That sounds a whole like Empathy to me, but dressed up in some fancy new clothes.
How could you know when you identity every person in the entire Empathy clan as just some Jim Bob or Jane Barb from poverty valley?
Empathy was never a precise concept in the first place, and most people are too lazy to clearly distinguish the perceptual side of empathy from the dispositional side (the later of which is heavily conflated with approval seeking and conflict avoidance, and these are further conflated with meekness/aggression, introversion/extroversion, low status/high status).
Dressing empathy up in a recognizable set of clothes (e.g. Marty Mindsight), roughly equates to clearing your throat before attempting to say something civilized.
Tying the antropocene epoch to the first nuclear detonation is a brazen attempt to smuggle the Garden of Eden / fall of man metaphor into this discussion under cover of a blinding fireball.
How about using Madame Curie instead, and picking a nice round date like 1900?
In 1900 Curie became the first woman faculty member at the Ecole Normale Superieure [/.sic]...
I also noted this passage in the Wikipedia article.
Despite Curie's fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude tended toward xenophobia—the same that had led to the Dreyfus affair—which also fuelled false speculation that Curie was Jewish. During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right wing press who criticised her for being a foreigner and an atheist. Her daughter later remarked on the public hypocrisy as the French press often portrayed Curie as an unworthy foreigner when she was nominated for a French honour, but would portray her as a French hero when she received a foreign one such as her Nobel Prizes.
In 1911 it was revealed that in 1910–11 Curie had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre's—a married man who was estranged from his wife. This resulted in a press scandal that was exploited by her academic opponents. Curie (then in her mid-40s) was five years older than Langevin and was misrepresented in the tabloids as a foreign Jewish home-wrecker.
Nobody speaks it. The closest anyone comes is "church latin" a near variant used by the Roman Catholic Church. That's what makes latin a dead language.
Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remained—however frozen—in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion. "Dead" is really just a shortened version of "dead to the evolutionary fads of populism".
One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.
On the other hand, perhaps Perl isn't quite as "dead" as the idiom suggests. Perhaps Perl is merely catatonic, or just resting.
I have now been told literally dozens of times that "you don't have to install systemd", but no one has yet to back that up with steps for an install without it, or how to remove it from an existing install.
apt-get install OpenBSD
OpenBSD has the best internal documentation, but has relatively weak SMP and narrower hardware support than FreeBSD, neither of which should matter for a vanilla router.
I've heard good things about pfSense, but haven't used it myself.
If you want to dabble with ZFS for a NAS server as well, then I'd just start with FreeBSD which is what I'm presently using for my firewall (the few internet facing services are jailed or priv-sepped), despite having previously used a separate OpenBSD since 1998. For a ZFS box, it's a heck of a lot smarter to have ECC memory, though.
I totally hear you on the current Linux trend to make radical architectural change on the mainline branch with hardly any prior communication or heads up to the existing user base.
Come with me, little kiddie... this won't hurt a bit.
In the world of mathematical research, what the NSA knows is by construction a superset of what the academic community knows.
Modulo pub net (aka Brewsky's) and "unpublished communication".
But apparently you subscribe to the the maxim that the "publish or perish" edict is axiomatically tantamount to "no unpublished thought" which I find interesting, because stuffy academic writing hardly strikes me as Truman Burbank's brainstem Twitter feed.
Not that this is a subject matter where we should stray into the kind of pedantry best reserved for slicing and dicing The Recognitions or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, which is how real geeks test their mettle.
We can see how many of the celebrities have fumbled, sport stars, politicians, movie stars, and yes, even religious leaders, they too fumbled.
Fumbled?
Either that's bait, or you haven't dialed in lately with your trusty USR to the acerbic backwash concerning America's popular reverence for all things Reverend.
The second such category is of slightly more importance, because it consists of the editors, producers, publicists, and a host of other media riffraff who allowed Falwell to prove, almost every week, that there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word ''Reverend''. Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin.
Falwell went much further than his mad 1999 assertion about the Jewish Antichrist. In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism on American civil society in September 2001, he used his regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were a divine punishment of the United States. Again, I ask you to imagine how such a person would be treated if he were not supposedly a man of faith.
Here Falwell plays into the meme (strangely accepted by many of faith) of God as a crypto dominatrix who delivers his retribution shrouded in the most complete and thorough back story conceivable about why the perpetrators might have acted on ordinary human motives (these acts, nevertheless, remaining somehow entirely transparent in their divine origin to suitably entitled religious figures).
I personally have to concur with Hitchens final decree on Falwell: "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."
I guess it's for this reason that the relief scene in Bull Durham (SPOILER: theraindelayinvlveshoomanagenci) is less than completely transparent to the off-screen local yokels, who don't the least suspect human motives when a deluge strikes right between the bullpens and doesn't wet a single stalk of corn within a ten mile radius (though I don't recall the movie bothering to suggest this, there really must have been some blustery weather in the space-time vicinity of non-divine origin to make this ploy modestly plausible, even for agrarian America).
The scientific high ground in this matter is to admit that the original peer review process sucked, lacking as it did any reviewer with sufficient statistical expertise to detect subtle methodological errors, and further, to admit that it does not require a PhD in any discipline to point this out (nor, especially, a peer-reviewed paper) if it happens to be true that the paper contained subtle methological errors (which it did).
It's all well and good that the main result itself seems to have held up under additional scrutiny brought to bear once these admittedly small deficiencies were aptly pointed out. This does not change the fact that the original peer review sucked.
(Perhaps you were merely lucky that your result continued to hold water after your subtle statistical errors were properly addressed. This is why a result that merely holds up isn't worth much in a high stakes debate. Proof by hindsight does not strike me as adequate given the magnitude of societal change that effective mitigation seems to require. To me, the stakes seem to be high enough to demand that critical links in the argumentative chain are right in all necessary respects before they are attached to a giant political lever; or, failing to achieve the almost impossible demand of being right in all essential particulars in peer-reviewed published paper V 1.0, that the culture of climate science embrace with a blazing passion the art of the mea culpa bug fix.)
Ordinarily, the peer review process is not expected to be 100% water tight, as the standard pace of science is stately and the stakes are modest. In this example, you paper served as the fulcrum of the biggest political mud fight of the late twentieth century. If climate scientists think that the fate of humanity and the planet lies in the balance, there shouldn't be even an epsilon gap in the quality of the peer review process.
You can't have it both ways without looking like a complete idiot. And it sure doesn't help your cause to look like an idiot when you're being attacked in a thousand illegitimate ways.
Thanks for your attention to this matter. I look forward to the future scientific culture of rock solid peer review in the first instance.
Live long and prosper, J. Random hockey fan
(By some strange twist of fate, this was the first item to cross my feed after spending thirty minutes flipping through Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery which I'm presently reading to discovery why David Deutsch, in particular, praises it so highly.)
A funny screed, but in the end just as wrong as what it debunks.
The Mossad does not have a bottomless budget. As a result, they generally fabricate pieces of uranium shaped like cellphones in hundred lots. They have even more expensive intrusions, which they fabricate in lots of ten, and then they have the most expensive intrusion of all, which is fabricated like a James Bond concept car (not the car that Bond actually gets, but the one he might get ten years from now).
It really does matter to edit your SSH configuration file to bump yourself up from 10^-9 cost bracket to the 10^-6 cost bracket.
Mossad is not magically except from the 80-20 law. They still try to use the cheapest effective method, and hope to haul in 80% of the catch for 20% of the effort.
If you're in the 99.999th percentile of pure evilness (backed by a private island gold reserve), it's no longer about casting a wide net, and moreover, you already know for certain that you're facing a Mossad-level adversary and you can proceed directly to paranoid schizophrenia.
If you're only in the 20th percentile of pure evilness (you fib on your tax return and download porn off some Shmoe's open wifi) it might just be true that Mossad-level adversaries filter feed at the cost-effective 10^-9 screening bracket.
They went to all this trouble to subvert NIST not because they couldn't break things otherwise, but because they couldn't afford to break things otherwise at the largest possible scale.
In 2016, the attacks on ??? expand to ???. I'm not betting MY customers' security on the answer.
Good luck with having any customers by the time you whittle away every protocol with a potentially expandable attack surface.
As we don't even have a formal theory of quantum computation yet, but we do know that some things can be computed by quantum methods, I don't think any current protocol is entirely exempt from worrying cracks in the plaster.
Whatever you like to tell your customers, there's just no escaping this hard business of having to make a judgement call about which cracks to worry about and which to ignore.
If your disk contains a larger number of large files with the names entropy$N (of which, the vast majority are actually full of entropy) the ability of the judge to distinguish a door from a wall declines to epsilon, at which point the judge might elect to sweat it out of you nevertheless (you're entirely screwed in this eventuality once you have no more passwords to divulge), but then so is the judge who gives a shit (some do) about the logical justification for his abuse of power (he can't actually know you're being willingly non-compliant—even more so if the file exercise_in_civil_liberty.c is found on your system containing code capable of having created those N-k entropy files).
[Yes, I'm aware that any stray disk subsystem metadata must support this story to the nth degree.]
I see in my post that IDLV mutated into IDVL and I mangled an mdash entity into a real mdash in one sentence. Pardon my sloppiness, but I didn't want to miss this opportunty despite feeling a bit rushed.
Alex: I regard my first encounter with the STL (very shortly after its first public release) as one of the great eye-opening moments in my software development career. Unfortunately, as I'm sure you well know, quality of implementation issues in compiler support for the C++ template idiom cultified (i.e. made cult-like) the deeper principles for at least five (if not ten) years thereafter.
I've long regarded the criticism against vector[bool]—I'm not going to fugger with angle brace entitiesâ"not being a container were misguided. Of course, it *must* be a container for reasons of sanity, but to portray the problem as a standardization committee brain fart seems to miss the main point.
Just as STL introduced a hierarchy of iterator potency (that was the main technical innovation behind the STL, was it not?) one could likewise introduce a hierarchy of container potency. The container we ended up returns interators which promise a dereference operator returning an lvalue (it's been a long time since I've used this terminology) which is why the following statement from the linked discussed is expected to work: typename T::value_type* p2 = &*t.begin();
But actually, of all the uses of containers found in the wild, I highly doubt that more than a small percentage (potentially a very small percentage) exploit the property that interator dereference returns an lvalue rather than an rvalue.
The net effect is that the standard containers promise us a potency we rarely exploit, yet the burden of this potency is universal. Forsake it in even the smallest way, and you'll be shouted out of the room for non-containerhood.
We could have handled vector[bool] by changing the standard container to not promise IDLV (container iterators dereference to lvalue). In cases where the programmer goes ahead and tries to do this, he or she obtains a simple syntax error (ha ha ha) and knows to either reformulate the algorithm to not require this property or to go back and add a specification override to the container setting the IDVL property to true.
With IDVL set, vector[bool] does not specialize.
With IDVL unset, vector[bool] will specialize.
Problem solved, except for the language overhead of introducing (and managing) a container strength hierarchy.
But instead, Herb Sutter decides to write this:
Besides, it's mostly redundant: std::bitset was designed for this kind of thing.
Doesn't that attitude make you want to pound your head upon a table somewhere? Seriously, if one repeats that remark 1000 times, we could almost make the entire STL go away (and return to the world we would have had instead had the STL not rescued us from parsimony mass produced.)
Clearly, there was enough of a pain point in the C++ standarization effort around iterators that the STL gained traction exceedingly quickly (and very late in the day), yet the C++ community is also extremely hidebound about minor pain points, as evidenced by Sutter's explanatory tack.
Obviously, there were some advantages in demonstrating that the STL approach could achieve performance comparable to C (and in some cases, better than C) in proving that the STL was not just another abstraction gained at the expense of runtime overhead (which all looks fine until five or ten different runtime overheads—however small each of these appears in isolation—begin to interact adversely).
But very quickly, the initial quality of implementation issues and the quirky (to be extremely kind) limitations of the C++ template mechanisms threw up some major walls in pursuing the underlying ideas behind the STL more extensively.
So, my question is this, more or less: in retrospect, was the early victory with C++ worth it (it's extremely easy to understimate the value of having a good idea noticed at all), or does the eternal puberty of the C++ STL continue to grate?
The reported findings, if corroborated by further inquiry, could add fresh fodder to an ongoing debate over the Third Reich's ultimately failed attempt to secure an atomic weapon.
If, could, fodder, ultimately, failed, secure. Every one of these words as cast is a pablum-brained Orwellian nightmare.
The German Jesus nut was supremacy in all things. After setbacks in The Battle of Britain and Moscow/Stalingrad, the Germans found themselves in a situation where they needed to tighten their belts (both militarily and technologically) and settle for supremacy in merely the most essential things.
It was this belt-tightening challenge they bungled like crazy. Belt-tightening somehow wasn't in the German lexicon.
There was a scold Fuehrer who lived in a shoe with so many children, he couldn't kick through; He gave them some broth without any bread, Then stripped 'em unsoundly to hiss boot instead.
Well, it was a try anyway, but it does capture the main idea.
There were enough tells in the first movie that I decided to skip both prequel sequels. My only regret concerns the movie not made.
The problem when you have a strong emotional investment in something is that one's instinct is to give it one more chance. By the time you've watched two bad movies, you're almost pot-committed to watch the third.
It takes a special will to abandon a franchise without falling into the emotional mulligan trap, and so there's ultimately little incentive for Jackson to not do what he did.
I'm slowly learning. My loyalty function has now evolved to where it's almost vertiginous.
No, it's aversive physical dominance. Any more hairs you would like to split, or are we done now?
Aversive: the recipient is not pleased about it.
Physical: there's a smacking sound.
Dominance: the recipient's preference in the moment doesn't count for shit.
Maybe he or she will thank you later with a greater understanding of the situation. Or maybe not.
To my mind your story could be an argument for more effective barriers. If you're going to make a barrier to enforce safety, go big or go home. Otherwise you're just conducting a first lesson in Jr Steeplechase.
A ridiculous number of people have gotten caught up in the whole âoehe used a minus sign instead of an ascii hyphen! The bastardâ controversy that has followed this thread around and has spilled over into any number of internet message boards. First of all, let me be clear. The issue was not with my use of a minus sign. The issue Amazon had was that someone had complained about hyphenation. Second, I have since gone back and checked the original file on the Kindle text-to-speech app and it renders fine. No issues. [my emph.]
<acerbic> These days 75% of all Slashdot posts seem to involve drilling down to get the original story straight. Tell me, when did a mass-confusion clusterfuck become the new nerd foreplay? Kindle typography, meet declining Slashdot editorial standards. You've got more in common than you think. </acerbic>
With entanglement, we have an FTL coupling that can't be used to convey classical information.
Why can't we have a similarly knackered stripe of determinism, one which can't be used to shatter the illusion of free will? This would be a kind of determinism where even if you sort of know it's there, it makes no damn difference to your interpretation of local space.
The only "accidental" discovery in science is the discovery one could have stretched out over a great many more research grants if one had better anticipated the scientific windfall.
Of course, we do tend to refer to the outcome of bad planning as "an accident" concerning our hominid prime directive, so perhaps there's no help for language after all.
You do realize that a narrative of this type can be fashioned around the prevailing conditions of all human societies at all points in human history?
America is an especially big and complex society, so one needs a correspondingly large and complex boogie man (though nevertheless, reductive to the core).
In the gospel of the one true fracture, defining yourself as against something only serves to throw more fuel on the fire. In reality, complex systems have hundreds or thousands of fault lines, and it's not always the case that the largest fault line is hovering around the supercritical state. Unless we all agree to obsess about it. Then the story self propels.
The slow march of AI is going to spin our a thousand fault lines. Get yours today!
Next it's not that hard to develop mathematical techniques to analyze text and language in posts...
Budget projects much? "Doable" and "easy" are not the same words. I'm guessing one person out of a hundred in the general population could take a reasonable stab at developing such an algorithm, and only one person out of a thousand could be considered a natural talent.
The first 20% of the work gets you to sqrt(sqrt(7e9)) as your mean perplexity, which is simultaneously impressive and yet not terribly actionable. And then the difficulty curve shoots off into the exponential regime.
My impression is the regret in taking these drunken pictures happens years after the fact, when the drunken college scene has been left behind, and the poster now has a family and a 9-to-5 job and they want to distance themselves from that past.
It shocks me how rarely the cultural underpinnings are made overt in these scenarios. What you depict might actually be the case in America, but I suspect it will be different in France, where when a search pulls up no college revelry whatsoever, cultured individuals might begin to seriously doubt your breeding and character.
Whether posting photos of regular drunkenness counts as bad judgement has a circular basis case. If you get yourself photographed draping and drooling over some chick who looks none too impressed with the group grope, there might be some legitimate flags raised. Multiple binge-ups during school session might also raise eyebrows, even in France. It sure won't accentuate that embarrassing C- you received in Economics 101 because of the "family crisis".
Artists practice drawing nudes for a good reason: the human eye is exquisitely sensitive to the normal shape of the human body, so you can't draw or paint badly and not have it noticed.
Of course, we have a good evolutionary reason for having developed this proficiency, along with a taste for keeping this proficiency in good working order.
Porn doesn't happen until the rest of the brain takes a holiday (our visual sub-system is by far our biggest neurological subsystem according to a Levitin book I read recently). Big chunks of the human brain taking a poorly planned vacation is endemic to the human condition. That's why I keep a list of twenty different types of cognitive porn, only one of which involves obsessing over the female body. I'm pretty sure "PC porn" must be on my list somewhere.
A general ergonomic rule-of-thumb is to adjust your monitor's vertical position so that the top edge is level with your eyes and you don't need to look upwards.
Do you go around believing every lazy-ass statement you've ever read?
My gut estimate is that I actively view the 20% of my portrait monitor above my horizontal line of sight about 2% of my total working time. What's up there, anyway? A menu bar, a window title bar, a bunch of FF controls, a bunch of FF tabs, the Slashdot header, some junk about DEALS NEW, "Reply to: Re: Have Both", then the Slashdot story header which repeats "Re: Have Both (Score: 3)", then there's you user information / date / perm-link. Everything else on this screen is below my horizontal line of sight, including the entirety of this input form where my gaze is normally focussed.
That lazy-ass statement almost certainly originates from an era where devoting 20% of a monitor to menu/window/media cruft left you with a painfully small working area.
If you bother to read articles where researchers are interviewed decades later about lazy-ass statements they tend to say: "well, yes, of course we knew that at the time, but at that time hardly anyone had even heard of ergonomics, so we chose to make the message as simple as possible, so as to get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the yammering". Last time I ran into this it concerned one of the BMI formulas (there are several body mass formulas in competition). And then they say, "if you go back and look at my original paper, it actually warns against expanding the mandate of this tool beyond our narrow focus of study". Did you really expect people would respect that warning? "Oh no, but what can you do?"
What typically occupies the bottom third of this screen, below where my gaze is the most comfortable? A tilda pop-up console bound to my Windows keyboard menu key.
I have a custom user style that adds white space to the bottom of every web page so that I can maximize FF on this monitor, pop up the Tilda window over top of the bottom third, and still scroll the bottom of the web page high enough to not be covered over.
And then I have my landscape monitor to the left, all within the optimal attitude wedge. In fact, the combination of the two is much better ergonomically than having them both in landscape mode, which was so wide that I used to sit tilted to one side or the other, putting strain on my back (also pushing more of my pixels into the far margins of my vision). I never been happier with any previous monitor setup, though it did require switching from Ubuntu to Mint with extreme prejudice.
In my opinion, most people persist in using fonts that are much too small, I suppose so that they can crowd more stuff onto their desktops. Small fonts would be a problem with this setup as it would cause me to lean forward sharper reading, and also creating sharper viewing angles toward the edges (my input box is presently displaying three lines per inch; I can read what I've composed without difficulty from six feet away).
A portrait-orientation of your monitor makes that objective difficult to achieve.
I suppose if the sum total of your ergonomic wisdom comes from a fortune cookie ("Eyes level with bezel last a lifetime.") and you have no capacity to think for yourself, portrait mode just won't seem terribly appealing. When one's approach to ergonomics is more holistic, one quickly comes to a different view.
And if you're writing that way because that's the story you want to write, or because you truly believe it's important to the integrity of the story that the culture be very different than our own, and you're OK with selling a few thousand copies or less, then that's fine.
If you don't write that way—with integrity and determination—then what you're writing isn't SF, it's what I call GSF, or genre science fiction.
Genre is primarily a form of entertainment. SF is properly a form of deep enquiry. I pretty much won't read genre anything. Of course, people lump much of what I do read into genre, but I don't support them in this activity (and none of Vonnegut, Le Guin, or Atwood would—or did—so far as they could get away with it).
One or two pieces in Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds (circa 1986) were very much to my liking. He shit on genre, too, and in a big way.
Slashdot Mirror
How could you know when you identity every person in the entire Empathy clan as just some Jim Bob or Jane Barb from poverty valley?
Empathy was never a precise concept in the first place, and most people are too lazy to clearly distinguish the perceptual side of empathy from the dispositional side (the later of which is heavily conflated with approval seeking and conflict avoidance, and these are further conflated with meekness/aggression, introversion/extroversion, low status/high status).
Dressing empathy up in a recognizable set of clothes (e.g. Marty Mindsight), roughly equates to clearing your throat before attempting to say something civilized.
Tying the antropocene epoch to the first nuclear detonation is a brazen attempt to smuggle the Garden of Eden / fall of man metaphor into this discussion under cover of a blinding fireball.
How about using Madame Curie instead, and picking a nice round date like 1900?
I also noted this passage in the Wikipedia article.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. [/.sic]
Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remained—however frozen—in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion. "Dead" is really just a shortened version of "dead to the evolutionary fads of populism".
One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.
On the other hand, perhaps Perl isn't quite as "dead" as the idiom suggests. Perhaps Perl is merely catatonic, or just resting.
apt-get install OpenBSD
OpenBSD has the best internal documentation, but has relatively weak SMP and narrower hardware support than FreeBSD, neither of which should matter for a vanilla router.
I've heard good things about pfSense, but haven't used it myself.
If you want to dabble with ZFS for a NAS server as well, then I'd just start with FreeBSD which is what I'm presently using for my firewall (the few internet facing services are jailed or priv-sepped), despite having previously used a separate OpenBSD since 1998. For a ZFS box, it's a heck of a lot smarter to have ECC memory, though.
I totally hear you on the current Linux trend to make radical architectural change on the mainline branch with hardly any prior communication or heads up to the existing user base.
Come with me, little kiddie ... this won't hurt a bit.
Modulo pub net (aka Brewsky's) and "unpublished communication".
But apparently you subscribe to the the maxim that the "publish or perish" edict is axiomatically tantamount to "no unpublished thought" which I find interesting, because stuffy academic writing hardly strikes me as Truman Burbank's brainstem Twitter feed.
Not that this is a subject matter where we should stray into the kind of pedantry best reserved for slicing and dicing The Recognitions or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, which is how real geeks test their mettle.
Fumbled?
Either that's bait, or you haven't dialed in lately with your trusty USR to the acerbic backwash concerning America's popular reverence for all things Reverend.
Here Falwell plays into the meme (strangely accepted by many of faith) of God as a crypto dominatrix who delivers his retribution shrouded in the most complete and thorough back story conceivable about why the perpetrators might have acted on ordinary human motives (these acts, nevertheless, remaining somehow entirely transparent in their divine origin to suitably entitled religious figures).
I personally have to concur with Hitchens final decree on Falwell: "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."
I guess it's for this reason that the relief scene in Bull Durham (SPOILER: theraindelayinvlveshoomanagenci) is less than completely transparent to the off-screen local yokels, who don't the least suspect human motives when a deluge strikes right between the bullpens and doesn't wet a single stalk of corn within a ten mile radius (though I don't recall the movie bothering to suggest this, there really must have been some blustery weather in the space-time vicinity of non-divine origin to make this ploy modestly plausible, even for agrarian America).
Dear Michael,
The scientific high ground in this matter is to admit that the original peer review process sucked, lacking as it did any reviewer with sufficient statistical expertise to detect subtle methodological errors, and further, to admit that it does not require a PhD in any discipline to point this out (nor, especially, a peer-reviewed paper) if it happens to be true that the paper contained subtle methological errors (which it did).
It's all well and good that the main result itself seems to have held up under additional scrutiny brought to bear once these admittedly small deficiencies were aptly pointed out. This does not change the fact that the original peer review sucked.
(Perhaps you were merely lucky that your result continued to hold water after your subtle statistical errors were properly addressed. This is why a result that merely holds up isn't worth much in a high stakes debate. Proof by hindsight does not strike me as adequate given the magnitude of societal change that effective mitigation seems to require. To me, the stakes seem to be high enough to demand that critical links in the argumentative chain are right in all necessary respects before they are attached to a giant political lever; or, failing to achieve the almost impossible demand of being right in all essential particulars in peer-reviewed published paper V 1.0, that the culture of climate science embrace with a blazing passion the art of the mea culpa bug fix.)
Ordinarily, the peer review process is not expected to be 100% water tight, as the standard pace of science is stately and the stakes are modest. In this example, you paper served as the fulcrum of the biggest political mud fight of the late twentieth century. If climate scientists think that the fate of humanity and the planet lies in the balance, there shouldn't be even an epsilon gap in the quality of the peer review process.
You can't have it both ways without looking like a complete idiot. And it sure doesn't help your cause to look like an idiot when you're being attacked in a thousand illegitimate ways.
Thanks for your attention to this matter. I look forward to the future scientific culture of rock solid peer review in the first instance.
Live long and prosper,
J. Random hockey fan
(By some strange twist of fate, this was the first item to cross my feed after spending thirty minutes flipping through Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery which I'm presently reading to discovery why David Deutsch, in particular, praises it so highly.)
A funny screed, but in the end just as wrong as what it debunks.
The Mossad does not have a bottomless budget. As a result, they generally fabricate pieces of uranium shaped like cellphones in hundred lots. They have even more expensive intrusions, which they fabricate in lots of ten, and then they have the most expensive intrusion of all, which is fabricated like a James Bond concept car (not the car that Bond actually gets, but the one he might get ten years from now).
It really does matter to edit your SSH configuration file to bump yourself up from 10^-9 cost bracket to the 10^-6 cost bracket.
Mossad is not magically except from the 80-20 law. They still try to use the cheapest effective method, and hope to haul in 80% of the catch for 20% of the effort.
If you're in the 99.999th percentile of pure evilness (backed by a private island gold reserve), it's no longer about casting a wide net, and moreover, you already know for certain that you're facing a Mossad-level adversary and you can proceed directly to paranoid schizophrenia.
If you're only in the 20th percentile of pure evilness (you fib on your tax return and download porn off some Shmoe's open wifi) it might just be true that Mossad-level adversaries filter feed at the cost-effective 10^-9 screening bracket.
They went to all this trouble to subvert NIST not because they couldn't break things otherwise, but because they couldn't afford to break things otherwise at the largest possible scale.
Good luck with having any customers by the time you whittle away every protocol with a potentially expandable attack surface.
As we don't even have a formal theory of quantum computation yet, but we do know that some things can be computed by quantum methods, I don't think any current protocol is entirely exempt from worrying cracks in the plaster.
Whatever you like to tell your customers, there's just no escaping this hard business of having to make a judgement call about which cracks to worry about and which to ignore.
If your disk contains a larger number of large files with the names entropy$N (of which, the vast majority are actually full of entropy) the ability of the judge to distinguish a door from a wall declines to epsilon, at which point the judge might elect to sweat it out of you nevertheless (you're entirely screwed in this eventuality once you have no more passwords to divulge), but then so is the judge who gives a shit (some do) about the logical justification for his abuse of power (he can't actually know you're being willingly non-compliant—even more so if the file exercise_in_civil_liberty.c is found on your system containing code capable of having created those N-k entropy files).
[Yes, I'm aware that any stray disk subsystem metadata must support this story to the nth degree.]
Self reply:
I see in my post that IDLV mutated into IDVL and I mangled an mdash entity into a real mdash in one sentence. Pardon my sloppiness, but I didn't want to miss this opportunty despite feeling a bit rushed.
Alex: I regard my first encounter with the STL (very shortly after its first public release) as one of the great eye-opening moments in my software development career. Unfortunately, as I'm sure you well know, quality of implementation issues in compiler support for the C++ template idiom cultified (i.e. made cult-like) the deeper principles for at least five (if not ten) years thereafter.
GotW #50
I've long regarded the criticism against vector[bool]—I'm not going to fugger with angle brace entitiesâ"not being a container were misguided. Of course, it *must* be a container for reasons of sanity, but to portray the problem as a standardization committee brain fart seems to miss the main point.
Just as STL introduced a hierarchy of iterator potency (that was the main technical innovation behind the STL, was it not?) one could likewise introduce a hierarchy of container potency. The container we ended up returns interators which promise a dereference operator returning an lvalue (it's been a long time since I've used this terminology) which is why the following statement from the linked discussed is expected to work:
typename T::value_type* p2 = &*t.begin();
But actually, of all the uses of containers found in the wild, I highly doubt that more than a small percentage (potentially a very small percentage) exploit the property that interator dereference returns an lvalue rather than an rvalue.
The net effect is that the standard containers promise us a potency we rarely exploit, yet the burden of this potency is universal. Forsake it in even the smallest way, and you'll be shouted out of the room for non-containerhood.
We could have handled vector[bool] by changing the standard container to not promise IDLV (container iterators dereference to lvalue). In cases where the programmer goes ahead and tries to do this, he or she obtains a simple syntax error (ha ha ha) and knows to either reformulate the algorithm to not require this property or to go back and add a specification override to the container setting the IDVL property to true.
With IDVL set, vector[bool] does not specialize.
With IDVL unset, vector[bool] will specialize.
Problem solved, except for the language overhead of introducing (and managing) a container strength hierarchy.
But instead, Herb Sutter decides to write this:
Doesn't that attitude make you want to pound your head upon a table somewhere? Seriously, if one repeats that remark 1000 times, we could almost make the entire STL go away (and return to the world we would have had instead had the STL not rescued us from parsimony mass produced.)
Clearly, there was enough of a pain point in the C++ standarization effort around iterators that the STL gained traction exceedingly quickly (and very late in the day), yet the C++ community is also extremely hidebound about minor pain points, as evidenced by Sutter's explanatory tack.
Obviously, there were some advantages in demonstrating that the STL approach could achieve performance comparable to C (and in some cases, better than C) in proving that the STL was not just another abstraction gained at the expense of runtime overhead (which all looks fine until five or ten different runtime overheads—however small each of these appears in isolation—begin to interact adversely).
But very quickly, the initial quality of implementation issues and the quirky (to be extremely kind) limitations of the C++ template mechanisms threw up some major walls in pursuing the underlying ideas behind the STL more extensively.
So, my question is this, more or less: in retrospect, was the early victory with C++ worth it (it's extremely easy to understimate the value of having a good idea noticed at all), or does the eternal puberty of the C++ STL continue to grate?
Once a year—like today perhaps—everyone and their dogs needs to Tweet out "As of $PRESENT_YEAR I have never received an NSL letter".
Unless, of course, a year comes and goes and one suddenly and forever forgets to participate in this strange custom.
If, could, fodder, ultimately, failed, secure. Every one of these words as cast is a pablum-brained Orwellian nightmare.
The German Jesus nut was supremacy in all things. After setbacks in The Battle of Britain and Moscow/Stalingrad, the Germans found themselves in a situation where they needed to tighten their belts (both militarily and technologically) and settle for supremacy in merely the most essential things.
It was this belt-tightening challenge they bungled like crazy. Belt-tightening somehow wasn't in the German lexicon.
There was a scold Fuehrer who lived in a shoe
with so many children, he couldn't kick through;
He gave them some broth without any bread,
Then stripped 'em unsoundly to hiss boot instead.
Well, it was a try anyway, but it does capture the main idea.
There were enough tells in the first movie that I decided to skip both prequel sequels. My only regret concerns the movie not made.
The problem when you have a strong emotional investment in something is that one's instinct is to give it one more chance. By the time you've watched two bad movies, you're almost pot-committed to watch the third.
It takes a special will to abandon a franchise without falling into the emotional mulligan trap, and so there's ultimately little incentive for Jackson to not do what he did.
I'm slowly learning. My loyalty function has now evolved to where it's almost vertiginous.
No, it's aversive physical dominance. Any more hairs you would like to split, or are we done now?
Aversive: the recipient is not pleased about it.
Physical: there's a smacking sound.
Dominance: the recipient's preference in the moment doesn't count for shit.
Maybe he or she will thank you later with a greater understanding of the situation. Or maybe not.
To my mind your story could be an argument for more effective barriers. If you're going to make a barrier to enforce safety, go big or go home. Otherwise you're just conducting a first lesson in Jr Steeplechase.
From Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
<acerbic>
These days 75% of all Slashdot posts seem to involve drilling down to get the original story straight. Tell me, when did a mass-confusion clusterfuck become the new nerd foreplay? Kindle typography, meet declining Slashdot editorial standards. You've got more in common than you think.
</acerbic>
With entanglement, we have an FTL coupling that can't be used to convey classical information.
Why can't we have a similarly knackered stripe of determinism, one which can't be used to shatter the illusion of free will? This would be a kind of determinism where even if you sort of know it's there, it makes no damn difference to your interpretation of local space.
Think big, grasshopper, think big.
The only "accidental" discovery in science is the discovery one could have stretched out over a great many more research grants if one had better anticipated the scientific windfall.
Of course, we do tend to refer to the outcome of bad planning as "an accident" concerning our hominid prime directive, so perhaps there's no help for language after all.
You do realize that a narrative of this type can be fashioned around the prevailing conditions of all human societies at all points in human history?
America is an especially big and complex society, so one needs a correspondingly large and complex boogie man (though nevertheless, reductive to the core).
In the gospel of the one true fracture, defining yourself as against something only serves to throw more fuel on the fire. In reality, complex systems have hundreds or thousands of fault lines, and it's not always the case that the largest fault line is hovering around the supercritical state. Unless we all agree to obsess about it. Then the story self propels.
The slow march of AI is going to spin our a thousand fault lines. Get yours today!
Budget projects much? "Doable" and "easy" are not the same words. I'm guessing one person out of a hundred in the general population could take a reasonable stab at developing such an algorithm, and only one person out of a thousand could be considered a natural talent.
The first 20% of the work gets you to sqrt(sqrt(7e9)) as your mean perplexity, which is simultaneously impressive and yet not terribly actionable. And then the difficulty curve shoots off into the exponential regime.
It shocks me how rarely the cultural underpinnings are made overt in these scenarios. What you depict might actually be the case in America, but I suspect it will be different in France, where when a search pulls up no college revelry whatsoever, cultured individuals might begin to seriously doubt your breeding and character.
Whether posting photos of regular drunkenness counts as bad judgement has a circular basis case. If you get yourself photographed draping and drooling over some chick who looks none too impressed with the group grope, there might be some legitimate flags raised. Multiple binge-ups during school session might also raise eyebrows, even in France. It sure won't accentuate that embarrassing C- you received in Economics 101 because of the "family crisis".
Daryl Hannah's distal indecency. In America, s/irony/context/g.
(I had forgotten that this clip also contains some good geek humour, though slightly dated and with just a hint of cheese.)
Artists practice drawing nudes for a good reason: the human eye is exquisitely sensitive to the normal shape of the human body, so you can't draw or paint badly and not have it noticed.
Of course, we have a good evolutionary reason for having developed this proficiency, along with a taste for keeping this proficiency in good working order.
Porn doesn't happen until the rest of the brain takes a holiday (our visual sub-system is by far our biggest neurological subsystem according to a Levitin book I read recently). Big chunks of the human brain taking a poorly planned vacation is endemic to the human condition. That's why I keep a list of twenty different types of cognitive porn, only one of which involves obsessing over the female body. I'm pretty sure "PC porn" must be on my list somewhere.
Do you go around believing every lazy-ass statement you've ever read?
My gut estimate is that I actively view the 20% of my portrait monitor above my horizontal line of sight about 2% of my total working time. What's up there, anyway? A menu bar, a window title bar, a bunch of FF controls, a bunch of FF tabs, the Slashdot header, some junk about DEALS NEW, "Reply to: Re: Have Both", then the Slashdot story header which repeats "Re: Have Both (Score: 3)", then there's you user information / date / perm-link. Everything else on this screen is below my horizontal line of sight, including the entirety of this input form where my gaze is normally focussed.
That lazy-ass statement almost certainly originates from an era where devoting 20% of a monitor to menu/window/media cruft left you with a painfully small working area.
If you bother to read articles where researchers are interviewed decades later about lazy-ass statements they tend to say: "well, yes, of course we knew that at the time, but at that time hardly anyone had even heard of ergonomics, so we chose to make the message as simple as possible, so as to get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the yammering". Last time I ran into this it concerned one of the BMI formulas (there are several body mass formulas in competition). And then they say, "if you go back and look at my original paper, it actually warns against expanding the mandate of this tool beyond our narrow focus of study". Did you really expect people would respect that warning? "Oh no, but what can you do?"
What typically occupies the bottom third of this screen, below where my gaze is the most comfortable? A tilda pop-up console bound to my Windows keyboard menu key.
I have a custom user style that adds white space to the bottom of every web page so that I can maximize FF on this monitor, pop up the Tilda window over top of the bottom third, and still scroll the bottom of the web page high enough to not be covered over.
And then I have my landscape monitor to the left, all within the optimal attitude wedge. In fact, the combination of the two is much better ergonomically than having them both in landscape mode, which was so wide that I used to sit tilted to one side or the other, putting strain on my back (also pushing more of my pixels into the far margins of my vision). I never been happier with any previous monitor setup, though it did require switching from Ubuntu to Mint with extreme prejudice.
In my opinion, most people persist in using fonts that are much too small, I suppose so that they can crowd more stuff onto their desktops. Small fonts would be a problem with this setup as it would cause me to lean forward sharper reading, and also creating sharper viewing angles toward the edges (my input box is presently displaying three lines per inch; I can read what I've composed without difficulty from six feet away).
I suppose if the sum total of your ergonomic wisdom comes from a fortune cookie ("Eyes level with bezel last a lifetime.") and you have no capacity to think for yourself, portrait mode just won't seem terribly appealing. When one's approach to ergonomics is more holistic, one quickly comes to a different view.
If you don't write that way—with integrity and determination—then what you're writing isn't SF, it's what I call GSF, or genre science fiction.
Genre is primarily a form of entertainment. SF is properly a form of deep enquiry. I pretty much won't read genre anything. Of course, people lump much of what I do read into genre, but I don't support them in this activity (and none of Vonnegut, Le Guin, or Atwood would—or did—so far as they could get away with it).
One or two pieces in Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds (circa 1986) were very much to my liking. He shit on genre, too, and in a big way.