LionRoar

I find the idea of old photo/data degradation strangely comforting. Even digital data seems to be unable to escape the law of entropy (don't mention the black holes). On another note; if corrupting data/photos was a wide occurrence now wouldn't we have heard about it in a big way?

I grew up, not with the satan idea, but was told that there was a relation between the apostle Peter and the symbol. The reason for that was that Peter was crucified upsidedown. They argued why someone would use it as a peace symbol when it was the symbol of Peter crucified. Which was a very strange argument if you think about it.

I made your statement a little more accurate. "THOU SHALT MAKE SURE CHILDREN UNDERSTAND [our version of] RIGHT AND WRONG!." You're welcome :)

Thanks for the link, I reread it. Nice story but I think I can guess his current password now: "Plus, if you’re interested in more of this, I’m writing a book!" :)

Yes, this! Exactly to the point. This is in my view THE argument against all-out snooping. It is about control, not about criminality.

"In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway – why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans. Surveillance operations from the US intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners. However I’m a foreigner. And I’m withdrawing my support from your event."

I realy like all the double layers he put into this :D Its a joy to read.

This is funny AND insightful. Reminds me of folding proteins. So, I guess it is a good moment to point to http://folding.stanford.edu/

The problem now is not the tv anymore. I grew up and have now to deal with the distractions of this age and time.

I have done this and I agree. "News" gives a single side view on the world and it is hardly an uplifting one. Personally I strongly belief that the general public opinion is negativer then needed caused by negative news-feeding. In the periods that I decided to not follow the news (opting out :)) I felt better and more relaxed. In the mean time I did not miss any big news and what I missed turned out not to be important. Easily to do as an experiment.

I grew also up without a television. That was no deliberate choice, my parents are orthodox christians. I was very creative in that period and I kinda miss that now :)

I went to the code.org site, looked around and tried the objective-C version. I was (positively) surprised that it did work because I am not in the USA at the moment, meaning it's not blocked for non-USA access.

The simulator didn't work unfortunately but they did warn about this on the site when I started. After I had done the tutorial I landed on the Summer Academy page where you can do a 8-9 week course in programming. Very nice!

Then I discovered that this was certainly not for free: $5000 it will cost you. I must admit I was a little shocked. That is not a price every one can pay for this learning to code adventure. That was a part Obama did not mention. It feels like a standard marketing trap, luring in people to do your course, buy your software, etc. Only difference is the frontman of the show ;)

It's proved again: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Now walk on please, nothing to see here.

I can totally understand your frustration that shines through. Basically I agree with you. 8 years ago I saw the start of an explosion of new languages/frameworks/etc. All solving 1 of more things of a bigger problem. To my mind it became too fragmented, too many layers where too many things can go wrong and if not, will have a performance penalty.

So I went to a more abstract approach by working visually in models. After some tries I discovered the OutSystems development environment for web applications and am working with it since on a daily base. The advantage of working visually is that I don't know or see what the compiler creates. (of course I encounter some SQL, JS, CSS and HTML)

However, sometimes I miss text based coding, so this year I looked around to see if the development situation had become better. In my opinion it has not. There seems to be less fragmentation but that's probably caused by the fact that only a select set survived. Besides that new initiatives have been started.

Personally I like the idea of using C as a cross platform language; because it already IS. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the lower levels of the used languages use it already in some form (remember it always needs to go native). Besides that, I think that if C would be the standard then within a couple of weeks you will have language X to C compilers and then have ABC->X->C and then have a webvariant WEB->ABC->X->C while undoubtedly someone will create a Javascript to web to abc to x to c compiler. And than there we are again where we started :)

So in my opinion the problem lays with the chains. Some abstraction is needed of course but not several layers on layers. I would like to see more direct to (e.g.) c compilers: JS->C, Web->C, ABC->C, X->C whereby it is not the goal to program in C but have it as an intermediate format.

I believe that software development has not grown forward enough. There is plenty movement left and right but not going forward. So, I am back to my visual modelling environment and will check later on...

Tor browser (package tor-browser-2.3.25-15_en-US, latest bundle) does have Javascript disabled by default. Please check options-content->enable Javascript. If I am mistaken I am delighted to hear otherwise.

If someone starts about Dark Web, VPN and privacy and then states: "so if a request for your data is legitimate, F Secure will not stop a proper investigation from the authorities" it renders it immediately completely useless in my opinion.

As the last year proofs authorities are the ones that do the snooping. So if it doesn't protect us from them, what's the point of such a service. Also linking to Facebook and Skydrive that have government-backdoors seems not so private to me.

Does F-Secure really understand in which world we live in today? Oh well, neither do I, back to my coffee.

I like these kinds of perspectives :)

Not jealous, just surprisingly misinformed and perhaps narrow minded :) Hope that India is going to work on the communications side of things, exciting times indeed!

I think it is a little bit odd to create a page that shows every fuck-word it can find in the world, call it "fbomb", having an About page whereby one only talks about the "F word" and "F-Bombs" while trying very hard not to type the word fuck.

Seems a kinda hypocrite to me. "Look someone said fuck in <country> haha, but I don't use that word, nono, not the F-word." I really dislike the term f-word. Say fuck if you want, say nothing if you don't want.

But, yes, funny idea.

I am not put off by the DIY surgery or the size of the computer. But I was astonished by this line: 'the chip can record Cannon's body temperature and transfer it in real time via Bluetooth.' If I would attempt such a thing like this I would make sure it could do a lot more!

Direct link to the article: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-diy-cyborg

Spoiler: there are no pictures of the biohack surgery

Reaction of Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond on the news. Sounds a lot more sincere then their previous denials (which proved to be lies forced by the law anyway).

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide. We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform." [0]

[0]http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/google...

I always realy like these kind of data. Not in a morbid sense but just to see the real data instead of marketing driven FUD. Another thought that I always have seeing data like this is that it gives a clear view where the government should spend their/our money.

Indeed! I was going to remark the same. Also a side effect of digital zoom is that it is not perfectly sharp. You see this already in the example pictures. After all, digital zoom is more of an effect then real zooming. For this reason I never use digital zoom on a digital camera. On my PC I have software that does a better job :)

I work at a small company as the only software engineer (indeed sofware is not the core business here). My annual salary is around 40K euro. 3 years ago we started a huge project and hired extra manpower (4 persons x 3 month). 1 person of that team is still with us today. We are on the moment busy starting up another big project whereby we hire 5 persons extra for a couple of months.

Without these extra software engineers we could have never reached our deadline.

However: an external consultant costs us 10K a month. Thus 3 x 3 x 10 = 90K. And for the new project; 5 x 3 x 10 = 150K. Nothing special but my point is the 1 person that still hangs around from the first project. That was (almost exactly) 3 years ago. So 3 x 12 x 10 = 360K euro. (total hiring amount > 600K). My salary in these 3 years would be 120K. I think it would have been cheaper to have had an extra employee. In fact you could have 3 until this moment.

So, based on that; hire consultants to have extra manpower in your project. However, hire them 'too long' and it was smarter to have an extra employee.

A program listing as screensaver (KolibriOS). Now, that is cool.

Although sounding a little bit cynical, there is unfortunately some truth in it: if thinking was important then the smartest people could be found on the highest positions. Clearly that is not the case (with a few exceptions). So we can only conclude that thinking is not of great value and smart people are not really wanted (unless they make cool, nice, shiny toys). It's just a simple observation; the world around us is not based on the smartest solutions.

A documentary I saw about the human brain gave an explanation for this: the brain always looks for the easiest solution because it wants to preserver as much energy as possible (it has already enough to do in the modern world). It is just natural that energy follows the path of the least resistance.

And that is the reason we don't have Plato's State :)

Despite having a curious mind I still find things I didn't know about. Being 42 I experience this while feeling a combination of frustration and delight. I am working on the silly frustration bit :) BTW I read the book last summer for the first time. Its brilliant and the underlying message even more.

You are correct. In fact, Commodore Basic had more of these shortcuts which allowed you to type in Basic commands really quickly. If you LISTed the code all shortcuts were changed to their correct command names. Kind of stenographic coding. Never saw anything like that later on with the 'modern' programming languages.. Maybe someone should bring this approach back :)

Edit: found a list of the keyword abbreviations. More then I expected/remembered. http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/BASIC_keyword_abbreviation