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Probably so. At some point I won some maths-heavy economy textbooks in an undergraduate probability theory competition. It was last updated a few years before 2008 (I would guess no later than 2004), and it is mainstream enough to be a gift agreed upon by large-finance sponsors and financial-applied probability theory professors.

While explaining the market models, the book had quite a few footnotes that briefly mentioned incentive structures at different levels (individual traders, groups inside a company, mortgage-issuers that unload all of the risk…) Sometimes it stayed politically correct («it remains to be seen how this incentive structure will affect market stability»), sometimes not (especially when there were enough historical examples of exactly the same incentive structure leading to the same problems), but it made clear that principal-agent problems in the then-current (and now-current) economy are well-known and easy to describe in mainstream economics.

Last time when nobody cared about a broken nest of security holes in the center of the Web, a small minority had organised a campaign to annoy people with complaints.

I mean Mozilla's campaign asking users to send complaints to each and every webmaster writing IE5-only sites. It somewhat worked.

5% false discovery rate is true if the apriori probability of each result is 50%. If a journal wants to publish only surprising results, and accepts p=0.05 with a good methodology as true, it will have higher rate of false claims, because the most interesting things are more surprising than a coin toss.

And if you slice the data from a single experiment in 40 independent ways, your chances to get something with purely random significance p<0.05 are better than 50% for a single study…

What does the calculation of advantage mean there? The advantage per one nice and one naughty roll (a pair of rolls) is multiplied by the total number of single rolls in a 4-player game.

And I guess an honest player would pick the nice locations as often as naughty ones (there is no reason to actually prefer them). I don't know the rules, so I don't know if there are enough naughty locations to roll only on them without _that_ being suspicious.

>MS Office is a de facto standard, and LO is not compatible with it

Neither is a different installation of MS Office.

If the only trace a criminal activity leaves is on a single encrypted drive, is it important if it gets prosecuted or not?

The police does parallel construction to avoid admitting access to illegally collected evidence, civil forfeiture to punish people for things police doesn't like without having to prove anything, etc — incentives for police to step over the rules are a larger problem than unbreakable encryption right now.

Could you please mention the number of amendment that restricts the right to refuse self-incrimination in the same way as the 13th amendment restricted the right to own slaves?

Supporting or undermining it by unpaid distribution of its disgusting output material? If he was directly supporting it, he would be already convicted based on tracing the payments, I guess.

And if obtaining and distributing the output material of a content industry without payment is supporting the industry, let that be put in writing…

I think the effect described in the text has another side: imagine that at some point using XYZ was obviously a bad idea for multiple reasons for a specific person in specific circumstances. Obviously, keeping track of the changes in XYZ will have a lower priority for a person who is not going to use XYZ anyway, even if one of the multiple show-stoppers gets fixed/changed/redesigned. This means that the person's opinion about XYZ slowly gets stale.

In this specific context I'd guess startx/xinit

1. Losing uncommitted changes by making two mistakes in a row after non-intuitive behaviour by the VCS is not unheard of in Git.

2. Git is strictly worse than both Fossil and Monotone (two SQLite-based DVCSes I have used) w.r.t. losing _committed_ changes: it doesn't do any sync calls by default, and while their documentation confidently says that fsync is just a waste of time, POSIX guarantees are not enough for safety (ext3 guarantees are enough, btrfs are not — writes to two different files are not guaranteed to be ordered by default, and I have lost commits because of a power failure, and I haven't checked what guarantees ext4 provides there).

Every legal protection creates a possibility of costly litigation, including a possibility of a litigation that is costly despite the claim being bogus.

A design patent (and a regular patent, too) can be broad enough to cover all the obvious solutions to an obvious problem. Even if it covers things that existed before the plaintiff started working on things described in the design patent, it still costs a lot to defend against it even when the prior art is obvious.

There are non-US crawlers. Of course they have their own governments to direct censorship. But they censor differently, so you get a better chance. Surprisingly, Baidu does index the relevant stuff in this case. For Yandex it is not even surprising (they have aimed to have some English-language presence since long ago).

Another question is that determining what is sensitive information is a bit complicated… But there is an option of asking the user to edit URL to find anonymous enough form of the bug trigger. Maybe after doing some basic fuzzing (like replacing runs of alphanumerics with random runs of alphanumerics of the same length, if possible).

Well, given Micromax exists and has manufacturing (and HQ) in India, now Indian government can say that smartphones are not cutting-edge high-tech per se.

I would say that «a mathematical universe» would be more correct here, because they just cover some of the areas; for example searching for «Ramsey» will yield no results; «probability» will yield just one result where an algebraic construction happens to be useful for calculating some probabilities.

* If I know the country and the timezone, I can automatically apply all the future timezone changes

Wrong, Russia has combined some timezones into a single one and then has split it back a few years later.

Asus Zenbook UX32LN (with a GNU/Linux system based on NixPkgs), RAM upgraded to 12GiB from 8 GiB just in case

Pros: · works nicely with Linux whatever kernel build is used, · UEFI is optional and it can be manually configured without hassle · acceptable battery life under light load (~5 hours) but dual-core i7 can perform reasonably well if the power draw is not a concern, · a nice FullHD screen with fine brightness adjustment (I prefer my screen to have the same brightness as a sheet of paper next to it — this is darker than many screens' minimal settings)

Cons: · after third time warranty-replacing HDD I gave up and bought a similar one from a different manufacturer · slightly too small at 13.3 inch — a larger screen plus larger battery plus larger keyboard would be nice…

I recently put it on the edge of a bed in a wrong way and it fell onto a plugged USB extension cable — the cable apparently suffered more than the notebook, which is nice.

And the reason why you cannot check that the program performs no I/O is because you cannot check if the I/O instructions are behind an infinite loop or an impossible condition or not.

It is definitely easy to verify that a program has no references to I/O instructions. This will reject programs like «if(false) then write("Hello")», so it is not a violation of Rice theorem (functionally equivalent programs are not treated in the same way). But you don't need to accept everything that is actually benign, you just need to make it easy to write benign code that passes the check.

It will be large (after deploying the reflecting facets) and lightweight and in a low orbit. It will remove itself just fine faster than you manage to crowdfund a rocket.

A person who monitors transactions and immediately submits a competing transaction with ridiculously high transaction fee (50% of the payoff) may have a chance to induce miners to include his illicit transaction in the new block instead of the legitimate payment.

Maybe illicit CRS can be a problem for some kinds of checks, but I guess you could feed first Linux kernel commits in the 2016 to some randomness extractor to get something that is harder to manipulate freely.

The article says «$50K in roubles» — the Russian-language site quotes 3.85 millions Russian roubles, and right now it is possible to exchange $50 000 in cash to 3850000 ₽ in cash.

Well, there are still terrains where Sherp would need to be carried by DT30 Everpresent http://www.military-today.com/trucks/dt30_vityaz.htm

Well, the space industry in Russia was never privatised in the first place.

And I am afraid that moving parts of Khrunichev Institute out of Moscow (for example — it happens independently of top-level restructuring) will deal more damage than formal rearrangement of top-level control.

I wanted to see what they would promote — and still was disappointed, as there was no option to show _only_ the promoted links (I prefer to access history by typing a part of the site name into the address bar).

I do block anything that I notice if it looks like a tracker, but I am ready to believe that Mozilla's description of client-side ad selection was correct.

There is such thing as current relative advantage; and to change what your relative advantage is, it may be useful to restrict some of the trade.

Also, having ten inefficient suppliers is often better than having one very efficient monopoly — because it is usually also efficient at overcharging.

If the incentives are perfectly aligned and there is a medium term success or failure to consider, relative advantage works as advertised; but this will be closer to three equal startup co-founders dividing the work in the early stages than to international trade.

These are the strongest argument against its core service management logic; those that explain why it is not better than Upstart (or daemontools or s6+s6-rc …)

And systemd causes problems not only by this, but also by its bundling of similarly mediocre or worse other components.

Well, note that the article is mostly about the core systemd service management part. The article also clearly studies quality of design and implementation, accepting core goals of systemd core as they are.

One problem with «shinier, newer, better, securer systemd» is that many systemd opponents want something less shiny. And systemd is big and shiny enough that _even_ sysvinit is better.

Most arguments for sysvinit you list are, for example, arguments for s6: s6 is just a supervision suite with no other ambitions, PID 1 during the normal operation (not boot/shutdown) is s6-svscan — a 32 KiB executable, and the part that requires debugging — service launch scripts — can still be a shell script.

I am a systemd hater (at least for my patterns of desktop use — systemd can be mostly fine on some servers) and my opinion of systemd is that it is mediocre as a service management, has bad logging system bundled (is https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69934#c7 fixed? can the systemd-bundled logging system give me the last 20 lines of the log without reading all 100 MiB of the log file — it previously could not?), and breaks my workflow hard (nothing similar to startx can be implemented by design http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-Feb... for example), and systemd updates make systemd try to control more of the system which I explicitly do not want controlled automatically (I have a very handy binding for standby, and I do not want the notebook to suspend on lid close; I have multiple network configuration scripts for each of three typical locations and choose between them depending on whether I plan to move around more than transfer multiple-GiB files; killing all this autoconfig requires work).

I would probably use uselessd just to avoid bothering if NixOS shipped it instead of full systemd; it doesn't so it is more comfortable for me to use a NixPkgs-based system with init=/bin/sh and minimal hand-written init scripts than stock systemd. I was capable to use systemd almost fine until systemd has ensured that startx-like functionality is impossible to get.

Edit: a typo

The concept of «assisting copyright infringement» is not popular among those who identify as hacker. So in current context your argument is moot.

Of course, «correct representation of authorship under the authors' choice of names and pseudonyms» is a concept used in copyright law with a better reputation, in that case your argument would fully apply, of course.

As for info: there is a link to full slides.

SAT-solvers are (mostly) not used to directly attack cryptography software in this talk; they are used to rule out some classes of attacks.

In the most general case, program property verification is intractable, but specific instances can still be solved. When you have some industry-standard key sizes, you need to verify only a specific program, and then constants matter. So a good SAT solver can give you some useful information in a few minutes on a modern desktop computer about some real cryptography implementations.