in the general direction of Polynesia.
In theory, it should be a short voyage.
Deep thinkers are less inclined to side-step the problem domain. Deep thinkers tend to spend most of their lives attempting to more accurately define the underlying problem domain, while their "sharper" peers futz around with ever more cylinders complexed.
Before Einstein: Assume time and space are separable.
Einstein: Why would we assume that, if light itself doesn't seem to have gotten the memo?
The coprolite breadcrumbs of head-up-ass IQ is to feign puzzlement over the origin of sex, since, after all, "asexual reproduction is more efficient". Duh! Of course. Right, because before sex, organisms could only compete, but after sex, it became possible to compete and cooperate at the same time. Competing and cooperating at the same time sure doesn't sound efficient (especially if your hearing is muffled by your liver and kidneys), yet here we are.
Yet. Here. We. Are.
Then: Eureka! Some dewy thinker leaps out of the bathtub to solve all of humanity's problems. "If only everyone would just ..."
That wet slapping sound you hear? That's the sound of some wet wizened wanker trying to uninvent sex (the oft attempted, yet rarely successful genie-returns-to-bottle reverse orgasm).
All competition and no cooperation makes Jack a dull boy.
Sex: the original, unruly mess (which somehow has never stopped humanity from reducing male vitality down to one number, and female vitality down to three—turns out, sex is inherently nostalgic about its far simpler prelude).
Yea, I say unto you, imagine if numbers in the "real" world were not just a single value, but two different values, magically bound together? How crazy would that be?
Well, for starters, it would be z->z^3-1 crazy.
And who would want that in a universe far easier to conceptualize without invoking spinors? (Sorry, Einstein, we tried, we really did.)
I don't know what IQ is deep down, but it certainly exists in some brittle forms ("sex is an aberration") which are far easier to stereotype than the real thing (the almost completely stymied "sex is not an aberration" crowd).
Hence a lot of flipping bullshit about how "intelligent" people really think.
———
[ed: GEB bonus prize for spotting the half-crab ass hat.]
And, no, I'm not the least bit bitter about EME.
Only not if five months beforehand, Theo already issues a patch without having been on the original distribution list, via a thumb-sized hole in the shitton dike.
He can't be the only security professional out there convinced to his very marrow that six months is a total crock.
You get real chemistry as soon as you're clever enough to construct Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's simple microscope.
The Greeks had glass BCE. And the Antikythera mechanism.
If they had managed to make a sufficiently clear glass bead, they would have soon discovered yeast, thence carbon dioxide, and soon the entire periodic table (soon enough to rewrite a thousand years of human history).
There were many potential paths to legitimate chemistry. The whole alchemy thing was a sad freak show. Call it the un-Einstein affair. Without Einstein, the geometric properties of space-time could have remained a freak show of the blind leading the blind down vaguely promising alleys for another half century.
What I find more interesting about LIGO is that we've basically got an intermittent, universe-scale GPS entirely for free.
To any alien civilization with their own LIGO observation database, we can now pretty precisely convey our galactic coordinate in space-time, just from the precise time ratios of the intervals between various observations, perhaps uniquely identified by participant mass (though time-stamps alone might be enough to uniquely resolve this, too—yay, metadata!).
It would be an interesting math exercise to image that some alien civilization broadcasts to us their own measured timestamps for a set of shared gravitational cymbal crashes (and suitable primer), from say 1000 light-years away (which means we need to wait a minimum of one thousand years to achieve the shared condition with the events we've presently measured) and then calculate how accurately we could pinpoint the location in space-time of the distant aliens (the co-linear events observed from our own near side would be of little utility, unless there passes another thousand years before we receive the alien coordinate list).
This is GPS on such a grand scale it's hard to even comprehend.
And, as we all know, a crippled key cannot be trusted.
Beware crippled keys! They might not appear to limp, but they are crippled all the same.
(Only don't say this in front of Kripkenstein, rather than his secret Japanese wife, or he might just kill you.)
Since there is no known crypto where an attack can't break a reduced version, this is pretty much tautologically true everywhere and always.
I think this actually functions as a form of tipping-point porn: when some crack finally scars the low-end of what you might actually care about, however little (e.g. 1024 bits), it's declared as having broken over the New Orleans flood control system and now the water is really coming, as if the deluge hadn't started ages ago, on a misty planet where the sun is never seen.
You nailed it.
Why add complexity and a bunch more points of potential failure which Apple is responsible for, when the user who consistently needs these features can simply clutter his or her rucksack (and packing reminder list) with unreliable knock-off port adaptors which Apple can forever disavow?
As if anyone would want Apple quality control end to end.
Of the 10% of the population who were willing to fight constant battles with DRM and game-proof their hardware, Linux on the desktop captured nearly 30% of the market.
I was extremely snarky in another post about an MBA-level chit chat on YouTube that revealed basically nothing.
Now I've tracked down a 1.5 hour technical talk featuring Mike Cordano, Dave Tang, Janet George, Brendan Collins, and Jimmy Zhu.
Technology of the Future: Western Digital Announces MAMR for Next Generation HDDs — 12 October 2017
The first 6m30 are disposable, that's as far as I made it so far.
This was via a failure forum where Seagate employees gather to trash Seagate management. Wow, what a potent reminder of the Y2K post-bubble apocalypse.
Jeff Frick interviews Brendan Collins on MAMR — 12 October 2017
15 seconds logo rotation.
30 seconds lip-gloss application.
30 seconds applied lip gloss.
At 2 m mark there's a flaccid PMR confession.
2m30 Finally, a useful question. Answer mentions head process "Damascene".
3m30 three enabling technologies for last three to four years: helium, microactuation, Damascene process.
Then, effectively "this new thing today makes things better blah blah blah track density blah blah blah linear density blah blah blah".
4m50 guest decries "host-side modifications" and notes that HARM requires wear-levelling, which introduces host-side modifications.
Then a truly inane comment from Frick, "heat is bad, isn't it, for everything in electronics?", which causes Collins to chuckle nervously, before he vigorously redirects, managing to instantly step in it himself noting "an order of magnitude heat difference".
Hmmm. HAMR runs circa 900 degrees K, so that would place MAMR around 90 degrees K (we'll exclude 9000 degrees K). If true, could require innovations involving liquid nitrogen. I think he meant "differential heat change", but he realizes he's talking to a Wharton MBA, so he kindly lays up.
6m30 MBA-style "more, more, more" masturbation. Ack! Thppt! (Bill the Cat saying "gag me with a spoon, and I mean right now".)
This is not a Wharton recruitment video.
Sigh.
When you're trying to recover a spinning-rust ZFS volume, what you really care about is independent head-servos per terabyte, if you want your mean-time-to-recover to be a smaller number than your mean-time-to-cascading-failure.
Sure, you could build a viable ZFS storage system using multi-petabyte hard drives, so long as you can perform a complete drive read (semi-sequential) in under 24 hours (for a 24 PB drive, that works out to a sustained per-drive semi-sequential bandwidth of 280 GB/s).
And then you'd need a really stiff platter axle, and fluid dynamic bearings able to support a 5 kg platter assembly, spinning extremely fast, with no wobble whatsoever, unmaintained, for years and years.
Hmmm, "is reaching". Passive verb phrase anchoring your lead sentence.
As Pinker points out in more than one book, the principle advantage of the passive voice is to avoid naming the subject conducting the action.
The subject of your sentence is "fake russia-gate narrative", which in this construction effectively behaves as topic, not subject. And it's already wrong, because "-gate" is a suffix that principally denotes criminal coverup (Nixon's more serious crime). Not a single item in your list concerns any kind of cover up (though a few that might warrant a cover up).
Does your adjective "fake" then apply to your misapplication of "-gate"? Well, it could, but it probably doesn't, as most readers would sort your intent here.
If there wasn't the possibility here of criminal collusion with the Russians on the part of several tight-lipped members of the Trump family (Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner) and prominent tight-lipped officials within the Trump administration (in the first row, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael T. Flynn; in the second row Roger Stone, Rick Dearborn, George Papadopoulos, and Wilbur Ross; in the third row, Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer via Cambridge Analytica) this would not be a "gate" narrative whatsoever.
I use the modifier "tight-lipped" because—despite norms and procedures designed to strongly encourage or legally require full disclosure concerning interactions with foreign nationals—we had to learn about these connections the hard way in almost every case.
Who, then, is the subject engaged in spinning this "fake russia-gate narrative" willfully elided from your opening sentence?
It is nearly a universal principle of tradecraft that no narrative about anything important is allowed to exist uncorrupted. If the opposing interests don't corrupt it automatically in the normal course of events, then interests benefitting from a general climate of less clarity are sure to step into the breach.
All joint narratives are fake narratives. To discriminate the true from the false, the valid from the invalid, one has to break some eggs.
Nameless eggs, in your case.
The vast majority of responsible news reporting has operated since the beginning on the heuristic of "where there's smoke, there's fire". Usually a hunch or vague suspicion precedes discovery of a smoking gun. Maddow bends over backwards to frame "smoke" stories in language such as "what this would seem to suggest". Like the Y Combinator, a fair number of these early smoke stories graduated to attain full unicorn status—and loving it.
The main exception to this rule are the more "salacious" aspects of the Steele dossier. Short of serving a subpoena to the Kremlin, these wilder allegations from the standard-issue shit stew of raw intelligence will probably remain unconfirmed. Colbert is by far the worst offender here, leaning on the pee tapes over and over again for cheap laughs, despite this having the least prospect of demonstrated credibility. Whenever the dossier comes up, Maddow keeps repeating "and other salacious allegations" and then refuses to go there.
Next, the whole point of the Mueller investigation is to assign responsibility where responsibility belongs, despite certain cretins fervently wishing otherwise.
Non-fake narrative (subtype "gate"): a worrisome number of people in the Trump administration had ties to Russia which they systematically concealed, criminally concealed, downplayed, covered up, neglected to recall, or lied about. Once discovered, most of these ties were directly confirmed by the person responsible. Snopes verdict: 100% confirmed.
Non-fake narrative (subtype "tradecraft"): the Russians are engaged in a global disinformation strategy to undermine democratic norms and thereby weaken their democratic adversaries. Snopes verdict: W
Clearly, any weapon this mysterious is backed by a resolved, national consensus. That much we know.
We also know that incompetence bests malice in the post season every damn time. So my guess is that they were targetting Canadians, but got a few passports mixed up, and ended up angering the Americans completely by accident.
Why Canada? Because the Cuban national consensus is *not* super keen right now to avoid pissing off Canadians.
Note: I wrote this without having noticed that Richard Brody was mentioned in the story submission.
Here's my personal calibration of Tomatoes:
_5 95-100___superb
_4 90-95____great
_3 85-90____good
_2 80-85____weak
_1 60-80____meh
_0 30-60____double meh
-1 _0-30____barrel bottom
If I had to engage in a Netflix-style 1-5 rating system (triple meh), then these would be my assigned numerical scores.
Since I agree with Tomatoes about half the time, I would lump 50% of all movies with a score less than 80 on Tomatoes into my "1" bucket , which would encompass everything from beyond terrible to pleasant (but shallow) time wasters.
I have a list of 600 movies I've previously seen, and close to another 400 on deck. Around 75% of my combined lists would score 3 or better on the system above.
I know there are plenty of worthwhile movies (to my own taste) scored by Tomatoes between 40 and 70 percent. The problem is that the filtering gets way harder, and I've got no shortage of options on deck less shrouded in doubt.
Here's a piece of criticism I read recently which I thought was first rate:
The Astonishing Power of "The Master" by Richard Brody
And here's Brody elevating himself to such a high register, I can barely follow his argument:
"Frances Ha" and the Pursuit of Happiness
These are both movies I've watched recently, movies that don't settle into the mind easily, which is more likely to send me scurrying back to Tomatoes to plum various reviews than when I picked the movie in the first place.
Last night we finished The Reader, yet another movie packed with WFT? moments, though in The Reader these "moments" sometimes stretched into dreary 15-minute long siestas. I can usually tell what I really think by whether I read all the green splats or all the red tomatoes first (confirmation bias as dowsing rod FTW). For The Reader I read the splats first. Case closed.
Here's the very last review I read before landing upon this thread:
Roger Ebert on The Fountain
So, the gutted carcass of what might have been a challenging, engrossing film, which—for someone who is not a professional critic—probably requires one pass for all the complex parsing, and then another pass to imagine the movie it was really trying to be. That's a big investment. A
Wolfram doesn't have the OR problem (original research).
I've added intermediate-level "translation" text to a few Wikipedia articles, and every time I do this I know I'm at risk of being reverted for OR.
QED for the Layman is a masterpiece of original explanation—and forbidden territory for Wikipedia contributors.
Second, it's very hard to avoid saying something false when interpolating between the basic and the advanced material.
When I've tried this myself, I've estimated that I was hitting around a 90% truthfulness, with the other 10% ranging from vaguely correct to outright howlers (and me not being able to discern the difference).
I consider myself a fairly severe fussbudget in matters of accuracy, which means I trust my estimate that I'm falling short. Except for the experts who wrote the expert material—some of whom are no good at any other level—I'd rate myself fairly high. And I still don't think my intermediate contributions are quite up to encyclopedic standards (and so I mostly only dive in when the article starts out in a pretty bad place).
Unlike the simple level, the intermediate level is precise enough to get yourself into real trouble, here and there, if you're not a subject expert.
The editors who contributed the advanced material, so far as I've noticed, tended to be the 2005-2007 heyday crowd making highly substantive main edits, and not necessarily sticking around for editorial maintenance, or even to assist a less expert author trying to step in and fill the expository gaps.
First and foremost, Wikipedia is process driven, not outcome driven. People need to bear that in mind, and be happy it's as good as it is.
My least favourite articles are the mathematics-heavy articles where 90% of the text is derivational, to the degree where the main points are encoded in lemmas. What I've noticed on these pages is that it's very hard to dive in in any kind of small way. You almost have to first break the existing page's back to steer the page in a different direction.
The final class of pages I've noticed are pages that were basically abandoned 75% finished in the first place. These can often be improved with a quick effort. But if you try to add too much text, you'll fail to provide enough cites (that requires real research). In my experience, one cite attached to a few added sentences usually survives.
And then if you get reverted, the page goes back to the same state, with no warning for the next fool who comes along and tries to make the same edit.
That's what I hate most. Many editors revert a contribution aimed at fixing a problem where they view the fix as problematic, with little concern that the original state was also problematic, while taking no ownership whatsoever of the pre-existing problem.
Now I don't care if 10% of my edits get reverted (be bold), but above that level it begins to feel like a giant waste of time, so I'm careful not to be so bold as to ruin my will to participate in the first place. (One sees many bitter former editors show up in these threads who didn't figure this out soon enough.)
Not even hard-core neoliberal economists believe this tripe.
There are many categories of market that capitalist democracies prohibit universally and unconditionally, such as selling your children, burial remains (but I dug them up on my property!), endangered-species penis powders (as in "made from" rather than "made for"), consumer products under a severe-hazard safety recall, and Oscar statuettes.
I added that last one just to get your bile up, but before you do, take heed that it's the only one on my short list imposed by the market itself, rather than government fiat.
Why Academy Award Winners Can't Sell Their Oscars
Seriously, raise your game. All you're managing to do is give respectable libertarians a bad reputation.
Whether sexual service constitutes a valid marketplace has been hotly contested in nearly every society known.
Clay Shirky: "Little Rice" | Talks At Google
Around 51m11 Shirky talks about duplicity on the part of the Chinese government in allowing corporate VPNs to bypass the firewall, but not personal firewalls. Somewhere else in that talk, he talks about the (large) category of activities which are "illegal, yet allowed" (until further notice—which will arrive abruptly, if it arrives at all).
Most societies "allow" the dopamine trade (sex, drugs, alcohol) but make substantial efforts to push it to the dark margins. (This compromise vastly predates neoliberal ideology, which hasn't changed a damn thing about how this part of the economy works.)
The one dopamine trade, fructose/sucrose, that historically escaped the heavy thumb, having recently been identified as such (the American metabolic syndrome epidemic is impossible not to notice in the healthcare spending balloon) has actually gone mano a mano in public debate in the way you seem to think this whole sphere operates.
Sugary Drinks Portion Cap Rule
What this rule amounts to is not having more than half a liter of dangerously sweet liquid show up on your receipt as a single line item (no-one is stopping anyone from ordering a six-pack of 12-ouncers, all for personal consumption; I don't even think the rules prevented McSodaCorp from offering three for the price of two).
Because homo economicus is a giant myth, the inability of McSodaCorp to list the 50-ounce portion on their display menu changes the purchasing behaviour of people who never in their wildest dreams would have purchased a 50-ounce portion (this effect is known as the framing effect). The putative "cap" doesn't stop you from arriving in the same place, supposing you were choosing on such a rational basis in the first place (which most people are not, in small affairs).
I'm legitimately torn and I see both sides. On this issue, I think either path is viable. A society might choose more nudge or less nudge, and then experience different pros and cons (please note when adding up the utilitarian total that the prematurely dead fail to exercise much big-f Freedom during the imprudently excised portion of their otherwise naturally allotted span).
Society also regulates alcohol portion size, but this rarely prevents anyone determined to do so from getting entirely slozzled. Fructose eventually kills through one of the same metabolic pathways by which excess alcohol consumption leads to fatty liver disease. Both chemicals lead to dependency loops, but only one causes people to slur their words. There's even a perspective that alcohol is ultimately less dangerous for many people, because you can only get shit-faced once per evening, rather th
Way to narrow it down from millions to ten of thousands. What an appallingly shitty lead.
Jaron Lanier
Knuth Discusses Bach, Pipe Organs, And CS
You: I'm not sure about this hire. Are we really, really, really sure he hasn't got a music degree? I smell a rat.
Now go back to your mother's cave, little boy.
Because the music degree itself is not the problem.
Yeah, no. Whoosh. What we're debating here is social engineering engineering, the kind of engineering a responsible corporation engages in if they're up to speed with the former.
I'm pretty sure this is why Apple wants to include a living retina eye scanner in every phone.
Personally, if I had the option (and an iPhone), I'd set things up so my smart watch's accelerometer first had to detect my left hand performing a sinister Catholic cross before the official password dialog accepted any secure input.
I don't even get the question. Microsoft is already—to a first and second approximation—Lotus Notes 2.0.
Their primary lock on the enterprise is their proprietary document format, and its extensive integration ecosystem—the many of COBOL-grade regoliths of Jericho—extending from BASIC to Visual Basic to Visual Studio to .NET to SharePoint and beyond.
Windows 10 these days is barely more than a cash register on a busy toll bridge (with a special, express lane for native DirectX 12).
Aside from a legacy investment lock-in (self-inflicted), the four surviving reasons to run Windows 10: you don't care (it came with the damn machine), you play immersive games, you work for a tired corporation, or you exchange documents with a tired corporation.
Make no mistake, this giant pile of dusty rock is built to last. But Microsoft's active relevance is already 80% in the rear-view mirror.
The one thing I will say, though it pains me, is that I've heard it said on more than one machine learning podcast that Microsoft Research is considered among the very best and most progressive of all giant, cutting-edge research labs.
MS Office Helper Not Dead Yet — April 2001
So we've seen this movie before.
How much of this generation's cutting-edge work coming out of Microsoft Research will also be Clippified?
Stay tune for the next soul-crushing chapter.
Or perhaps their new embrace of the Linux ecosystem portends that they've finally learned from their past mistakes (someone remind me to check back again in another five years).
It's ridiculous to even debate this.
If a person (or a machine) overhears a private conversation, and then later—in a completely different context—betrays any understanding of such—name one animated, 3D-chessboard villain who can't sniff betrayal off a single, misplaced syllable—what you've got is a side channel that needs to sleep with the fishes.
The only reason Cortana snoops is to later betray its gleanings though autocorrelated "suggestions".
Swear, fucking Cortana, swear.
Same for me. It's perched on an small, wooden stereo cabinet with a DVD player I deliberated purchased with no BluRay support.
[*] As soon as they sell a feature to you, they count you as a user—see Google+—and then that statistic is rolled out to the studios to pressure them into dropping the format you actually use.
Our minimal yet adequate television resides in the corner of the room. Once a week we roll the stand very close to the couch, and pogo both of the speaker stands up close, as well. Then, when we're done watching (one or two movies which I procured on DVD days ahead of time) we send the court jester back to the corner where it belongs.
_____
Hitchens was fond of repeating the line that "alcohol is a good servant and a bad master".
Lustig, in his new book The Hacking of the American Mind, pretty much lays out the case that every dopaminic daemon needs to be kept on a short leash. To run this through the not-so-brainy left/right cheese greater: dopamine is the neurotransmitter of reward, and serotonin is the neurotransmitter of accomplishment.
_____
I basically read the whole of Chaos Monkeys straight through the other day. The Wolf of Wall Street strand is the usual dopamine, dopamine, dopamine narrative. Antonio goes so far as to moot with a faint toot Facebook's binge-drinking IPO as a vestage of moderation because he didn't notice many dishevelled revellers in unusually close consultation doing lines of coke off the nearest conference-room table.
_____
Convenience. More than half the time it means: won't get between your and your next dopamine hit. Back in serotonin world, I consider my television "convenient" because it stays in the corner when I put it there, and demands little to no attention when I'm better occupied by other life pursuits. Dopamine is a high-maintenance hobby. And now we've essentially proved that this is no accident: its core biological function: to keep you going back to the well for high-maintenance things.
Chasing the dragon
Compared to heroine, video resolution is a relatively cute dragon, the Draco vulgaris that Pratchett mocks in Guards! Guards!.
Yeah, in their living rooms and bedrooms. Unlike the household squealer from the European middle ages, dragons whisper ever so slyly.
The dragon dictates, and, lately, it also listens.
Samsung Warns Customers To Think Twice About What They Say Near Smart TVs
Ever this seductive dragon whispers "come closer, little girl" and "moar pixels!"
You're probably not as aware of the ambiguities of the C language at the machine level as you ought to be.
Logic is underappreciated and overvalued. Few programmers are really good at logic (the underappreciated part), and it isn't the whole story, either (the overvalued part). I assure you, Larry understands that permissible ambiguities in programming languages are orders of magnitude smaller than for human language.
To quote Moneyball: it's a metaphor.
I'll be happy if Perl 6 is someday redeemed as an important, if eccentric, stepping stone on the path forward. At my age, though, I'm less optimistic about still being alive to see this happen.
And I'm not even that old.
Seriously, your inability to identify a quality vendor after three long years is germane to this discussion?
What you actually mean is that the replacement cycle for the bud is by no means guaranteed to be any longer than for the phone if you're too lazy to do proper homework.
Of course, proper homework is also a cost, and it might (in some cases) be rational not to bother with this, except for that little phrase "high end DAC", because I've never bought a "high end" anything where I didn't do proper research beforehand.
So you argument boils down to: assume you're already trapped in the disposable technology mindset, then this too is not a free lunch.
For the rest of us, much of the debate here concerns our resentment about being nickel and dimed into the disposable technology mindset against our established preferences.
I also own a Sony voice recorder, very high quality microphones, good enough for the highest certification of speech recognition, since before speech recognition was worth shit. I could dictate on my phone, but I prefer this. It also has rock solid pitch and playback speed adjustments, using buttons that always stay put.
However, it doesn't have Bluetooth and never will.
Great, now I get to carry both kinds.
Whatever happened to tools that were good for one thing only with convenient, baseline interoperability?