jkn

Star Trek's society is collectivist (as all societies are, to a degree), but is it authoritarian?

I suspect that summarizing collectivism as authoritarian is like summarizing libertarianism as selfish: they go well together, but you can also get one without the other.

I don't know Star Trek very well, but as a utopia I guess they imagine a form of collectivism that largely preserves individual freedom? Of course most of the show centers on Starfleet, an authoritarian organisation like any military, which doesn't tell much about the whole society.

The Data Liberation Front team was formed at Google in 2007, and released Google Takeout in 2011, worldwide, well before the other big companies had anything similar in place.

http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2011/06/data-liberation-f...

For more up-to-date information see the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front#c...

This service works quite well, I'm using it to backup the whole of my Google data every few months, including Gmail, Photos and Drive.

Ha I thought you were wrong, but it turns out that indeed, you can disable image loading in the Gmail Web interface, in the Android app, but not on iOS: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?co=GENIE.Platf...

So on one hand a "bad" company advances its strategic interests by contributing to a free and open technology. On the other hand, this technology can bring general benefits beyond the company's interest.

The question is: does one outweigh the other? I think in many cases, for Web technologies, the corporate interest is modest and the general benefit is enormous, so it's definitely a win-win.

As for Android, the open platform part is a huge piece of tech that many have found useful beyond the smartphone market. On smartphones the open source project has enabled several ROM communities that ended up offering versions free of any Google service. There is nothing comparable on the iOS side.

Even Android with Google services is a pretty good deal: for the most part you get to choose what you share with Google (at the price of some features).

I think comparing to Symbian is difficult, Symbian never was in the same league as Android and iOS was it? A better comparison would be with Windows Phone or iOS. Apple has invested a lot in its privacy-friendly image, and I trust they are doing a good job. But they are the outlier. Then you have Microsoft... I don't know where Windows Phone standed privacy-wise, but they sure got a lot of criticism regarding privacy violations in the desktop/laptop OS. Although it's not free.

All in all I don't think Android is a good example to support your viewpoint.

You could say the same of all Web technologies. Do you actually think it would be better to have software patents and royalties on every Web standard?

For one thing, this would be catastrophic for open source projects (and indeed commercial audio and video codecs have been a huge pain for open source developers and users). Well, you're suggesting that free codecs are bad because they profit Facebook, and you could say the same about open source software, especially those that get contributions from Facebook.

I rather think that advertisers will always pay money to advertise, and when some of that money goes to developing open and free technologies that's a good thing.

There are many free lunches. You can get a universally supported free video codec to use for your hobby project or for your company's product, without having a Facebook account. It is always possible to find hidden costs in free products, so what? You can do the same for paid-for products. The idea that a Blu-Ray player won't spy on you because the manufacturer paid some royalties is... flawed.

No but it does grow the economy. Things you buy with the borrowed money count towards the GDP.

If you have people buying and selling nothing that's going to be a small economy.

If you have the same people, with the same wealth, buying and selling stuff to each other, that grows the economy.

If you have the same people buying and selling stuff faster, they may still retain the same wealth but the economy will grow even further.

The size of the economy is about the number of transactions, and printing money or borrowing money can definitely grow the economy (IF that money gets used to accelerate economic transactions).

I'm impressed by the lengths to which the authors must go and have gone to refute the skeptics' counter-explanations. For example, they simulated the presence of a potentially observing competitor using an audio recording of a competitor that was not actually observing the raven caching its food. Indeed otherwise a skeptic might claim that the caching raven was acting as "observed" in response to the different sound, rather than (as the authors want to show) because it inferred that it can be seen when the peephole is open.

The main idea is to have every line of text fall on an evenly spaced grid. Here's an example where the middle paragraph is not grid aligned: https://i.stack.imgur.com/XskJu.png

Generally you also want the baseline of titles to fall on the grid. Possibly also the formulas, figures etc.

LaTeX is pretty bad at this: by default it inserts stretchable vertical space between paragraphs, and around things like bullet lists, centered text and formulas.

Stretchable space is a good thing when you have a lot of elements beside simple paragraphs: it gives TeX flexibility to produce a nice page layout. For example the optimal spacing around equations might not be a multiple of the inter-line space. And you might still want to have the last line land precisely at the bottom of the page, so there must be a stretchable space somewhere. This flexibility also helps avoiding widows and orphans[1].

On the other hand I think non-grid-aligned text looks terrible for novels, especially when the page is thin and you can see through the paper the text on the other side (it's much less noticeable if the lines on both sides are perfectly aligned). Grid typesetting is also nice when you have multiple columns of text on the same page: it looks odd if the lines of one column are not aligned with those in the next column.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult.

I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.

Indeed...

From the article: "He definitely goes where there is government money".

In other words, he definitely goes where we wish more people would go.

This reminds me of Cloud Atlas...

There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well.

The natural order is the law of the jungle. The strong eats/exploits the weak. Would you agree that this is the most natural order? I think the whole point of civilization is that we can do better than that.

Let's define socialism as the collective control and ownership of the means of production and their profits, and capitalism as the private ownership of these things. In this case I'm not sure which is intrinsically more "fair". I care deeply about individual freedom and not having some collective telling me how I should live my life. But at the same time I care a lot about social justice and not having the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.

It seems obvious that a good system would be one that strikes the right balance between these conflicting interests. It certainly isn't whatever is most "natural". Nature serves no purpose.

Also, a force we have to contend with is the development of technology. I think it has the consequence that the "right balance" is shifting more towards intervention from the state: due to increasing automation, the capital is getting an ever greater share of profits. At some point the state has to intervene to enable some redistribution of wealth.

It's too bad the vision depicted at the beginning of the article (full texts potentially available in all libraries), didn't come true. But I feel that the public did get the most important benefit from the project: the ability to search these books. I've been researching a history of science subject recently and it's amazing the amount of information I could get from Google Books and nowhere else online. And where the snippets are not enough, I have the book title and author name, so I know where to look for the information in print.

If you consider Nature in general, nothing is good or bad. Colder is better for organisms that prefer cold, warmer for those that prefer warm. No life at all might be best for the geological (or should I say areological) wonders on Mars.

Ethically speaking, I think most climate change "alarmists" (what is the equivalent word with positive connotation?) are either worried for the species that will go extinct, or the poorer humans that will suffer the most from it.

The BSD license is developer-centered. It's awesome for developers, mostly avoiding any licensing headache.

The GPL is user-centered. It's not designed to be nice to developers, but to protect the user's freedoms.

So to a first approximation I expect that developers that think more of developer's freedoms favor the BSD license, while developers that think more of user freedoms favor the GPL.

we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders...

Number of executive orders per president, per year in office[1]:

  Theodore Roosevelt    144.7
  William Howard Taft   181.0
  Woodrow Wilson        225.4
  Warren G. Harding     216.9
  Calvin Coolidge       215.2
  Herbert Hoover        242.0
  Franklin D. Roosevelt 307.8
  Harry S. Truman       116.7
  Dwight D. Eisenhower  60.5
  John F. Kennedy       75.4
  Lyndon B. Johnson     62.9
  Richard Nixon         62.3
  Gerald Ford           69.1
  Jimmy Carter          80.0
  Ronald Reagan         47.6
  George H. W. Bush     41.5
  Bill Clinton          45.5
  George W. Bush        36.4
  Barack Obama          34.6

All the data I have seen point to "altruism" [1] more than a war with Microsoft. Consider the list of Project Zero reports where the deadline was exceeded (thanks to brainfog for the URL): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?can=1&q...

[1] Certainly not literally altruism. I suppose Google thinks this projects benefits everybody including themselves.

This a pretty magical solution.

- Backward compatible. No API change.

- Naive, idiomatic and wrong use of the API automatically becomes naive, idiomatic and correct: Existing code that was using wall-clock time will now be using monotonic time when it should, and only when it should [1]

- No change to the memory footprint on 64-bit systems

- No change to the range of representable dates [2]

"No API change" means if for some reason it turns out to be a bad idea, they can still revert it and stay backward compatible (though of course, the documentation will mention how monotonic times are used to calculate better time differences and that would no longer be true after a revert).

Very impressed with the extensive survey of existing code which didn't find a single case where the change would cause an issue.

[1] Except when a user got out of their way to calculate a time difference in a non-idiomatic way.

[2] The range is only restricted when monotonic time information is present, which cannot sensibly be the case outside the restricted range.

On Unix, an empty file is a working implementation of the "true" command (provided that is in the PATH and set as executable). This is because it is interpreted as a shell script, and an empty script of course exits successfully.

I'm pretty sure this was actually used in some Unix/Linux version, and they got bug reports due to the poor performance (executing a shell to do nothing), which makes for a lot of bugs per line of code. Unfortunately I can't find a reference. Instead I found that AT&T Unix implemented "true" as an empty file... with a copyright notice! See http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html

IIRC you could resize the standard cmd console easily, just type "mode 160" (or whatever width you want). I don't have a Windows installation around to check it, but maybe someone can confirm?

You're right of course about the GC metrics. And there was some disappointing increase of GC CPU usage with the 1.8 changes (I don't now the current status). But some of the items you mention (package management, mature optimization framework) will hardly make cases where Go cannot be used, which was the original point. Same for concurrent data structures which can be implemented in Go, even if the lack of generics makes it less convenient. I do agree with you regarding the other items.

Indeed. But looking at the GC improvements in Go 1.8 ("typical" GC pauses of less than 100us), the set of cases where you can't use the language might be shrinking significantly. Now if only they could turn that in some sort of guarantee...

I don't think this is right. The energy of a photon is h multiplied by the frequency, but the frequency itself can be anything. Even if the process creating the photon is inherently quantized (e.g. bound electron with quantized energy levels), we will measure slightly different frequencies (and so different energies), due for example to the Doppler effect[1]. Still with the Doppler effect, you can give a photon an arbitrary frequency (energy) by changing the velocity of the reference frame where you make the measurement (that is, until someone shows that the velocity of the reference frame is quantized... not something that is presently known).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_broadening

So beautiful and upsetting at the same time. Is there any way we can donate to this lawyer and these refugees?

The last thing, about the Oliver Stone movie, what a shame.

Thanks, impressive foresight in the last paragraph (as of today; the picture might yet get bigger of course):

The drive for the Euro has been motivated by politics not economics. The aim has been to link Germany and France so closely as to make a future European war impossible, and to set the stage for a federal United States of Europe. I believe that adoption of the Euro would have the opposite effect. It would exacerbate political tensions by converting divergent shocks that could have been readily accommodated by exchange rate changes into divisive political issues. Political unity can pave the way for monetary unity. Monetary unity imposed under unfavorable conditions will prove a barrier to the achievement of political unity.

Or do you just disagree with his methods?

What do you mean with "just"? The methods employed to reach a goal can have downsides (side effects) that dwarf the benefits of reaching the goal.

At least they eat their own dog food.

Are they at war with the Taliban?

The US haven't formally been at war with anyone since WWII[1], so we must rely on an informal definition of war (otherwise even Vietnam would be excluded).

A middle-ground definition of war that requires parties to be nation states but doesn't require a declaration of war, seems a bit arbitrary.

Instead of declaring war, the US now has Congress-sanctioned "use of military force". This includes the current "conflict" with the Taliban regime.

In this context the line between war casualties and assassination is very blurry. I think the blur itself might be one of the worst things about this new way of waging war.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/all-the-...

Mandatory health insurance is another good example:[1]

In 1890 the constitution was changed by popular vote to give the federal government the authority and duty to establish a health care system, either voluntary or mandatory.

A project for mandatory accident and health insurance passed the parliament in 1899, but a referendum was requested and the proposed law was rejected by popular vote in 1900.

A new law was passed in 1911, keeping the mandatory accident insurance but leaving the states free to make health insurance voluntary or mandatory. This law survived a referendum in 1912.

Attempts at revising the health insurance law failed in the 20's, 40's and 50's.

A popular initiative for mandatory health insurance failed the vote in 1974. A counter-project submitted by the government, with mandatory coverage for large risks only, also failed the vote.

Finally, another popular initiative for mandatory health insurance is deposited in 1986. The government prepares an indirect counter-project, resulting in a law that includes mandatory health insurance. The law is adopted by the parliament in March 1994, but a referendum is requested. Both the initiative and the referendum on the law are submitted to a popular vote in December 1994. The initiative fails by 76.6% "no" while the counter-project passes by 51.8% "yes".

[1] http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D16608.php

It wasn't even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system. Davlik isn't drop-in compatible with the JVM anyway.

I have seen this argument a lot but it doesn't make sense to me. Who says it has to be a drop-in replacement at the binary level to have interoperability value? The source-level interoperability is obviously valuable to developers, why ignore it?

It's quite a stretch to say that the FSF supported Oracle before the Supreme Court. Also you seem to think that the FSF supports API copyrightability as a means of making free software more attractive to developers. This is not at all their position. Here is what they said at the time of the Jury verdict in the first trial[1]:

Were it grounded in reality, Oracle's claim that copyright law gives them proprietary control over any software that uses a particular functional API would be terrible for free software and programmers everywhere. It is an unethical and greedy interpretation created with the express purpose of subjugating as many computer users as possible, and is particularly bad in this context because it comes at a time when the sun has barely set on the free software community's celebration of Java as a language newly suitable for use in the free world. Fortunately, the claim is not yet reality, and we hope Judge Alsup will keep it that way.

As for their brief against Google's petition to the Supreme Court[2]:

SFLC and FSF take the position that the decision below is wrong, but that certiorari should not be granted for three reasons: (1) the decision of the Federal Circuit merely mispredicts what the Ninth Circuit would do if it had been the Court resolving Oracle's appeal from the District Court's finding that the application program interface declarations at issue are non-copyrightable; (2) the decision rests on narrow factual grounds; and (3) there is no public interest in continuing to adjudicate this dispute because Google can now and could have used all material at issue under the terms of the GNU GPL v2.

What to make of this? It's a bit convoluted. On the general issue of proprietary APIs, the FSF supports Google's position. But they think the judgement against Google from the Federal Circuit court carries virtually no value as precedent, as they say in their brief[3]:

Despite the manifestly erroneous character of the decision below, the petition for writ of certiorari should not be granted. The precedential weight of a decision so evidently mispredicting the law of another Circuit is essentially nil.

Now independently of the Oracle v. Google dispute, they would prefer if Google were using the GPL license for Android. Wouldn't it be nice if the bad Federal Circuit judgment could incentivize Google to use the GPL, without affecting other cases? I think that is the tactical advantage the FSF saw in opposing Google's petition to the Supreme Court. And it might have been a good call, as Google is indeed switching to the GPL Java implementation[4].

[1] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-statement-on-jurys-partial-verd...

[2] https://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2014/dec/08/sflc-files-...

[3] https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2014/google_v_orac...

[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switche...