shubble

The articles criticism I think stems from the same feeling of discomfort I got when I understood a bit better how drugs are developed.

As a culture I think we have a certain faith in the medical system to save us from death, the same way previous generations looked to priests to save the spirit.

The inference you mention 'high HDL is associated with low cardiac arrest, therefore a drug that increases HDL might help is more vague than a layman expects. It's like saying 'I want a safe car, and German tend to be safe, therefore I will buy a German' - it's valid in the absence of a real understanding of how to specify and select a safe car, but it's more vague than you'd be comfortable with. You expect an engineering company to be able to specify a safe car based on deep knowledge. But because our understanding of the disease, and of what different chemicals can do is incomplete, a drug company can't do that. Instead, they follow as many hints as they can to select a chemical that might work, and then advance it through a series of progressively more expensive trials until they are pretty sure it does more good than harm.

That's a valid way of doing things, and at the moment it's all we can do. But it's not what a layman imagines, or certainly not what this one imagined. It undermines our sense of control - our sense that we are immortal and can get on with making an angry birds clone to get rich because there will be plenty of time to do the projects we want to after the payoff - it's not like we are going to die of heart disease, science has our back on that one!

Or maybe I'm generalizing my personal feelings too much?

Microsoft seem to have a vision for their device which is quite different from the IPAD. Perhaps I'm reading between the lines too much.

Imagine a tablet that connected wirelessly to a nearby monitor and keyboard. Imagine arriving at your desk, placing your device in a charging station, picking up the mouse, and working on your device as a desktop.

Imagine picking up the device to go to a meeting, using it as a tablet to browse your colleagues slides while she talked. Imagine it's your turn. You touch the screen, and the projector takes its feed from your device screen instead, wirelessly. You can change slides by gesture, draw with your finger to illustrate your talk, and run the programs you have developed and make changes. After all, this is your development machine.

Laptops already do a lot of this but they are cumbersome. Mostly, people want to read on the move, and that's what a tablet is for, consuming data.

Anyway, that's where I think Microsoft is going, but it's been a long day and I'm talking out my ass. Would you actually find a device like this an improvement on a laptop?

I think this has to be tempered with an acceptance that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes you are not the right person for 'that' job.

If you are working in a team at a big company it's easy to recognize this because the person who is sits in the next cubicle. Programmers don't start making product flyers because the marketing guy always does them so well.

But working alone, when do you decide to hire another freelancer to do that bit? A friend who designs games always hires artists to concept how important models should look. They send him some pencil sketches. Surely he could save money by coming up with an idea and just drawing it, it's not hard... But the ideas from a good concept artist are just better than what he or I would do. They spend a lot of time getting so skilled, and if he invested that same time, no game would get made.

So yeah, knowing how to do everything is good, but spotting when you need to have spent those 10'000 hours more so...

So you've been doing the minimalist living thing? Do you find yourself spending more or less time in the virtual world, having made the physical one a little less comfortable? Also, as an aside, how do you deal with the expectations of the opposite gender?

I got no mail, and was signed up for ai, ml, db. It seems only ai is open to registration so far, perhaps to get an idea of demand and discover bugs...

An irc channel on freenode would be ideal. How about irc://irc.freenode.net/#ai-class

I'm one of those people who didn't get a Google Plus invite, so maybe I'm a bit bitter.

But no one else I know did either.

If facebook can replicate Plus's killer features, even approximately, before it gets put on open beta, it will lose it's ability to win users. Why would you want to maintain 2 social networking profiles when both networks do approximately the same thing?

Imagining that the release is true, this will do strange things for pay bargaining. Imagine if you could look up your colleagues before asking for a rise? On the other hand, I don't recall anything really horrific on that form. Enough data to steal my identity and take out a mortgage in my name, yes. Enough to embarrass me? no...

The illegal technology is so ubiquitous you don't even notice it. As far as I know the DVD player in VLC is illegal. Does anyone remember when the blueray key was released? Without that I just don't think opensource playback would be possible, and it remains illegal to distribute. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

In some public NATO reports, they said that during the Kosovo thing, NATO hackers took out specific Serbian radar installations to cover for the strike planes. I guess the Serbians didn't get the memo about putting critical infrastructure on a routable network...

That's sort of like saying that software piracy is theft.

Blaming victims for rape is dangerous because it discourages victims from coming forward, and adds to intense feelings of shame and guilt that come with sexual violation. It also tends to come with suggestions that women should restrict their behavior, not seeking to be attractive or acting in 'risky' stereotypically male ways.

Criticizing a cooperation for failing to follow security best practice, and speculating about the effect of outsourcing or technology is completely different. I'd say that as a lot of people here run websites, it's probably a good idea too.

I don't think a rational justification is really important to these people, but I believe a lot of the initial anger came from sony removing features from the original playstation.

A major feature, removed by automatic patching, as a non-legal reaction to a previous jail beak attempt, was the ability to run a second OS such as linux. You might recall stories about people using networks of play-stations running linux, with their unusual cell processor architecture, to crack wpa, or model the weather.

This wasn't to sony's benefit. The playstation was a cheap way of getting the cell chip rather than buying blades full of them from IBM, absolutely because sony sold the consoles below cost and hoped to make the money back from game royalties.

The ability to run pirate, or unlicensed home-brew games threatened sonys ability to recoup this money from normal users, so they pulled second OS.

A lot of users chose the playstation over alternatives because it would run linux. It was a nice dual use 'TV media PC' and console. Sony removed the feature that they paid money for. The users were upset, probably more upset than they were by the hotz thing which was a bit abstract.

But I don't think these hackers cared, personally.

I've heard that unlike say steel, the majority of gold ever mined is still in circulation, and by circulation I mean locked vaults. A few large organizations control the vast majority of it, and this is especially true since governments have not needed to hold gold for years. The reason for the scarcity of gold, and it's value, is that this gold is not for sale. One gold owning organization could make a great deal in other currencies by attacking the gold market, much as quantum fund used it's sterling holdings to attack the British currency with great success.

Lots of people seem to think gold is 'safer' than paper currencies, while it seems the same. Am I missing something important here?

I've been using emacs for a few months now (it's surprisingly good), and am starting to run into wanting to do little modifications. Speaking as a non-lisper, I really wish a rewrite existed in a more modern language. I don't wanna start an argument about lisp here but there is a reason people don't use it for major developments, and it's not the performance. But it would be unfair not to point out that you can extend emacs in a variety of languages including python. Its just a bit messier.

I love the response. Anyone compiled it? What does the weird return code do?

This presentation: http://goo.gl/hgkea [pdf], shows why skype is evil.

The protocol and client are both obfuscated at cost to performance and security. Exploits have been found repeatedly for everything from remote code execution to using skype clients like a botnet.

Non-NAT'd nodes are forced to carry traffic for NATed nodes. Skype have the ability to intercept your calls, but you guessed that anyway.

Also, if everyone in the world used one phone company, or bank, and that company refused to allow other new companies to inter-operate, they would face antitrust. Skype, and arguably facebook, control their markets. They should be forced to allow inter-op.

Most of the time, IDEs get these features by calling CLI programs. It's very easy to call CLI programs from VIM/EMACS, and set up bindings to make it very quick. As for code navigation, plugins let you navigate to functions, explore projects / directories, and intelisense.

On the one hand, when developing for a new platform or language, you spend some extra time tweaking on VIM, rather than being able to use the platform developers Eclipse GUI immediately. On the other hand, I've found that being exposed to the command line tools with all their arguments, you are more able to fix problems and automate tasks.

No one want's to be a second tier friend.

But it seems to me most people have up to 10 close friends, up to 100 sort of friends (the colleague you like and talk to daily, but wouldn't ask about your sexual problems), and then a large number of people they want to follow or not fall completely out of touch with (second tier friends who you no longer work with, but might ask a favor at some point).

I've found that people get upset if you don't ad them on facebook. It marks them as unimportant to you. I doubt they'd like to be categorized as a second tier friend, or demoted to third tier.

I'd say rather than creating categories, it would be better to allow users to make groups of friends, and select which group gets which news. That way you could say "Oh I'm sorry I didn't invite you to my party, I had you down under work people"...

I haven't been following while you wrote this, so maybe a video where you do a brief outline of the chapters and what we can expect to get out of them would help us decide whether to buy. Also, please consider selling as an ebook. Good Luck.