deadowl

A dead man switch on GMOs, in case there are any other unexpected consequences, has already been mentioned here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015572

And after reviewing that thread again, it appears such technology has already been commercially developed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...). Although in this instance it doesn't make the plant susceptible so much as it creates a food system dependency on the company that sells the GMO in order to grow the food in the first place.

I know that at least Sprint already does this. You can typically see your call log on the bills, but getting text messages requires a notarized form.

https://support.sprint.com/support/article/Get_your_text_mes...

This already happens without GMOs, e.g. Africanized bees. Meanwhile, having a dead man switch would turn GMO-based food systems into a potential weapon (i.e. don't mess with us or we'll put your country into a famine).

Patenting plant strains is a bit older than GMOs.

- "engineered to be vulnerable to confidential substance" - EV

Probably the biggest threat of GMOs is that if you can make them more resilient to a herbicide, fungicide or what have you, that you can also make them more vulnerable to some substance that could then be later used to trigger famines.

Except you don't advertise that.

It's also one of the most conceptually difficult parts, which makes it a good learning opportunity.

This is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot idea. First of all, it legitimizes the kind of BS Mormon Utopia plan that [the NewVistas project is trying to accomplish in VT and Provo, UT](http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/). It also involves massive reappropriation of the existing value populations have invested in the land. There's also no good metric for land service value other than feedback from existing stakeholders, which can be volatile in changing circumstances. I won't support a project that will have victims.

People have competing value systems. Communities grow around those value systems as they are constantly negotiated and re-negotiated over time. Asserting that one system of values is better than another is nothing short of authoritarianism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-EEgmEWJw

The film with the aliens and Jeff Goldblum made that particularly clear.

I saw some opposition research guys in the UVM Bailey Howe Library late last year. They stood out like a sore thumb, dressed like hipsters--in the special collections room, and pulling multiple boxes on Bernie Sanders at a time. I'd never really seen someone pull that much stuff at once before. Then again, I don't visit special collections that frequently.

One of the people who work at the library contrasted it with when Howard Dean was running for president. There were opposition research guys from that election. However, instead of dressing like hipsters, they wore black suits.

Easy, just repeat the gun emoji 21 times and it has plenty of meaning.

Does FairPoint?

From what I understand, salting prevents computing the tables ahead of time and the ability to cross-reference a single password hash against all other password hashes. It doesn't prevent people who have access to both the salt and the hash from performing the same attack against individual passwords.

There's nothing to stop anyone from creating a reverse lookup table by systematically generating strings and their hash, and aside from dictionary words, this is an example of low hanging fruit. It's a repeated sequence of characters, which would be the second most obvious heuristic (after the dictionary) when trying to generate plausible passwords and their associated SHA1 hash.

Before the LinkedIn leak, I was guilty of sharing passwords across sites, and I got a wake up call by a "someone tried resetting your password" email. Started resetting them all, got to the point where I noticed there were a lot and I should probably use a password manager. Eventually I found out I had over 100 online accounts for various things, all of them now having unique passwords. I've deleted a handful of them (e.g. MySpace, MyCokeRewards). There are a couple more I'm trying to get deleted (e.g. Dominos) but haven't been successful yet.

There are entire companies built on tracking non-users around the internet.

I don't get a lot of opportunities to play around with JS frameworks, which is odd because I hobby-code a lot in JS. I imagine the top reasons to use frameworks are cross-browser compatibility and support for scalability in the domain of your work. Unfortunately sometimes people use them because the only tool they have is a hammer, so everything is a nail. Vanilla DOM manipulation has become much easier in the past few years. I have played around with some new DOM features in my own time, but for anything public-facing I'm going to use a library that allows for cross-browser compatibility, and typically that's a combination of jQuery, polyfills, etc.

I imagine designing thorough unit tests for 2000 lines of code could take a few weeks, and continue to have sparse edge cases crop up over the course of years. They're nice to have for mature software components. If you're prototyping, they're a waste of time.

Good to know!

I would really like if Unicode properties were implemented. I'd also like to see a RegExp escape function. String padding sees common enough usage that it should be added.

I've found more formal database schemas are often lost on people that don't work with relational data. Any ideas on how to avoid that?

That works for most decision tree models. Venn diagrams are better for explaining anything having to do with set models. Cartesian graphs are good at explaining time/space complexity.

Maybe if I was using Python or Ruby. But JS? REALLY ugly practice. Multiple blank lines not allowed? I usually go with two to segment heavily procedural code. The most appalling thing by far though is spaces instead of tabs... what's wrong with this guy?

If they're on a home email server, they always need a warrant. For hosted email, they don't require a warrant for older emails.

With the ACLU and EFF backing, I'm not finding any significant negatives. On the other hand, this bill is so overdue that it leaves me wondering.

On a downer note, this is so overdue that I'm wondering why now instead of ten years ago.

Home email servers require a warrant. It's third-party email servers, or even third-party hosts, that this is addressing. That is assuming my past understanding is correct. It should be unconstitutional as it stands now, as anything password-protected whatsoever should ideally fall under reasonable expectation of privacy.

As a Vermont resident, I'm happy Senator Batman (Leahy) co-authored the Senate version.

If you host your own private server, from what I recall reading (and looks consistent with a cursory Google search), a warrant is required to review your emails.

Edit: looks like it only applies to in-home servers, not hosted ones.

About fucking time (pardon my language)

I know that Vermont effectively abolished slavery by 1777. Massachusetts effectively abolished it in 1783. There were still lots of loopholes though.

It's not hard for an organization to put a system in place to mitigate any particular individual from making a poor decision. Entering into any decision that is high-stakes inherently justifies the cost of the existence or creation of such a system. For example, RFP processes are often required for any spending over a particular threshold on external vendors. Hiring processes often include input from more than one person.

If the investors didn't do their proper due diligence, then they can take steps to be more responsible in the future. If the founders misled them, then it becomes an economic and political issue of how to address and further prevent such problems.