Niten

Every book I've purchased on the Kindle shows up in exactly the same font, and likewise for any documents that I email to my Kindle. If the Kindle hardware supports multiple font faces (aside from italic or bold face variants), I haven't seen any evidence of it.

Fortunately for me, I like the Kindle's font, so I don't consider it an issue for the type of reading for which I use the device.

I'm not privy to any statistics on the matter, but simply as an Android user I can tell you that Android applications can't dial numbers, send SMS, etc., unless you explicitly grant them permission to do so -- and Android will tell you, plain as day, that the application wants privilege to access "Services that can cost you money".

I realize the iPad is great for PDFs -- in fact I recommended it to my sister over the Kindle for that very purpose. But this isn't really relevant to whether the Kindle or the iPad is the better device for reading eBooks from the Kindle book store...

In response to that quote, I'm sure the iPad is in many respects a great eBook reader. But I like to read on the go, particularly outside in the sun, so for me the iPad can't compare to my Kindle's battery life and e-ink display, not to mention its free 3G access for those few times that I need it.

But I know not everyone's use is the same, and the iPad must rock for books with pictures and maps and such.

You'll have to take that up with Apple, unfortunately.

On a side note: I'm glad you mentioned that there's an HP-48 emulator available for Android, because somehow I'd never thought to look for one and now I'm in nerd heaven.

If by "my handy hp-48 emulator" you mean to say you're the one who wrote it, then thanks and mad props; this is fantastic.

My vote is for ARP Networks.

http://www.arpnetworks.com/

They officially support FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as various Linux distributions, and since their VPSs are KVM rather than Xen-based you don't have to worry about building or running a Xen kernel inside your VM. In my experience they're very reliable.

Even if Windows is your primary OS, there's no reason for the typical user to have to run Adobe Reader on a regular basis. Just use a nice lightweight viewer like PDF-XChange, Sumatra, or Foxit instead.

Windows is my primary OS, and I don't even have Adobe Reader installed.

Yeah, but at least most other browser vendors merely distort the truth; here Microsoft purports to do an HTML5 feature comparison, and they don't even get around to mentioning <canvas>! That's flat-out lying about what it means to be an HTML5 Web browser.

Sigh... part of me really hoped that IE 9 would finally give Windows a standards-compliant built in Web client. But perhaps something about the culture surrounding the IE team is so fundamentally broken that we'll never see such a thing short of a major Microsoft reorganization.

You're wrong on both counts. Even back in 2007, NIST deemed 1024-bit RSA too weak:

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-P...

And BitLocker's trusted boot path does defend against the evil maid attack:

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-do-i-miss...

Even if you want to make some semantic argument that this doesn't strictly fall under the mantle of "disk encryption", it still proves the point that FileVault is no substitute for BitLocker.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against OpenBSD's superiority here in the slightest. In fact, except for my FreeBSD VPS, my general rule is that none of my Internet-facing machines run anything but OpenBSD.

I'm just saying that if Microsoft can duplicate even a little of those good practices and bring them to the masses, more power to them.

> OS X equivalent is encrypted disk images and FileVault

Calling FileVault an "equivalent" of BitLocker is too generous. BitLocker provides several important things currently lacking from OS X's built in disk encryption facilities:

* Strong encryption: If you use FileVault, you're essentially gambling that your hypothetical attacker can't break a 1024-bit RSA key. That isn't such a good bet these days.

* Trusted boot path in conjunction with a TPM; defense against the "evil maid" attack

* Support for full disk encryption, not merely encryption of home directories

* Enterprise key management and recovery, so that full disk encryption can conceivably be used within a large organization

You'll want to buy PGP or similar if you're on a Mac and you want good disk encryption. (But that still won't give you anything like BitLocker's boot path verification.)

But yeah, the whole parental controls thing is not only a moot point (didn't OS X actually have that first?), but pretty much irrelevant to security in the sense intended in this discussion...

However, this only helps if you're a typical desktop user whose primary threat is a random virus or other malware attack. If you're like Google, on the other hand, you have to worry about highly developed targeted attacks -- to stretch the analogy, a large bear that has specifically picked you out of the crowd.

When that's the case, all the random scattershot viruses in the world become irrelevant, and your platform's inherent security mechanisms and development practices are the only things that matter.

This is true. However, I'll settle for Microsoft following OpenBSD's lead and implementing ASLR and DEP in the world's most widely used desktop operating system.

Yes, it does. Recent versions of Windows (Vista and especially 7) have had security track records at least on par with OS X and desktop Linux. Mac OS X hasn't been doing terribly well lately, and Apple is notoriously slow to patch known security flaws, e.g.: http://bit.ly/62bTNQ

I'd provide a link to hard data, but for some reason Secunia's taken down their list of unpatched vulnerabilities in OS X (?!), even though they provide this data for most other operating systems, including Windows.

> All I have left to do is complete the new battery pack, which should boost the battery life to around 8 - 10 hours. I'm hoping to have that done in the next couple of weeks.

So what? U.S. government free speech policies allow citizens to say most whatever they like, including things that cannot legally be said in Islamic theocracies. When a U.S. resident inevitably exercises his freedom of speech in a way that offends Muslims, would someone in Saudi Arabia therefore be justified in claiming that "the U.S. insults Islam"?

No, of course not.

> You people (over 30) are not real users. Please understand this.

Baseless generalization. There's some age correlation there, no doubt, but I know people over 30 who use Facebook as enthusiastically as the most social of high-schoolers, and I know people under 30 who won't touch it. At least among the technically inclined, Facebook usage style is more a matter of personal disposition than age. It's stupid to say nobody over 30 has anything useful to say about the site.

And the over-30-year-olds I know who make minimal use of Facebook? They have plenty clue "about how Facebook actually works", thank you; due to their years of experience I find them often more clueful than the most voracious teenage user. They just choose to use the site differently, or not at all, regardless of their level of understanding.

I myself am well under 30, by the way, lest you accuse me of an age group bias.

If history is any indication, history isn't any indication. (E.g., Apple is always the niche player, right?)

Just because the previous top social network eventually faded away doesn't mean we should expect the current one to do the same in any similar manner or time frame. There's quite a lot that differentiates today's Facebook and the MySpace of old. For one thing, how many third parties ever built on MySpace as an application platform, to the extent that they are today with Farmville and Microsoft Docs and the like?

If you want to be picky, you might even say this doesn't really implement Church numerals in C++ (it implements them in the C++ compiler), since the conversion between integers and Church numerals takes place in compile time template expansion. What happens if you want to throw a new integer at this program at runtime?

> You might have to pass -ftemplate-depth-1024 to g++ to get this compiled.

Yeah, no kidding. Semantic arguments aside, this made my head hurt, and I've actually done a reasonable amount of C++ programming.

For comparison, here are what Church numerals look like in Clojure, another language that (like Haskell) has first-class higher order functions:

    (defn church [n]
      (cond (= n 0) (fn [f x] x)
            (> n 0) (fn [f x] (f ((church (dec n)) f x)))))

    (defn unchurch [n]
      (n inc 0))

And it works at runtime.

False. (Or at least willfully misleading.)

It is true that Hussein did use chemical weapons, with a wink and a nod from the Reagan administration, against Kurdish civilians in the Iran-Iraq war. However, in this context, the question of whether Hussein "had weapons of mass destruction" is clearly a question of whether he had them leading up to the 2003 US-led invasion, which, to the best of anybody's knowledge, he did not. After the invasion the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Iraq had destroyed all major stockpiles of WMDs and had completely ceased production in 1991.

An increasing number of revisionist apologists are intentionally conflating whether Hussein ever had chemical weapons, and whether he had them in 2003, which was the (ostensible) justification for the war. Let's not let such slimy rhetorical tactics slide.

Except that, apparently, it turned out not to be so simple in practice:

In each and every case we discovered devils in the details and realized "Well, we can't." We could make a TCL-like language that could run many simple TCL programs but that would not be upward compatible - and have that TCL-like language nicely integrated with the larger environment. We could make an Emacs Lisp style of environment that could run some Emacs Lisp code directly but that would not be upwards compatible - and have that alternative Emacs Lisp nicely integrated with the larger environment. But we absolutely could not, for fundamental reasons, directly support Tcl and Emacs Lisp with fidelity and wind up with a sane programming environment.

Can anyone point to what kind of fundamental problems he's talking about here?

The same stories are also here:

http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/zenindex.html

Did one of these sites copy the other? Or does it even matter?

No, not directly. But they're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of hardware and licensing by limiting users' ability to run Solaris for free on beige boxes, and that does seem to tilt the odds in the open question of whether Oracle will continue to let OpenSolaris thrive, or whether they will marginalize it to maximize short-term profit.

I say short-term profit because, in taking this course, Oracle seems to forget that many of the part-time tinkerers and educational or small business users whom they've just priced out of Solaris will be the ones making "enterprise" purchasing decisions in the future. This revised licensing agreement ensures that such users will be more comfortable and familiar with the competition instead--Linux, BSD, even Windows (Microsoft has done a fantastic job ensuring that their software is affordable in the education and small business sectors, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy profit margin in enterprise sales).

What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

I should have been more clear about this. In my previous post, I'm supposing that killing the children would be the wrong thing to do, as I strongly believe our current understanding of human psychology and sociology indicates. But I could be wrong, and whether I'm right or wrong about this moral decision is not a matter of opinion, but is fundamentally a scientific question. This, as I understand it, is Harris's point.

You miss the point entirely, and your "counterexample" is a non-sequitur.

The purpose of Harris's speech is to argue, against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain, that there are ethical and moral truths to be found even if we cannot yet discern them. In response you mount a straw-man argument against a coarse implementation of utilitarian ethics, but this doesn't even relate to Harris's point.

To answer: yes, it would be a bad idea to kill all children found torturing small animals. Why? Because, as human beings, we would suffer greatly in such a society (to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling, and children don't flourish into healthy adults in a society where their murder is considered acceptable), even if a naive implementation of utilitarian ethics incorrectly indicates that such an approach leads to the greatest overall happiness. That this is a fact subject to evidence, rather than a simple matter of opinion, is Harris's point here.

"And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has."

That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.

No, not necessarily, but it typically seems to be the case. In practice I suppose it's just plain difficult to compose something that's both accessible and deeply rewarding, and the few bands that can really pull this off become incredibly successful (e.g., Arcade Fire with "Funeral").

Exactly. Functional programming may or may not be "worth it" to use for one particular problem or another.

However, if we ask ourselves whether functional programming is worth learning (as I suspect the poster is really asking), then the answer is clearly yes, if for no other reason than that's the only way you can make an informed decision as to whether it's worth applying FP to that particular problem of yours.

That's too bad, I hadn't tried that. Though offhand I can't think of a good way to even try scaling these presentation slides to an iPhone-sized screen.