JohnStrange

In my experience from organizing conferences people who self-identify as vegetarians eat milk products and eggs, though sometimes reluctantly. Vegans don't.

It will make things way worse, since politicians from now on can and will plausibly deny any video evidence about them. Candidates will literally rewrite history instead of merely suffering from amnesia and any real evidence will end up in battles between one TV show 'expert' against another.

On a bright side, young aspiring actors can make porn movies to get some cash early in their career without necessarily having to fear it will ruin their career many years later - those movies will exist anyway.

Interesting blog entry but I was a bit disappointed not to hear about Solomonoff induction, as it is often taken to determine quite rigidly what is in principle learnable by induction. What's the connection of the approach mentioned in the blog post to Solomonoff induction?

Insecure defaults are always bad. The other way round would be the right choice. Let users downgrade their security for performance, if they insist.

It contains all the information you need, loads immediately, etc. It's a perfect web page.

I'm changing my system soon and I can tell you that I'm very, very happy that most of my games are on Steam. I remember that manual installation from DVD used to take minutes to hours, and I just don't have the time for this any longer.

Right now, my biggest nightmare are VST plugins. They are in fact the reason why I didn't upgrade my PC from an i7 920 for years. I estimate it will take me at least a week of full spare time use to deinstall them on the old machine and re-install them on the new machine. Steam would make many people a huge favor if they managed to enter the pro audio market, which still comes with their own installers, licensing schemes, DRM, spurious hidden support services, etc. All the bad stuff, exclusively for honest customers.

That's correct, and I should mention that Schadenfreude can sometimes even be used with a positive connotation, namely when a bad person suffers some misfortune due to his own wrongdoings.

What about microwave beams? Wasn't one of the theories that these could have been used for surveillance and caused brain damage with similar symptoms?

Gmail also drops sent mails occasionally for no apparent reason. They don't even bounce back, they simply disappear and never reach their destination.

Yandex is pretty good but I haven't found a use case for DDG yet. Whenever I set it for "privacy" reasons (not that I really believe them), I have to go back to Google to get reasonable results. I can confirm the memory loss, though, ego-surfing confirms it for me. Much of my older stuff is gone and all the top links for my name are related to my current work. (So in my case, it's kind of beneficial.)

I believe Brexit is a loose-loose deal. It's bad for the UK because it causes a lot of complications without producing real benefits. Basically, the UK will loose lot of political influence and control while having to abide to the EU's trade rules anyway. It's bad for the EU, because the union may loose cohesion, as it may turn out that the UK is doing not so bad after all and local anti-European socialist and nationalist movements will capitalize on that a bit, because the EU looses influence on the US without the UK, and because the UK provided a counter-balance to the axis France-Germany and now smaller countries fear that the EU will move forward faster than they wish for.

My prediction is that the net result will make everyone a little worse off in 10-20 years from now than if the UK had stayed in the EU, but the effect will not be very noticeable and overall hard to quantify.

I wish they would still make calculators as beautiful as that one instead of all the cheap plastic we get today. All the Casio FX-880P would need is a slightly faster processor and a slightly more modern programming language with structures and hash tables. There is even a guy in Germany who still makes PC connection cables for them - although only as a hobby and he's booked out for months in advance.

You mean those eternally scrolling pages whose main purpose is to hide content that belongs to the user in the first place? These sites are a pest.

I can speak for CommonLisp, scheme and Racket. Someone else will have to answer for Haskell. Generally, LISPs are extremely flexible, reasonably fast, compiled languages with macro systems that allow you to develop a domain specific dialect. Some of them, like CommonLisp and Racket, come with a pretty huge set of libraries, tooling and ecosystem.

Why aren't they used?

They are used a lot.

Is it because they are too hard to use, or to difficult to approach for a beginner?

They tend to be easy to learn but difficult to master for writing idiomatic code, i.e., have a relatively long flat learning curve.

Is it possible to hear bad things about those languages?

Sure. In my personal experience, their biggest downside is the same as their biggest selling point: their flexibility. Code is generally hard to maintain and read by others. You can invent some incredibly hacky spaghetti code monstrosities in LISPs if you want to. More disadvantages: high memory use, dynamic typing and dynamic dispatch can suck big time (e.g. Racket OOP methods are mostly checked at runtime, which can lead to testing nightmares if you're not careful)

Overall, CommonLisp and Racket are pretty good 'batteries included' languages, whereas some scheme implementations are extremely fast and evolved small extension and scripting languages.

Ahhhh ... it doesn't suffice to simply do your work without slacking, we need no less than the best and brightest for mostly boring office jobs in the government!

Maybe some groups within the NSA need the best and brightest, but the government in general doesn't. A lot of government work concerns accounting and administrative tasks that are neither intellectually challenging nor do they have a clearcut equivalent in business. Most government agencies cannot be run like businesses, because there either is no market to speak with or the markets for their 'products' are not free and open.

All you need is people who get their work done.

but we must also make it easier to fire people (or manage them downwards) for incompetence

That only works if you start at the very top. If you get what I mean.

I agree that browser-based password managers and password managers on Android are insecure. These platforms have huge attack surfaces.

I'm using ForgotIt? [1] because I'm its author. It doesn't have a browser interface and doesn't have a mobile version. I would make a version for iOS if I used an iPhone, but I have never planned to make an Android version, because Android devices are just too insecure. (They are theoretically secure but in practice most of them don't get enough security updates.)

That being said, ForgotIt? also has some weaknesses that are laid out in its documentation. It doesn't lock memory, so you should use encrypted swap or disable it, and its keystretching algorithm compromises a higher security margin for speed.

Depending on your threat scenario you can also keep some of your passwords written on paper in your wallet. You could also keep them in a physically secured place like a wall safe. If you're worried about targeted attacks, that's in fact the best choice for most people, since no current operating system, no PC, no tablet, and certainly no phone is currently safe from a targeted attack by a dedicated adversary.

[1] http://peppermind.com

Some contemporary mathematical theories such as "Inter-universal Teichmüller theory"[1] are so complicated that only one or two dozen people in the world can understand them. Proof assistants like Coq do not help with those kind of theories at all. In a nutshell, research mathematics has become fairly complicated, to say the least. (I'm saying that as a layman, from what I've gathered about it. I'm not a mathematician.)

Programmers are less intelligent, skillful and diligent on average than research mathematicians? How do you figure that?

Well, the selection process is much harder. It's an empirical claim that could be falsified, but the claim seems reasonable in lack of any counter-evidence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...

It's not just that, people spend way more time going through mathematical proofs, finding, and formulating them. If you give programmers time to muse about every function for weeks and write no more than 50-100 pages of program text per year or even less, then their programs will be almost bug free. You get what you pay for.

Note: I'm not claiming that programmers should be treated like mathematicians or vice versa, I'm merely pointing out the differences of the activities.

Edit: There is of course also a more trivial reason. On average, research mathematicians are probably more intelligent, skillful and diligent than typical programmers.

I can see the difference, but I think in reality these cases are way less clear and the lines are way more blurry. I also wasn't really discussing the legality of his actions, I was rather addressing the way in which some of these people slip on the wrong path. Some of them may be evil, but not all of them are the kind of malign criminals as these media stories portray them.

Since it's holiday season, I'll give a more comprehensive answer with a literature recommendation: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull. I'm pretty sure you'll like it if you haven't read it yet. Also relevant would be Gottfried Keller's Kleider machen Leute (clothes make the man), a beautiful love story. Unfortunately it apparently has never been translated into English.

People loose millions every year without consequences. It's only considered a crime under certain circumstances and if you don't fulfill the general expectations in terms of behavior, dress codes, legal structures, etc. Maybe this guy just made the mistake of using a way of loosing the money that made him personally liable. He used the wrong form of investment and legal structure.

If he had taken a better lawyer and fund manager, this wouldn't have happened.

Don't you have to run your own IMAP server for that to work?

Although my mail provider is fairly generous about storage space, it's not unlimited.

Are you sure about your noncompliance status?

IANAL, but aren't there treaties between the US and all EU countries that avoid any double taxation? You have to pay income tax wherever you live most of the time and conduct your business. You never have to pay income tax twice, in two countries. Unless you obtain your income mainly in the US, you should be exempt from paying US taxes. This is independent of citizenship.

Sorry if I'm missing something, I thought (and have been told) that this is how it works, so I'd be happy if someone else with more knowledge could clarify this.

I'd like to see a return to semantic markup, accompanied by pragmatic information about the purpose of the data and its intended size. The data should also be strongly typed. Then leave it to the client how to display, how to edit, and how to select the data.

The receiver should decide how to best display e.g. a list of 20000 names or a choice between 4 options on his device.

No big surprise here. The US is a member of the UN, of course, and the US and the UK were the driving forces behind the inception of the UN, which was first conceived by the US State Department and later worked out in more detail by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Harry Hopkins.

Bitcoin and other crypto coins are a neat idea until their underlying cryptographic primitives are broken. Then they will immediately loose all of their value. Every cryptosystem of the past has been broken at some time.

Maybe in hindsight due to a certain perceived technological superiority, but that's far from clear and from the perspective of the 80s the Warsaw Pact was far superior in conventional force by numbers in Europe. See e.g. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_138256.htm?s...

If you look at the figures you'll find out that such a defense network could never have worked as a deterrent and wouldn't work today either. Russia had and still has a gigantic amount of conventional troops including heavy artillery and thousands of tanks, and can easily gain air superiority in any local conflict.

That's why the US always insisted on a first nuclear strike option during Cold War, which almost lead to the total destruction of the world in 1983 when the Soviets misinterpreted a NATO maneuver as preparation for a first strike.

No it's not the tracker, it also works for magnet links and people get letters for downloading.

There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-tra...

This lawsuit won't help them a bit, though. They're struggling because they gained a persistent reputation among gamers that games built with their engine are beautiful but unplayable on any normal hardware. Whenever I hear "CryEngine" I think of the "But will it run Crysis?" joke.

Maybe they should have rebranded it, but in any case they seem to have done something wrong about their business in comparison to, say, Unity.

PocketChip: only 5 h battery life, not durable, but otherwise would be ideal - but with 5h battery life it's nothing but a useless gimmick

DM42: no alarm, too limited programming (basically a HP42 clone), no CAS, otherwise it would be ideal

gemini pda: too short battery life, way too expensive

numworks: kind of cool, but doesn't meet the criteria either, and it currently still has math problems (accuracy changes with every firmware update, the least thing I want from a calculator is inconsistent floating point arithmetic)

If I knew more about electronics, I'd make my own device but my life is unfortunately too short and too busy for that. I guess you can't always get what you want. ;)