I suspect that the objectionable paragraph was written by Drayton, that the note atop the introduction is not at all overstated, and that that paragraph would not have made it into a more polished version of the paper.
The impulse for making static typing less partial and more complete causes type systems to become overly complicated and exotic as witnessed by such concepts as "phantom types" and "wobbly types".
On Twitter, tptacek specifically suggested a hard ban on politics as an example of more restrictive guideslines. What makes me uneasy about this is that there's a huge gray area surrounding what qualifies as politics. For example, I don't regard tptacek's recent comments about the market for talent as politics, but a lot of people probably would. If we ban politics, then petty squabling over politics will be replaced by petty squabbling over censorship each time the mods kill a thread which is only borderline political.
And even if they were that silly, I'd be pretty confident that a fair use defense (parody) would hold up here, if something so ridiculous were actually to go to court.
If you make an exact copy of me at time t, then until the original and the copy part ways and have distinct thoughts and experiences, they're both just me_t, one no more so than the other. At t+1, me_t doesn't exist any more; this is true regardless of how many copies of me_t once existed.
This isn't responsive. You've only answered my question to the extent of defining "same" as the opposite of "other", which is not a lot of progress. So again, what makes this "other" chap "other", and why should anyone care about satisfying that criterion?
If even the new consciousness isn't able to know, then what does "same" mean and what part of that definition aren't you satisfying? More acutely, why should you care about satisfying it?
More interesting than anything Microsoft is doing here is Google's answer to it. If Microsoft caught Yahoo doing this, they'd bury them in lawyers. Google is confident enough to just go public and take the PR win.
I think that in 2011, checking referer headers can be considered an acceptable form of CSRF prevention. Some very old browsers and plugins allow referer headers to be spoofed, but by now so many other vulnerabilities have been found in all those that if you're still using them then CSRF is the least of your problems.
Something's seriously messed up if, once the XML has been parsed, their code can even tell the difference between those two constructs, much less care.
Uh, somewhere in between, I think. I'm contending that one way is logical, conventional, and clear, and the other way is illogical, odd, and confusing. I think that's a stronger statement than just an aesthetic preference, but I'm not citing anyone else's prescription.
No. I merely think he's missing the forest for the trees by preserving one obsolete typographic detail in a historical text yet translating the whole thing into HTML with minimal styling. This is somewhat akin to completely remodeling a 100-year-old building yet insisting on preserving the original knob-and-tube electrical wiring for authenticity -- you lose all the original charm yet you're still stuck replacing fuses twice a day and offending your readers every time the word 'succor' appears.
I'm taking issue with the decision stated in the first sentence: "In my previous post about the grand old trade of basket-making I included several extracts from some 18th century books, in which I preserved the long s (ſ) as used in the original printed texts".
'ſ' is just an 's'. It's a typographic variation carrying no semantics. The proper way to reproduce it in a new medium is simply to use 's' everywhere. To do this is no more unfaithful to the original work than using Times Roman on the screen when the original was printed in Caslon.
No reason you would be. But you can be sure that your personal hosting is more secure than (your personal hosting ∪ Google). In the latter case if either breaks you're screwed.
He's not the first mathematician to get annoyed by how poorly designed the numeric classes in the Haskell prelude are. But there are better alternatives already out there. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/numeric-prelude
I am looking right now at Schneier's reference implementation of the Blowfish key setup function, and there is nothing in it that would not be straightforward to parallelize across a CUDA warp (read: no conditional branches). Is it your assertion that getting from here to a working bcrypt cracker would be sufficiently difficult as to constitute a significant "contribution to cryptography literature"?
The specific improvement scrypt makes over bcrypt is not yet relevant; nobody has ever hardware-optimized a bcrypt cracker, and the project that successfully does so and publishes their results will have made a contribution to cryptography literature.
Sure they have. A hardware-optimized bcrypt cracker is called a GPU. I can buy a 480-core GPU on Newegg for $350, but it doesn't come with any more RAM than a low-end PC does.
Think what would happen if this became widespread. Book publishers start charging exorbitant prices because most of their buyers don't care. Employers push back and negotiate deals for themselves with publishers. Do you really want the book market to look like the US healthcare market?
If I had a billion dollars and had paparazzi chasing me, I would love for them to try this so that I'd get to mount an AA gun on my yacht and shoot them down.