anon4711

Would you mind backing that up with a link?

One of the problems I face when somebody comes along and tells me that they're now on Telegram, Cryptocat, Wire, or whathaveyou is that I might recall an issue but there doesn't seem to be a good up-to-date overview that answers the questions (1) should I trust these people (how bad was it; was it in their code or a dependency?) and (2) is it known to be far less secure than it advertises? (still?)

I recall e.g. that Moxie reviewed Telegram's security, found that none of it made any sense and that its authors didn't know what they were doing. https://tobtu.com/decryptocat.php looks like the cryptocat analogue of that. Have the two projects improved somehow? Have some people joined or others left?

Could you please also provide links for the claim that CryptoCat and Telegram are being used by governments to hunt down activists?

Please start with this log entry

> 2016-09-29T23:57:32Z Xach: I dropped com.informatimago because I do not want to have to discuss anything with pjb again. I have never enjoyed discussing anything previously, but his vile twitter feed drove me over the edge, and his project no longer builds, so I don't want to report problems or discuss solutions.

from here: http://ccl.clozure.com/irc-logs/lisp/lisp-2016-09.txt

His projects were removed from quicklisp in September (see e.g. http://blog.quicklisp.org/2016/09/september-2016-quicklisp-d...) over this matter.

There are two sides to this and I think they're important to distinguish: If the person in question was wrongfully accused, this could do undeserved damage to him. This would be a misfortune (albeit not a great one given how little activity my comment generated) but I'm currently sufficiently convinced this won't happen that I went ahead and posted the comment.

The other matter is rehabilitation. Whether he should be allowed to apologise at some point, say that he made a mistake, and be welcomed back, is something that you cannot decide for everyone. It's up to your personal beliefs, in particular your religion. Everybody needs to determine that for him- or herself, in my opinion.

A person can be smart in one domain and stupid in another, so much is clear (think Grothendieck in maths and politics)

But a person cannot be both respectable and disrespectable at the same time, I find, although I'm afraid now we might be disagreeing rather about words than ideas. Respectability, to me, is a compliment to somebody's set of values.

Please scroll further. I understand that some of it is French but you should notice rather quickly nonetheless that this did not just happen on a single occasion. Essentially everything he writes fits into the narrative of #whitegenocide

PJB has become a bit (too little for my taste) of a persona non grata in the common lisp world (which has a large overlap with the emacs world) ever since it was suggested and so far not disproved (names match, nicknames match) that he's the person behind https://twitter.com/ogamita

edit: To make it more precise, full names are identical and http://www.informatimago.com/index.html links to http://pjb.ogamita.org which uses the same name (ogamita) as that twitter account.

Comparing this with surgery is not fair, I think. Here (with a food like soylent) the gains are low and the risks are high. With surgery, the risks are high but so are the gains. Before you go into surgery you're given a list of 10 ways you might die if something goes wrong. Oftentimes, though, the alternative is certain death (in the very near future).

Edit: I was replying to "But we have made surgery mistakes along the way". On a second reading, I notice that you did not actually mean to imply "it was necessary there so it's necessary here".

You're not alone: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-travel-...

With Safari entirely unable to handle this page, I really feel like I'm missing out on the modern web with it for the first time.

Another false negative: Pinterest.

The use-case? Well, you have a process that will run for a long time. You don't want to keep a terminal open. You /could/ just detach it. Now what if you want to kill it? Open another terminal, kill it by PID or through pkill. Clicking a button might be more convenient.

This is already addressed in the article, e.g. here:

    There might, however, be a dark side to the story. There is
    a good reason we were designed to have finite sensitive
    periods. Takao Hensch, a Harvard neuroscientist, has
    written that plasticity takes a lot of energy: It’s
    exhausting to keep all your neural circuits in a dynamic
    state. Restricting it may protect the brain.

and in the paragraphs thereafter (I don't want to quote them here in full).

I didn't mean to imply that you did; sorry if that came out wrong.

I take the attribution in the first link (references to "Führerbunker" and "Führer") to mean that the author is comparing Lennart Poettering to Hitler. That's not funny, it's just very, very inappropriate.

You probably mean `git fetch` or `git pull`. There is no `git update` in the default feature set.

Google Allo: Why people such as Edward Snowden are advising against using the app

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...

"Sign up to view more plans"

Except that after I sign up, I still can't view the plans until I set up my billing details. Meh.

Quick rundown of alternatives and up/downsides (e.g. everybody has Debian so that's not noteworthy) of which I've personally used the first four:

  - DigitalOcean
    has FreeBSD
    has Fedora
  - Vultr
    has FreeBSD
    has Fedora
  - Linode
    has Fedora
    cheaper than the others
    relatively fast CPUs
      e.g. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
    UI not as nice as the others'
  - Exoscale
    has OpenBSD
  - CloudScale
    only does daily (rather than hourly) billing

Their customers should rightly be outaged.

Since they make it so clear that they're '[..] not interested in building “crazy libertarian utopias for techies.”', I wonder:

Who is? And where can I sign up for that?

Even though this is not what this article is about, quite a few comments suggest better ways to compute the midpoint of two doubles, where "better" is supposed to mean "such that unnecessary overflow is avoided".

What I haven't seen is the suggestion

  0.5*x + 0.5*y

Yes, we now have two multiplications, but floating point multiplication is considerably faster than division.

I'm sufficiently interested to ask for further details :)

It's not that surprising, it is? I would expect Italian wages to be considerably lower.

(I don't mind drifting for a bit)

A considerable part of their actions is very disruptive, seeking to, in the view of the protesters, I imagine, annoy everybody involved in the transport of nuclear waste to such an extent that they'll give up, while in actuality just causing a financial burden for the taxpayer (17000(!) policemen were in service during the protest you linked to according to [1]). That includes the traditional "Schottern" (the "[removal of] gravel from the bed of the train tracks to stop the train" as the article calls it), see also [2].

Even encouraging others to go "Schottern" on the internet is punishable[3] (sorry, again only in German) and punished, though.

And with respect to physical attacks, I think those protesters are rather harmless. I believe not a single policeman was injured in the aforementioned protests, even though thousands of protests were there (1500 at some point, 5000 at another point in time).

[1] http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2010-11/castor-gorleb... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottern [3] http://www.oberlandesgericht-celle.niedersachsen.de/portal/l...

You're missing the key difference here: The maximum an anti-nuclear protester could hope to achieve through his or her actions would be to have the country quit nuclear power generation, nuclear waste storage, etc.

The political views of a far-right politician such as Höcke (probably aka Landolf Ladig[1]), if you translate them into what he hopes to turn Germany into, threaten the liberal democratic basis of the German constitution. And that we have a law against.

Naturally, the means through which said anti-nuclear activists try to achieve their goals, if only of making themselves heard, need to be legal, and if those actions are sufficiently illegal that they constitute a crime, I'm sure that will get the perpetrators in trouble and rightly so.

[1] https://andreaskemper.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/landolf-ladig...

Why would 10^24 be a million billion billion? It's 4 blocks of 6 zeros each, so that I'd expect you to call it a billion billion billion billion, if anything.

On OS X, Horos is a free and open derivative of OsiriX.

http://www.horosproject.org