msg

If the suspect had a screen lock, would that create a reasonable expectation of privacy?

Would you have a problem with an officer opening a suspect's mail at the scene of an incident? Ripping paper is just as little effort as hitting buttons on a phone.

De facto privacy is very different from this legal concept of "expectation of privacy". Obviously a man with a gun can violate your de facto privacy easily. The question is, what boundary are you going to put on the legitimacy of that activity?

We don't require warrants to violate your de facto privacy - we require them to violate your legal expectation of privacy.

Required listening:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...

It's about a cop who felt that his station was becoming corrupt. So he started wearing a wire all the time and recorded evidence against his bosses.

"I will always remember the first time a cop lied to me"

Without reading further -

I've kept my nose pretty clean, so mine was a cop who ticketed me for going 70 on the freeway. He told me that 60 mph was an appropriate speed for the fast lane on I-5 in the 60 mph zone, heading north into Seattle, one of the worst freeway congestions in the country.

I was pretty jaded even before I heard that This American Life episode, but that really nailed in the coffin. The officer sold my trust in the police department pretty cheaply that day.

What I use:

GoogleMonkeyR - a Greasemonkey that breaks SERP ads and instant search and allows you to format them to your liking.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310

Rainbows End: "No User-Serviceable Parts Within". Technology is depicted as black boxes all the way down. Cars shut down when driven outside of sanctioned roads. LARP content unavailable unless you have the rights.

Reflections on Trusting Trust: "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." The proposal is that Trusted Computing is supposed to defeat this truism. I have my doubts.

I hope that we will be able to do irreparable damage to Trusted Computing and make it untenable. This large jail will be broken out of like all the others.

We already live in a world where the rich can buy new legs and survive HIV better than the poor. The poor are already shamefully misused by social, legal, and economic systems stacked against them. Adding computers just adds a more explicit level of control.

The solutions to the new problems are the same as the solutions to the old problems: enfranchise the poor, make government responsive to them, give them the tools for mobility and independence. The hackers will continue opening the technological ways. As a kind of Gotterdammerung last resort, the printable gun, the darknet, PGP keys.

And that means that the problems are more scary because of future shock and culture shock than anything else. They're Hollywood nightmares about the future, but the future turns out to be, good and evil, the same old thing.

It's similar to what we said when MJ died: we feel a kinship of spirit with someone who hacked. Instead of hacking technology, he hacked himself. And there's a certain question about how far you'll go to pursue perfection.

I hold out hope that Armstrong will be exonerated by history, since he's chosen not to do it himself. I wish we were all upvoting his response, which is much better.

If you guys have not read Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (finished it this week), you should.

Its about the evolution of the human species over the next million years turning on very specific events in Ecuador in the year 1986, and the common ancestor of all future humanity.

In his unique style, of course.

tl;dr: I think that agrees with what I was saying, for some definitions of the word "separated".

The two activities credentialling and learning are strongly related, because testing can be a good way to give feedback during the learning process, in addition to being the only scalable way to filter masters from novices. As far as I can tell, apprenticeships and co-ops don't scale today. Interesting if they could.

I don't think it harms Udacity to run both - a free tier for people to get their feet wet in CS and explore through a lifetime of learning, and a pro tier that gives the equivalent of a Master of Science with certificate (ie, classes only, no thesis). The free tier allows unlimited retries, has no deadlines, and encourages self-learning. But the pro tier separates the wheat from the chaff a bit, is strict on identity, is strict on plagiarism, gives one-try test grades, and has a minimum bar for certification.

You could probably make the divide between free and pro in a much different manner than I just did. I think I gave a pretty old-school university way of thinking about the problem. Of course they are not confined to think this way.

The materials for both tiers could be very close to each other, to the point where it would be wasteful to separate instruction. That's why liberal education and professional education get smushed together into higher learning today. Maybe Udacity can separate out these two in an interesting way.

It's very simple, I think:

If you need these courses for credentialing, you have to lock them down more. Get a credit card, require a payment, and issue a token. Validate the name and address (and maybe store a hash of the SSN), and don't allow duplicates. Treat "cheating" as fraud, and act accordingly.

If you need these courses for lifelong learning, the problem doesn't exist. Let someone take it a million times if that's what they need to do to learn.

Use debugging to form a mental model.

When I'm trying to understand foreign code in less than enough time, I instrument it (almost always at inputs/outputs) and try to treat functions as black boxes. In an ideal world the black boxes would be working.

Data flows are as important as algorithms. See this thing from Guy Steele.

http://dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html

In particular:

Fred Brooks, in Chapter 9 of The Mythical Man-Month, said this:

"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious."

That was in 1975.

Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, paraphrased Brooks' remark into more modern language:

"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures, and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."

That was in 1997, and Raymond was discussing a project coded in C, a procedural language. But for an object-oriented language, I think this aphorism should be reversed, with a twist:

"Show me your interfaces, the contracts for your methods, and I won't usually need your field declarations and class hierarchy; they'll be irrelevant."

I think, however, that practitioners of both procedural and object-oriented languages can agree on Raymond's related point:

"Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around."

An interesting litmus test. I caught the satire at 3 but double taked when I started wondering how this stuff would translate to my company of choice.

True story, two weeks ago my team launched a feature and decreased latency. We hunted for an explanation and finally found out that some code that blew away our feature was launched coincidentally at the same time. It was a pretty unlikely scenario, and we have controls designed to prevent it, but it happened anyway. I wonder how many collisions like this Facebook will have to deal with as they expand.

I would vote for free healthy food though.

Interesting. I have shown my son the Logo turtle, but hopefully this will make even more sense to him. I was looking for a way to expose him to Processing but unsure where to begin. It's obvious now.

We are home schooling and always looking for new and interesting stuff to do with him.

Thank you, John.

You prefer to make mathematical discoveries using automated theorem provers.

It occurs to me that these would make hilarious fortune cookies.

Spirals, functional, ... Emacs. I haven't done such high math but analysis seems more like how I approach design problems (domains more unique, beauty and intuition for guidance).

I have noticed that when each kernel is firm and can be cleanly separated from the cob, I am more likely to do rows. When I do, though, I usually take a horizontal chunk at a time.

I don't think this is about "blaming the manufacturer" for the behavior of retailers. My anecdata is that they distributed their product to the gift shop of what is, overall, a kid and preteen museum. For adults, there is a King Tut exhibit and an IMAX theater, segregated from the rest. The main flow has animatronic dinosaurs, a bug house, a tide pool, a bunch of touchable exhibits. Kids come through on field trips. So this product is wrong for that retailer. There was probably no location in the store that would have kept it from being seen and wanted by kids.

Maybe the Buckyballs guys will say, "hey my hands were tied, I couldn't do that level of due diligence with every store I sell my product to." And the regulator will respond, "hey my hands were tied, I couldn't allow the product to be sold without that level of diligence."

That doesn't mean that regulator is somehow being unfair to Buckyballs. It means the laws of physics are being unfair to Buckyballs for not allowing them to create a cool sticky product without health risks to children.

Yes, there's a certain amount of proportion that needs to be taken. Yes, more kids die from drowning in backyard pools. But it's not unreasonable to ask that these products (like cigarettes, like prescription drugs) are more difficult for children to acquire at retail.

I was in the gift shop at the Pacific Science Center (Seattle) two months ago. The Buckyball demo video was playing on the corner of the sales counter, surrounded by the other science toys and kits that the museum sells. So I feel this claim of "marketing to adults" is somewhat disingenuous.

This is about a year old. I hadn't seen it.

You can guess from the headline (because big developers/publishers destroy your soul and your projects).

The mini profiles of games and people are sweet.

From the same chart:

Extra Light (Olive Oil) - 468°F

Maybe that's what GP was referring to. I would put the oils with higher smoke points in the chart closer to exotic territory (avocado, ghee, rice bran, tea seed). I buy my Extra Light OO in jugs at Costco.

Short takeaway: I use EVOO for dressing/cold applications, Extra Light for frying.

Nokia sold the Qt licensing business over a year ago. The remainder was in the offing as soon as the Windows deal went down.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt/

It's apt, as long as the locked down nature of iOS and the target hardware made it suck less.

I don't know the facts here.

In author land, you may have sold the publication rights to the prior work to someone, and you may not have reprint/derivative works rights without a new deal.

You can see rights clearances on the copyright pages of some of your favorite novels, anthologies, and story collections: "Portions of this work appeared in a substantially different form in ANALOG June 2005."

When I see this in magazines and newspapers the credit to prior work is often in italics at the end. I guess I assumed cash (or backscratching) was on the line for them.

I observed this with Google Music too. Nirvana is underrepresented in my music collection (1-2% tops) but I seem to hear multiple Nirvana songs every time I log in and shuffle all (4-6 hour period). I have wondered if Google Music is picking music that is related to previously heard music.

But I have no way to check without looking at the source.

Until Google Music gets smart playlists, I have no recourse I guess.

Stealing usually has the undertone that this is a zero-sum game. You have something, I steal it, you don't have it any more. The operative word is "take" and it implies the removal of a thing from the sphere of influence of its owner into the sphere of influence of the stealer.

The thing need not be directly physical. You can steal money from someone and spend it without ever seeing a paper dollar.

Your definition would have me stealing a wall of a public building when I drop trou to urinate on it. That's one way to make use of it.

We have different words with different meanings for a reason. That's why we object to adding "unauthorized copying" to the definition of stealing.

"Nothing of value was lost", only perhaps "potential value". If it couldn't be copied, it could potentially be worth $0 to the copier/market. That's what makes copying distinct from stealing and interesting from a moral point of view.

I understand he wasn't actually armed when he went in. Only when he returned through the emergency exit.

Hopefully people will think ahead far enough to downplay the effectiveness of such security measures.

I flagged you. Sorry, this just looks like flamebait/trolling to me. If you want to believe I'm a Liberal Elite silencing your "discourse" I guess I can't convince you otherwise.

Wizard... is about to die

The interesting point: the couponing market is saturated, so Groupon must grow into new markets or find new products for its existing systems and software.

I wouldn't bet on this kind of metamorphosis. A slow death spiral is more likely as Groupon runs out of room to maneuver.

I left an employer after designing a large project. I might have put them in a time crunch on that one.

But I didn't feel bad about that, because they had just had me work mandatory overtime and weekends throughout the summer to finish a project that slipped anyway.

Projects at that company lasted over a year. I wasn't waiting for the next one.

The guy I was working with on that project seemed a little bitter when I left. I hope he realized that there's more than one way for your partner to be hit by a bus. I didn't throw him under it. If he was understaffed he should look to management, not to me.

It would be nice to get everything on one page. As it is, in my laptop I am scrolling up and down a lot to see the instructions, the terminal, and the local filesystem, which are laid out as three rows in one long column.

I did the tutorial mostly without looking at the filesystem so I could stop scrolling. But I know I missed a few helpful "extra" hints because they were below the fold next to the filesystem.

On the plus side, it piqued my interest. I've been meaning to get around to this.

I feel for you.

I totally buy that there can be unhealthy leadership throughout an org. The story sounds familiar to me. It only takes one bad grand-manager to ruin the show for a lot of people.

If there's one thing that has gotten on my nerves at Amazon, it's this insensitivity to employee retention. I don't know you, but I'm confident Amazon would be better off with you having fun on the right team rather than poking you until you leave. Not letting you leave for greener pastures would be a huge red flag for me. I would ask for the manager logins to avoid.

I've seen other situations where a bad policy followed strictly caused good engineers to walk out the door. Not because they couldn't hack it, but because the policy was arbitrary, or restrictive. Maybe this is endemic to big companies in our industry. I know I prefer a little more anarchy and humanity.

My experience has been one of more regular movement. I had a somewhat unusual move early on, about six months into my tenure. I spent a couple years on a great team and then moved laterally to emerging projects in the same org.

I know our mileage has varied but I think these are two very recognizable portraits (including crisis management) of the company.

I've been an engineer at Amazon for some years.

I started in a worse-off team, but I moved to one since that succeeds and is insulated from politics. We're on the margin of the dependency graph and own our whole stack from pageview to database. We also have end-user customers, which gives us a North Star that seems to help.

Without denying any of your experience, there are many Amazons inside this big umbrella. Probably hundreds of autonomous (more or less) teams. The good and bad about working at a place like this are not evenly distributed. From what I've seen, when it's bad, it's really bad. But it can be good too.

My advice to job seekers would be: get some inside scoop on the right/wrong teams to join. Failing a person you can talk to, ask about the level of pager activity and how independent your team is. With high visibility and high rewards come high pressure. It was wrong for me and it could be wrong for you too.

Can someone put this in context? Is this an inkling of things to come? I'm curious about how the trend toward automation, away from human labor, will affect unemployment and disaffection in China.