Why are the West the bad guys for intervening against a war criminal, but Russia isn't a bad guy even though it's also carrying out war crimes by bombing civilian populations, by annexing sovereign foreign territory (Crimea), by shooting down an airliner full of civilians over the sovereign territory of a nation it is attacking, and by backing a war criminal?
The problem isn't that the West can't see that they're the bad guy, the problem is that you're still so wallowing in the self-hatred towards the West bred from mistakes made now over a decade ago that you've failed to realise that the West isn't in fact the bad guy anymore, and that mantle is now firmly held by Russia.
When the West permanently annexes sovereign foreign territory, when it starts intentionally targeting civilians, when it starts engaging in military interventions to specifically defend war criminals, then you can say that. Until then your argument is wholly unfounded, and in complete contradiction to reality.
Last time Russia showed off it's air defence systems it was by selling the S-300 to Syria to protect it from Israeli attacks.
Only in 2007 Israel flew 7 non-stealth F-15s backed by a number of F-16s and an ELINT aircraft right through the heart of Syrian airspace to blow up it's nuclear programme.
If we've learnt anything about Russian hardware is that it's capability is mostly complete bullshit. If they can't shoot down an entire squadron of non-stealth aircraft penetrating into the heart of a nation through an entire emplaced air defence network then what fucking good are they going to do against aircraft like the B-2, F-22, and F-35? Even the F-117 is still covertly in service if needed. I doubt the S-400 is sufficiently advanced to suddenly make a jump into usefulness given that the last gen version basically just didn't work at all no matter how much money you threw at it or how much time you had to spend preparing it.
Activating the S-400 is probably the quickest way to get Russia's latest bragging threat eliminated into a laughing stock with a HARM. Just like it's 5th Gen fighter whose engine blows up spontaneously and can't get enough thrust even when you do get it into the air, and it's latest tank whose computer system crashed in the middle of showing it off in Red Square, or their show of force dispatch of their aircraft carrier the Admiral Kutzentsov into the Mediterranean only for it to end up losing two aircraft in 3 weeks including state of the art SU-33 and MiG29K in the sea, in good clear calm weather conditions.
Russia has spent the last 5 years threatening the world with things like the S-400, using it as an excuse to invade Ukraine and so on and so forth, then threatening US airspace with it once they did. It's about time someone called it out for the laughing stock it'll no doubt be, just like everything else they've produced in recent decades.
Russian military power is a joke, their only advantage is merely in the numbers against smaller countries with desperately under equipped opponents like Ukraine, Georgia, and Syria. They wouldn't stand a chance against a real military power like the US.
The problem is you're thinking about it from your point of view - i.e. that of a rational actor.
You could apply the same logic to saying who gains from bombing their own civilian population including women, kids, and hospitals with barrel bombs, he's only creating generations more hate towards himself, it's an irrational act.
And therein lies the problem. Dictators are not irrational actors, they believe themselves to be untouchable, they've built a personality cult and are surrounded by yes men. They believe themselves to be infallible, indefeatable. That view will only have grown when Obama warned of red lines for chemical weapons use, but then did not act on them. It'll have only grown even more when Russia rocked up and turned the tide of the war for him.
Do not for one second believe that Assad would think rationally, even that's assuming it was Assad's decision at all. For all we know it could've just been a local commander being fed up as fuck of seeing his men dying left and right and said to hell with it, I want you to bring in the gas.
Trying to argue that it doesn't make sense because an irrational actor acted irrationally in itself doesn't make much sense.
Given that PIPCU is funded by the IPO, and that the City of London police is a defacto private sector police force, I don't think it's really actually much of a jump.
It's not like this is London's Metropolitan Police or anything we're talking about where public control is retained. The City of London police is directed by the City of London Corporation, and the IP Office is the organisation that represents rights holders with government funding which is past on to fund PIPCU.
The reality is if rights holders say jump, PIPCU and the City of London police simply ask how high. If they're providing a place where they can submit take down requests make no mistake, the City of London police and PIPCU have shown themselves more than willing to pursue it unquestioningly. This story is basically just about increased automation of how they control their pet police force to do their bidding.
The problem is that there's really very little residential population in the City of London's square mile, and so the representatives that are elected there are therefore elected on behalf of the corporations rather than average citizens. Hence why it's a different beast to other police forces and is in fact basically a private police force.
Personally I wouldn't mind if they stuck to their square mile, but unfortunately they attempt to apply extra-territorial jurisdiction to other parts of the country, where our local police forces act and where those police forces priorities are supposed to be decided by those of us who live in these areas by our elected police crime commissioners. As we're seeing here, they also try and apply international jurisdiction by trying to apply the standards of their corporate owned square mile to service providers across the world. The square mile is where all the banking crimes happen in the UK (Libor trading scandal for example), but the City of London police turn a blind eye to it - imagine the uproar about jurisdiction if say South Yorkshire police went down to the square mile and started arresting criminal bankers? Shame the same isn't true when the City of London police go and arrest some minimum wage labourer for selling a Kodi box in South Yorkshire.
As such, frankly, I believe the City of London police force should be axed as it's way overstepping it's mark, and policing in the square mile should be handed over to the Met, who are at least accountable to the people to at least some degree still. City of London police are an affront to the concept of policing by consent which is precisely what the UK policing system is meant to be based upon.
The monetary value in Twitter was never in discussions, debates, or the latest celebrity selfie.
It was in the fact that often news broke there first. Someone feeling an earthquake, or seeing a US assault on OBL's compound is announced there before it hits the news, and as such automated data mining and monitoring can reap great rewards, from trading, to being the first news person with a story, to targeted advertising based on an event, to better directed emergency response information, or nowadays, to intelligence information in warzones, and even to whatever the latest fucking presidential policy is towards something apparently.
Twitter's problem is that if it loses followers, it loses that edge. It can facilitate conversations until the cows come home but no one cares about that, no one's going to develop anything meaningful or massively profitable against that. What they need is geopolitical information and that simply requires a large active, global user database. If you can weed out information that will affect the markets, if you can weed out intelligence useful to the military, if you can weed out important news before anyone, then you're going to be providing value.
Twitter's API needs to support that to the greatest degree possible, and it needs to maintain a thriving userbase to back it up.
I actually read TFA, followed the links, and (yes really) looked through the list of collected content.
Amusingly was this under movies:
"URL for a specific two second chunk of content if there is an error"
Anyone want to guess at Microsoft's liability if that video content is illegal such as child abuse video?
They don't appear to collect a music sample segment though, greater paranoia about copyright infringement suits from the music industry over the movie industry perhaps?
I actually don't think there's any nefarious intent, it looks like everything is specifically focused on error diagnosis and I suspect Microsoft just asked each time what minimum viable error diagnosis data they collect. I think the problem is Microsoft haven't then looked at the bigger picture to realise how much profiling can be done on someone with a combined data set and how bad the overall collection of data looks. What was probably intended as a unified toolset for error reporting and diagnosis for each of the different teams at Microsoft (i.e. data reported back is presumably dispatched automatically to the relevant team) ended up looking rather creepy as a whole.
I don't buy the whole CIA conspiracy theory drivel some people spin with this kind of data collection (because the CIA can already get the NSA to collect this data and then some if they want it even without Microsoft's help) but I do think companies like Microsoft need to think harder about features like this - what may seem a great idea to them, doesn't necessarily seem great to consumers. This is something that should've been picked up by their architecture team and highlights what happens if you don't include things like data protection and privacy as a cross cutting concern across your product suite even if you've included it as a concern at individual project level.
The BBC article on this stated the rise in complaints was indeed due to the rise in drone ownership.
Personally I don't have a problem with drones, just as I don't have a problem with things like quad bikes and dirt bikes, and other such things. I do have a problem when they're used illegally though - i.e. when a quad biker nearly runs be down because he's belting illegally down a country path. Similarly I have a problem with drones being used by criminals to scout houses out for robbery. UK law says you're not allowed to fly a drone within 50 metres of a house.
As is always the case in our country, it's also illegal to employ countermeasures for these types of things, so for example, if someone illegally flies a drone through my window and into my house, I'm not legally allowed to hack it, or destroy it. So for law abiding citizens it's not an equal playing field. If it weren't for stupidity like that then people would probably have less of an issue as they could just tackle nuisance drones themselves, but if they try it'll then be them in trouble with the law. This is kind of the same in the US I guess with the guy who shot one down because it was perving on his family but who then got prosecuted for doing so.
The issue is simply that they're just another toy for chavs to break the law with, and I think the real solution is probably to eliminate chavs through some kind of national purge style event, but Owen Jones says we can't do that because they're actually the victims. The victims that commit the crimes. Or something.
We're seeing a growth in these sorts of problems a lot, not just with drones, but with many things - where the police can't adapt fast enough to deal with new types of law breaking, and where citizens aren't legally allowed to prevent it themselves either. As such, it's not surprising that such things draw a wealth of complaints, what else can people do other than complain if the police are ineffective and they're not allowed to tackle problem users themselves? There will always be people who misuse these things, and it's a question of what you do about that - you quite rightly point out that the growth in complaints is due to the growth in ownership, so I suspect this growth will only increase as problem users also grow with the growth of the overall user base. It's really just a new version of the old problem of that one guy that just has to turn his sound system up at 4am so loud that he keeps the whole neighborhood awake but where the police don't bother to tackle it and the neighbours aren't allowed to go and force him to turn it off, what else can they do but all complain?
If it becomes too problematic then it ruins it for well behaved users when the inevitable regulatory changes come in so it should be in everyone's interest except the assholes in question to find a solution to disrespectful usage.
I'd honestly be surprised if a robot is any more cost effective than using human labour in many areas, the robotic advantage is undoubtedly in places with more dangerous tidal swell or at depths below 40m. This might be less true in Florida, but labour is much cheaper throughout large swathes of the Caribbean and many such nations would love to be able to profit from protecting their reefs. The biggest barrier I could see is that there is simply not a functioning industry to export them currently. If there were exporters available for these fish then there are many poor but skilled sustenance only fisherman throughout this region who would love to start gaining a serious income by selling them on the world markets.
I've not hunted them myself, but I've been down with people hunting them in the Caribbean (I was just there to do some underwater photography and got some nice shots of people hunting them), a single person can easily pull in 50 or so in a single dive shoving them into a bucket. They're easy to find and stand out like a sore thumb, they're slow and stupid, and not scared of humans.
As you say they are incredibly tasty, so the real key is the setting up of commercial scale aggregation of stock for cost effective export. I understand that many Caribbean nations now are slowly added them to their regular diet, but there is sufficiently large population that an export market is required. I have also helped prepare these, and there is a lot of undue fear about their poisonous spines - they're so easy to chop off harmlessly, and the venom they carry isn't even remotely as dangerous as many claim - you can actually drink it if you're so weirdly inclined, it's only dangerous if injected into the bloodstream. The stings will hurt you a lot, but they're about as fatal as bee stings - if you're allergic to them then yes, you're going to be in trouble, but few people are that allergic to them, just as few people are allergic to bees and end up going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. Some people don't even really feel the pain much at all - I've seen similar responses with toxic sap in Euphorbia sp., where some people don't feel it, and others suffer an acid type burning effect, it's quite individual as to how you'll react, but death is rarely on the cards - the only other way that becomes the case is if you get stung an awful lot at once, so putting your hand into a bucket of lionfish might do it, but that's about it.
Given that places like Europe have done an astoundingly good job of over-fishing the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic to the point that places like the UK are replacing the fish in their staple fish and chips with god awful tasteless imports of often unnamed fish from places like China, it might offer a welcome respite to start shipping these things over to the UK as an alternative for fish and chips to cod and haddock bringing back the flavour that tasteless imported fish from Asia simply do not offer but that cod and haddock always did.
I've seen the damage they do to reefs and it's genuinely shocking - the reefs just lose all colour, and many species prominent just a kilometre or two away on healthy reef just vanish. This actually has a knock on impact in that because lionfish devour the young of other fish, and are indiscriminate about it, it means that other fish stocks suffer so it has a direct impact on fish stocks of other species meaning less fish to grow up for us to eat - it's in the interest of fishermen therefore to back this kind of endeavor.
It should also be made legal to capture and sell these for the aquarium trade across the whole Western Atlantic - it seems mindless that we spend time breeding them for aquarists when we could just take them out the ocean and have ample supply to sell them on from there.
Which is why as well as a quiet space, I also think a good environment for developers is one that supports flexible working. I start at 7:30 and finish at 4, because at least I can get about an hour and a half to two hours in of decent code first thing before the office gets too noisy. Some of the other devs prefer later starts and do 10 until 6:30. As long as everyone is in between 10 and 3 then that's ample time for collaboration.
You shouldn't have to work an extra 2 hours over to get your work done, you should be able to come in 2 hours later.
Developers need to be well slept, and able to focus - a quiet working area is only part the equation, not being forced to work extra hours because the working environment is shit is another part of it. Home working at least every now and again can also often help with this for some people.
That's the god argument - how do you know he doesn't exist?
Provide me some evidence that they are stopping any attacks because of mass data interception. Every time our security chiefs in the UK are questioned on it they say things like "We've stopped maybe 3 or 4 in the last year", but can't provide any details about them whatsoever, and can't even get a firm figure - is it 3 or is it 4? we're not talking about a large number here. It shouldn't be hard to know how many such big, important cases with massive bragging rights you've succeeded in dealing with. If they can't give a firm number when the number is so small then that implies that they're struggling to find many cases to be even remotely linked closely enough to terrorism to class at stopping terrorist attacks. When they were pushed for more info we manage to get a suggestion that many such attacks weren't even to do with Islamic terrorism and they included things like anti-fracking protestors sabotaging equipment, and hard-line animal rights activists sending letter bombs to animal testing labs.
If they can't provide any evidence to back up their claims (i.e. they don't seem to be able to point to prosecutions), and can't even decide how many they've supposedly dealt with even when they're talking about ridiculously small numbers then it seems unlikely it's achieved anything much - this is for what it's worth, for all cases for a year, not just those which have been dealt with thanks to mass data farming - for that, there's not just no evidence that it's been succesful at all, but not even any claims it has - they just say they need it and that's the last we hear. When we have had prosecutions, they've often been over trivial things (like "He had a copy of the jolly roger's cookbook, so he's a terrorist) and typically they collapsed. If you don't know what the jolly roger's cookbook is then it's a collection of text files that just about every kid with access to the internet had a copy of on a floppy disk in the 80s/90s, but much of which was entirely fictional.
Meanwhile people who are known to the security services keep carrying out attacks, so it's clearly not having any impact on the people that actually have the capacity to carry out an attack either way - even when they could do targetted interception and get a warrant to outright read their digital communications contents, not merely the metadata.
There's no such thing as a perfect terrorist, especially when this one was already known to the security services.
He may have been a lone operator, but pre-disposition to violence, coupled with conversion to Islam, which follows the exact same pattern of a number of other attacks over the last decade means this person should have been well on their threat radar.
It doesn't need a matrix style setting because that's retarded and does not exist - it just needs that the security services start doing a better job of using these key indictators that keep popping up time and time again to detect actual threats.
The problem is that rather than focussing on people like this, who have already been flagged to the security services and who subsequently show up a number of other indicators, they're too busy sweeping up everyone's data whilst having no clue what to actually do with it.
When the person is known to the security services, when they've exhibited a number of behaviours such as willingness to harm other human beings, pre-disposition to brainwashing (i.e. religious conversion) then it's absurd to say there was anything but an intelligence failing here. Sure, maybe there were a thousand other people that also looked like this and they couldn't figure out which ones to focus on, fine, but that's still a failing - they still need to understand why they can't pick these guys out from the others, and still need to prioritise their resources on these thousand people rather than spend billions on mass data farming that apparently isn't helping them whatsoever.
Ah yes, this is like how everyone calls IT, IT, but UK government, schools etc. decided to try and start a trend to rename IT to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as if communication wasn't in itself an information technology and hence IT already a perfectly sufficient acronym.
It never took off, to this day I never see anything other than IT in private sector (except when trying to attract the odd bit of public sector business), whilst schools and some UK public sector departments still desperately try to cling on to their redundant and unncessarily convoluted ICT pointlessly.
I think it'll forever remain a mystery as to why public sector makes up and distorts terms for things that are already well established and commonplace under different terms everywhere else, but I'm sure there's a cost saving in figuring out how to stop them doing that in there somewhere. Bonus points for the person who figures out how to save the tax payer millions by putting a stop to this kind of pointless shit.
They are - she also said a day after it happened that there wasn't an intelligence failing, which is obviously not true, because, well, it happened.
Any succesful attack is an intelligence failure, you can argue there's nothing more intelligence could've done, but it's still ultimately a failure.
The fact that MI5 once again, as in the case of just about every terrorist attack in the Western world of the last 20 years knew about this guy really says it all - we're still, even now, despite this being a repeated failing, building bigger haystacks, rather than getting better at finding the needle. So what's the solution this? Obviously build a bigger haystack again.
It's the same old fucking story and until someone starts focus on where the real failures are occuring - the security services - and stops treating them like an untouchable force that can't ever be criticised, then we're fucked. There's a reason terrorists and the Russians alike are running circles round Western intelligence at the moment and that's because no one's willing to consider that they might actually be shit, and that drastic measures might be needed to sort them the fuck out, like sorting the inept leadership who think more data is the solution despite the fact that tactics has been failing for 20 years now.
I disagree with rarely obvious. For example, I've inherited C# code before where the code performs thousands of type conversions in a loop - i.e. string to integer, and does so using a method that throws an exception (i.e. Int32.Parse) when there are exceptionless alternatives available (i.e. Int32.TryParse).
In cases like this is simply obvious that the exception throwing and catching solution is wholly sub-optimal, it's performance is worse by several orders of magnitude, with no benefit to be obtained whatsoever - it's not even more readable, or more maintainble, it's just outright bad.
This is just one example, but there are many cases I've seen over the years where there is just an objectively superior way of doing things that can save on all resources - CPU, memory, and improve by all metrics - readability, maintainability, security.
Mostly, these problems arise because of inexperienced programmers such that an experienced programmer can implement an all-round superior solution.
No man, you just tell your encryption don't take that shit, don't let yourself be imaged, encryption. Stand firm in the face of these fascists, encryption, and do right by me man.
Says the guy who so can't shut up to the point he followed me across discussion. You've done an excellent job of proving my point about you being an insecure failure. Go on, keep at it, it's brilliant, I don't even have to make the point anymore, you keep doing it for me.
Okay, look I get it, your understanding of adventure is being so utterly desperate that any change to your life is good.
My understanding of adventure is hiking across Svalbard, where polar bears roam, diving with things bigger than me like sperm whales in the Azores, basking sharks in Scotland, and whale sharks in Indonesia, going on a field trip in Eastern Brazil and discovering previously unknown species of cacti to science. Next year is diving with marine Iguanas in the Galapagos, the year after I'll be diving under the North Pole.
I get that you can't comprehend what real adventure is, that you're probably jealous, which feeds your necessity to stalk me into completely separate threads to continue telling me how you believe that being adventurous is the same as suffering a desperate need for change because you're one of life's failures.
That's all fine, but the fact remains that you're still ultimately the problem here - it's not my fault your life is shit, it's not my fault you're jealous, it's not my fault that you don't know what real actual adventure looks like because you've never experienced it. Keep telling yourself otherwise all you want, but that won't change the fact that it's all still entirely your problem, and that you'll still remain completely wrong whilst you keep up your victim mentality of it being everyone elses fault.
If you ever do manage to achieve something with your life, and do actually manage to travel properly, meet different people, in different cultures, you'll eventually understand why it's important to understand that you might not always be right, until then you'll continue to be a bitter pretender that spends his life being wrong on the internet. Good luck whichever path you choose.
"No it isn't. I've traveled extensively, lived in four separate countries (for longer than a year), and each time there were compromises. Some things were worse, some were better, but overall each was more interesting than staying put."
Yes, because your situation was bad enough for that to be the case in the first place, mine isn't, many people's isn't. Fine, you're right, if your life if fucked then absolutely any move is going to be good on balance, but not all of us are in such a negative situation.
"I'm a person, I moved for more interest. I threw away a regular income, and everything I own to try something different and I know a *lot* of others that did the same. Maybe you just hang out with boring people or maybe just old, but I assure you there are millions of people out there who live for adventure, even if it means they have to get their hair wet."
Nope, more assumptions, all wrong. What you're really saying is that your life was terrible enough that it didn't matter what you did, again, I'm not in that situation. I'm happy with my life, I'd still like it to be better, everyone wants their life to be better, but I don't want it to be worse - you obviously were at such a low point that it couldn't get any worse so it didn't matter. We're not all fuckups though.
"Or not interesting enough. And you don't have to change everything only some things. You've made it clear you'll only move if pretty much everything is the same. That's fine, but a lot of people think differently to you."
No, I made it clear I'd move if it was a net improvement, that's not the same thing - for you it is, and I understand that, if your life was terrible that nothing could be worse which is the entire implication of your argument then fine, but again, we're not all in that situation.
"Based on what you've told us about yourself. "Must haves: Same sized house, same income, same commute", your words friend..."
Different climate, different way of life, different activities, different culture, different people, different job. What bit of that argument threw you? Oh the selective reading bit, I see.
"No we've been over this already. Repeating lies won't make them any more true."
Selective reading. Go back to the start of the thread and try again. You've dug yourself so far down the rabbit hole of false assumptions and invalid arguments that you can't even remember what the thread was about.
Now do fuck off, I really don't care how much you want to tell me about how terrible things are for you that you'll take anything over your existing pathetic life even if it means meandering into a completely irrelevant thread - I'll give you a hint, Slashdot shuts down conversations after a while precisely because sometimes it's just time to shut the fuck up and stop being wrong about something indefintely, now take the hint.
I think that was Berners Lee's point - that we need to figure out how to do it. Your view is that it's impossible because we've not managed to do it yet, but that's no the point - it's not about what we can already do, it's about what we want to be able to do. Just because we haven't done something doesn't mean we can't do something.
There is a lot of scope to improve on this sort of project using machine learning, if for example you produce an objective data set of stories that have high veracity vs. some that as you suggest have high collusion but low veracity then you could use ML techniques to judge going forward.
You'd probably end up with some kind of trust rating that grows or erodes over time, coupled with topic competence. So say for example Gamergate - you'd typically see that gaming websites have zero trust rating when it comes to politics because they have no background in that field, this would push other news organisations above them that do have competence in the field of politics but they wouldn't have much advantage because they wouldn't have much experience in gaming. This would in turn push sites like Slashdot up the rankings for subjects like this because it has a good history of both gaming and politics forcing the user comments disputing the press view into much more public view.
This is just a stab in the dark of course, but the point is that I wouldn't say it's impossible, just because it hasn't yet been done.
"Most people I know who moved (and I know a fair few) moved because they wanted to try something different. Not to do exactly the same thing, or a perception of a better life, merely something that is more interesting. You are clearly not one of them, you've made that point clear."
Nonsense, you're still grasping at straws. Your whole argument is based on the misguided assumption that if you want an equivalent quality of life then you're not wanting to do something different. That's patently false, it's possible to still want the same size house, the same salary, and same commute to work whilst indulging in a completely different culture and lifestyle outside of that.
You're fundamentally wrong - people don't move to do something different, they move to make their lives better. Sometimes, that involves changing everything, like moving from a cramped inner city London flat to a much larger accommodation in New Zealand, for less money. In other cases, that means maintaining the same high level of living and salary, whilst achieving a better work life balance, better weather, a better political climate, a friendlier culture, and a much more fulfilling lifestyle outside of work.
People only move to change absolutely everything, when absolutely everything in their life is shit. That's not the case for everyone, some of us have no problem with some elements of their lives, but still wish to change others. You're ironically making judgements about my travelling experiences, my acceptance of change and so forth without having any idea about me, and in turn you're getting your entire points completely and utterly wrong as a result.
As I said before, you're just grasping at straws to try and tell yourself that you're correct, and failing miserably at every turn because the simple fact is that you are instead completely wrong. You tried to defend a comment that was simply false - a suggestion that a move to NZ will always leave you with a bigger house, I've explained why that's not true, and if you still don't want to accept it that's fine. But at least recognise the irony in suggesting someone doesn't like change, when you can't even change your mind about whether you were correct about something so utterly trivial as a minor point made on the internet.
No, I think you're assuming this process requires some person to make arbitrary decisions. That's not the case.
What he's talking about is creating smarter algorithms that weight content based on it's veracity such that stories with little to no veracity aren't given the same or higher prominence as stories with high veracity.
That is, given that stories have to be ranked (we can't place them at the same place on a page or you'd not be able to decipher it as they'd all be on top of it) then they should be ranked based on their veracity - how verifiable the content within those stories is.
So effectively algorithms have now reached a point where they're able to interpret content to categorise it and so forth, they now need to take the next step and begin to try to verify content by cross referencing it with other sources and so on and so forth.
As such there's no contradiction, just a request that the companies that act as the front end to most people's people's internet experience do a better job of separating fact from fiction so that when someone searches for something they get something that's objectively true before they get something that's fiction. That's not censorship, that's better ranking of data based on relevance so that irrelevant fiction can no longer get away with pretending to be relevant truth when it's simply not.
This, for what it's worth, would greatly improve journalism, as it would force news sites to make damn sure that they're telling the truth and can back that up before publishing a story that otherwise may or may not be true.
Have you read these books yourself out of interest?
I ask because I looked over The Pragmatic Programmer again myself a year or two ago and was horrified at how poorly it's aged. Some of what it professes is frankly just outright bad practice nowadays so if you haven't re-evaluated it I'd suggest scrapping it from your required reading list.
Again, I think you're making assumptions. Britain is without a doubt a nation full of travellers, but again a massive portion of the population doesn't travel, which is precisely why a majority voted for Brexit - those people who voted for Brexit are, the vast majority of the time, precisely the type of people who are poorly travelled. Those people weren't bothered by things like the currency tanking because they rarely step outside their own little neighbourhoods, let alone the country. These are your classic little England types.
I'm an internationalist by any measure, that is in my blood precisely because I am well travelled, and precisely because I do hate this country and like taking every opportunity I can to leave it. I also couldn't get away with being timid even if I wanted to; when you reach senior levels in business you just can't get away with that. I've hiked inside the arctic circle, I've dived multiple places throughout 4 of the 5 oceans, and I've discovered new populations of plant species in South America and I'm barely into my 30s. I've no problem with travelling and being adventurous but to do that requires disposable income.
So it's precisely for that reason the idea of spending more on my mortgage to get an equivalently sized house in New Zealand and in turn sacrificing my ability to travel put me off the idea of moving in the first place. By staying here I keep my standard of living including my ability to travel to the places I've always wanted to go (Scuba diving in places like the Galapagos isn't a cheap past time), which is precisely my point - if I move to NZ and get an equivalently sized house I sacrifice precisely the ability to travel.
You seem to be stabbing in the dark with all sorts of ideas to justify why you think it's correct to assume that moving from the UK to New Zealand will always leave you better off, whilst missing the more obvious resolution to your paradox - that your preconceived notion is simply incorrect. Most such emigration myths are based on the classic fallacy of believing the grass is always greener, but as always the reality is far more nuanced.
As an aside, you may start seeing less Brits when you travel going forward, certainly in France last August, and the West Indies a few weeks ago there were far less of my fellow countrymen than I'm used to seeing. There were more Americans than usual, presumably because of the currently over-valued dollar.
It's the case for many millions of other Brits because you still have well over 30 million people living outside the big cities and the majority of them do so because they can get bigger houses there than they can in the cities. The idea that commuters like me are rare and unusual is simply false, villages such as that I live in are almost entirely populated by people like me, the exceptions are the local plumber, the local post office owner, a couple of farmers, and the local shop owner. Rural Britain is absolutely full of these commuters villages now, and these commuter villages are in high demand and also full, to the extent that the government has been outright planning areas of green belt to be built on to build new garden towns for commuters.
Of those people living in villages such as mine, there are of course some who could benefit from a move to New Zealand - the farmers, the plumber and so forth, but for the majority of us living in these villages they're still going to be in the exact same situation as me.
So yes, for someone stuck in the painfully small accommodation in inner city areas New Zealand is going to be a fantastic improvement in quality of life for them - but here's the problem, so is moving to a commuter city in the UK. If like me, you've already done that, then the jump to New Zealand just isn't that great and again, yes, there most definitely are millions of Brits living in commuter towns like I do simply because it's the only way you can get a decent sized house without being a multi-millionaire.
Again, I think you're basing your understand of life in the UK on arbitrary averages found in publications that are far from scientific, and that's misguiding your understanding of what life is like in the UK.
For what it's worth the problem I have with moving isn't just with New Zealand - my wife is Canadian so we considered moving there too, but I don't want to deal with the shit winters they get, so Western Canada is the best bet, and yet Vancouver has the exact same house price problems that Auckland does.
So many people move countries without thinking it through or looking into it, and then just end up moving back to their place of origin within a year or two, and it's precisely because of the type of issue I'm describing here - it's not always as straightforward and inherently great as people think. There are compromises - for me, if I do move to New Zealand I will be accepting that decrease in house space, but I'll be living in a country with a far more progressive political climate, with far greater future prospects, far better schooling if we decide to have kids, and for me, better weather and far better places to scuba dive. As I said - it's not that I'm saying NZ is bad or doesn't have it's upsides, just that house space isn't one of them and yes, that does in fact apply to the millions of us Brits who already have nice houses in commuter towns which the government is building more of because of demand.
"Of course you can, as I stated if you look beyond public transport as you only transport option. I live more than 45 public transport minutes from my office, but I cut that travel time in half by riding a motorbike. By doing this, I get a bigger house, and you could too."
Right, but that means giving up the ability to do anything on my commute, so it's already causing a difference in terms of quality of life meaning we're no longer comparing like for like. Even outside of public transport though there are still major issues with traffic in Auckland.
"The average house size in Britain outside of London is only 89m2: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u... I don't even know how you squeeze 3 bedrooms into 89m2. "
Well you've failed at reading comprehension here - the article says the average size of a new build three bedroom home is 89m^2. That ignores the fact that there are also plenty of 4 bedroom and upwards new build homes that are much larger coupled with a vast amount of existing housing stock that is also much larger. You've gone from using misleading stats, to now completely and utterly mis-representing stats. New build three bedroom homes are small because the government has been creating massive financial incentives for house building companies to build "affordable housing". The fact that building companies have then gone on to take those incentives and build "affordable housing" shouldn't really surprise anyone. It still says nothing about the average house size outside the UK's high density cities like London though which is drastically higher as evidence by my very own plot, the price I paid for it, and the price it's worth now.
"As I said in my original response, do you have examples you could provide? Because I think your opinion is not based on reality."
Yes, I provided one, the fact you choose to ignore it doesn't make me wrong, it makes you wilfully ignorant. I pointed out that I have a 5 bedroom detached house (we don't work on m^2 in the UK so I've never bothered to measure it, but it's like any decent sized detatched 5 bedroom house - good size kitchen, utility room, living room, dining room, double garage, en-suite, bathroom, study, sizeable attic for storage etc.). To move to Auckland to get an equivalent standard of living I can only get a 3 bedroom single floor detached house for the same money. This isn't just some guesswork or something, this was based on an actual plan to move coupled with thorough investigation of the housing, work, and commute options, before discovering this reality, that I wouldn't actually be able to have the same standard of living by moving there. A move to NZ is great for relatively unskilled workers because you can just move to rural New Zealand where they need plumbers, brick layers and so forth and get a massive increase in the standard of living, but for people like me with a very specific, sought after but in limited geographic areas, well paid skillset, I can't do better by going to New Zealand, I have to downsize, or pay substantially more.
Whether you want to listen to my anecdote or not is really irrelevant, it doesn't change the reality. Bask in wilful ignorance if you want by denying that reality, but that's not really my problem.
I'll give you a hint though, if New Zealand was this perfect wonderland, where everything is unquestionably better, then why are they working so hard to get people like me over and have been for decades? If it was so clear cut they'd have closed their skill shortage long ago - they haven't because people like me realise the dream falters a bit when it collides with reality. If you want to keep on dreaming though, then go for it. I haven't given up completely on the idea of moving to get out of this increasingly shit country, but whether it's New Zealand or somewhere else is now a lot more up in the air - when I first thought about it New Zealand was the clear cut choice until I looked into the reality of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are the West the bad guys for intervening against a war criminal, but Russia isn't a bad guy even though it's also carrying out war crimes by bombing civilian populations, by annexing sovereign foreign territory (Crimea), by shooting down an airliner full of civilians over the sovereign territory of a nation it is attacking, and by backing a war criminal?
The problem isn't that the West can't see that they're the bad guy, the problem is that you're still so wallowing in the self-hatred towards the West bred from mistakes made now over a decade ago that you've failed to realise that the West isn't in fact the bad guy anymore, and that mantle is now firmly held by Russia.
When the West permanently annexes sovereign foreign territory, when it starts intentionally targeting civilians, when it starts engaging in military interventions to specifically defend war criminals, then you can say that. Until then your argument is wholly unfounded, and in complete contradiction to reality.
Last time Russia showed off it's air defence systems it was by selling the S-300 to Syria to protect it from Israeli attacks.
Only in 2007 Israel flew 7 non-stealth F-15s backed by a number of F-16s and an ELINT aircraft right through the heart of Syrian airspace to blow up it's nuclear programme.
If we've learnt anything about Russian hardware is that it's capability is mostly complete bullshit. If they can't shoot down an entire squadron of non-stealth aircraft penetrating into the heart of a nation through an entire emplaced air defence network then what fucking good are they going to do against aircraft like the B-2, F-22, and F-35? Even the F-117 is still covertly in service if needed. I doubt the S-400 is sufficiently advanced to suddenly make a jump into usefulness given that the last gen version basically just didn't work at all no matter how much money you threw at it or how much time you had to spend preparing it.
Activating the S-400 is probably the quickest way to get Russia's latest bragging threat eliminated into a laughing stock with a HARM. Just like it's 5th Gen fighter whose engine blows up spontaneously and can't get enough thrust even when you do get it into the air, and it's latest tank whose computer system crashed in the middle of showing it off in Red Square, or their show of force dispatch of their aircraft carrier the Admiral Kutzentsov into the Mediterranean only for it to end up losing two aircraft in 3 weeks including state of the art SU-33 and MiG29K in the sea, in good clear calm weather conditions.
Russia has spent the last 5 years threatening the world with things like the S-400, using it as an excuse to invade Ukraine and so on and so forth, then threatening US airspace with it once they did. It's about time someone called it out for the laughing stock it'll no doubt be, just like everything else they've produced in recent decades.
Russian military power is a joke, their only advantage is merely in the numbers against smaller countries with desperately under equipped opponents like Ukraine, Georgia, and Syria. They wouldn't stand a chance against a real military power like the US.
The problem is you're thinking about it from your point of view - i.e. that of a rational actor.
You could apply the same logic to saying who gains from bombing their own civilian population including women, kids, and hospitals with barrel bombs, he's only creating generations more hate towards himself, it's an irrational act.
And therein lies the problem. Dictators are not irrational actors, they believe themselves to be untouchable, they've built a personality cult and are surrounded by yes men. They believe themselves to be infallible, indefeatable. That view will only have grown when Obama warned of red lines for chemical weapons use, but then did not act on them. It'll have only grown even more when Russia rocked up and turned the tide of the war for him.
Do not for one second believe that Assad would think rationally, even that's assuming it was Assad's decision at all. For all we know it could've just been a local commander being fed up as fuck of seeing his men dying left and right and said to hell with it, I want you to bring in the gas.
Trying to argue that it doesn't make sense because an irrational actor acted irrationally in itself doesn't make much sense.
Given that PIPCU is funded by the IPO, and that the City of London police is a defacto private sector police force, I don't think it's really actually much of a jump.
It's not like this is London's Metropolitan Police or anything we're talking about where public control is retained. The City of London police is directed by the City of London Corporation, and the IP Office is the organisation that represents rights holders with government funding which is past on to fund PIPCU.
The reality is if rights holders say jump, PIPCU and the City of London police simply ask how high. If they're providing a place where they can submit take down requests make no mistake, the City of London police and PIPCU have shown themselves more than willing to pursue it unquestioningly. This story is basically just about increased automation of how they control their pet police force to do their bidding.
The problem is that there's really very little residential population in the City of London's square mile, and so the representatives that are elected there are therefore elected on behalf of the corporations rather than average citizens. Hence why it's a different beast to other police forces and is in fact basically a private police force.
Personally I wouldn't mind if they stuck to their square mile, but unfortunately they attempt to apply extra-territorial jurisdiction to other parts of the country, where our local police forces act and where those police forces priorities are supposed to be decided by those of us who live in these areas by our elected police crime commissioners. As we're seeing here, they also try and apply international jurisdiction by trying to apply the standards of their corporate owned square mile to service providers across the world. The square mile is where all the banking crimes happen in the UK (Libor trading scandal for example), but the City of London police turn a blind eye to it - imagine the uproar about jurisdiction if say South Yorkshire police went down to the square mile and started arresting criminal bankers? Shame the same isn't true when the City of London police go and arrest some minimum wage labourer for selling a Kodi box in South Yorkshire.
As such, frankly, I believe the City of London police force should be axed as it's way overstepping it's mark, and policing in the square mile should be handed over to the Met, who are at least accountable to the people to at least some degree still. City of London police are an affront to the concept of policing by consent which is precisely what the UK policing system is meant to be based upon.
The monetary value in Twitter was never in discussions, debates, or the latest celebrity selfie.
It was in the fact that often news broke there first. Someone feeling an earthquake, or seeing a US assault on OBL's compound is announced there before it hits the news, and as such automated data mining and monitoring can reap great rewards, from trading, to being the first news person with a story, to targeted advertising based on an event, to better directed emergency response information, or nowadays, to intelligence information in warzones, and even to whatever the latest fucking presidential policy is towards something apparently.
Twitter's problem is that if it loses followers, it loses that edge. It can facilitate conversations until the cows come home but no one cares about that, no one's going to develop anything meaningful or massively profitable against that. What they need is geopolitical information and that simply requires a large active, global user database. If you can weed out information that will affect the markets, if you can weed out intelligence useful to the military, if you can weed out important news before anyone, then you're going to be providing value.
Twitter's API needs to support that to the greatest degree possible, and it needs to maintain a thriving userbase to back it up.
I actually read TFA, followed the links, and (yes really) looked through the list of collected content.
Amusingly was this under movies:
"URL for a specific two second chunk of content if there is an error"
Anyone want to guess at Microsoft's liability if that video content is illegal such as child abuse video?
They don't appear to collect a music sample segment though, greater paranoia about copyright infringement suits from the music industry over the movie industry perhaps?
I actually don't think there's any nefarious intent, it looks like everything is specifically focused on error diagnosis and I suspect Microsoft just asked each time what minimum viable error diagnosis data they collect. I think the problem is Microsoft haven't then looked at the bigger picture to realise how much profiling can be done on someone with a combined data set and how bad the overall collection of data looks. What was probably intended as a unified toolset for error reporting and diagnosis for each of the different teams at Microsoft (i.e. data reported back is presumably dispatched automatically to the relevant team) ended up looking rather creepy as a whole.
I don't buy the whole CIA conspiracy theory drivel some people spin with this kind of data collection (because the CIA can already get the NSA to collect this data and then some if they want it even without Microsoft's help) but I do think companies like Microsoft need to think harder about features like this - what may seem a great idea to them, doesn't necessarily seem great to consumers. This is something that should've been picked up by their architecture team and highlights what happens if you don't include things like data protection and privacy as a cross cutting concern across your product suite even if you've included it as a concern at individual project level.
The BBC article on this stated the rise in complaints was indeed due to the rise in drone ownership.
Personally I don't have a problem with drones, just as I don't have a problem with things like quad bikes and dirt bikes, and other such things. I do have a problem when they're used illegally though - i.e. when a quad biker nearly runs be down because he's belting illegally down a country path. Similarly I have a problem with drones being used by criminals to scout houses out for robbery. UK law says you're not allowed to fly a drone within 50 metres of a house.
As is always the case in our country, it's also illegal to employ countermeasures for these types of things, so for example, if someone illegally flies a drone through my window and into my house, I'm not legally allowed to hack it, or destroy it. So for law abiding citizens it's not an equal playing field. If it weren't for stupidity like that then people would probably have less of an issue as they could just tackle nuisance drones themselves, but if they try it'll then be them in trouble with the law. This is kind of the same in the US I guess with the guy who shot one down because it was perving on his family but who then got prosecuted for doing so.
The issue is simply that they're just another toy for chavs to break the law with, and I think the real solution is probably to eliminate chavs through some kind of national purge style event, but Owen Jones says we can't do that because they're actually the victims. The victims that commit the crimes. Or something.
We're seeing a growth in these sorts of problems a lot, not just with drones, but with many things - where the police can't adapt fast enough to deal with new types of law breaking, and where citizens aren't legally allowed to prevent it themselves either. As such, it's not surprising that such things draw a wealth of complaints, what else can people do other than complain if the police are ineffective and they're not allowed to tackle problem users themselves? There will always be people who misuse these things, and it's a question of what you do about that - you quite rightly point out that the growth in complaints is due to the growth in ownership, so I suspect this growth will only increase as problem users also grow with the growth of the overall user base. It's really just a new version of the old problem of that one guy that just has to turn his sound system up at 4am so loud that he keeps the whole neighborhood awake but where the police don't bother to tackle it and the neighbours aren't allowed to go and force him to turn it off, what else can they do but all complain?
If it becomes too problematic then it ruins it for well behaved users when the inevitable regulatory changes come in so it should be in everyone's interest except the assholes in question to find a solution to disrespectful usage.
I'd honestly be surprised if a robot is any more cost effective than using human labour in many areas, the robotic advantage is undoubtedly in places with more dangerous tidal swell or at depths below 40m. This might be less true in Florida, but labour is much cheaper throughout large swathes of the Caribbean and many such nations would love to be able to profit from protecting their reefs. The biggest barrier I could see is that there is simply not a functioning industry to export them currently. If there were exporters available for these fish then there are many poor but skilled sustenance only fisherman throughout this region who would love to start gaining a serious income by selling them on the world markets.
I've not hunted them myself, but I've been down with people hunting them in the Caribbean (I was just there to do some underwater photography and got some nice shots of people hunting them), a single person can easily pull in 50 or so in a single dive shoving them into a bucket. They're easy to find and stand out like a sore thumb, they're slow and stupid, and not scared of humans.
As you say they are incredibly tasty, so the real key is the setting up of commercial scale aggregation of stock for cost effective export. I understand that many Caribbean nations now are slowly added them to their regular diet, but there is sufficiently large population that an export market is required. I have also helped prepare these, and there is a lot of undue fear about their poisonous spines - they're so easy to chop off harmlessly, and the venom they carry isn't even remotely as dangerous as many claim - you can actually drink it if you're so weirdly inclined, it's only dangerous if injected into the bloodstream. The stings will hurt you a lot, but they're about as fatal as bee stings - if you're allergic to them then yes, you're going to be in trouble, but few people are that allergic to them, just as few people are allergic to bees and end up going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. Some people don't even really feel the pain much at all - I've seen similar responses with toxic sap in Euphorbia sp., where some people don't feel it, and others suffer an acid type burning effect, it's quite individual as to how you'll react, but death is rarely on the cards - the only other way that becomes the case is if you get stung an awful lot at once, so putting your hand into a bucket of lionfish might do it, but that's about it.
Given that places like Europe have done an astoundingly good job of over-fishing the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic to the point that places like the UK are replacing the fish in their staple fish and chips with god awful tasteless imports of often unnamed fish from places like China, it might offer a welcome respite to start shipping these things over to the UK as an alternative for fish and chips to cod and haddock bringing back the flavour that tasteless imported fish from Asia simply do not offer but that cod and haddock always did.
I've seen the damage they do to reefs and it's genuinely shocking - the reefs just lose all colour, and many species prominent just a kilometre or two away on healthy reef just vanish. This actually has a knock on impact in that because lionfish devour the young of other fish, and are indiscriminate about it, it means that other fish stocks suffer so it has a direct impact on fish stocks of other species meaning less fish to grow up for us to eat - it's in the interest of fishermen therefore to back this kind of endeavor.
It should also be made legal to capture and sell these for the aquarium trade across the whole Western Atlantic - it seems mindless that we spend time breeding them for aquarists when we could just take them out the ocean and have ample supply to sell them on from there.
Which is why as well as a quiet space, I also think a good environment for developers is one that supports flexible working. I start at 7:30 and finish at 4, because at least I can get about an hour and a half to two hours in of decent code first thing before the office gets too noisy. Some of the other devs prefer later starts and do 10 until 6:30. As long as everyone is in between 10 and 3 then that's ample time for collaboration.
You shouldn't have to work an extra 2 hours over to get your work done, you should be able to come in 2 hours later.
Developers need to be well slept, and able to focus - a quiet working area is only part the equation, not being forced to work extra hours because the working environment is shit is another part of it. Home working at least every now and again can also often help with this for some people.
That's the god argument - how do you know he doesn't exist?
Provide me some evidence that they are stopping any attacks because of mass data interception. Every time our security chiefs in the UK are questioned on it they say things like "We've stopped maybe 3 or 4 in the last year", but can't provide any details about them whatsoever, and can't even get a firm figure - is it 3 or is it 4? we're not talking about a large number here. It shouldn't be hard to know how many such big, important cases with massive bragging rights you've succeeded in dealing with. If they can't give a firm number when the number is so small then that implies that they're struggling to find many cases to be even remotely linked closely enough to terrorism to class at stopping terrorist attacks. When they were pushed for more info we manage to get a suggestion that many such attacks weren't even to do with Islamic terrorism and they included things like anti-fracking protestors sabotaging equipment, and hard-line animal rights activists sending letter bombs to animal testing labs.
If they can't provide any evidence to back up their claims (i.e. they don't seem to be able to point to prosecutions), and can't even decide how many they've supposedly dealt with even when they're talking about ridiculously small numbers then it seems unlikely it's achieved anything much - this is for what it's worth, for all cases for a year, not just those which have been dealt with thanks to mass data farming - for that, there's not just no evidence that it's been succesful at all, but not even any claims it has - they just say they need it and that's the last we hear. When we have had prosecutions, they've often been over trivial things (like "He had a copy of the jolly roger's cookbook, so he's a terrorist) and typically they collapsed. If you don't know what the jolly roger's cookbook is then it's a collection of text files that just about every kid with access to the internet had a copy of on a floppy disk in the 80s/90s, but much of which was entirely fictional.
Meanwhile people who are known to the security services keep carrying out attacks, so it's clearly not having any impact on the people that actually have the capacity to carry out an attack either way - even when they could do targetted interception and get a warrant to outright read their digital communications contents, not merely the metadata.
There's no such thing as a perfect terrorist, especially when this one was already known to the security services.
He may have been a lone operator, but pre-disposition to violence, coupled with conversion to Islam, which follows the exact same pattern of a number of other attacks over the last decade means this person should have been well on their threat radar.
It doesn't need a matrix style setting because that's retarded and does not exist - it just needs that the security services start doing a better job of using these key indictators that keep popping up time and time again to detect actual threats.
The problem is that rather than focussing on people like this, who have already been flagged to the security services and who subsequently show up a number of other indicators, they're too busy sweeping up everyone's data whilst having no clue what to actually do with it.
When the person is known to the security services, when they've exhibited a number of behaviours such as willingness to harm other human beings, pre-disposition to brainwashing (i.e. religious conversion) then it's absurd to say there was anything but an intelligence failing here. Sure, maybe there were a thousand other people that also looked like this and they couldn't figure out which ones to focus on, fine, but that's still a failing - they still need to understand why they can't pick these guys out from the others, and still need to prioritise their resources on these thousand people rather than spend billions on mass data farming that apparently isn't helping them whatsoever.
Ah yes, this is like how everyone calls IT, IT, but UK government, schools etc. decided to try and start a trend to rename IT to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as if communication wasn't in itself an information technology and hence IT already a perfectly sufficient acronym.
It never took off, to this day I never see anything other than IT in private sector (except when trying to attract the odd bit of public sector business), whilst schools and some UK public sector departments still desperately try to cling on to their redundant and unncessarily convoluted ICT pointlessly.
I think it'll forever remain a mystery as to why public sector makes up and distorts terms for things that are already well established and commonplace under different terms everywhere else, but I'm sure there's a cost saving in figuring out how to stop them doing that in there somewhere. Bonus points for the person who figures out how to save the tax payer millions by putting a stop to this kind of pointless shit.
They are - she also said a day after it happened that there wasn't an intelligence failing, which is obviously not true, because, well, it happened.
Any succesful attack is an intelligence failure, you can argue there's nothing more intelligence could've done, but it's still ultimately a failure.
The fact that MI5 once again, as in the case of just about every terrorist attack in the Western world of the last 20 years knew about this guy really says it all - we're still, even now, despite this being a repeated failing, building bigger haystacks, rather than getting better at finding the needle. So what's the solution this? Obviously build a bigger haystack again.
It's the same old fucking story and until someone starts focus on where the real failures are occuring - the security services - and stops treating them like an untouchable force that can't ever be criticised, then we're fucked. There's a reason terrorists and the Russians alike are running circles round Western intelligence at the moment and that's because no one's willing to consider that they might actually be shit, and that drastic measures might be needed to sort them the fuck out, like sorting the inept leadership who think more data is the solution despite the fact that tactics has been failing for 20 years now.
I disagree with rarely obvious. For example, I've inherited C# code before where the code performs thousands of type conversions in a loop - i.e. string to integer, and does so using a method that throws an exception (i.e. Int32.Parse) when there are exceptionless alternatives available (i.e. Int32.TryParse).
In cases like this is simply obvious that the exception throwing and catching solution is wholly sub-optimal, it's performance is worse by several orders of magnitude, with no benefit to be obtained whatsoever - it's not even more readable, or more maintainble, it's just outright bad.
This is just one example, but there are many cases I've seen over the years where there is just an objectively superior way of doing things that can save on all resources - CPU, memory, and improve by all metrics - readability, maintainability, security.
Mostly, these problems arise because of inexperienced programmers such that an experienced programmer can implement an all-round superior solution.
No man, you just tell your encryption don't take that shit, don't let yourself be imaged, encryption. Stand firm in the face of these fascists, encryption, and do right by me man.
Says the guy who so can't shut up to the point he followed me across discussion. You've done an excellent job of proving my point about you being an insecure failure. Go on, keep at it, it's brilliant, I don't even have to make the point anymore, you keep doing it for me.
Okay, look I get it, your understanding of adventure is being so utterly desperate that any change to your life is good.
My understanding of adventure is hiking across Svalbard, where polar bears roam, diving with things bigger than me like sperm whales in the Azores, basking sharks in Scotland, and whale sharks in Indonesia, going on a field trip in Eastern Brazil and discovering previously unknown species of cacti to science. Next year is diving with marine Iguanas in the Galapagos, the year after I'll be diving under the North Pole.
I get that you can't comprehend what real adventure is, that you're probably jealous, which feeds your necessity to stalk me into completely separate threads to continue telling me how you believe that being adventurous is the same as suffering a desperate need for change because you're one of life's failures.
That's all fine, but the fact remains that you're still ultimately the problem here - it's not my fault your life is shit, it's not my fault you're jealous, it's not my fault that you don't know what real actual adventure looks like because you've never experienced it. Keep telling yourself otherwise all you want, but that won't change the fact that it's all still entirely your problem, and that you'll still remain completely wrong whilst you keep up your victim mentality of it being everyone elses fault.
If you ever do manage to achieve something with your life, and do actually manage to travel properly, meet different people, in different cultures, you'll eventually understand why it's important to understand that you might not always be right, until then you'll continue to be a bitter pretender that spends his life being wrong on the internet. Good luck whichever path you choose.
"No it isn't. I've traveled extensively, lived in four separate countries (for longer than a year), and each time there were compromises. Some things were worse, some were better, but overall each was more interesting than staying put."
Yes, because your situation was bad enough for that to be the case in the first place, mine isn't, many people's isn't. Fine, you're right, if your life if fucked then absolutely any move is going to be good on balance, but not all of us are in such a negative situation.
"I'm a person, I moved for more interest. I threw away a regular income, and everything I own to try something different and I know a *lot* of others that did the same. Maybe you just hang out with boring people or maybe just old, but I assure you there are millions of people out there who live for adventure, even if it means they have to get their hair wet."
Nope, more assumptions, all wrong. What you're really saying is that your life was terrible enough that it didn't matter what you did, again, I'm not in that situation. I'm happy with my life, I'd still like it to be better, everyone wants their life to be better, but I don't want it to be worse - you obviously were at such a low point that it couldn't get any worse so it didn't matter. We're not all fuckups though.
"Or not interesting enough. And you don't have to change everything only some things. You've made it clear you'll only move if pretty much everything is the same. That's fine, but a lot of people think differently to you."
No, I made it clear I'd move if it was a net improvement, that's not the same thing - for you it is, and I understand that, if your life was terrible that nothing could be worse which is the entire implication of your argument then fine, but again, we're not all in that situation.
"Based on what you've told us about yourself. "Must haves: Same sized house, same income, same commute", your words friend..."
Different climate, different way of life, different activities, different culture, different people, different job. What bit of that argument threw you? Oh the selective reading bit, I see.
"No we've been over this already. Repeating lies won't make them any more true."
Selective reading. Go back to the start of the thread and try again. You've dug yourself so far down the rabbit hole of false assumptions and invalid arguments that you can't even remember what the thread was about.
Now do fuck off, I really don't care how much you want to tell me about how terrible things are for you that you'll take anything over your existing pathetic life even if it means meandering into a completely irrelevant thread - I'll give you a hint, Slashdot shuts down conversations after a while precisely because sometimes it's just time to shut the fuck up and stop being wrong about something indefintely, now take the hint.
I think that was Berners Lee's point - that we need to figure out how to do it. Your view is that it's impossible because we've not managed to do it yet, but that's no the point - it's not about what we can already do, it's about what we want to be able to do. Just because we haven't done something doesn't mean we can't do something.
There is a lot of scope to improve on this sort of project using machine learning, if for example you produce an objective data set of stories that have high veracity vs. some that as you suggest have high collusion but low veracity then you could use ML techniques to judge going forward.
You'd probably end up with some kind of trust rating that grows or erodes over time, coupled with topic competence. So say for example Gamergate - you'd typically see that gaming websites have zero trust rating when it comes to politics because they have no background in that field, this would push other news organisations above them that do have competence in the field of politics but they wouldn't have much advantage because they wouldn't have much experience in gaming. This would in turn push sites like Slashdot up the rankings for subjects like this because it has a good history of both gaming and politics forcing the user comments disputing the press view into much more public view.
This is just a stab in the dark of course, but the point is that I wouldn't say it's impossible, just because it hasn't yet been done.
"Most people I know who moved (and I know a fair few) moved because they wanted to try something different. Not to do exactly the same thing, or a perception of a better life, merely something that is more interesting. You are clearly not one of them, you've made that point clear."
Nonsense, you're still grasping at straws. Your whole argument is based on the misguided assumption that if you want an equivalent quality of life then you're not wanting to do something different. That's patently false, it's possible to still want the same size house, the same salary, and same commute to work whilst indulging in a completely different culture and lifestyle outside of that.
You're fundamentally wrong - people don't move to do something different, they move to make their lives better. Sometimes, that involves changing everything, like moving from a cramped inner city London flat to a much larger accommodation in New Zealand, for less money. In other cases, that means maintaining the same high level of living and salary, whilst achieving a better work life balance, better weather, a better political climate, a friendlier culture, and a much more fulfilling lifestyle outside of work.
People only move to change absolutely everything, when absolutely everything in their life is shit. That's not the case for everyone, some of us have no problem with some elements of their lives, but still wish to change others. You're ironically making judgements about my travelling experiences, my acceptance of change and so forth without having any idea about me, and in turn you're getting your entire points completely and utterly wrong as a result.
As I said before, you're just grasping at straws to try and tell yourself that you're correct, and failing miserably at every turn because the simple fact is that you are instead completely wrong. You tried to defend a comment that was simply false - a suggestion that a move to NZ will always leave you with a bigger house, I've explained why that's not true, and if you still don't want to accept it that's fine. But at least recognise the irony in suggesting someone doesn't like change, when you can't even change your mind about whether you were correct about something so utterly trivial as a minor point made on the internet.
No, I think you're assuming this process requires some person to make arbitrary decisions. That's not the case.
What he's talking about is creating smarter algorithms that weight content based on it's veracity such that stories with little to no veracity aren't given the same or higher prominence as stories with high veracity.
That is, given that stories have to be ranked (we can't place them at the same place on a page or you'd not be able to decipher it as they'd all be on top of it) then they should be ranked based on their veracity - how verifiable the content within those stories is.
So effectively algorithms have now reached a point where they're able to interpret content to categorise it and so forth, they now need to take the next step and begin to try to verify content by cross referencing it with other sources and so on and so forth.
As such there's no contradiction, just a request that the companies that act as the front end to most people's people's internet experience do a better job of separating fact from fiction so that when someone searches for something they get something that's objectively true before they get something that's fiction. That's not censorship, that's better ranking of data based on relevance so that irrelevant fiction can no longer get away with pretending to be relevant truth when it's simply not.
This, for what it's worth, would greatly improve journalism, as it would force news sites to make damn sure that they're telling the truth and can back that up before publishing a story that otherwise may or may not be true.
Have you read these books yourself out of interest?
I ask because I looked over The Pragmatic Programmer again myself a year or two ago and was horrified at how poorly it's aged. Some of what it professes is frankly just outright bad practice nowadays so if you haven't re-evaluated it I'd suggest scrapping it from your required reading list.
Again, I think you're making assumptions. Britain is without a doubt a nation full of travellers, but again a massive portion of the population doesn't travel, which is precisely why a majority voted for Brexit - those people who voted for Brexit are, the vast majority of the time, precisely the type of people who are poorly travelled. Those people weren't bothered by things like the currency tanking because they rarely step outside their own little neighbourhoods, let alone the country. These are your classic little England types.
I'm an internationalist by any measure, that is in my blood precisely because I am well travelled, and precisely because I do hate this country and like taking every opportunity I can to leave it. I also couldn't get away with being timid even if I wanted to; when you reach senior levels in business you just can't get away with that. I've hiked inside the arctic circle, I've dived multiple places throughout 4 of the 5 oceans, and I've discovered new populations of plant species in South America and I'm barely into my 30s. I've no problem with travelling and being adventurous but to do that requires disposable income.
So it's precisely for that reason the idea of spending more on my mortgage to get an equivalently sized house in New Zealand and in turn sacrificing my ability to travel put me off the idea of moving in the first place. By staying here I keep my standard of living including my ability to travel to the places I've always wanted to go (Scuba diving in places like the Galapagos isn't a cheap past time), which is precisely my point - if I move to NZ and get an equivalently sized house I sacrifice precisely the ability to travel.
You seem to be stabbing in the dark with all sorts of ideas to justify why you think it's correct to assume that moving from the UK to New Zealand will always leave you better off, whilst missing the more obvious resolution to your paradox - that your preconceived notion is simply incorrect. Most such emigration myths are based on the classic fallacy of believing the grass is always greener, but as always the reality is far more nuanced.
As an aside, you may start seeing less Brits when you travel going forward, certainly in France last August, and the West Indies a few weeks ago there were far less of my fellow countrymen than I'm used to seeing. There were more Americans than usual, presumably because of the currently over-valued dollar.
It's the case for many millions of other Brits because you still have well over 30 million people living outside the big cities and the majority of them do so because they can get bigger houses there than they can in the cities. The idea that commuters like me are rare and unusual is simply false, villages such as that I live in are almost entirely populated by people like me, the exceptions are the local plumber, the local post office owner, a couple of farmers, and the local shop owner. Rural Britain is absolutely full of these commuters villages now, and these commuter villages are in high demand and also full, to the extent that the government has been outright planning areas of green belt to be built on to build new garden towns for commuters.
Of those people living in villages such as mine, there are of course some who could benefit from a move to New Zealand - the farmers, the plumber and so forth, but for the majority of us living in these villages they're still going to be in the exact same situation as me.
So yes, for someone stuck in the painfully small accommodation in inner city areas New Zealand is going to be a fantastic improvement in quality of life for them - but here's the problem, so is moving to a commuter city in the UK. If like me, you've already done that, then the jump to New Zealand just isn't that great and again, yes, there most definitely are millions of Brits living in commuter towns like I do simply because it's the only way you can get a decent sized house without being a multi-millionaire.
Again, I think you're basing your understand of life in the UK on arbitrary averages found in publications that are far from scientific, and that's misguiding your understanding of what life is like in the UK.
For what it's worth the problem I have with moving isn't just with New Zealand - my wife is Canadian so we considered moving there too, but I don't want to deal with the shit winters they get, so Western Canada is the best bet, and yet Vancouver has the exact same house price problems that Auckland does.
So many people move countries without thinking it through or looking into it, and then just end up moving back to their place of origin within a year or two, and it's precisely because of the type of issue I'm describing here - it's not always as straightforward and inherently great as people think. There are compromises - for me, if I do move to New Zealand I will be accepting that decrease in house space, but I'll be living in a country with a far more progressive political climate, with far greater future prospects, far better schooling if we decide to have kids, and for me, better weather and far better places to scuba dive. As I said - it's not that I'm saying NZ is bad or doesn't have it's upsides, just that house space isn't one of them and yes, that does in fact apply to the millions of us Brits who already have nice houses in commuter towns which the government is building more of because of demand.
"Of course you can, as I stated if you look beyond public transport as you only transport option. I live more than 45 public transport minutes from my office, but I cut that travel time in half by riding a motorbike. By doing this, I get a bigger house, and you could too."
Right, but that means giving up the ability to do anything on my commute, so it's already causing a difference in terms of quality of life meaning we're no longer comparing like for like. Even outside of public transport though there are still major issues with traffic in Auckland.
"The average house size in Britain outside of London is only 89m2: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...
I don't even know how you squeeze 3 bedrooms into 89m2. "
Well you've failed at reading comprehension here - the article says the average size of a new build three bedroom home is 89m^2. That ignores the fact that there are also plenty of 4 bedroom and upwards new build homes that are much larger coupled with a vast amount of existing housing stock that is also much larger. You've gone from using misleading stats, to now completely and utterly mis-representing stats. New build three bedroom homes are small because the government has been creating massive financial incentives for house building companies to build "affordable housing". The fact that building companies have then gone on to take those incentives and build "affordable housing" shouldn't really surprise anyone. It still says nothing about the average house size outside the UK's high density cities like London though which is drastically higher as evidence by my very own plot, the price I paid for it, and the price it's worth now.
"As I said in my original response, do you have examples you could provide? Because I think your opinion is not based on reality."
Yes, I provided one, the fact you choose to ignore it doesn't make me wrong, it makes you wilfully ignorant. I pointed out that I have a 5 bedroom detached house (we don't work on m^2 in the UK so I've never bothered to measure it, but it's like any decent sized detatched 5 bedroom house - good size kitchen, utility room, living room, dining room, double garage, en-suite, bathroom, study, sizeable attic for storage etc.). To move to Auckland to get an equivalent standard of living I can only get a 3 bedroom single floor detached house for the same money. This isn't just some guesswork or something, this was based on an actual plan to move coupled with thorough investigation of the housing, work, and commute options, before discovering this reality, that I wouldn't actually be able to have the same standard of living by moving there. A move to NZ is great for relatively unskilled workers because you can just move to rural New Zealand where they need plumbers, brick layers and so forth and get a massive increase in the standard of living, but for people like me with a very specific, sought after but in limited geographic areas, well paid skillset, I can't do better by going to New Zealand, I have to downsize, or pay substantially more.
Whether you want to listen to my anecdote or not is really irrelevant, it doesn't change the reality. Bask in wilful ignorance if you want by denying that reality, but that's not really my problem.
I'll give you a hint though, if New Zealand was this perfect wonderland, where everything is unquestionably better, then why are they working so hard to get people like me over and have been for decades? If it was so clear cut they'd have closed their skill shortage long ago - they haven't because people like me realise the dream falters a bit when it collides with reality. If you want to keep on dreaming though, then go for it. I haven't given up completely on the idea of moving to get out of this increasingly shit country, but whether it's New Zealand or somewhere else is now a lot more up in the air - when I first thought about it New Zealand was the clear cut choice until I looked into the reality of it.