Programmatic

At the risk of derailing this conversation, do you have resources to show that transitioning works? The debate on both sides has muddied the water for me and I'd love to see evidence for this. Thanks in advance.

At least there were options that were grouped in a sane fashion and discoverable while I was in a particular screen trying to grope around to find a setting that I needed to change. about:config is not discoverable in any way, shape, or form and we've lost the ability to discover capabilities that you don't look for in particular via a broader search. The ability to find something in passing that is related to your mission has severely diminished.

Meanwhile, I fire up the average application that uses the Gnome HIG spec, and I find it horrendous to use. They take it a number of steps further and remove, completely and thoroughly, any ability to customize. I very much like the Apple mentality circa 2005 with sane, intelligent defaults, a small number of configuration options in a small number of screens, and an advanced button for everything else. Apple did a very good job back then of making their software feature complete and customizeable without making it a shit show in either the too dumb or too complex direction.

I can give the quantum of the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're just possibly overly defensive for SQL injections if they're using the DB to do the hashing. They should be using parametrization anyhow and HAND, but maybe they missed that memo.

You omitted the bit just above your quote, which says:

>> A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward or forward. Allowances may be made for adjustments to capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers. Examples in English include “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”, “Amor, Roma”, “race car”, “stack cats”, “step on no pets”, “taco cat”, “put it up”, “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” and “No ‘x’ in Nixon”.

Given the last sentence, doesn't that change the meaning of your sentence to directly refute your interpretation?

The AK in particular is an interesting weapon in that the controlled part (legislation around guns deals with the concrete part that "is" the firearm, which is the action that houses nearly all of the other parts) is made out of stamped/bent sheet metal.

The harder part in the case of an AK is the parts kit that has all of the other parts that must be actually machined. Step 0 of making an AK from a shovel is "buy a parts kit made from an entire old, previously functional gun minus the sheet metal and wooden furniture". In terms of making a true firearm from scratch an AK would still be fairly difficult. In terms of making a technical "firearm" (the controlled part), the AK is one of the simplest.

I may be assuming ill intent where there is none, but I feel like that's part of the plan of the entities (Google, FaceBook) that automate recommendations: get you to discard that nagging feeling like you're missing something of actual importance, and just get your info from the feed. If I were nefarious and had their real estate, I would certainly like to not be transparent so that I could manipulate things without people being able to tell or complain.

> So I try to embrace the bubble when it is useful for me. I appreciate that when I type "something something python" into google the top results are relavant to my work and not about snakes or comedians. But when I'm want to form a politcal opinion I use duckduckgo and activly look for contrary positions.

I have a hard time feeling like it's helping me when I get filter bubbled; I feel like I'm more productive and on point when I know where I am in relation to the rest of the world for whatever reason. The feeling when you learn what to search to get the desired specialized results instead of other general usages by adding keywords or going to sites that are more specialized themselves (e.g. stackoverflow where you can search [r] to search posts tagged with "r" in particular) is wonderful. You opt in to a bubble of a particular sort versus not knowing what else there is out there. I tend to feel a bit... disgusted with Google deciding what's good for me during a given search.

That solution would fail to catch several of the examples that were requested to be caught. Sometimes something that appears overengineered is built that way to meet the actual requirements a problem presents.

What's your preferred solution?

He's not expecting the use of a regex to do the whole heavy lifting of checking for a palindrome, in the example he uses it for the replace functionality to remove non-alphanumeric characters.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e8553707cd6162040e7d12b2a1...

stringToTest = stringToTest.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0–9]/ig, '');

Access to popular applications that you and your staff are familiar with and can use anywhere on a plethora of other devices, potential simplicity compared to maintaining Linux on the desktop.

He was pointing out that you mixed your units in your analysis. You divided annual cost by daily ridership for the cost instead of multiplying the daily ridership for annual ridership. I think he was short in how he pointed this out to you. That being said, as the one presenting the data I believe it's in your interests to ensure that what you wrote is accurate. When someone shows inaccuracies, I think it's disingenuous to continue to use data that has been shown to be flawed. That was more tersely expressed as "you should take it down."

I would recommend changing your units in your site to either be all daily, or all annual. This means that you could meaningfully present and compare percentages of ridership, like I did for ATL above.

Getting back to the numbers at hand, YUL has 82% O&D[0], meaning that for 15M passengers there will be (15m * .82 / 365) -> 33,298 daily users. 30% daily ridership does seem like a steep target to hit. If you get the O&D numbers for all of the airports and compare daily values, you may still be able to express you idea and make a case without people being distracted by inconsistencies.

Another factor to add, eyeballing your graph, would be the correlation of metro ridership to the percentage of airport passengers opting into the metro. The numbers for the southern US would probably be explained by a poorer metro compared to SF and the northeast.

You put yourself out there, and you obviously are passionate about your subject, but please take a step back to look at the suggestions and how they will improve your case or show you new insights.

[0] http://www.admtl.com/sites/default/files/RA2015_A.pdf "The percentage of connecting or transit traffic held steady at about 18%, i.e., nearly one in five passengers, or 2.8 million people for the year, had an airport of origin or destination other than YUL."

Indeed. That was the first thing that caught my eye in the graph since I enjoy using the MARTA system in ATL when I go there and it's pretty busy. It didn't pass the sniff test when I saw that.

I did some quick digging. The term to google to get local traffic without connecting passenger info is "origin and destination", and it looks like O&D is about a third of the overall traffic[0] since there are ~45m total enplaned annually and of that ~15m enplaned from origin. Doubling the enplaned number to get the enplaned and deplaned number would be about 82k daily average. With 10k daily metro riders, 12% ridership seems pretty good.

[0]: "ATL is anchored by a large, local traffic base with 15 million O&D enplaned passengers for fiscal year (FY) 2014." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fitch-upgrades-atlanta-ga-pas...

Without copyright, anyone could make a knockoff Apple and it would dilute their brand so much as to make it unworkable for Apple to make a quality product and get paid for it. Apple absolutely requires copyright protection of their software to keep their brand exclusive to drive profit to keep making nice products. The PC world that you noted is the epitome of the race to the bottom they would have to participate in otherwise.

From the perspective of the farmer it's still worse than zero-sum because they've paid to become educated while still bringing home the same amount of income. This scenario also assumed that education brought real productivity gains vs. being a signal.

This is more about what Acton was saying, so we're looking at good and bad from his perspective. I don't think we need to invoke moral relativity as we already have a frame of reference. He seems to have clearly indicted men of power unless there's text that I have omitted stating otherwise.

You can inspect the element and delete it to gain full access to the article. Lots of sites like to put a noscript div up that obscures the article, but the full text is underneath. No ajax trickery here.

I don't think that interpretation jibes with the text:

Assertion:

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases."

Rationale:

"Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

He then goes on to rail against people that hold power:

"Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

Without the idea that power tends to corrupt those in power, there would be no reason to presume that they did wrong by default or to say that people who exercise influence and authority are bad men.

I do agree that there's no easy way thought this, and it sounds like we'll likely have irreconcilable viewpoints. I hope that you will at least seek to ensure that the constitutional rights everyone are upheld, even for people that you find repugnant. If we don't uphold fundamental rights for the worst of us, the powers that be can use that as the thin edge of the wedge to remove those rights for the rest of us. It was enjoyable to converse with you, have a good one.

> There is abuse of children, then there's the act of making recordings of it for others to consume. The latter certainly functions on a demand curve, as it takes more work to produce something than it is to just do it.

With the Rhino argument, the entire reason for the act occurring is economic (kill rhino, collect horn, get paid). For paedos, the act occurs because they want to do it. Being able to gain social standing or affirmation is secondary. People record child pornography for posterity without distributing it.

> There probably isn't much rationality to it. Legislation is more of a political process than a rational one.

Agreed, and that is the thesis of my argument.

> I would agree with that assessment. But there's also a shocking amount of truly, unbearably horrific content in the world. Disgust may not be the most rational basis to make something illegal on, but it's better than nothing. Laws are intended to be iterated on over time, a more nuanced view will eventually prevail, though it might take decades.

Disgust is not a reasonable basis for making something illegal. At a bare minimum, I believe that the first amendment rights of people drawing depictions of child abuse are being violated. But it's "icky" and not politically viable to defend, so nobody defends them.

> Paedophilia is not illegal. It's child abuse and possession of child pornography that's illegal. You can't convict someone of being a paedophile, there's no law against it.

Possession of something that depicts, but is not, child pornography is also illegal (and to your point, irrational to make illegal).

At the risk of losing my footing to try to make a point, I think it's somewhat similar if someone said "Being homosexual isn't illegal but engaging in any act whatsoever, whether it victimizes anyone or not, is." We've already ruled that sodomy laws violate people's constitutional rights. I'm not saying that paedophiles should have the right to express their affinity with children (they cannot consent), but removing all outlets for it smacks of trying to pray the gay away.

I think our nation would be far more sane if we decriminalized mere possession of child pornography, as disgusting as it is. I would rather have my fifth amendment right not to decrypt a drive than catch people that have not directly (and I would argue also not indirectly) harmed anyone by viewing images.

1) Are you advancing the argument that abuse of children is an economic response to demand, and not that the perpetrator wanted to do it in the first place? 2) How does this argument explain the illegality of drawings depicting underage sex with none of the depictions being based on a real-life individual?

Somewhat unrelated (I'm not trying to set up a straw man here), I believe that it's more consistent to believe that society finds paedophilia to be disgusting and that due to their disgust that paedophiles should be jailed. I believe that this is due to the conflation of thoughts with actions, and the belief that someone with those thoughts will always be prone to action. It's a somewhat risky viewpoint to espouse that "paedophilia in and of itself should not be illegal, abuse of a victim should" given the fervor of the people against paedophilia, but I think it is more congruent with a living in a free society. It's a shame that anyone suggesting nuance there is usually then associated with paedophiles in the mind of the person hearing the argument.

I am no fan of compelled decryption, and believe it is a violation of 5th amendment rights. That being said, I think the government's argument is stronger than usual having proven that he has accessed files regularly in the encrypted drive by showing logs of regular access to content with suspicious filenames.

The police have a fundamentally different argument here than "it happened to be in his possession".

Ping has confounding factors as well (firewall blocks, DNS, etc). If it works then you know that it's IP reachable, reachable on that TCP port, and that there's a responsive daemon on the other end. If it doesn't, you know that you need to troubleshoot. A device could not ICMP echo request ping, but respond to httping. Neither is perfect.

It referred to a "high-pitched, short and somewhat sharp sound" (the bullet pinged off his helmet). SONAR uses noises that sound similar, so SONAR emanations became pings and then it became associated with echo/response at that point.

I can't claim to speak for OP, but am also against most tracking. I would also tend to think that being against first party tracking would be an unwinnable battle. It also leaks less data than third-party tracking, since the third party can see your activity across multiple sites whereas first party can only see your activity on that site unless it's aggregated through a backend service (another poster mentioned the ability to upload server logs to GA). No matter what, they can see what you load from their site.

Getting to first party hosting of more intrusive analytics (scroll location, etc) I think rather than disallowing certain scripts/URLs to run, you have to get back to behavioral-based blocking. Doing that in an environment that you allow any JS to execute seems tough since sandboxing something that can update the page based on location can "talk" to another part that can report back to the server.

If you don't like intrusive first party analytics, just stop all JS.

Illegal is not immoral; copyright is a legal construct designed to reward content creators for their works for a limited period of time before it enters the public domain. Our history, culture, and heritage is a fabric of works created by individuals that enter the public consciousness. If you co-opt culture and won't offer it to people through legitimate means, don't be surprised if they go to the frictionless and better value proposition of copying information from the internet without permission.

Anecdotally, I still wind up stopping because... I'm a lazy bastard. Feeling like you've failed on a random project that you talked about is demotivating, so I can see the point both ways. I renovated my master bathroom several years ago and had talked about it at work, but I'm lazy ;) so it took about a year to complete. Being the butt of the "so how's the bathroom going ;D" joke at work did not really help my motivation on it, having an upcoming wedding and needing to get it finished did.

I've been working on doing only one project at a time, which has helped with my success rate and self worth. I still think about several and have a hard time focusing, but I try not to talk about them until they're actually in progress if at all.

Not to mention that talking about your plans appears to decrease the odds of you doing them

https://sivers.org/zipit

I began the JHU Data Scientist Specialization on Coursera and worked through the Data Scientists Toolbox and R Programming classes, but found them a bit lackluster in their presentation.

The course content (videos, slides) presents some basics with a large emphasis on having a "hacker ethos" to do more work and digging on your own to be successful. The quizzes and projects in the R course demanded the use of techniques that were outside of the content provided in the lecture. I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to Google. I expect a curriculum to be a self-contained unit of learning, or else I wouldn't bother with curriculum.

Contrast this to Coursera's excellent (and free) Rice University Interactive Python Programming classes that are really superb. The Rice University team put together an online Python interpreter complete with graphics capability so that students could test each other's code. The R class left peer review of students' code as "do not run the code, eyeball it and see if it looks right". I understand why they did it (execution of potentially harmful code), but Rice's solution was elegant.