I think Gawker was wrong, and deserved to be seriously damaged by this (and many other things), but lets not pretend that this wouldn't have hurt them if they weren't wrong. Defending yourself takes an enormous amount of energy, time, and money. If a billionaire hates you they can fund lots of lawsuits against you that would have otherwise never materialized. This would constantly drain you, even if you win, even if you win costs. Since the billionaire is just funding it, they don't even need to step into the court room to ruin your life.
In this case Thiel waited (probably) until Gawker had done something particularly bad (at least liability wise). That's good, but its easy to see what someone of his resources could choose to do with no apparent repercussions. Of course this is disturbing. The fact that our court system is abusable in this fashion doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the individuals who might so abuse it.
The article took this case as proof and omen way beyond what it actually shows, but its not nothing.
I'm doing text (both word and character) models based on Karpathy's char-rnn using Amazon's gpu instances. It's not very expensive, but I would like to do hyperparameter optimization which takes a lot more computing power. Specifically I'm trying to see if it can be useful for auto-completion or sentence rephrasing.
It doesn't really sound like he was a professional foreigner in the sense that he was hired to be a foreigner, like some stories I have read[1]. He had a regular job, and being a foreigner gave him more attention.
That article was more suited for editorial than technology. Pao was hated mainly for things either done by reddit before her, or done by her before reddit. Unfortunately, as leaders often are, she was held responsible for both. That being said she was interim, and was apparently not aligned with reddit culturally. That's an internet thing, not, as this article was so quick to claim, a gender thing.
The fine tolerance coil made of kilometers of superconducting wire. All the care and material considerations needed for tight tolerance device that has to survive being cooled to a few degrees kelvin. On top of that the safety considerations of storing energy in the gigajoule realm.
I basically mean people with an interest in privacy and implications of information technology on society. If someone doesn't have that interest, I wouldn't expect them to assume the NSA is collecting all the info it can. With a basic background I would expect other people to recognize how powerful vacuuming up everything is. This expectation is strengthened by personal experience (moderate n, but selection bias). Certainly having the leaks makes people actually talk about it -- partially because assumed isn't the same as proved when you are an activist. Furthermore the extent to which the NSA hands this information over to eg the FBI was unknown. IMHO the real danger of spying on everyone is 3 felonies a day style selective enforcement. If the NSA keeps everything well barricaded from political and personal motivations and only pursues genuine threats to national security I frankly think that might be best for everyone. That possibility is seeming less likely because of information the leaks have provided.
I tend to assume people pretend to be surprised because it allows them to be more outraged. This assumption could easily be egocentric bias, but I have difficulty seeing how any moderately informed person would be truly surprised by these 'revelations.' Some interesting specific details, sure -- but nothing particularly strange has surfaced.
That makes sense - the ice cubes are below freezing, so it will take less melting to reach melting point equilibrium temp. In this case you are simply using the heat storage of ice rather than the phase transition energy required to melt the ice.
I hate to spoil the fun, but she may well just be someone the thief sold the laptop to. Unless there's some unmentioned reason to believe she's not innocent it shouldn't be acceptable to spy on her and post her activities online.
How exactly is the military industrial complex related to DMCA? If you really mean special interests, then say that instead of recycling the 'military industrial complex' catch phrase.
I agree that pretty much anyone who gave a cursory inspection would come to the conclusion that the attacks were from Chinese intelligence. There were still lots of defences of China claiming it could be patriotic hackers, or that the evidence was circumstantial. I think some of this was that if US officials make it clear that they know the attacks are from China it puts them under pressure to act (potentially in a way that would anger China). Diplomatically it's more convenient to pretend not to be sure.
"Without establishing a solid connection to China, there will always be room for observers to dismiss APT actions as uncoordinated, solely criminal in nature, or peripheral to larger national security and global economic concerns. We hope that this report will lead to increased understanding and coordinated action in countering APT network breaches."
This really is the key point. People generally believed that the major hacks have been Chinese government based, but without publicized proof public policy is unlikely to change. China (and people who don't want to insult China) can get away with dismissing the mountain of circumstantial evidence because few people with power want to directly accuse it. Maybe this report will start to change the situation.
True - if caffeine was interfering with his sleep then it was a problem. I didn't see any indication that he had attempted to fix his sleep schedule before he dropped caffeine, though it's certainly possible that he did. Sleep exercise and diet are connected to each other, and maybe kicking caffeine happened to give him enough motivation or momentum to improve all three of them, but it's only loosely related. Setting up dropping caffeine as the cause of his improvement is strange - it just happened to come first.
Exactly. The focus of the whole story is on caffeine, but dropping caffeine is quite minor in comparison to eating better, sleeping better, and exercising more. I think it's general consensus that caffeine withdrawal takes no more than a week.
With perfect efficiency a 10 kg weight lifted 2 meters would only output about a tenth of a watt over half an hour. That is indeed enough for a led, but not a very powerful one. I doubt this is worth it.
You might want to keep the buttons at the bottom of the object they modify (for example on the 'update my list' page). That would make it more consistent on mobile or space constrained displays. It's also more common practice.
"""""""""""""""
"colorscheme wombat
set nocompatible
"set background=dark
"
"""""""""""""""""
"stevelosh recs
set encoding=utf-8
set scrolloff=3
set autoindent
set showmode
set showcmd
set hidden
set wildmenu
set wildmode=list:longest
"set visualbell
"set cursorline
set ttyfast
"set ruler
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set laststatus=2
"set relativenumber
set undofile
let mapleader = ","
nnoremap / /\v
vnoremap / /\v
set ignorecase
set smartcase
set incsearch
set showmatch
set hlsearch
nnoremap <leader><space> :noh<cr>
nnoremap <tab> %
vnoremap <tab> %
set wrap
set linebreak
"set textwidth=79
set formatoptions=qrn1
"set colorcolumn=85
inoremap <F1> <ESC>
nnoremap <F1> <ESC>
vnoremap <F1> <ESC>
nnoremap ; :
noremap j gj
noremap k gk
set tabstop=3
set autoindent
set shiftwidth=3
set expandtab
set nohlsearch
nm <C-P> :se invpaste paste?<CR>
""""""""
" Sage settings (from Franco Saliola)
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.sage,*.pyx,*.spyx set filetype=python
autocmd Filetype python set tabstop=3|set shiftwidth=3|set expandtab
autocmd FileType python set makeprg=sage\ -b\ &&\ sage\ -t\ %
""""""""
" REQUIRED. This makes vim invoke Latex-Suite when you open a tex file.
filetype plugin on
"""""
" IMPORTANT: win32 users will need to have 'shellslash' set so that latex
" can be called correctly.
"set shellslash
" IMPORTANT: grep will sometimes skip displaying the file name if you
" search in a singe file. This will confuse Latex-Suite. Set your grep
" program to always generate a file-name.
set grepprg=grep\ -nH\ $*
" OPTIONAL: This enables automatic indentation as you type.
filetype indent on
" OPTIONAL: Starting with Vim 7, the filetype of empty .tex files defaults to
" 'plaintex' instead of 'tex', which results in vim-latex not being loaded.
" The following changes the default filetype back to 'tex':
let g:tex_flavor='latex'
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
"There sure has been a lot of trouble lately for Reddit, and I'd like to talk about about that before I nip off for a spot of tea"
Other issues aside, this sentence uses several British expressions. Wong does not seem to be British. Is Wong acting British because he is talking to the BBC? Is the BBC paraphrasing? That quote just seems odd and contrived.
Setting noscript to allow all on page worked - sorry for the bother. Edit: it did work the very first time for some reason (I wanted to have a work and personal account).
I'm still having trouble signing up. I put in the information and click 'launch tent' and nothing happens. I assumed yesterday that the problem was overwhelming demand, but ~2500 users over 20 hr shouldn't overload the site.
In that case you are criminalizing something other than the thing you actually want to stop. It's not walking across the street that's the problem, it's running into traffic. In this relatively low stakes problem people still run into the problem of not knowing the unwritten law. For instance people from cities where jaywalking is never prosecuted go to somewhere where it is aggressively prosecuted and get shafted.
But you could be. Universal crimes that are only prosecuted when the police want to get you are a large part of the problem. Everyone is guilty of something - see Three Felonies a Day.
"on this planet." Maybe that would give people motivation to get off it. Regardless if you want to weigh counter-factual people against living people your moral system will have some curious implications which you might not like. If someone threatens to not have children if you don't give them your money are you going to take into account the non existent future lives snuffed out and give in?
I find it difficult to believe that you've never seen an argument that the patents are invalid. You may not agree, but the argument has been made many times. The usual argument is that the patents are obvious. Bouncy scrolling, double tap to zoom, pinch to zoom and one fingered scrolling. Do you find these non-trivial and non-obvious? You mentioned that ideas are not patentable, but in practice that is exactly what is protected - the fact that a machine implementing them is technically what is patented makes little practical difference.
Exactly - most of the effort was making a game that hid that simple mechanic so that it took some (admittedly interesting) math to figure out where the dependence was.