kds

Nicely implemented chat services are in demand, or so it seems. They might be sold into the billions and monetized with ads, and I guess the negative spin comes from purely business origin, though disguised as concerns of crypto professionals.

BTW, if Telegram crypto was that much insecure why members of the so-called "security community" haven't yet compromised the Telegram chat for real (regardless of any contests and petty rules) and proven they had been right?

I don't rule out this as impossible - I just think that without such proof it's all just a kind of stupid whining.

Misleading title. This has nothing to do with privacy and encryption. Just to quote a couple of recent Pavel Durov's tweets: "To media covering us this week: Telegram channels are public broadcasts. They are the opposite of private chats. Please don't mix the two."... "Our policy is simple: privacy is paramount. Public channels, however, have nothing to do with privacy. ISIS public channels will be blocked."

EU is not a state with a single national mindset and identity - it's a bag of different countries with different fragmented cultures and languages. China has its Baidu and Qzone, and Russia has its Yandex and VK. All this in spite of the obvious lack of Silicon Valley analogs.

I believe the multi-millionaire publisher Felix Dennis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dennis) in a certain sense would not quite agree...

In his book "How to Get Rich" he related his hint to pioneer PC-magazines publishing to his interest in early PC-games.

This seems to be the case PG wrote recently in his latest essay - when someone is experiencing a new thing purely as a user, not developer, and feeling and thinking about what's still missing that could be useful to others like him.

Well, maybe the way Danny Ocean (George Cloony) manages his team in Ocean's Twelve (the movie) - tight team, clear plan, known desirable end-result, exact subtasks and timing, confidence in the experts' abilities (proven before).. A sense of common purpose, unity, and perhaps friendship helps also.

There is a book, "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy"(2010), by Joseph Stiglitz - an economist of Nobel prize fame and former Chief Economist of the World Bank, who very early saw the coming of the global crisis and was laughed at in 2005-2006 for his opinion, esp. at a then held Davos summit.

In his book he elaborates deeply - but accessibly for "laymen" - what went wrong, how it could be fixed, but against whose interests in US the ideal public policy solution would have been, and so why just a dubious set of half-measures were taken, by whom, and how it might all worsen as situation in the near future.

So far, for the period from 2010 to 2012, what he claims and predicts seems right and rings true to me.

I did not see in the presentation the following code snippet:

"from twisted.internet import protocol, reactor"

Somehow I feel cheated... ;) :P

This is indeed very revealing on the interesting qualities/properties of the engine => "...and so I was watching how this game developed – Houdini sacrificed a pawn, two pawn, three pawns in a queen-less middle game, to end up winning the game in convincing fashion. During the game I wasn't sure at all that what we were seeing was a brilliant game – and not some obscure bugs I’d left in the engine… I don’t think any other engine could have played this game the way Houdini did..."

Big problems - sometimes before even to be formulated and asked - require big fundamental and applicative science research programmes and the respective advancement.

These are not something to be expected from venture capital. They are something resulting from deliberate state scientific and industrial policy, longterm goals, and adequate funding.

Examples from 1950s-1970s: DARPA/USA, and the resp. space and rocketry programmes in the former USSR.

Private capital - be it venture or not - comes later (and this is not a bad thing) when the new technologies are relatively well understood , "tameable", and can be applied to mass human consumers' or corporate needs (perceived or not, new or old) yet to be satisfied.

Private capital doesn't like fundamental scientific research risks - even in the pharmacy industry. It tries to bear mostly the market-related and implementational risks.

A thought experiment: Think on what funds and in what conditions happened the development of packet switching, TCP/IP protocols suite, HTTP, (examples of fundamental breakthrough). Then think the same about Facebook, for example.

My point summarized => States/Governments shouldn't worry about entrepreneurship programmes, clusters, tech-business climat, etc.

If adequate funding is provided for breakthrough scientific research and to the universities in general (so there are also the high-quality scientists to do it), breakthrough technology business solving big problems will happen inevitably.

The title of the submission is a bit misleading.

PG explicitly states in the essay that it's not that much on Java itself but rather on the way hackers judge technologies (the "hacker radar" in his expression).

And these are not quite predictions but statements on how Java is (or was then back in 2001) perceived.

And I think, IMHO, a substantial part of the Java success today should be attributed to the JVM, not so much to Java, the language. Clojure/Scala/etc. are kind of clues for this.

I can't wait for the next Hollywood sci-fi movie in which aliens discover Earth just to find out that humanity wiped out itself to extinction or mysteriously left the planet for some reason... but Facebook, YouTube, and Google - as computational infrastructures - still work (powered on by means of a rusty switch in some dark industrial facility room) and they start to learn about humans from their profiles.

How did he manage to find you after 20 years?

The graph is built according to Facebook data, as the article claims. Certain edges and vertices should be easy to check then.

It was RMS in the beginning - he built the foundations: the software (GCC, the GNU-project, Emacs), the philosophy and the values (his essays and interviews), the organisation (FSF), the copyleft legal rights (GPL).

ESR wouldn't be as recognizable as he is if he had chosen to opine on something less important and influential than RMS and his contribution.

Congrats to the courageous - and experienced! - startup founders with kids and supporting wives - I wish them great success.

This sounds really cool and might lead to some changes in user behavior and usage patterns - since users would have the ability to judge objectively on their usage.

Thanks for sharing your opinion - I'd give them credit, though. At least they've discovered the virus during their investigative research.

Thanks for the securelist-link. It's indeed a better source for some technical details, also from a Kaspersky expert... But in the RT-interview the Kaspersky's chief malware expert says things that concur with what you share: "There is no reliable relation between Stuxnet and Flame as we call it…they are completely different. Because Stuxnet was a small application developed for a particular target with the specific objective to interact with industrial control systems and break them down. And Flame is a universal attacking tool kit used mostly for cyber espionage."

"It was actually after an inquiry from the International Telecommunications Union, which is a part of the United Nations, who actually asked us to start conducting research" ...Wow, this sounds serious, indeed.

http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Minesweeper/

"It's not often you can win a million dollars by analysing a computer game, but by a curious conjunction of fate, there's a chance that you might."

-- prof. Ian Stuart, in a lecture on Minesweeper and P-vs-NP

An interesting observation, indeed - so the enhancement opportunities were effectively explored within the first year or so. The next two years count for far less, though I guess the cleverest approaches started to emerge just then.

Well, the widely-known real example I mention is the Netflix Prize result -> 3.3% CAGR (cumulative annual growth rate, the 10% is for the whole period of 3 years, not for 1 year).

The numbers you mention are the hypothetical ones. Go and find a real publicly documented example that is close as values and margins to what you describe and I might agree.

NB. #1) Google and web-search, or some similar startup success story, as example doesn't count - they're the 2-person startup gone wildly successful, not a previously big entity that hired 2 ML-geniuses to open their eyes.

NB. #2) If I could bring a revolutionary increased value to a company - through vastly enhanced data processing and analysis - rather than doing a consultancy and educate somebody I'd rather enter the industry as competitor and prove the "old" guys don't understand the business anymore.

10% increase in 3 years translates to around. 3.3% yearly growth rate. So in your example the 3.3% increase would be that 10M$ => so 1% of your annual business revenue is 10/3.3 or just above 3M$.

But that means you already have a really significant business that makes ~300 M$ per year. And you manage to increase it just by peanuts (relatively speaking).

And there is inflation in economy, and the alternative costs of not investing such a huge sum or part of in Apple stocks (for example) during those years.

My point explained better:

The startup success of getting from zero to millions just because of clever ML/data-science/statistics is something to be respected and admired. But for already big-business all this big-data buzz might provide just minor enhancement opportunities at best.

I felt a similar kind of skepticism when I saw it took ~3 years to improve the Netflix recommendation system with just ~10% - in the context of the Netflix Prize, with great minds (data scientists and practitioners) participating and collaborating.

Maybe the initial system was quite good and it had no space for easy-and-fast enhancements, I don't know.

But 10% overall improvement result in 3 years (just as quantitative ratio, esp. if it translates directly to the same growth pattern in financial revenues) is something that makes the business types yawning.

From the respective wikipedia links:

"Tunguska-M1 offers a 360-degree field of view, a detection range of around 18 km and can detect targets flying as low as 15 m"

"The specific feature of the Pantsir-S1 system is the combination of a multiple-band target acquisition and tracking system in conjunction with a combined missile and gun armament creating a continuous target engagement zone from 5 m height and 200 m range up to 10 km height and 20 km range, even without any external support".

My point is that in the near future you can't expect much from drones in real-action offensive missions - regardless where the hit should come (from the drone itself or from somewhere else where the drone relays the gathered info) - against an army with the relevant technical base to counter either the drone or the in-flying tactical rocket.

Of course, now they are quite OK and up to the task to chase Taliban guerilla fighters, "police" the sky, or something like that. On the longer-term perspectives I can't say anything.

Well, if you're approaching a senior age, and you've been recognized for your fundamental breakthrough scientific research in computer science - that you made while having fun writing software - maybe you should think also about writing a book, besides perhaps taking that academic position you rightly were offered.

The 1,5 million dollar missiles (and more expensive ones) will be used for destroying the command centres controlling the pilot-less planes. Most of them as current locations are known even now.

A flock of such air-crafts in a fleet formation if used for massive offensive action (like the Luftwaffe-style bombings in WW2) could be "switched off" with an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse in the most severe case. Besides this extremity - a distributed but single-coordination-and-control battery of modern ground mobile anti-aircraft defence rocket complexes can deal with tens to up to a few hundreds flying units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir-S1 ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K22_Tunguska).

I don't think that in the observable future these drones could be something more than a single-plane single-mission reconnaissance tool used strictly against technologically vastly inferior armies/societies.

But you've seen the GCC - the thing that compiles the Linux kernel, right? The default C - and some more languages - compiler on almost any Linux or BSD system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection

It's the GCC and the related tools, my friend, that made possible the GNU Linux OS and its kernel, and a multitude of other open source (free!) software. And also the GPL license, of course.

People shouldn't be so fixed just on Emacs as the only Stallman's contribution and defining legacy in the software world. IMHO, his editor is the least important thing he created.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

I'd have appreciated such a step and public online announcement of its motivations if done before Christmas. Not after the bonus payment.