Tell that to the families of the women and children who are murdered in the net terrorist attack that could have been prevented had the NSA been able to monitor the terrorists communications as they are supposed to.
Just curious. When is the last time you encountered an issue where you could see both sides, if ever?
Your comment might even be worth a serious response if your comment contained any evidence (or hint of evidence) that your "other side of the issue" circuit wasn't discarded at birth.
I know, I know. It's a high standard and a hard cross to bear.
What I want is my next phone to operate in PAN mode (personal area network), in which I wear the SIM card / "${new_shiny}G" transceiver / shared-storage-volume on my belt, and then I use any peripheral I wish to use in conjunction with it (dumb phone, smart phone, tablet, smart watch)—possibly several at the same time.
As I see it, each device would have essentially it's own installation and software profile (with the majority of storage local), but there would be enough on the belt blob that you could just pick up some device lying around (supposing you trust it enough) and associate it temporarily, and have it work well enough as a "guest" device on your PAN to get by.
I'd be totally happy to have two belt blobs: one for voice service and another for data service, provided it all worked together seamlessly. I'd source each service from the most competitive bid.
I dislike the current phone architecture and security model so much I turned my Android data modem off six months ago (after uninstalling most apps with any kind of dangerous permission bit) and haven't really missed it at all. I kept the light meter, sound meter, scientific calculator, stopwatch/timer and signal strength meters (GPS, Wi-Fi, "${new_shiny}G"). I would also have kept "POTS-comparable audio quality" if I had managed to download such a thing (maybe I just didn't search hard enough).
It hasn't been a problem. I'm around Wi-Fi often enough to not care and I rarely drive anywhere unfamiliar.
If you ask me, we're definitely at peak phone, but it's a dystopian peak, not a design peak.
verified in humans by analyzing church documents containing the lifespans of choir castratos versus the unmodified monks they lived alongside
You need to rethink verification.
In A/B results taken from one environment (and a really weird one, at that) was worth a hill of beans (freshly severed) then thousands of mutually contradictory diet studies could all be true.
Let me assure you, if the worst happened to one of my family members (choose me God—if you exist—rather than any of my family members if this is somehow necessary to maintain your "God moves in mysterious ways" shtick), I won't wake the next morning as a revenge fascist.
It's not that I lack the little clump of neurons (which evolved over the last six million years) that's directly connected to the dopamine kicker when the filth of the world get their just desserts.
No, the problem is that I have this other organ known as the cerebral cortex (if you have one) which understands that what comes around goes around, and that society needs to model restrained behaviour so as not to complete the feedback loop and actually cause a deeper regression into the methods and mores of the Spanish Inquisition.
As good as it might feel to take harsh / harsher / harshest revenge (is there any acceptable stopping point once you board this train?) it doesn't actually bring your dead family member back to life again.
Huh. Does not compute. Life is fragile. There is no undo key. Not even if you mash it with 10 million volts. To be an adult in this world, we must ultimately accept loss (no matter whether it arrives all bundled up in a conveniently filthy bag of skin).
There's this weird thing where so many Christians think that the odd testaments are the good testaments (this runs parallel to Beethoven's symphonies, and opposite to the Star Trek movie franchise).
In the third testament, the good Jesus returns to earth:
Jesus: I'm here to save souls and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum. Commence operation "river of blood". Nobody in Texas ever had much time for the free-love, hippie testament. The third act can't come a moment too soon.
When I finally write What Jesus Got Right, there aren't going to be any appearances of either the first or the third testament. Then I'll go on book tour in the deepest, darkest heartland of Texas, and thousands of milquetoast admirers will flock to my book readings, who will privately confess "we just all feel shouted down by the shit kickers chewing grass stems".
I certainly won't the hell go on book tour in Norway. "What's your point, anyway? We already know this."
As I expected, spending 5 minutes typing a simple example to make a point brought the insecure people out of the woodwork.
I take it you're from planet Seinfeld, where even what you manage to learn about life (generally frowned upon) does basically nothing to change your behaviour. In your haste to hew to "simplicity", one large worm MIRVed into multiple smaller worms, and you basically went (inside your own mind) "and the rest is fine print", without a whit of that thought making it to your fingers (heaven forbid that your 5m effort turn into a 5m30s effort).
Technical debt, meet treading-lightly-upon-the-fine-print debt. Back in the seventies, never a closet door was opened on a sitcom without twenty pounds of unused sports equipment cascading down from the storage shelf. And yet, in at least 50% of the buying public, a giant "on sale" tag attached to a racket handle still succeeded in disabling the part of the brain chanting quietly to itself "and where would I put it?"
Some people by nature tend to read the fine print. I'm one of those people, so I know how it goes. It's all too easy to slide into an enabling role, where half your day is spent—for little official credit—helping extract fine-print avoiders from the sports-sock snow pack when the karma closet finally comes tumbling down.
"Gosh, I had no idea snow could be so heavy."
"Would you like some rum with that? I've got this keg thing around my neck."
"I thought those were mechanical gills."
"No, the sound effects are made by a Raspberry Pi. It's actually a keg of rum."
"Wow, you're awfully prepared. I take it you do these rescues a lot?"
"Enough to learn how the pattern goes a hundred times over."
"How does it go?"
"Here's where it starts. Someone tosses off a quick 5m answer, without even noting that fine print exists, even if it only takes an extra ten words."
"But everyone knows that fine print exists."
"To judge by the state of your closet, you're a lapsed Catholic and I'm your indulgence."
As it happens, I read Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley about a week ago, and it's still on my desk. It's a great book. If you like this kind of stuff (I know I do) this book contains as much material on the subject as can reasonably fit in under 400 pages. If you like this stuff, read it.
The pertinent chapter for this thread is titled "A Little Bit Stupid" in which John Draper exploits recently automated [*] "busy verification" to eavesdrop on a primary line of the San Francisco FBI. How do you like them apples, with the roles reversed? (Hint: not very much, not very much at all.)
[*] It had become a little bit too automated in certain large American cities, which additionally qualifies this material for the Boy Scout merit badge "Stolid and Stupider", though that's a much harder-to-tell story about design incompetence internal to greed-addled AT&T.
Even though Draper bragged to a turncoat, he was still protected by the FBI's nearly impenetrable internal aura of "impossible things can't happen to us" until Draper demonstrated the technique while his turncoat buddy made a tape recording.
"All hell broke loose," recalls an anonymous source familiar with the investigation. "... Headquarters wanted this case solved, fast," the source remembers. "In thirty years, it's the most freedom I've ever seen special agents given in a case. All they had to do was sneeze and say, 'I need a Lincoln Continental' and there would be one parked out in front of the building. Headquarters wanted it solved, whatever it would take, and there were no questions asked.
Why so much fuss? To protect the rectitude of lovable Uncle Sam? Probably not so much. Because tight-assed officialdom in positions of power say a great many things they definitely don't wish to defend against the harsh light of day? You be the judge.
Really, I don't know how Lapsley managed to write this entire book and not intrude more into the obvious. Perhaps two hundred pages of draft manuscript hit the floor in the editing process. (I know every third sentence in my first draft would have contained judgmental invective.)
Here's another thing that freaked out the FBI. The hackers weren't even savvy enough to try to market their incredible capability to the highest bidder (Sold!—to the secret undercover double-agent Flim Colby) and they weren't actually taking any money! or drugs! or prostitutes! so you can't even release the scent hounds.
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there.
Action is where your crepuscular adversary has taped your intimate moments of conspiratorial graft and offered it up to the highest bidder. The FBI loves action.
Suspense is where your glazed-doughnut adversary has recorded your intimate moments of conspiratorial graft, and doesn't even give a shit, so pretty soon compromising cassette tapes are bouncing around on the dashboard of some horrible mid-seventies beater or tossed randomly into a shoe box of bad Country and Western ($2 obo) at someone's yard sale. The FBI hates suspense.
You see? I'm terribly prone to editorialising.
Anyway, my point about the SS7 hack is pretty much "dog bites man". This kind of thing has been ubiquitous since the first long-hair envious AT&T engineer included "observability" in his desiderata concerning globally distributed systems undergoing a Groundhog Day–esque eternal-September late pubescent growth spurt.
The standard word count given to authors of genre fiction to estimate finished page count from word count is 250–300 words per page. Your 100 pages per hour at 300 words per page works out to 500 words per minute.
I just looked at Explode the Phone which I have on my desk, and I estimate this book at 400 words per page, somewhat denser than the typical book. I recently read it in a single session at a rate somewhere around 60 pages per hour, or about 400 words per minutes, without missing many words.
My opinion is that most people who think they're reading much faster than 600 wpm are being enabled by shallow testing practices. Most of the science shows that 600 wpm is the upper end of "normal" comprehension.
A proper test would involve exposing the reader to a test where a small percentage of the claims were altered in some fairly outlandish way, such as this modification of the book mentioned above:
The project eventually resulted in something called the Intel 8008, an early microprocessor that Intel began selling for $1200 each in 1972.
I suspect most so-called speed readers coming across that sentence in the middle of a long book would hoover up the incorrect decimal point without blinking.
At a level of global cooperation never before achieved by the human race, on a project vastly more expensive than any project previously undertaken by any nation state (or supranational governing body) humanity could achieve X in Y years for Z dollars—where the precise value of X is pretty much irrelevant, since it surely won't happen in less than Y*3 years and Z*10 dollars, in the unlikely event it happens at all.
What Coke promised: "I'd like to teach the world to sing".
What Coke delivered: global BMI inflation & Texas-sized land yachts.
The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.
The academics are probably right, but it still pisses me off how they engage in circular reasoning.
It's been decades already that expressing severe skepticism over anthropogenic over global warming has been tantamount to a suicidal CLM, creating a situation within climate-science academia where "expertise" and "orthodoxy" are 90% interchangeable.
This doesn't mean they are wrong. It does mean they should check for a second elbow before they congratulate themselves for being able to pat their dorsal desk-jockey humps.
Economist's love to talk about "expressed preference". Watch what people actually do, rather than listen to what they say they would do. Behavioural psychologists like to talk about time horizon, noting that how we balance near-term desires vs long-term goals is crazy-making.
It's 100% clear that expressed preference is mediated by environmental factors: all too soon, you are what you wallow in. The advertising industry exploits this with the precision of an ink-jet printer nozzle by ensuring that everywhere we go online, the environment is littered with lizard-brain crack cocaine. We know that if our "rational" brain gains is granted control, most people make choices more consistent with their stated long-term goals. In a moment of clarity, people go into their Facebook privacy settings and choose sane defaults. And then, whoops, those sane settings disappear over and over again.
Man vs Borg. Borg wins.
We tend to think of advertising in the competitive, capitalist frame: Coors vs Budweiser in a taste bud alliance set to. Closer to the truth, it's probably Coors & Budweiser vs deck repairs and completing that extra certification after work. Every reminder that you could be drinking a cold beer instead takes another small bite. This is why potato chips are now displayed at eight difference places in every supermarket. Every impression counts, in the extended lizard-brain arm wrestle.
These days it's not Marshall McLuhan saying "the medium is the message", it's the behavioural neurologists.
Over and over and over again, the experimental subjects who self-report being "good" at multitasking (the kind that resembles having persistent social media feeds open on your desktop) actually measure as being the worst, at both the primary task and the distraction task.
It's clear from your dialog that the PM in question lives at the center of whatever country in which he/she currently resides. How could a smart developer have missed this?
Project Manager: Just do it. Developer #1: Fine. I seem to recall you sent everyone xmas cards last year. Project Manager: I probably did. You'd be amazed at how much harder people will work for small tokens of personal significance rather than bankable remuneration. Developer #2: You haven't moved lately have you? Project Manager: No. Why do you ask? Developer #1: Extra fine.
There are few methods of torture worse than waterboarding that don't either cause lifelong disfigurement or eternal thumb-sucking of the soulless body, which is why waterboarding was the preferred beverage of a discerning hegemon in the first place.
As much as I'd like to think that "noooo, not the rug!" would lead to a actionable blubbering in satanic Arabic, it probably wouldn't.
"A lot worse" is not something Trump himself could stomach watching, no matter how easy it might be to mouth the words in front of adoring hordes of sycophantic, authoritarian followers.
By way of Exploding the Telephone (highly recommended) I was reading Trump's Nuclear Experience just yesterday, which reprints a 1987 interview between Rosenbaum and Trump, in which uncle John plays a critical role.
"He told me something a few years ago," Trump recalls. "He told me, 'You don't realize how simple nuclear technology is becoming.' That's scary. He said it used to be that only a few brains in the world understood it and now you have a situation where thousands and thousands of brains can easily understand it, and it's becoming easier, and someday it'll be like making a bomb in the basement of your house. And that's a very frightening statement coming from a man who's totally versed in it."
Then I spent another hour perusing Rosenbaum's views on Nabokov (also recommended), because at the end of the day it doesn't matter who or what inhabits Trump's public persona, the persona itself is unfit to hold public office.
I checked into the author's venture, Runtime Technologies, and this is one of the blurbs I found;
Simplifying the use of websites and related technologies to meet business communications and information management needs dynamically and without requiring in-depth technical knowledge or expertise.
One suspects their staff writers are quarantined deep in the darkest heart of Dogfood City.
AC posts an anti-government spending screed demonstrating weak to non-existent comprehension of Economics 101.
So that's how this endless positive feedback loop happens.
In any given year, the police have a fixed budget. They almost certainly want more black-ops toys than their budget permits them to purchase, so they must then navigate their relative preference of one toy over another, which certainly does translate into a price sensitivity modulo substitution goods. (He who thinks that inter-departmental spending rivalries are less than ferocious has never attended a staff picnic after a "friendly" ball game.)
Furthermore, budgets tend to segregate salary expenses from other expenses, so that 100% of the spend doesn't go on the pay stub, which is of course what the average officer really wants. My god, it's an interlocking mesh of preference constraints all the way down!
I don't actually mind idiots that much. It gets on my nerves sometimes to see these things put forward without so much as displaying the comprehension that education exists (even if the AC doesn't wish to pursue it). Yes, indeed, Johnny Appleseed. Your unfamiliarity with substitution goods does indeed perpetuate a particularly rank form of anti-government bullshit.
For my part, I've never lacked for ability to criticise government without needing to exaggerate the problem in any dimension. It's actually pretty pathetic to need to exaggerate the flaws of government in order to remonstrate against its deficiencies.
As for inefficiencies in the private sector, we have Deepwater Horizon and the TARP bail-out. Looks like our inefficiency throw-down between government and the private sector is going into extra innings yet again.
Over in mixed doubles, the cost of medical care delivery in the United States hasn't lost a single match in international competition over the past two decades.
Being able to identify a sentence's main verb represents a quantum leap in clarity of thought and expression.
When a person mistypes "they're" sentence after sentence (in which the docked-tail portion functions as the sentence's main verb) it really does make a statement that the author doesn't give a shit about sharing the burden in social discourse.
Given the fixation in K-12 education to hammer home the difference between there/their/they're, consistently managing to get these wrong is pretty much on par with asking "so who is this Nelson Mandela guy you keep mentioning, anyway?" while blathering on about the proper American response to ISIS (because the person has somehow management to sleepwalk through every ambient mention of Mandela for the majority of his or her thinking life).
I rarely point out grammatical errors unless the text I'm responding to is one step removed from word salad (no fixed meaning whatsoever can be inferred at better than 70% odds). What I won't do is leave trivial grammatical errors unfixed when I quote other participants in an online thread, because each additional exposure to sloppiness only makes the sloppiness more entrenched.
This follows from Postel's law (be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept) while being somewhat of a contravention of the end-to-end principle (interior nodes in the network should leave things the hell alone).
I tend to view it as an interior node doing fragmented packet reassembly. (what pf would call "scrub").
I tend to leave mistakes alone that English teachers everywhere haven't hammered upon year after year after year on the long, hard educational slog to the grade-eight-equivalence adult literacy standard.
The writer who can't get "they're" right (given multiple opportunities) is the driver who doesn't comprehend the relationship between velocity, reaction time, and stopping distance—because he or she doesn't see much point in completing the exercise.
I'm pretty sure redshift (which I'm running under PC-BSD) assists in managing my sleep disorder. I have three 24" displays. It's a lot of light. The last time redshift was inadvertently disabled, at some point in my evening work session I looked at the clock and went "holy shit, it's past midnight!" This does not comply with my sleep program.
My disorder is N24. After many years of personal study, I have fairly high confidence that while it is supposed to help, blue light in the morning influences me very little, if at all (I have a professional treatment box). Blue light at bedtime does, however, seem to make things worse.
What did cure my disorder was 0.75 milligrams of sustained-release melatonin roughly six hours before bedtime.
Before I tried SR melatonin, over several years of experimenting with non-SR melatonin I only ever managed to reduce my 25.5 hour circadian day to 24.25 hours. Drifting 15 minutes a day doesn't sound like much, but it's substantially less desirable than the full cure.
Apparently many people don't get groggy after taking melatonin mid-day. It happens to hit me pretty hard.
Recently I read a paper about how melatonin increases circulation to the hands and feet without increasing core metabolism, with the net effect that core body temperature declines (apparently, enhanced vascularization of the nail beds makes them efficient radiators). Since I started wearing warmer clothing after my daily melatonin dose, my early evening grogginess has declined by about 2/3rds. It doesn't hurt either to throw in some "orthostatic challenge". This was how the stuffy research paper described "standing up and walking around".
Given how blue light works, there's not much point shielding yourself from one source if you end up getting exposed to another source. The reading lamp in my bedroom is a yellow bug lamp. Added bonus: it's extremely slow to warm up, so it's a great lamp to turn on for a few seconds in the middle of the night, if my back pain treatment arsenal rolls out of reach under the bed.
If you have issues reading/comprehending the shorter code then you should probably find a different line of work. Seriously.
Unfortunately what counts as "readability" is 50% groupthink. I rarely pay much heed unless the barrier to entry on the language I'm using is pretty high to begin with.
One you've waded through Static Single Assignment Book, you'll never find the infamous ?: operator unreadable ever again.
I'm going to write a book. It will be called The Joy of Reswyping Lvalues, because I assume most people who find ?: "unreadable" are programming using Swype keyboards.
Once you record the names of the people you raped, pillaged, and kicked in the nuts (not necessarily unlike a taste of the victim's own unrecorded medicine applied to the penultimate preliterates) innocence is immortalized.
As cynical as that sounds, I'm actually in favour of breaking the chain by having some conqueror in the long chain voluntarily choose to make amends. There are no innocents. Until some transgressor makes their repentance not depend upon the sainthood of the victims, this eternal pattern can never end.
That's what the words have meant for a couple hundred years now
There's a mode of language usage you're not taking in account. People often choose their terminology precisely because of the voodoo freight it imports into the mind of the undiscriminating listener. Break the mystic bond between mystic Celtic tradition and the modern understanding of Celtic culture, for many the word loses its essential appeal.
While there is a narrow modern sense of Celtic culture minus the mystic Celtic varnish, I don't think this usage is particularly common.
My experience informs me that most people, by preference, fall into the "love me some varnish" contingent.
Yes, and garbage collection only resolves a single class of resource leaks and fuddles.
Once you've conceded defeat in correctly managing the larger class, it's by no means automatic that programmers who find this path appealing will succeed with any other form of resource management.
The functional language that would impress the hell out of me is the one so strong it can manage its own resources without even resorting to garbage collection, through pure hard-assed logic, applied recursively, all the way down.
The book (a real one. Made of wood products and glue) that I paid.50 for never needs to connect to the internet, never needs to get anyone else's permission to be read and never expires.
Where are you living exactly? A Swedish prison?
24x7 controlled humidity, cheap acid-free paperbacks as far as the eye can see, with no authoritarian oversight. We should all be so lucky.
We got ourselves a nice Kobo, which is ideal for travel, but never signed up for the business model. Free content, paid content with no DRM, and whatever we can borrow from the library (which also puts the authoritarian jackboots to their ink-and-paper offerings after the same three weeks).
No, they can't make you return your paper copies. But they can make you wish you had, unlike your Swedish jailers. (In hardened cases, the Librarian has time travel at his disposal to set up a group "ook" seance. That'll surely set your teeth on edge in any timeline if your book is a decade or more overdue.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious. When is the last time you encountered an issue where you could see both sides, if ever?
Your comment might even be worth a serious response if your comment contained any evidence (or hint of evidence) that your "other side of the issue" circuit wasn't discarded at birth.
I know, I know. It's a high standard and a hard cross to bear.
What I want is my next phone to operate in PAN mode (personal area network), in which I wear the SIM card / "${new_shiny}G" transceiver / shared-storage-volume on my belt, and then I use any peripheral I wish to use in conjunction with it (dumb phone, smart phone, tablet, smart watch)—possibly several at the same time.
As I see it, each device would have essentially it's own installation and software profile (with the majority of storage local), but there would be enough on the belt blob that you could just pick up some device lying around (supposing you trust it enough) and associate it temporarily, and have it work well enough as a "guest" device on your PAN to get by.
I'd be totally happy to have two belt blobs: one for voice service and another for data service, provided it all worked together seamlessly. I'd source each service from the most competitive bid.
I dislike the current phone architecture and security model so much I turned my Android data modem off six months ago (after uninstalling most apps with any kind of dangerous permission bit) and haven't really missed it at all. I kept the light meter, sound meter, scientific calculator, stopwatch/timer and signal strength meters (GPS, Wi-Fi, "${new_shiny}G"). I would also have kept "POTS-comparable audio quality" if I had managed to download such a thing (maybe I just didn't search hard enough).
It hasn't been a problem. I'm around Wi-Fi often enough to not care and I rarely drive anywhere unfamiliar.
If you ask me, we're definitely at peak phone, but it's a dystopian peak, not a design peak.
You need to rethink verification.
In A/B results taken from one environment (and a really weird one, at that) was worth a hill of beans (freshly severed) then thousands of mutually contradictory diet studies could all be true.
Crap. Insert paragraph break before "Nobody".
Try speaking for yourself sometime. This is the same fucking smug, self-satisfied meme as "there are no atheists in a foxhole".
The marvellous but little known Christopher Hitchens deathbed conversion
Let me assure you, if the worst happened to one of my family members (choose me God—if you exist—rather than any of my family members if this is somehow necessary to maintain your "God moves in mysterious ways" shtick), I won't wake the next morning as a revenge fascist.
It's not that I lack the little clump of neurons (which evolved over the last six million years) that's directly connected to the dopamine kicker when the filth of the world get their just desserts.
No, the problem is that I have this other organ known as the cerebral cortex (if you have one) which understands that what comes around goes around, and that society needs to model restrained behaviour so as not to complete the feedback loop and actually cause a deeper regression into the methods and mores of the Spanish Inquisition.
As good as it might feel to take harsh / harsher / harshest revenge (is there any acceptable stopping point once you board this train?) it doesn't actually bring your dead family member back to life again.
Huh. Does not compute. Life is fragile. There is no undo key. Not even if you mash it with 10 million volts. To be an adult in this world, we must ultimately accept loss (no matter whether it arrives all bundled up in a conveniently filthy bag of skin).
There's this weird thing where so many Christians think that the odd testaments are the good testaments (this runs parallel to Beethoven's symphonies, and opposite to the Star Trek movie franchise).
In the third testament, the good Jesus returns to earth:
Jesus: I'm here to save souls and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum. Commence operation "river of blood". Nobody in Texas ever had much time for the free-love, hippie testament. The third act can't come a moment too soon.
When I finally write What Jesus Got Right, there aren't going to be any appearances of either the first or the third testament. Then I'll go on book tour in the deepest, darkest heartland of Texas, and thousands of milquetoast admirers will flock to my book readings, who will privately confess "we just all feel shouted down by the shit kickers chewing grass stems".
I certainly won't the hell go on book tour in Norway. "What's your point, anyway? We already know this."
I take it you're from planet Seinfeld, where even what you manage to learn about life (generally frowned upon) does basically nothing to change your behaviour. In your haste to hew to "simplicity", one large worm MIRVed into multiple smaller worms, and you basically went (inside your own mind) "and the rest is fine print", without a whit of that thought making it to your fingers (heaven forbid that your 5m effort turn into a 5m30s effort).
Technical debt, meet treading-lightly-upon-the-fine-print debt. Back in the seventies, never a closet door was opened on a sitcom without twenty pounds of unused sports equipment cascading down from the storage shelf. And yet, in at least 50% of the buying public, a giant "on sale" tag attached to a racket handle still succeeded in disabling the part of the brain chanting quietly to itself "and where would I put it?"
Some people by nature tend to read the fine print. I'm one of those people, so I know how it goes. It's all too easy to slide into an enabling role, where half your day is spent—for little official credit—helping extract fine-print avoiders from the sports-sock snow pack when the karma closet finally comes tumbling down.
"Gosh, I had no idea snow could be so heavy."
"Would you like some rum with that? I've got this keg thing around my neck."
"I thought those were mechanical gills."
"No, the sound effects are made by a Raspberry Pi. It's actually a keg of rum."
"Wow, you're awfully prepared. I take it you do these rescues a lot?"
"Enough to learn how the pattern goes a hundred times over."
"How does it go?"
"Here's where it starts. Someone tosses off a quick 5m answer, without even noting that fine print exists, even if it only takes an extra ten words."
"But everyone knows that fine print exists."
"To judge by the state of your closet, you're a lapsed Catholic and I'm your indulgence."
"You sound bitter."
"Just a minor side effect of my cellulose diet."
As it happens, I read Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley about a week ago, and it's still on my desk. It's a great book. If you like this kind of stuff (I know I do) this book contains as much material on the subject as can reasonably fit in under 400 pages. If you like this stuff, read it.
The pertinent chapter for this thread is titled "A Little Bit Stupid" in which John Draper exploits recently automated [*] "busy verification" to eavesdrop on a primary line of the San Francisco FBI. How do you like them apples, with the roles reversed? (Hint: not very much, not very much at all.)
[*] It had become a little bit too automated in certain large American cities, which additionally qualifies this material for the Boy Scout merit badge "Stolid and Stupider", though that's a much harder-to-tell story about design incompetence internal to greed-addled AT&T.
Even though Draper bragged to a turncoat, he was still protected by the FBI's nearly impenetrable internal aura of "impossible things can't happen to us" until Draper demonstrated the technique while his turncoat buddy made a tape recording.
Why so much fuss? To protect the rectitude of lovable Uncle Sam? Probably not so much. Because tight-assed officialdom in positions of power say a great many things they definitely don't wish to defend against the harsh light of day? You be the judge.
Really, I don't know how Lapsley managed to write this entire book and not intrude more into the obvious. Perhaps two hundred pages of draft manuscript hit the floor in the editing process. (I know every third sentence in my first draft would have contained judgmental invective.)
Here's another thing that freaked out the FBI. The hackers weren't even savvy enough to try to market their incredible capability to the highest bidder (Sold!—to the secret undercover double-agent Flim Colby) and they weren't actually taking any money! or drugs! or prostitutes! so you can't even release the scent hounds.
Alfred Hitchcock
Action is where your crepuscular adversary has taped your intimate moments of conspiratorial graft and offered it up to the highest bidder. The FBI loves action.
Suspense is where your glazed-doughnut adversary has recorded your intimate moments of conspiratorial graft, and doesn't even give a shit, so pretty soon compromising cassette tapes are bouncing around on the dashboard of some horrible mid-seventies beater or tossed randomly into a shoe box of bad Country and Western ($2 obo) at someone's yard sale. The FBI hates suspense.
You see? I'm terribly prone to editorialising.
Anyway, my point about the SS7 hack is pretty much "dog bites man". This kind of thing has been ubiquitous since the first long-hair envious AT&T engineer included "observability" in his desiderata concerning globally distributed systems undergoing a Groundhog Day–esque eternal-September late pubescent growth spurt.
The standard word count given to authors of genre fiction to estimate finished page count from word count is 250–300 words per page. Your 100 pages per hour at 300 words per page works out to 500 words per minute.
I just looked at Explode the Phone which I have on my desk, and I estimate this book at 400 words per page, somewhat denser than the typical book. I recently read it in a single session at a rate somewhere around 60 pages per hour, or about 400 words per minutes, without missing many words.
My opinion is that most people who think they're reading much faster than 600 wpm are being enabled by shallow testing practices. Most of the science shows that 600 wpm is the upper end of "normal" comprehension.
A proper test would involve exposing the reader to a test where a small percentage of the claims were altered in some fairly outlandish way, such as this modification of the book mentioned above:
I suspect most so-called speed readers coming across that sentence in the middle of a long book would hoover up the incorrect decimal point without blinking.
At a level of global cooperation never before achieved by the human race, on a project vastly more expensive than any project previously undertaken by any nation state (or supranational governing body) humanity could achieve X in Y years for Z dollars—where the precise value of X is pretty much irrelevant, since it surely won't happen in less than Y*3 years and Z*10 dollars, in the unlikely event it happens at all.
What Coke promised: "I'd like to teach the world to sing".
What Coke delivered: global BMI inflation & Texas-sized land yachts.
The academics are probably right, but it still pisses me off how they engage in circular reasoning.
It's been decades already that expressing severe skepticism over anthropogenic over global warming has been tantamount to a suicidal CLM, creating a situation within climate-science academia where "expertise" and "orthodoxy" are 90% interchangeable.
This doesn't mean they are wrong. It does mean they should check for a second elbow before they congratulate themselves for being able to pat their dorsal desk-jockey humps.
s/Economist's/Economists
Bad fingers, bad.
Economist's love to talk about "expressed preference". Watch what people actually do, rather than listen to what they say they would do. Behavioural psychologists like to talk about time horizon, noting that how we balance near-term desires vs long-term goals is crazy-making.
It's 100% clear that expressed preference is mediated by environmental factors: all too soon, you are what you wallow in. The advertising industry exploits this with the precision of an ink-jet printer nozzle by ensuring that everywhere we go online, the environment is littered with lizard-brain crack cocaine. We know that if our "rational" brain gains is granted control, most people make choices more consistent with their stated long-term goals. In a moment of clarity, people go into their Facebook privacy settings and choose sane defaults. And then, whoops, those sane settings disappear over and over again.
Man vs Borg. Borg wins.
We tend to think of advertising in the competitive, capitalist frame: Coors vs Budweiser in a taste bud alliance set to. Closer to the truth, it's probably Coors & Budweiser vs deck repairs and completing that extra certification after work. Every reminder that you could be drinking a cold beer instead takes another small bite. This is why potato chips are now displayed at eight difference places in every supermarket. Every impression counts, in the extended lizard-brain arm wrestle.
These days it's not Marshall McLuhan saying "the medium is the message", it's the behavioural neurologists.
Over and over and over again, the experimental subjects who self-report being "good" at multitasking (the kind that resembles having persistent social media feeds open on your desktop) actually measure as being the worst, at both the primary task and the distraction task.
Dunning-Kruger, thy name is Twitter.
It's clear from your dialog that the PM in question lives at the center of whatever country in which he/she currently resides. How could a smart developer have missed this?
Project Manager: Just do it.
Developer #1: Fine. I seem to recall you sent everyone xmas cards last year.
Project Manager: I probably did. You'd be amazed at how much harder people will work for small tokens of personal significance rather than bankable remuneration.
Developer #2: You haven't moved lately have you?
Project Manager: No. Why do you ask?
Developer #1: Extra fine.
There are few methods of torture worse than waterboarding that don't either cause lifelong disfigurement or eternal thumb-sucking of the soulless body, which is why waterboarding was the preferred beverage of a discerning hegemon in the first place.
As much as I'd like to think that "noooo, not the rug!" would lead to a actionable blubbering in satanic Arabic, it probably wouldn't.
"A lot worse" is not something Trump himself could stomach watching, no matter how easy it might be to mouth the words in front of adoring hordes of sycophantic, authoritarian followers.
By way of Exploding the Telephone (highly recommended) I was reading Trump's Nuclear Experience just yesterday, which reprints a 1987 interview between Rosenbaum and Trump, in which uncle John plays a critical role.
Then I spent another hour perusing Rosenbaum's views on Nabokov (also recommended), because at the end of the day it doesn't matter who or what inhabits Trump's public persona, the persona itself is unfit to hold public office.
I checked into the author's venture, Runtime Technologies, and this is one of the blurbs I found;
One suspects their staff writers are quarantined deep in the darkest heart of Dogfood City.
Last time I looked my bottle of stupid pills had a tiny inscription written on the bottom: May refuse to swallow.
I think for you, bifocals would be a timely investment.
AC posts an anti-government spending screed demonstrating weak to non-existent comprehension of Economics 101.
In any given year, the police have a fixed budget. They almost certainly want more black-ops toys than their budget permits them to purchase, so they must then navigate their relative preference of one toy over another, which certainly does translate into a price sensitivity modulo substitution goods. (He who thinks that inter-departmental spending rivalries are less than ferocious has never attended a staff picnic after a "friendly" ball game.)
Furthermore, budgets tend to segregate salary expenses from other expenses, so that 100% of the spend doesn't go on the pay stub, which is of course what the average officer really wants. My god, it's an interlocking mesh of preference constraints all the way down!
I don't actually mind idiots that much. It gets on my nerves sometimes to see these things put forward without so much as displaying the comprehension that education exists (even if the AC doesn't wish to pursue it). Yes, indeed, Johnny Appleseed. Your unfamiliarity with substitution goods does indeed perpetuate a particularly rank form of anti-government bullshit.
For my part, I've never lacked for ability to criticise government without needing to exaggerate the problem in any dimension. It's actually pretty pathetic to need to exaggerate the flaws of government in order to remonstrate against its deficiencies.
As for inefficiencies in the private sector, we have Deepwater Horizon and the TARP bail-out. Looks like our inefficiency throw-down between government and the private sector is going into extra innings yet again.
Over in mixed doubles, the cost of medical care delivery in the United States hasn't lost a single match in international competition over the past two decades.
Being able to identify a sentence's main verb represents a quantum leap in clarity of thought and expression.
When a person mistypes "they're" sentence after sentence (in which the docked-tail portion functions as the sentence's main verb) it really does make a statement that the author doesn't give a shit about sharing the burden in social discourse.
Given the fixation in K-12 education to hammer home the difference between there/their/they're, consistently managing to get these wrong is pretty much on par with asking "so who is this Nelson Mandela guy you keep mentioning, anyway?" while blathering on about the proper American response to ISIS (because the person has somehow management to sleepwalk through every ambient mention of Mandela for the majority of his or her thinking life).
I rarely point out grammatical errors unless the text I'm responding to is one step removed from word salad (no fixed meaning whatsoever can be inferred at better than 70% odds). What I won't do is leave trivial grammatical errors unfixed when I quote other participants in an online thread, because each additional exposure to sloppiness only makes the sloppiness more entrenched.
This follows from Postel's law (be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept) while being somewhat of a contravention of the end-to-end principle (interior nodes in the network should leave things the hell alone).
I tend to view it as an interior node doing fragmented packet reassembly. (what pf would call "scrub").
I tend to leave mistakes alone that English teachers everywhere haven't hammered upon year after year after year on the long, hard educational slog to the grade-eight-equivalence adult literacy standard.
The writer who can't get "they're" right (given multiple opportunities) is the driver who doesn't comprehend the relationship between velocity, reaction time, and stopping distance—because he or she doesn't see much point in completing the exercise.
I'm pretty sure redshift (which I'm running under PC-BSD) assists in managing my sleep disorder. I have three 24" displays. It's a lot of light. The last time redshift was inadvertently disabled, at some point in my evening work session I looked at the clock and went "holy shit, it's past midnight!" This does not comply with my sleep program.
My disorder is N24. After many years of personal study, I have fairly high confidence that while it is supposed to help, blue light in the morning influences me very little, if at all (I have a professional treatment box). Blue light at bedtime does, however, seem to make things worse.
What did cure my disorder was 0.75 milligrams of sustained-release melatonin roughly six hours before bedtime.
Before I tried SR melatonin, over several years of experimenting with non-SR melatonin I only ever managed to reduce my 25.5 hour circadian day to 24.25 hours. Drifting 15 minutes a day doesn't sound like much, but it's substantially less desirable than the full cure.
Apparently many people don't get groggy after taking melatonin mid-day. It happens to hit me pretty hard.
Recently I read a paper about how melatonin increases circulation to the hands and feet without increasing core metabolism, with the net effect that core body temperature declines (apparently, enhanced vascularization of the nail beds makes them efficient radiators). Since I started wearing warmer clothing after my daily melatonin dose, my early evening grogginess has declined by about 2/3rds. It doesn't hurt either to throw in some "orthostatic challenge". This was how the stuffy research paper described "standing up and walking around".
Given how blue light works, there's not much point shielding yourself from one source if you end up getting exposed to another source. The reading lamp in my bedroom is a yellow bug lamp. Added bonus: it's extremely slow to warm up, so it's a great lamp to turn on for a few seconds in the middle of the night, if my back pain treatment arsenal rolls out of reach under the bed.
Unfortunately what counts as "readability" is 50% groupthink. I rarely pay much heed unless the barrier to entry on the language I'm using is pretty high to begin with.
One you've waded through Static Single Assignment Book, you'll never find the infamous ?: operator unreadable ever again.
I'm going to write a book. It will be called The Joy of Reswyping Lvalues, because I assume most people who find ?: "unreadable" are programming using Swype keyboards.
"First nations" amounts to "last preliterates".
Once you record the names of the people you raped, pillaged, and kicked in the nuts (not necessarily unlike a taste of the victim's own unrecorded medicine applied to the penultimate preliterates) innocence is immortalized.
As cynical as that sounds, I'm actually in favour of breaking the chain by having some conqueror in the long chain voluntarily choose to make amends. There are no innocents. Until some transgressor makes their repentance not depend upon the sainthood of the victims, this eternal pattern can never end.
There's a mode of language usage you're not taking in account. People often choose their terminology precisely because of the voodoo freight it imports into the mind of the undiscriminating listener. Break the mystic bond between mystic Celtic tradition and the modern understanding of Celtic culture, for many the word loses its essential appeal.
While there is a narrow modern sense of Celtic culture minus the mystic Celtic varnish, I don't think this usage is particularly common.
My experience informs me that most people, by preference, fall into the "love me some varnish" contingent.
Yes, and garbage collection only resolves a single class of resource leaks and fuddles.
Once you've conceded defeat in correctly managing the larger class, it's by no means automatic that programmers who find this path appealing will succeed with any other form of resource management.
The functional language that would impress the hell out of me is the one so strong it can manage its own resources without even resorting to garbage collection, through pure hard-assed logic, applied recursively, all the way down.
Where are you living exactly? A Swedish prison?
24x7 controlled humidity, cheap acid-free paperbacks as far as the eye can see, with no authoritarian oversight. We should all be so lucky.
We got ourselves a nice Kobo, which is ideal for travel, but never signed up for the business model. Free content, paid content with no DRM, and whatever we can borrow from the library (which also puts the authoritarian jackboots to their ink-and-paper offerings after the same three weeks).
No, they can't make you return your paper copies. But they can make you wish you had, unlike your Swedish jailers. (In hardened cases, the Librarian has time travel at his disposal to set up a group "ook" seance. That'll surely set your teeth on edge in any timeline if your book is a decade or more overdue.)