funkymike

This could be as simple as connecting the dots between you logging into your ISP account to pay your bill via the VPN.

This is one specific way in which a VPN is a poor solution to protecting privacy. It means the user has to constantly be on guard to which traffic should go over the VPN and which should not. Even one single slip up could negate all the benefits you think you are getting.

Edit: This reply should have been a couple levels higher, addressing the general tracking discussion rather than NATs specifically.

Both of those are consistent in one respect, that they both expand executive power. A group with power consistently seeks to increase that power. The FCC wants power, the NSA wants power.

One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.

The client may not have to build the links but it still has to be aware of their specifics. It has to know that /articles takes arguments X and Y, and that /v2/articles takes arguments Y and Z. You're trading building links to inspecting links. What advantages does this have?

I agree and I wasn't clear enough about that. Moving funds from areas that provide clear tangible results to research that might produce results seems wrong.

> but a potentially bigger issue with the act is that it transfers $3.5 billion of public health spending to medical research.

I would like to see much more public funding going towards medical research, with the stipulation that the results must be open and cannot be patented.

In mentioning this I just had an idea that I don't remember seeing before. I wonder if there should just be a sort of medical treatment lottery for pharma companies. They come up with a treatment, get a patent, and prove it works as normal. Instead of allowing the monopoly however, the FDA could buy out the patent and make it public domain. The pharma company gets a guaranteed and immediate profit (say 50% of the projected total profit over the life of the patent). Meanwhile any company can then produce the drug/device/etc. competing on the quality and price of the treatment, separate from the cost of the research that led to it.

Wouldn't it be better to plan further ahead and make a requirement that the venues need to be in use for X years prior to the games? This would ensure that the facilities are usable outside of the Olympics.

There is a big difference between computer science as taught and software development in practice. These hiring practices are there to weed out people just can't design applications or write code with any proficiency.

Interviews are a two way street. For most companies you should be able to talk to the hiring manager and other developers that you would be working with. Ask yourself whether as a junior developer if you will be able to learn from them. This includes technical skills, soft skills, and personality.

From my own experience I interviewed with a small company right out of school where I would have been the second or third developer (I forget now). One reason I did not pursue it is that I seemed to know more about development best practices than their existing developers; for example they did not use source control at all. While I would have had the opportunity to make a big impact on the product, I don't believe I would have grown much.

On the subject of making code reviews a positive experience I think it has been helpful where I work to explicitly discuss code reviews. What makes a good code review vs. a bad one. For example the idea that code review comments should be based on the substance of the code rather than style.

This stuck out to me as I tend to be very critical in code reviews, which I think made other developers uncomfortable. By talking about it though I was able to soften my approach. I was also able to make sure my language came across as reviewing the code, not the developer.

One important service that the existing textbook companies provide is editing. That's the gap that seems to be unaddressed by having professors self publish.

There's a big difference between McDonald's and a high end restaurant, even if you just order a hamburger. McDonald's has already been working on automation. Have you noticed that humans no longer dispense drinks there? They are also working on getting rid of the human order takers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDon...

For restaurants where one of the main draws is price I think automation is inevitable as a cost saving measure.

I was responding to the idea that there are no more frontiers on earth left to explore. "frontier exploration is a massive part of many of our cultures, but the painful truth is that there aren't any left on Earth."

The sea is still a frontier. There is a lot about the oceans that we still do not understand.

I actually find the Netflix UX frustrating. First they removed the straightforward ability to simply say that I never want to watch a show, and then hide it from me. Beyond that I can rate a show 2 stars and yet it continues to come up in recommendations. This gives me the feeling that it doesn't really matter how I rate shows because they are going to shove whatever they want at me regardless.

The only competitor I can compare it to is Amazon. In that regard I agree that Netflix obviously puts more into the interface. Amazon's splitting shows into seasons and not even grouping them together is maddening.

There is no need for the weather app to identify you as the user. It only needs to fetch the weather data for a given location.

I think that the issue comes in when people have the option of both plain sight and searching. For example if an electrician is paid by the local PD to report drug paraphernalia they now have an incentive on future calls to poke around where they don't strictly need to be. How do you know whether they conducted an illegal search (as an agent of the government since they are paid if they find something) vs. saw it in the regular course of their duties? To me that is the key. The person is already in a somewhat privileged position, not just standing on a street corner with their eyes open. The payment creates a conflict of interest, thereby making anything they find suspect.

It goes even farther than Joe Schmo at Best Buy not being trusted. They are being paid to find "evidence." That direct conflict of interest should invalidate anything they find.

I too find that really creepy. Yet at the same time it seems inevitable. After all, is it really so different than going to amazon.com and seeing a front page tailored to your purchasing habits? Or even different from an employee recognizing you and asking if you are back to buy the widget you were asking about last time?

It is important that the caller provide some information for authentication purposes. Just because someone uses your phone (or spoofs the number) doesn't mean that they should be able to make changes to your account.

Lots of companies outsource their IVRs. And everything is all too often cobbled together in a just-make-it-work-right-now fashion.

Beliefs like this are what get people killed. People think they can drive safely far above the speed limit. People think they can drive safely in adverse conditions at unsafe speeds. They are wrong and get themselves and others maimed and killed every day. Their complete confidence doesn't save them, but is the root of the problem.

I am reading this as preferring that if you are in an accident it is at least your fault rather than the fault of a self driving system. However, there are far more drivers on the road than you. Turn this around to be other other party.

So now you are in an accident caused by someone else. If that accident would have been prevented had they turned on the automated driving system that is in their vehicle, then do you still prefer this? Is having someone to blame really worth being in an accident that would not have happened if the computer was in control?

So, is it truly reasonable for you to refuse to engage the self-driving system in your car, putting other people on the road at greater risk?

I wonder if there will be increased liability, both financial (insurance) and legal, when someone willingly chooses to take control in a situation that would be well-handled by their self driving vehicle.

This is what humanity really needs. The best part is that once it is out in the wild it should spread naturally, if slowly. Thus it will eventually penetrate to every human society and wipe out the current strains of the bacteria.

"One errant car" already kills scores of people today. It really isn't that much different with autonomous vehicles. A stop light isn't going to prevent a distracted driver from entering an intersection. Mechanical or software problems already cause fatalities today.

That said I would still prefer to have a hands-on option with my car. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood looking for someplace to eat or maybe house hunting are examples of when you can't just pick a destination ahead of time. You want to drive slowly and decide where to go turn-by-turn.

I have successfully used the export feature to hand off project documentation I was keeping in vimwiki. This way they got a set of HTML files that anyone could view. Some of them did not use vim at all so while this meant the documentation would not be as easy to edit at least it was accessible.

I was thinking about this just yesterday. It would be great if email providers made tools to painlessly create encryption keys and get them synced up to all your devices securely. From there each email you send can include an automatic signature of where to find your public key. On the other side when you receive emails from others with such a signature you can then choose to have the email reader fetch the key and let you start trusting it with a single confirmation click. From then on your emails to that person will be encrypted without you having to think about it.

For almost all users getting a message from someone you personally know containing a message that they would legitimately send would be sufficient to trust the referenced key. If you are a little paranoid you could ask them over the phone or in person to send a specific message that you would then trust, or just ask for the URL itself. I believe that in-person key exchanges utilizing large trust networks are overkill for the vast majority of people sending everyday communications.

Make it so simple as 1) one time key creation and copying to each device 2) one time trust per other person that is completely streamlined by the software. If the gmail team implemented this for example other email providers would soon do the same and it would spread like wildfire. Very quickly a huge amount of email would be encrypted. Of course this would require an open design that anyone can implement.

Maybe there's a fundamental flaw with this idea that I'm not seeing. If so, please say so because otherwise I'm going to just be disappointed in five years when email is still 99% unencrypted.

Getting these things corrected can actually be quite difficult. I regularly get emails from an optician in another state. I have replied multiple times that they are sending information to the wrong person, but they continue to do so. Fortunately this has never included detailed health information, but merely revealing a patient relationship with a specific medical provider can be a breach.

In another instance I was getting emails about an account someone created with American Express using my email address. I sent multiple emails to their customer support to get them to stop sending financial information to the wrong person with no results. In this I also found it difficult to even figure out what agency to report them to for failing to take action when notified. Eventually I took the time to call them. It took around 20 minutes (not counting time on hold) of talking to multiple people to get them to remove the email address from the account. This included them asking me several times for my social security number - which I flatly refused to provide since I had zero business relationship with them. This refusal actually seemed to confuse them.

Google knowing where you go could make their models of you more valuable. Now they can specifically target ads based on where you go and when. Sitting in the cab waiting to get where you are going what are you going to do? Pull out your smart phone and see an ad offering a sale at a competitor to where you told the cab to go.

I wonder if having all the gear will have a positive effect. Once drivers learn it means that those are self-driving cars it can begin to acclimate drivers to having such cars on the road. And as they see how (hopefully) predictably those cars drive it will increase their comfort level until they may be willing to purchase a self-driving car for themselves. I could also see a small rise in rear end collisions as people think that they can safely tailgate a self-driving car believing that it will not stop suddenly, that it will not act in the unpredictable ways that normally make us cautious of other drivers/cars on the road.

Recognizing the words is just the first step. Getting meaning out of those words is what really counts. When on a telephone call I may miss a percentage of what was said, due to poor audio quality, the speaker's accent, etc., but based on context I can still understand the message the speaker is trying to convey most of the time. Transcribing each word with near-perfect accuracy is unnecessary if the layers above that can handle it.