13,880 karma · joined May 28, 2015
If this is the only definition you're aware of, then apologies, but you're not the right person to be attempting to drive this discussion.
If you're aware of the many others but do not consider them 'clear', then there is something else going on here, and I am starting to wander about agenda.
It was Microsoft who chose to be different here.
You should of course make your own judgments, but many people do not consider that a good tradeoff.
I think it is "fair" to describe action B as following from action A, when there is good reason to consider them related.
If you revise your observations of reality based on what you fear might happen later, you're not observing reality.
> attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation
And right on cue, here comes someone who would rather talk about Eminem and Epstein to blur the situation than talk about the actual situation.
There are questions substantially more interesting than a reductionist "do I have an innate right to access private websites?"
Briefly, the issue with auditing, as with most things, is incentives over time. The difference between fraud in finance and software engineering is how long the bezzle[1] lasts. In finance, it can last a very long time in up economies, leaving Big Three auditors plenty of time to scurry off. In software you have to deliver at some point, leaving lying auditors exposed to discovery by security researchers immediately.
There is certainly still room for shenanigans if not set up correctly, but less than in finance.
I'm not even talking about the gradient ranging from innocent bugs to incompetent coders and how that gets papered over. When you buy shoddy physical goods, there are typically characteristics you can't hide, like cheap materials. But with software like this of course the only function your average person can verify is that the transmission happens, not how it is encoded. Neither Grandma nor your manager are likely to break out tcpdump to check.
And of course the DMCA complicates this in the US, and things are even worse for researchers elsewhere.
Third party audit and reputation are the only fixes I see. And the second one requires a commercial environment that rewards it. The current one doesn't; it rewards novelty and lies, so that's what we get.
It is too bad - the Mac hit this sweet-spot where it was pretty much my perfect machine for several years - a kickass Unix workstation in a decently built laptop, with a decent GUI, with access to consumer apps, too. It was great while it lasted.
Thing is, this is a reasonable thing for Apple to do. Back when they weren't enormous, it made sense for them to at least make token gestures to the Unix-weenie/developer market - we threw a lot of money at them and made them hip when they were down and out. Now we're in rounding-error territory, and that we got what we wanted for a while was sort of a happy accident, anyway. Building developer dream-machines was never Apple's thing.
I bought my first Mac in 1991, and this one will last a while longer. Can't really complain too much about 30 years of decent-to-awesome tools.
If anyone wants to sample him first, if you like the short stories on his website, you'll almost certainly like his books.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking at fpm for packaging. Unless you're doing something weird or need an obscure format, it is the tool you want.
Of course, sample size of 1, etc. It could have been coincidental.
That is not a compact phone.
I know I'm in the minority here, but the iPhone4, in my view, was the ideal form factor (3.5", I think). At least half of the time I glance at my phone, the informational payload is not even a full sentence and requires no interaction. Otherwise, I check mail and sometimes use maps. More or less, my phone occupies the niche that I'm supposed to want a digital watch for, but don't.
If I need more screen, there are a plethora of options. I really don't want a tablet in my pocket. And I don't keep it with me like anywhere nearly like I used to - it has turned in to more of a 'desk phone' that I check when I think about it.
I certainly did with vi. I've jumped editors a bunch of times and still use others for specific tasks, but always come back. I'm guessing it is some combination of learning something complex - the first thing in a new area you study tends to inform how you look at other things in that area. And muscle memory.
FYI, on the Mac, BBEdit handles huge files like a champ.
I missed the note about the grinding cost-increases of college that people don't apparently need to work to pay for (and everyone apparently goes to!).
And the entry for the increasing deaths-of-despair rate that is turned the US life expectancy rate negative.
And the one for young folks' increasing need to delay what used to be normal young adult things, like home purchase and marriage. And...
I think what you mean is that, if you have money and are over 40, the world will cater to you. (And to be clear, I'm in that category, as are many here.)
You need tax lawyers to ensure you're doing that right. You need employment lawyers to ensure your termination process follows the law. You need accounting experts to ensure you're reporting correctly. In every legally distinct market.
How many laws, regulations and reporting requirements does your average chemical plant comply with?
In addition to what you mention, it screws up archival uses if you're not diligent - copy/paste or screenshot something, and if the date is at all contextually relevant... well, it isn't any more.
But why talk about executive pay and not marketing? Research clearly takes a backseat to marketing at these shops:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...
As for who pays for research, you're right that pharma companies now pay for over half of US biomed research, something that's been true for about a decade. I don't know how that "5 times" figure was calculated, but my figures show the government currently finances about 1/3 of biomed research, including almost all basic research.
Of course, pharma benefits from that research, too, and looking only at spends understates the value of those contributions. One recent study found that
"NIH funding contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016."
Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.
This is true in a specific way, and it is sometimes useful to use this frame. But in this case, I think the frame obscures more than it focuses.
"We" aren't getting together and voting or bidding or whatever. I think the closest thing to a choke point for decision making about some of this is in Google's hands, with Chrome. At least until the browser monopoly wheel spins again.
> We have to give something in exchange for "free" services
Eh? No. The requirement is that services need resources to exist. If you immediately extrapolate to pseudo-moralistic finger-wagging at "consumers", you're ignoring a lot of ways various organizations have found to exist. It is either self-blinding or a heavy thumb on the scale.
Put another way, you can call things whatever you want, but a marketing campaign does not obligate me to accept your silly branding nonsense.
I've had them be annoying to me before. My favorite PP fact I found out the hard way: never put the string 'aleph' in the note field. Apparently that's flagged as a Terror-Word(tm), and it held up a transaction of mine for over a month.
I still use them, but only under modified-casino rules: never play with money you can't lose. Have a separate bank account just for them, so they can't get up to shenanigans with more than you intend; never depend on them for anything time sensitive; and never send money anyone depends on for anything important.
Yep, this is the big deal. After I "discovered" the ME, my first stop on my home network was the switch, to block all that crap. (And I found my storage server, equipped with a Supermicro all-in-one motherboard, helpfully grabbed an IP for the ME to listen on with an 'admin/admin' password.)
I just wish the empire builders at the NSA would care about something other than their own little power center. They knew this would happen - it always does. The NSA is probably the biggest security threat to the U.S. people[1] at this point, because they keep building concentrated, high-value targets and then lose control of them.
[1] Not to be confused with 'U.S. government interests'.
The tradition was still going at that point.