stuki

Thinking of "programming" as a completely separate field, to be "done" by specialists only, is highly unfortunate.

All "programming" really is, is formulating what you want done precisely. A compiler can take it from there. Where a specialist in "computers" comes in, is he can optimize your algorithms to run more efficiently. But in more cases than not, what "programmers" are tasked with, is to "just make it work", with little more specificity than that. And then the garbage inputer gets upset because he gets garbage back out.

SQL was originally, back when clarity of thought was still considered fashionable in executive suites, intended to be used by decision makers. "Specialist" IBM "programmers" provided the code that accessed and processed the relevant records efficiently, but the person who wanted an answer, often a C level, was the one tasked with specifying what he wanted done. With enough precision that his question made sense.

Good way to keep resources locked up in zombie companies unable to generate even 0% return, by letting them roll over loans despite destroying value.

Instead of flushing out the stagnant resource pools, so they could be put to better use doing something less wasteful.

And if two commands get stored in quick succession, such that the first results in a state that renders the second impossible? Particularly if some of the balance updates in the first command, are contingent on others ( credit line backing checking account updated if deposit balance < 0, for example )?

Financial transactions are pretty much the poster child for atomic, multi update transactions and pessimistic locking.

IPv6 doesn't fundamentally offer end users anything far beyond the current standards.

I'm imagining a protocol for less tightly coupled endpoints could be written to, while the "switches" merely translate traffic to route it on current infrastructure. A more application agnostic version of mixmaster or TOR, so to speak. The important part, is really to get enough of a variety of end user apps written to it, to prevent anyone from knowing much about the traffic simply due to the protocol spoken. Then, over time, to optimize away more and more crud, until we've got dedicated hardware. It may still be a bit utopian, but the current mess isn't really serving people all that well anymore, either.

Which is a pretty good indication that all meaningful solutions to the spying problems, need to work at a level more fundamental than government. Routing around them, or rendering them impotent, by design, if you wish.

Even by the "standards" of Newsweek, this article is supremely stupid.

Current high level languages make so few concessions to the underlying execution engine, that all they really are, are convenient notation for clear and logical thought. The only reason they seem needlessly hard to your average Newsweek hack, is because of his/her own shortcomings in the clear and logical arena.

English, as well as other "human" languages, are (perhaps)good for making highly concrete grunts to ones hunting party, and for making jokes to impress chicks. They were never well suited for describing complex processes and procedures. And complex processes and procedures is what defines an advanced economy. Every area of advanced economy endeavor suffers from having too much of it's workings half assedly and imprecisely "described" in a "human" language. And honestly, for no other reason than that too many "stakeholders" are too bloody dense and lazy to learn anything better suited.

But I guess there are those who think mathematics would be better off without all that weird, difficult notation as well. With mathematicians instead hand waving and counting on fingers, in front of calculators "smart" enough to learn from humans......

It's not "our own" government, for any "our own" that purports to include me. It is a junta with enough guns to have their way with people across a continent. Pretending otherwise may sound "non extremist" and "responsible", but it's still ridiculously naive and bound to lead to nothing but disappointment. In ever increasing doses.

Practically, a good start is to recognize that not all valuable communication mechanisms benefit all that much from minimizing latency of packet delivery. IOW, not all, in fact not even most, means of communication really need the kind of "apparently real time" performance that telephony requires.

Moving services that don't, to a protocol where the focus is on making mixing and anonymizing simple, reliable and robust; rather than simply max throughput and min latency, would make end user security and anonymity guarantees much easier to make. And, for many types of channels, this can be done without much at all in the way of negative side effects, given how fast the underlying switching infrastructure has gotten.

Current protocols were necessary for any kind of usability when hardware was slow and expensive. And good enough privacy and security vise, when even the NSA didn't really have the means to do much wide net spying at the network level. But neither of those realities of the original internet is true anymore. Instead, sorry for the pompousness, the new environment is so different as to require, or at least recommend, something almost akin to a "new internet." Built with the "new" threats to communication in mind.

I'm not working anywhere, at a startup nor anywhere else, that could conceivably "profit" from any of the above ramble. If what I'm saying makes no sense, it's because I'm a moron (or at least misinformed), not because I'm a scumbag.

The relevant question isn't whether it is "breaking things" in the abstract, but whether it is breaking things in a way meaningfully detrimental to end users. Or, if you really want to stretch it, perhaps also include externalities imposed on the "internet as a whole."

In the era before the omnibox, I personally can't see much in the way of "breaking things" on account of OpenDNS. Doesn't mean you and others can't disagree with that, but it's not as cut and dried as your statement seems to imply.

All "language" is not the same. To be reliably and consistently machine executable, a language needs to facilitate manipulations that are logically rigorous. While in a language for general human communication, emphasis needs to be on manipulations that are more fluid and aesthetic in nature. Facility with one does not necessarily translate well to another. Particularly in the English -> Programming direction, which makes it doubly dangerous to assume it does, when hiring for STEM type jobs. Extreme aspies and savants aside, most good programmers can communicate well in English, in the sense they can formulate their intent precisely. While the converse is much, much rarer.

One threat that is getting bigger in the Bay Area, is the ever increased concentration and dependence on start ups. Most of whom are not living of anything remotely resembling cash flow.

The tech eco system itself is one thing, and largely populated by people who can afford a bit of a hit. But nowadays, everything is priced and organized around ever more millionaires being minted in tech every day, and the spending these generate. Take even some of that away, say by making money less artificially cheap, and there is potential for plenty of pain and dislocation across the area.

Much like Finance in NYC, the tech boom/bubble is driving costs so high in the Bay Area, that the only remaining jobs are either in tech, or jobs providing highly paid, localized and personalized services to tech workers able to afford paying thousands to have their toenails clipped, lips kissed and walls decorated with Van Goghs. Leaving those providing the latter, highly vulnerable to any slowdown in the increasingly monocultural spigot from which almost all funds here now flow.

The kind of aggressive court interference talked about in the article, will (or at least should) be the catalyst to make that happen.

Anonymous comments really ought to be hosted anonymously and in a distributed fashion, preventing them from being taken down or "used against you." The "fire in a crowded theater" supposed exception, is simply not relevant wrt internet comments.

Like any other scheme to make commenting more expensive (resource wise), it implicitly makes the assumption that the value of what one has to say, somehow correlates with how much resources one has at ones disposal to be heard.

In the web era, the most important job a publisher has to ensure his site is a good one, is to write and edit content in such a way that he attracts an audience of interesting readers. Who will in turn, offer interesting comments. It is not, as may have been the case earlier, to hire the "best" journalists, to write their version of the truth. Sites that still use the latter approach, rarely, if ever, reach the level of truly interesting, simply because no one, or small group of, writer(s) will ever cover all bases, the way a whole community of interested and interesting commenters will.

Are they also going to force participants not to blog, talk about, or otherwise disseminate the information they gleaned there?

Otherwise, this childishness is just another act by the clueless to try grabbing some attention for themselves, while doing something of no practical value. While simultaneously flaunting how little they know, about how the world really works.

Compared to most of Europe, one of the things the US has to recommend it, is easier access to personal bankruptcy, jingle mailing underwater house keys etc. Of course, given the obsession of our time being to trick someone into putting his name on some dotted line, the politicos are doing their darnedest to destroy this, but it's still easier to just walk away in America than in most places.

Good to hear Sweden has as good, (perhaps better?) access to such facilities.

Not just waiting....

If you have the ability to insert backdoors on widely used hardware with no realistic alternative implementations, without anyone other than a very select few (who all have plenty to lose if they reveal anything) knowing about it; AND the only thing you'll use it for is National Security (preventing someone from building a nuke to drop on your country), why would you NOT go through with it?

I simply cannot fathom how the NSA could hope to intercept and physically mess with every single piece of $10 to $10,000 router sold.

If true, and I have a hard time believing it is not, either this is done at the design level (and not just on router chips), or only for big ticket backbone and/or enterprise equipment.

The additional layer of redirection, at least conceptually enables the use of application specific, or pluggable, vDOMs and/or diffing strategies.

I guess the takeaway is: Don't operate Big Data companies out of Europe..... Pack up your bags, apply for YC and move to SV instead...

All harassing publicly famous entities will achieve, is to make obtaining available information more difficult for regular people. While those with deeper pockets and better connections, will simply pay niche providers for deeper searches and indexing.

From a privacy POV, you would WANT this kind of White Hat demonstrations of where your privacy weak points are. That way, you are aware of them and can make accommodations. While third party services can spring up to address the most widespread concerns. Rather than show up for a job interview, and have the interviewer "know" something about you, that you have no idea is available to them at all.

Another is Beck's "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns." Just like Smalltalk-80, it's a book relevant for anyone writing software, almost regardless of language and discipline.

And they did all this despite their paying customers not wanting their coffee that way? Simply because they wanted to, above else, be as nasty as they could to people, never mind lost sales, complaints, court fees and what have you?

In other words, the corporate culture of their coffee operation is not greedy, as often assumed, but specifically sadistic. Happy to suffer lost sales and revenue, higher legal fees, and a shattered reputation, just for the pleasure of burning people?

It would be interesting to see the kind of interview processes that managed to maintain that kind of a corporate culture despite all the churn inherent in minimum wage job environments.

Outside of emergency rooms and acute care, people have quite a bit of choice as to when to see a doctor, and whom to see. It is conceptually little different than auto repair in that sense. Making the world artificially black and white only serves to obscure nuances. Some times you really could use some help right now, most of the time not. The efficient way to deal with the former, is to plan ahead and make arrangements. For the latter, YAGNY may well be the efficient approach.

Heck, even someone rendering services as conceptually involuntary as a will executor, can have a reputation fr being good or bad. Despite you not necessarily having much choice on the matter when the headline service is being rendered.

Rather, tort reform, or more accurately some sort of limitations of what one can drag the civil courts system into, boils down to looking at who wrote the Bill of Rights, and making an estimate as to whether it is reasonable to believe they intended them to be used to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars for spilling coffee on oneself. Or, more pointedly, hundreds of thousands in legal fees by lawyers.

Did we really have cases like this, back when the Bills' authors were still alive? Otherwise, doesn't all this brouhaha look like it boils down to little more than someone getting paid very well to conveniently misunderstand what the Bills were intended to mean? Paid better, in fact, than if instead of harassing others, they simply went out and solved the problem they perceive exist, by selling perfect temperature coffee themselves.

And as she didn't specifically ask for coffee served at a specific temperature, McDonald's had no way of knowing what temperature she preferred.

What McDonald's did have, however, was a way to estimate what temperature it's customers in general prefer their coffee served at. Roadside Coffee is, after all, a pretty competitive market. If you're too far off temperature wise, people go elsewhere.

Hence, by the standards of "the community", or whatever you wish to call them, McDonald's served coffee at the right temperature. Or at least close enough not to offend enough of them to lose measurable business.

Out of curiosity, did McDonald's manage to poor milk into the cup, and still have it end up that hot? Maybe I have weird ideas about coffee, but for someone all too used to lukewarm coffee once milk is added, that actually sounds quite impressive for such a decidedly low rent establishment.

Reviews weighted by trust, seem to do quite well in most places where they are employed. From Amazon and Ebay sellers to Uber drivers to College rankings. Even yelp rankings, which are extremely unspecific, seems to provide users with waay better than random ability to pick the good from the bad. Even when it comes to doctors, as a matter of fact.

I would honestly be very, very surprised if they didn't end up working substantially better for medical doctors than for most other service providers. As, at least in my experience, very few people who decide to though the effort of becoming a doctor, do so with the express intent of scamming their way to riches, the way many Ebay and Amazon sellers do.

I am sure that in some selected cases, an aggressive tort system could be construed to have provided a better outcome, but at what systemic cost? Massive over treatment of every conceivable low probability condition, to stave off grounds for lawsuits. Doctors scared of going with their hunches, and instead of doing what they feel is the best for the patient, doing what they expect will be easiest to defend if the outcome should be less than ideal.....

Doesn't forcefully injecting an expensive and completely unconcerned outside party, into an arrangement between two parties that are outcome concerned, strike you as an inefficient use of resources? Why not, instead, try to find ways to make the two concerned parties understand each other better?

And what kind of reputation, do you think an Amazon seller who makes potential customers sign "no review" contracts, will get?

There's nothing magical about the medical field, that makes approaches developed elsewhere somewhat irrelevant there. It's just another fee for service arrangement. Although many Doctors do like to fancy themselves as special snowflakes.

What always irked me about the whole "vacuum train" debate, is that once you have vacuum, why bother with trains?

Trains beat individual cars efficiency wise, largely because they are long and have low frontal areas, hence air resistance, for their size and carrying capacity. Get rid of the air, and why not go whole hog with lightning fast cars?

Heck, put in place mechanisms to charge e-cars' batteries when in tunnel, and you can not only shoot someone to Europe in an hour, but allow him to drive out of the airlock and to his final destination pretty much interruption free as well. With Elon Musk being the latest hawker of vacuum tunnel hype, maybe we'll finally get to see a Tesla with no need to apologize for limited range.....

More realistically, before even contemplating doing a passenger version, someone should at least do a preliminary, by soundly and reliably beating FedEx Overnight Air between New York and LA/SF. Then plan on going from there with acquired learnings.

Any coffee heated to the point where it is still drinkable at the end of a 20 minute commute, will be hot enough to kill if poured straight down your throat in one gulp. It is up to the customer to have some sort of clue.

I am pretty sure that when granny makes coffee herself at home, she makes it at least as hot as McDonalds serves it. Whistling kettles and all.

In a country of millions of people doing stuff, sometimes the stars align wrong for someone, and they get hurt. It doesn't have to, and in fact rarely is, someones "fault." It wasn't granny's "fault" that this one time she fumbled the lid and spilled coffee. Given enough tries, sooner or later anyone would, as it is a positive probability outcome. But neither is the probability of it happening large enough to say McDonald's was "at fault" of something. Stuff happens. Sometimes nice stuff, sometime less so. No need to feed a lawyer army either way.

It's the same silly obsession with finding who's "at fault" that underpins the enormously inefficient (except for, again, for lawyers) "at fault" car accident insurance schemes in place in most states. Despite most accidents and other mishaps being the result of all manners of complicated, best modeled as random, factors. None of which are a specific party's "fault."

But of course, there's the old adage about most people ending up in law school, do so because they couldn't hack math well enough to ever get into the complex systems classes....:)

Reputation systems, reviews and properly skeptical consumers, are what to aim for, in determining who is good and who is not. Whether for restaurants or doctors. Not frightfully pricey lawyers and other coercive, after-the-fact institutions. And, in the most egregious of cases, say McDonald's spiked granny's coffee with a hand grenade, the criminal courts get involved as a last ditch anyway.

Reliance on civil courts may sound attractive to the naive, but the lawyers and institutions involved, are just as single mindedly focused on their own personal gains, financial and in prestige, as either party to the original dispute. It's not that they are necessarily systemically partial to one side or the other, but rather that they are partial to making the fight as acrimonious and expensive as possible. As that is, after all, their "side."

Just for clarification, wouldn't it appear that RBS was in violation of licensing terms even when it owned LaSalle, by using the software corporation wide, despite it only being licensed by a subsidiary?

Otherwise, you'd think there would be a huge market for tiny little companies that happened to have a "site license" for some expensive software.

I still think the judge, or some other authority, should put a cap on the price Complex Systems could charge, rather than leaving RBS completely at the mercy of their vendor. Perhaps the appeals court will.

That's pretty central to any OO language. "Everything's an object." Veering away from that, only serves to turn the language into a mess of boxing and unboxing.

That's not to say that OO is necessarily the ideal language paradigm, but it has certainly been the most dominant in the era Python has existed.