This works, but by blocking half the light, wouldn't you get a pretty dim picture?
576 karma · joined February 5, 2014
In #1 you mention "security practices like expiring session tokens in cookie" and then go on in #2 to say that the exact same thing isn't good enough. You do know that the T in JWT stands for "token", right?
Are you sending raw JWTs straight to the browser? Why? That's the big problem, not setting "admin=true" inside of a JWT. The data in a JWT is a claim that's meant to be verified by signing. It's no more and no less.
If you want to describe the OAuth implementation or something more substantial than a "cool kid" then it might be more illuminating, but you don't give any context.
A JWT is just a base64 encoded JSON object that has a signature. You can pass one to any base64decode() function to see the actual data, so the important part is checking the signature to see whether it's been tampered with.
But the whole "admin=true" part, while it doesn't sound like best practice, isn't inherently less secure than using the JWT notation for scopes. "admin=true" might as well be "scope=admin" so the person criticizing the "cool kid" doesn't seem to understand JWT usage themselves.
What's important is where you sign and verify a JWT: Signing means using a secret key, which means actually having a secret key stored, which means that it has to happen server-side.
Proper JWT usage means that both the data creation/signing and data reading/verifying are always happening on the server, and you've got to trust the security of your servers, since they have the ability to read your shared secret key.
So to be secure, you shouldn't really send the JWT to an insecure client like a web browser at all. Since anyone can read a JWT, you're unnecessarily leaking information about the inner workings of the app, just giving hackers important info like the variable names you're checking for.
Instead, the best move is to use key/value storage for hashing your JWT into garbage and sending that over to the browser. When the user performs an action, they'll send the nonsense key and the server will retrieve the actual JWT and verify/perform the actual request handling.
Of course, this just takes the conversation back to session handling. There are various ways to mitigate the risk of someone stealing another user's session data and using it to impersonate the user, but those aren't unique to JWT.
Anyway, the comment above doesn't give enough detail about what the "cool kid" was doing in order to determine whether it was bad security or not. Sounds like either a lazy description of the actual scenario, or a poor understanding of JWTs.
Cannabis has been a Schedule 1 drug for decades, which makes it, according to the DEA's own definition, a drug "with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."
It's only in the past couple of years that there's been any sort of serious talk about potential health benefits. Marijuana use and sale was first banned in 1937, and when that ban was later declared unconstitutional, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 created the drug scheduling system and placed it in the "most dangerous" category.
Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the original 1937 ban, so it seems hard to claim that the prevailing "Marijuana talk" of our time has focused on the health benefits, rather than the dangers. The reason there's been a small but constant discourse on the health benefits of cannabis over the past eight decades is that the current laws and the official DEA stance are clearly overzealous.
It's as if soft drinks were outlawed, and our government declared that they were as bad for your health as heroin. In truth, if you are a sufficiently heavy "daily drinker" of sugar water, you will develop a severe chemical dependence, and eventually wind up with type 2 diabetes, which will permanently damage your health and certainly shorten your lifespan. However, there's nothing wrong with having a root beer every now and then.
So if soft drinks had been illegal for the past 80 years because they had "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse" (which is true), you'd definitely be hearing some determined voices pointing out that there were some potential health benefits of sugar and water.
Reading the article, I was reminded of a nagging question I've had in the back of my mind for a bit.
The ASCII table was invented in the '70s, when the cost of disk storage was much higher than it is today. But it's a shared dictionary, a standard that we can all agree upon, something that's already on every computer.
The thing I've wondered about is whether there could be any advantage to creating new generations of shared dictionaries that are domain-specific, and much larger.
For example, in the specific (and over-simplified) case of transmitting large quantities of English text from a server to a client, you could reduce the amount of data sent over the wire if both parties shared a lookup table that contained the entire English dictionary. In that case, you wouldn't transmit a book as a collection of characters, but rather as a collection of words.
Furthermore, it would seem like you could apply the same traditional compression methods like what's described in the article to furthermore reduce the amount of data being sent. Rather than identifying repeating patterns of letters, you would identify repeating patterns of words.
Of course, the obvious drawback is that an English lookup table is useless for transmitting anything other than English text. But again, disk storage being as cheap as it is, I wonder if it wouldn't be such a monumental problem to store many domain-specific dictionaries.
Of course, you'd always want to keep the ASCII table as a fallback. Much in the same way that a conversation in sign language (ASL, specifically) is largely composed of hand gestures referring to words or concepts, but the language still includes the complete alphabet as a fallback.
The thing I don't understand well enough is whether modern compression already incorporates concepts that are similar enough such that a shared-word dictionary would be useless. It seems like the "LZXX" style of compression essentially includes a similar but dynamically-generated sort of dictionary at the beginning of the transmission, and subsequently refers to that in order to express the message itself. Would the gains of having enormous shared dictionaries cancel out the advantage of that approach, only in a much more "wasteful" way?
The issue is that she was apparently told to use the .gov email address provided to her by her work, and she did this instead.
People have accused her of doing this for various reasons, but personally I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from hillary@clintonemail.com, and so that she could use her own BlackBerry.
Foremost, it helps to be born incredibly wealthy, or be born into a world where you have connections to incredibly wealthy, powerful people.
Secondly, whether it's the bootstrapping founder or the speculating funder, the person sitting on their mountain of cash and influence has to be unsatisfied with sitting on a mountain of cash. There's many things money can't buy, but there is one difficult--yet attainable--thing you can do with wealth:
Be famous.
In Silicon Valley, those who are merely wealthy-but-not-famous feel envy toward Jobs, Zuckerberg, and all of California's movie and music celebrities. These people are / will be remembered after they're dead. If you die with ten Ferarris in your garage, you're just as non-existent as a blue collar worker who has a couple dozen people show up to his funeral.
In New York, those who are merely wealthy-but-not-famous have spent generations sitting on old wealth, but the '80s are long gone. Stock brokers aren't cool anymore. Goldman Sachs is hovering somewhere between evil and being a joke. Manhattan's wealthy are starting to feel envy toward Silicon Valley's fame, so they're throwing money at their young relatives and friends in Brooklyn. They do this in the hopes that some of that money will stick to something famous, and they'll be a part of something more eternal than their own lives.
Seattle's wealthy tech giants aren't glamorized. Gates is the quintessential nerd who made Microsoft Windows, the eternal punching bag of boring corporate software. Jeff Bezos is strange to say the least, and Amazon, the WalMart of the internet, is a company that somehow manages to be even more culturally boring than Microsoft.
In fact, the concept of using wealth to achieve fame to achieve immortality isn't lost on Bill Gates. He isn't spending the second half of his life trying to buy in at the ground level of the next big American corporation, he's becoming immortal by spreading his name throughout the developing world via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
So what does this article really mean when it talks about being risk-adverse? Most people don't have the luxury of avoiding risk. If having rent money is an actual concern in your life, the uncertainty of attaining that next round of VC funding pales in comparison. What's more risky than putting your life savings into opening a small shop or restaurant? But since that's not a tech startup, it doesn't count in the rankings, and so the author of the article condemns Seattle as being a city of people who are frozen in fear of failure.
In fact, the article even manages to touch on the right idea, while missing the truth behind the statement:
"Seattle's weak spot is funding."
In other words, the ultra wealthy of Seattle just don't care as much about tech startups. It's not good or bad, it's just a fact.
If you're rich in NYC or Silicon Valley, status means buying into someone else's good idea so that you can claim your role in being a part of the "next big thing." If you're rich in Seattle, status means that you have the best quality of life: Wealth means a beautiful house by the water, a boat, a nice camper van, and enough free time to regularly take it out of the city. Extreme wealth doesn't mean that you get to look over business plans and sit on the board of directors for what you hope is going to be the next Snapchat. It means that you found a charitable organization, host big community events, create crowd-pleasing spectacles, and put your name on them.
This article is one person's feeble attempt to put attention-grabbing spin on a statistical study. The cited study is likely trustworthy and indisputable. The article is pointless fluff and arbitrary value judgements. Everybody already knows where to move if you want to network with wealthy startup investors, we didn't need some fool writing an article about how Seattle "flails".
But the bigger issue with the Kindle platform is the inability to mimic the usefulness of a large, graphics-heavy reference book. It has a tiny screen that isn't good for viewing larger diagrams, and its tools for quickly flipping through pages or jumping back and forth between specific parts of the book are pathetic when compared with using a real book.
In terms of popular digital devices, the Kindle is the most puzzling to me. It was an innovative and groundbreaking technology when it was introduced 8 years ago, and all we've seen since then are the most boring and incremental improvements. Some have even been major missteps, as evidenced by the removal of physical page-turning buttons, only to have them return in the latest model.
Imagine if smartphones, tablets, wearables, or laptops had undergone such a severe lack of innovation in the past 8 years. How the product leadership of the Kindle team isn't fired and replaced with people who have real vision is a complete mystery to me.
I thought Bezos was supposed to be a hard-ass, but from an outsider's perspective it seems like he's totally fine with them barely lifting a finger to collect their paychecks.
Imagine a very affordable, portable laptop with week-long battery life, completely free of distractions like youtube.
It writes. It reads. It sends emails. That's it. Maybe as a stretch, they could quietly make it attractive to the tech community with a Unix-compatible shell and SSH ability. Call it the Kindle TypeLighter.
You're welcome, Amazon. I'll accept my royalty payments in personal check.
EDIT: Before anyone says anything about refresh rates, there's plenty of electronic ink technologies that are more than capable of supporting the rates needed to rapidly add characters to the screen. This thing, for example: http://www.dasung.com.cn/
As for which OS (Win/Mac/nix) controls the majority share of developer desktops, I feel like it's always going to depend on what you're developing, so talking about the overall "biggest slice of the pie" for developers is less meaningful than talking about who has the biggest slice in the consumer space.
For example, a backend web developer might look at this "Winbuntu" thing and suddenly be attracted to the idea that they could trade their Mac in for a PC that lets them do all the UNIXy stuff they need for their job, but at the end of the day lets them play the latest PC games...
...unless SteamOS continues to grow in popularity, in which case Microsoft loses share because a Linux-based laptop suddenly seems like the best choice for a gamer-developer.
On the other hand, if we're talking about a company handing work laptops out to employees, frontend developer-designers are likely to continue preferring (requiring, really) Macs for a long time to come, and that likely means that it makes more sense to keep a common platform and hand Macs out to everyone, since so many server devs are already well-accustomed to using Macs. And though Windows might eventually become attractive enough to professional designers, Linux is deeply neglected in the design-oriented space.
But that's all just web development, which has much more fluidity than other types of development. Game developers will continue to develop on the platforms that they intend to support (or Windows for consoles, at least for the time being). iOS developers will continue to develop on Macs. Mac developers will develop on Macs, Windows developers will develop on Windows, and Linux developers will develop on Linux. I'm barely an Android developer, but it seems to be slightly more natural to work on a Mac or Linux machine, and yet "Winbuntu" would likely remove that advantage.
I agree that with Windows embracing Linux so deeply like this, it certainly opens the door for a lot of people to make the switch-- personally, I bought a Surface Book because I was excited by the hardware, but quickly returned it once I realized how unhappy I was without native access to a terminal. If Ubuntu continues to flourish as a fully-fledged aspect of Windows, I might consider buying the Surface Book 2.
But my personal anecdote also illustrates the greater point-- this opens the door, but it doesn't push anyone through it. I was tempted away from Apple because they've stopped innovating on their laptops. In order for developers to switch to Windows, they'll have to be tempted for their own reasons. And old habits do die hard.
All jokes aside (although it's true about my car), it just seems like a fundamental truth that digitally-secured systems always provide convenience at the cost of, well, security.
In his original list, "City of Gods" (which he didn't even spell correctly-- the english title is "City of God") is the only film made in the last 2 decades.
His updated list, which was supposed to be more inclusive to women, adds Apocalypto, District 9, Kung Fu Hustle, and Dirty Pretty Things, all of which are directed by men-- and he even removed "City of Gods", one of the few movies from the original list that had a female (co)director.
In fact, the entire list reads like a giant insult to all of Lee's contemporaries. Does he want every aspiring filmmaker to enter the business with antiquated sensibilities about cinematography?
He's coming across like the smug high-schooler who just discovered Led Zeppelin and declares that they're the greatest band of all time, and all modern music is crap.
http://deadline.com/2014/03/mel-gibson-career-hollywood-dese...
In short, the man has had his share of troubles including alcoholism, and he had some extremely inappropriate outbursts in response to the negative criticism he received after making Passion of the Christ. But while a more savvy public figure would respond by going on a highly-publicized "apology tour" to repair his public image, he chose to address his problems privately and tried to make amends for his actions without bringing a film crew to capture every moment. Just because you weren't invited along for the spectacle doesn't mean it didn't happen.
For comparison: filmmaker Woody Allen, who does a great job of publicly portraying himself as a lovably bumbling and nervous little guy, has been repeatedly accused by Mia Farrow's daughter of raping her when she was 13. He also cheated on Mia Farrow with her own adopted daughter, who was 21 at the time. Mike Tyson, as the article mentions, is a convicted rapist. Yet these men have done a better job than Gibson at repairing their public image, but this says nothing about what goes on in their hearts and minds. Everybody knows Roman Polanski is a child rapist, and that's why he fled the country. But Jack Nicholson was clearly involved in that incident as well, and even if he didn't rape a child, it's clear that at the very least he knew what was happening and in some capacity shared some responsibility. Again, he's one of the most beloved actors of our time.
I'm not saying that just because those men got away with bad things that Mel Gibson should also be given a free pass. But you can't call him an anti-semite just because he was blackout drunk and said some nasty things about the jews at at time when his life was in the dumps.
If the world was privy to every nasty and embarrassing thing you've ever said or done, what would we think of you?
It's been long enough that I've forgotten the terminology, but I remember thoroughly enjoying the process of first building a widget, then meticulously arranging all of the little boxes, color-coding, and labeling various sections until it looked visually attractive. Then when I was satisfied, I could take that entire widget and abstract it away as a small box with only the relevant input/output connectors.
I guess it's always just stuck out in my mind as the one time I really dug into a visual language, and the aesthetic aspect of organizing my "code" was very appealing. It's been a decade since I last opened any of those old project files, but I can still picture many of the components I built with my mind's eye. In and of itself, that's got to be worth something.
I imagine that someday we'll see the rise of a programming metaphor that works as a hybrid of code and visual. Even though working with PureData was inspirational, I don't see text-based languages losing relevancy any time soon. However, I think that while text code is great for representing the flow of logic, higher-order organizational constructs (such as class hierarchies) might be better represented by visual relationships. If I give you a paper and pencil and ask you to map out interconnected relationships between a bunch of entities, you're probably going to start drawing boxes and lines-- and end up with something that looks a lot like PureData.
Especially if you consider the potential of future iterations on today's VR/AR concepts, I wouldn't be too surprised if programming languages eventually looked like color-coded interconnected boxes of text code that can be rearranged in space. It wouldn't even be that far-fetched to imagine animations being included to enhance a programmer's ability to visualize the flow of logic. And I don't think that such concepts should be particularly offensive to those who consider themselves to be serious programmers.
You talk about the watch like it's inherently got to have a slow CPU and short battery life. But it's the display that's the single largest consumer of battery, and the CPU is relatively weak in an effort to compensate for that. On top of that, a leather or plastic band is a complete waste of wrist real estate that could be put to use as batteries or sensors or anything else.
A device like that could be your watch, phone, tablet, laptop, TV, smarthome remote, fitness tracker, and wallet. The wrist device shouldn't be an accessory, everything else should be an accessory for the wrist device.
Your comments about cloud storage and data centers is no more relevant to this topic than it is in any other. There's nothing mutually exclusive about "headless" wrist computers and the cloud. Obviously with a data connection, your wrist device would in fact be your always-present connection to that remote data center.
The successful smartwatch wiill function and look like a normal analog watch with real mechanical hands, except it will be stuffed to the brim with mobile CPUs, Bluetooth, cellular, WiFi,GPS, NFC, accelerometers, heart rate monitor, flash storage, and batteries. Batteries in the watch face as well as throughout the entire wristband. Just cram it with all that modern crap but make it look and function like a watch that an actual normal person wouldn't be embarrassed to wear. A smartphone with everything except for that obnoxious screen.
If that existed, consumers could pick and choose from an infinite buffet of accessory devices that are purely designed for user interaction, while leaving the connectivity and processing up to your headless wrist-mounted computer, which one again, isn't a complete embarrassment to wear.
Your "smartphone" should just be a screen for your wrist computer. Your laptop should just be a bigger screen for your wrist computer, with a keyboard that's also just an input device for your wrist computer. Your television is just a really big screen for your... You get the idea. Good news: you don't even have to own a crappy proprietary IR-based remote that you'll inevitably lose, because your TV UI exists on the handheld "smartphone" screen that passes data to the big screen via the watch computer.
Your wrist computer would have awesome battery life because it's not powering an LCD screen and the whole device can just be packed with batteries. Notice how the Pebble's battery life puts the Apple Watch to shame, and it could be even better without any screen at all. I have a Withings Activite and the battery lasts for months, even though it has bluetooth and a haptic motor.
Your wrist computer can be upgraded and you can still have compatibility with all of your same accessories, giving you the freedom to upgrade each device piecemeal. Drop your handheld "phone" screen in the toilet? Good thing it was just an LCD panel with a WiDi chip so it only cost 100 bucks, and you didn't lose any phone numbers despite not having cloud backup.
Bottom line: Everyone is trying to make the smartwach work as some kind of pale shadow of a smartphone that has a worthless interface, a garbage battery life, and doesnt even functuon as a decent timepiece. Even with all that, you still have to have a smartphone to make it a functional device. As long as tech manufacturers continue to follow that strategy, the smartwach will continue to be an abysmal failure.
Everyone's been looking for the "smartphone killer" and they're hoping it's the smartwach. It will be, but only once we actually let the smartphone die. What does the iPhone 6s / Galaxy [whatever] offer over the iPhone 5 / Galaxy [whatever - 3]? Nothing. Maybe some new color options. Webpages started scrolling smoothly on phones about 3-4 years ago,and since then its been a wasteland of innovation. We're at the "look how many cupholders we have" phase of smartphone advancement.
It's plain that the future is one device, always on your person, impossible to lose, one unified OS, and with an infinite ecosystem of compatible auxiliary interfaces. If the tech giants don't already have their engineers working toward this vision, they should feel shame.
Why does it even have to be a watch? How much processing power and battery life could you stuff into a subtle, tasteful belt? Nobody has any vision.
In terms of single player games, I don't think the same logic applies, and in my opinion we've gone way too far in the "short attention span" direction. As long as a game makes it easy to save and resume, immersive hours-long experiences with detailed graphics can be really fun to consume in bite-sized pieces. Nintendo's been doing it for decades with their portable devices (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Metroid), and it's clearly a successful approach.
It's a shame that smartphones are orders of magnitude more powerful than the Game Boy, yet mobile app stores are overflowing with single-level "infinite churn" games that amount to Tetris with micropayments.
It's built on top of express.js and offers some of the more "Railsy" features that express lacks. Also supports this idea of shared models between the client and server (going for that whole code reuse thing you're talking about).
The company was also bought by IBM so I'm feeling pretty confident that it's going to keep getting regular updates and long-term support. They offer a bunch of enterprise-type features for the paid version, but the free one will be enough for your needs.
Some people lament what you're talking about, and they do it equally for raising livestock as well as growing and harvesting our own fruits and vegetables. That growing distance between us and our food production is certainly an issue, but it's the infinitely lesser one compared to the violence of meat consumption.
Given that humans crave the types of food they crave, I don't see lab-grown meat as anything but a pure win for science, humanity, and all living beings. In my mind, it's an achievement on par with fire, the wheel, electricity, antibiotics/sterilization, and the internet.
If you want self-contained binaries, learn Go. If you want lightweight scripts that run effortlessly on all unix systems, learn bash scripting. It sort of sounds to me like you're complaining about not being able to shoehorn your chosen language into all possible scenarios.
Personally, I also believe that there's only one reason why the paper book isn't far less popular than it is, and it's entirely temporary.
Get out of the tech-minded echo chamber and ask a person why they would still buy a paper book when they could buy an e-book, and they'll pretty much only respond with "paper books just feel right to me".
The problem is completely unrelated to pricing. Since the beginning of time, people have comfortably navigated the sliding price structure of books. Some people want to buy the next Hunger Games on day 1, and they pay $39.99 to buy the hardcover and find out what happens to Katniss. Some people wait until the hype dies down. Some people borrow from a friend, and yes, some people still go to the library. And those exact same rules apply to e-books.
The entire conversation just reeks of idiocy and a bunch of industry coalitions blindly grasping around for places to point fingers because they apparently are overlooking the simple thing that everybody constantly says. I've already said it, but I'll say it again:
"Paper books just feel right to me."
Steve Jobs had a beautiful intuition about peoples' relationships with technology. It was a skill that's so painfully rare that he's still known as basically the only guy capable of figuring out what would make an advanced piece of technology attractive to an average person. Sadly, he was completely wrong about the iPad being an acceptable replacement for a book, and I feel like many people are continuing to follow him down the wrong path.
This has nothing to do with distribution and pricing. It has nothing to do with the cost of manufacturing an e-book being far less than a paper book. People still pay tons of money for games on Steam.
The single problem is that e-readers aren't good. They're garbage. That's it. Amazon is the clear leader, but it's not good enough. For anyone who wants to dominate the e-reader industry, here's your free advice:
1. Make an e-reader with a beautiful e-paper screen capable of displaying full color.
2. Make the screen refresh very quickly
3. Give it sensible touch gestures that you never accidentally trigger, and give it very useful physical buttons.
4. Make sure it can do everything a book can do. Can you quickly thumb through a 500 page novel on a kindle? Nope. Can you easily write something in the margin? Nope. Can you bookmark your current reading position, and also earmark a few other favorite spots in the book? Nope.
5. Give it a non-tech appearance. Make the damn thing out of wood.
6. Sell it in 3 sizes from day 1: The current standard paperback-ish size, as well as a smaller smartphone-sized one, and finally a large one, like ~15 inches.
Aside from the challenges of building a better color e-paper screen with great refresh, the others are just so obvious and so stupidly ignored. I'm actually frustrated just writing this. Make the e-reader personal, make it a lovable object. People will not stop throwing their money at this.
I don't have any problem with you choosing to wear a helmet because you want to avoid TBI, but unless you're also wearing a helmet every time you get in a car, you're behaving irrationally.
Also, here's another study and some choice quotes:
"Use of a helmet was only associated with a 10% decreased risk of severe injury, a difference which was not statistically significant."
"Patients with neck injuries were much more likely to be severly injured (OR=4.09) and hospitalized (OR=2.56) than were patients without neck injuries. They were also 15 times more likely to die than those without neck injuries [...] There was no association of neck injury with helmet use, either in the entire group of patients with neck injury (OR=0.9, 95% CI 0.6 to 1.4, adjusted for age)"
"Males were 2.4 times more likely, those hit by motor vehicles 14.1 times more likely, and those traveling at self reported speeds > 15 mph, 2.6 times more likely to be killed."
1. http://bmj-injuryprev.highwire.org/content/3/2/110.full.pdf
The point is that when you're cycling or doing any activity, you expose yourself to a combination of risks. I've never argued that helmet use isn't a valid way to decrease certain risks (I wear mine daily when commuting in traffic, and sometimes when hitting the bike path out of the city I leave it at home), but it's detrimental that we focus on that as the only cause of risk, because it causes people to ignore everything else.
People like telling other people to wear helmets because it's an easy solution. But it only (kind of) solves one problem, and even worse, it's used as a scapegoat, a means to blame the victim. A woman gets flattened into 2 dimensions by a tractor trailer while riding her bike, but what's this? She wasn't wearing her helmet?? Come on people, wear your helmet!
It's as if we were to address the entire issue of auto safety with "wear a seatbelt!" and considered the matter closed even if a kid who's never driven before is going 100mph through a residential neighborhood with his eyes closed.
Here are some facts:
In 2013, 32,719 people were killed in road accidents.
Also in 2013, 4,735 pedestrians were killed. The leading cause of injury to pedestrians is tripping and falling, but by far the leading cause of death is being hit by a car.
For cyclists in 2013, 743 were killed. The leading cause of cyclist deaths is, again, being hit by a car.
At this point, even though these numbers show that bicycle deaths account for only .02% of deaths in the US each year (which completely disqualifies cycling accidents from being anywhere close to a health epidemic) people will inevitably point out that not many people ride bicycles, so that 743 is actually quite a large number. Of course cars kill 20 times as many pedestrians as they do cyclists, because there are so many pedestrians, and so few cyclists, right?
While there's nothing wrong with that statement, the fallacy is in thinking that you can just extrapolate from there with simple multiplication. Cycling accounts for approximately 1% of all trips taken in the US. So the logic is that if cycling accounted for 100% of all trips, instead of 32,719 we'd have 74,300 people dying in road accidents! Terrifying!
Except it doesn't work that way. Remember that the leading cause of death to both pedestrians and cyclists alike is cars. So if 100% of road traffic were cyclists, there wouldn't be any cars to kill anyone.
Now is a good time to bring up The Netherlands, a country where cycling accounts for 27% of all trips, and in cities (where accidents of all types are much more likely) that number rises to more like 50%. Even worse, practically nobody wears bike helmets there! So clearly, their hospitals must be overflowing with people suffering from exploded skulls. One can only imagine the carnage on their streets... because it doesn't exist. In 2013, 184 cyclists died in The Netherlands, which is .001% of their population. Our 743 account for .0002% of our population, but if you multiply that by 27 (1% vs. 27% of all trips taken) you get .006%, which is 6 times as many deaths per capita.
In other words, it's much safer to be a cyclist in a country where nobody wears a helmet but everybody bikes, than it is to be a cyclist in a country where virtually nobody does it, but at least you have a piece of styrofoam strapped to your head.
Why? Because when more people bike, we build more infrastructure to support bikes. Drivers become more aware of bikes, and instead of just gnashing their teeth and dangerously swerving around them, they're familiar with how bikes move through traffic and see them as just another part of driving on a road. Cyclists are more visible, motorists are more prepared, and everybody gets along better. And bikeshare programs are exactly the kind of thing to promote more people riding bikes.
But wait, we still haven't trotted out everyone's favorite last-ditch argument when all else fails! "No matter what you say about big-picture statistics, you'd still be safer wearing a helmet."
Yes. This is true. Adding more shock absorption to the human skull can protect the brain from traumatic injury. In fact, it's so true that it applies to virtually every human activity. So let's really follow through, and make it mandatory to wear a helmet while driving or riding in an automobile. Let's make it mandatory for pedestrians to wear helmets. Why stop there? Let's make it mandatory to wear full body armor any time you leave the house, and let's make it illegal to sell or build anything with sharp corners. Let's spend our entire lives suspended in smooth carbon fiber tanks full of Jell-O, so that nothing is a danger to our well-being until a heart attack ends it all!
Incidentally, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, is a real health epidemic, and is preventable by putting your butt in a bike seat and riding a few miles every day.
Sources:
http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/traffic-fatali...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dutch-dont-wear-helmets....
That being said, it's hard to be excited about the game, because there doesn't seem to be one. I'm looking forward to when you release the engine in a documented usable form so that people who are passionate about games--not game engines--will have a chance to use this amazing tech.
On the other hand, it seems like there's nothing you can't do, maybe you're also a genius game designer. Though I'd still like to see what other people can do with it.
The concrete reason to do this is to make life easier for those who are the targets of bias. The hope is that reducing bias will reduce underrepresentation naturally.
There are many conversations about diversity that stray into controversial territory. People start talking about quotas, which leads to arguments about reverse discrimination and the true meaning of a meritocracy. This is not one of those conversations!
I see no evidence that the author is getting anywhere close to suggesting that equal representation is more important than evaluating people based on merit alone. She's saying that most of us carry biases around, and that it's important that we do our best to prevent them from making life and work shitty for our peers.
There's a difference between wanting equal representation "by any means" and wanting it "the right way". This article is advocating the latter--and even then only as a secondary goal--the primary goal is to make sure we don't let our biases create hostility toward those who've already proven they have a right to be here.
What isn't great is a lack of variety. Why would you want everybody on your team to be the same type of person? You want everyone's abilities to be complementary, not identical.
That might be the most cringey opening quote I've ever read for an article. Straight out of Silicon Valley (the show). The only explanation I can come up with is that the reporter knows nothing about tech and the kid was trolling her.