Posts by JLV 2252 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
>The Universe is also finite though.
Ok, I'll bite, because I recently saw some preacher's book makes a big point of the "fact" that the universe being infinite is stupid.
If the universe IS finite, then, once you reach its limit - and I am NOT talking about the limit of the current Big Bang expansion - what do YOU claim lies beyond that boundary?
Space is infinite. The volume w "things in it" is not - it's our expanding Big Bang front. The number of planets is therefore not infinite (and we're still discovering goldilocks planet likelihood, even for increasingly elastic definitions of what life might pit up with).
As to the absence of aliens - most of them learned much too late not to light lanterns in dark forests.
Good points. Laptops and desktops have already reached good-for-number-of-years status ages ago. Given enough RAM and fast SSD storage you dont need to upgrade very often. Remember when a 3 yr old PC was yesterday's jam?
Phone makers only have themselves to blame for making things worse by yanking up flagship costs from 7-800 to 1000 $ CAD even as feature sets stabilized. Enhanced water protection is my only real wishlist item at this point.
Glad iPhone X dud-ded and hoping Sammy follows. One shouldn't have to pay 1000$ for a phone by a decent manufacturer, when all other electronics generally see fast price drops.
As I am happily looking at telemetry (for our own good so that MS knows what we want), upteen configuration options, many of them unpinnable, configuration options that change from release to release, a Powershell for which I need to look up even the simplest options, configurations that needs to be done through Regedit at times.... Disappearing menus => ribbons. Edge! Bing!
But fear not. MS finally understood my needs. Make it AppStore-only and everything is solved. I am soooo grateful.
Belfiore is starting to remind of Sinovksy in how his announcements usually are things that I really, really, want to hear.
I can only contrast my 2011 MBP, w aftermarket RAM, SSD, replaced keyboard and battery, with a 2016 version where everything is glued/soldered.
Price aside, the former makes me want to re-buy Apple. The latter makes me evaluate which Linux laptop vendors offer both build/driver quality and upgradeability.
Look, I prefer BSD over GPL myself, but no need to get all pernicikity and finicky about open source definitions. It's annoying when the RMS crowd does it, but your hair splitting is hardly a great improvement.
Besides, since this is about desktop OSs, Linux 1-2% market share, such as it is, greatly beats BSDs consumer/ end-user desktops (unless you want to draft in macOS in the FOSS camp somehow).
esp if they smash £200 of windows to get at those £5 each time.
We have similar losers here and it strains my general preference for lighter sentences when the same petty crimes are done dozens of times. At that point, I believe the extra costs of long term incarceration are offset by recurring court, insurance and victim costs. For that small minority much longer sentences seem more like common sense.
Still, I hope he doesn't die from this shit. I thought a week or two was already iffy health-wise.
>definately
indeed
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=definately
on a more useful note, I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34810337-the-last-good-man by Linda Nagata. Much more thoughtful than the average MilSF but then again that's usually how she rolls. Think "soldiers vs drones" as in "cavalrymen vs AFVs" and you get the idea - looks at technological obsolescence from the POV of the obsolete. Does a good job of credible near future extrapolation.
true but systems like postgres install w incoming connections pretty much all disabled except for localhost. still very easy to play with, but opening needs a modicum of thought.
this is not the first time this type of stuff has happened - mongodb was similar a while back
Well, maybe.
But what would it do to a less prepared outfit than Github? Who already had a wakeup call a year or so ago with was attributed to perhaps Chinese retaliation for some packages china objected to.
I do wonder. Won't the bandwidth bills eventually show up at the memcache user sites? Prompting them to take thumbs out of rectal cavity and secure them?
- ban your only serious opponent in upcoming election. Hey, at least he wasn't murdered by mysterious strangers like the previous one
- send some "volunteers" to Ukraine East. Nice how soldiers can volunteer off their military bases with their weapons and wo being AWOL
- Syria needs help oppressing and gassing. Let's tow our geriatric carrier there. Declare Mission Accomplished cuz that worked well for that other bloke on his carrier.
- call Orthodox Church and ask which sexual orientation they need banned this week.
- one of my best friends cited in Panama Papers has $400M from his violinist career? Totally above board, I tell ya.
- shut down independent media outlets. No, that's done already.
- fix the doping mess. We should never have gotten caught.
- Wave your willy big bad nukes. Half of this may never work. Most of it is irrelevant with 7000 existing nukes. All of it will probably syphon off more dosh into the inner circle, just like $50B Sochi Games.
I really expected better from the Russian people after Communism fell but all they seem to care for is getting the same respect they did back when their country had the Gulags.
Making fun of Hangouts? A-OK by me. Hate the thing. Making fun of Google product terminations/commitment issues? Ditto, although they still have a while to go before catching up with MS.
Fuschia - that's a bit of a disservice, innit? Fuchsia is partly conceived by the guys who did BeOS and that's quite a pedigree in my book.
Letting aside for a second Google's slurpiness, it's nice to see some experimentation in new OS. When it comes right down to it, you only have 2-3 main families right now:
Linux/BSD/macOS vs Windows. So, basically Microsoft's offerings and (very well done) offshoots of 70's Unix.
Dissing new OSs tryouts is like the folk who repeatedly claim we should have stopped designing system languages at C/C++.
I dunno about you, but I find the Go/Rust/Swift stuff are shaking that up in new and novel ways.
There's nothing wrong with trying out new from-scratch OS architectures. It's not my money anyway, so why not let Google have a go?
We know that hosts subjected to microorganisms that they have no immunity to doesn't end well.
But how's the flip side? Microorganisms infecting unfamiliar hosts? Cross species viruses jumps, like pig to humans, happen, but not often and that's with hosts whose DNA is very similar.
FB being useful, what's next, Fat Kim going humanitarian?
hopefully, for all the apparent opportunities for stupidity here, a competent judge will inherit a test case and set a reasonable precedent that clarifies liability.
it's one thing to not hold online sites liable for bad content posted by users. it's another if a site's business model is predicated on users breaking laws.
prosecuting craigslist for instance would be different from backpage's alleged behavior.
>Not 3,000, that's for sure
And if loons like you have their way, it's best if no one finds out, neh?
https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx
Hear no evil see no evil speak no evil - If you don't research a problem, that makes it go away
FCC under Pai and NRA. These 2 groups have nothing in common except having both attracted a lot of dislike, where to large segments of the population, they are spawns of Satan.
The core supporters of each may very well have good reasons to dislike the other outright - farmers unhappy w cable fees or, smaller group, telecom free for all advocates unhappy with assault rifles. For outsiders both are pariahs.
Sure, they may hope for strength in unity. But the synergy is unclear and sometimes it is best to steer clear of endorsement/ing controversial parties.
Ars Technica readers repeatedly quipped that this was like reading The Onion.
k. I know it's popular to rag on node/npm hereabouts.
I know I struggle enough with JS testing and failure hardening that running a backend on it would not be my choice.
But, if you have to write complex web frontend behavior, you're stuck with JS there. Old JS: no import or rquires, no modules, no TypeScript or Coffeescript. <script src=https: tags :(
Serving up old style JS browser client code from a saner codebase using JS15/Typescript/Coffeescript needs a transpiler. Most of those use node/npm modules that get it to act essentially as a compiler.
I.e. use of npm does not equate to writing server code in JS.
Trying for irony, is he? J2EE simple?
Might have changed these days, with lessening popularity and ebooks.
But a quick look at the Java book section 10 yrs ago would show creaking heavy shelves of endless alphabet soup Java drudgery to get the simplest things done: Spring, JNI, JMA, jndi,Hibernate... None of which could talk to non-Java heretics, jni aside.
And we aren't talking small books either - 400-500 pages was common for any one of those mind bogglingly dull topics.
Txs, I remember better now. Thing is, in previous versions of Excel you could actually set those options at import/export time, without putzing with the locale.
Which makes it quite annoying when they've taken that away for some unknown reason. One could always hope that it was to plug a possible security issue and harden Office, but, somehow, that seems unlikely.
Faxes: my paranoid little self wont let me email anything truly confidential like a social security#. But I'll fax it, after confirming the recipient is expecting it. Unprotected sitting around lifetime here is ideally minutes, not forever in email systems.
Sure. But sort the list by Total, descending.
Honduras
Venezuela
El Salvador
Swaziland
Guatemala
Jamaica
Colombia
Brazil
Panama
Uruguay
USA
These are countries before you. You do know Latin and Central America have a really bad reputation for safety and homicides? Low police budgets, corruption and notorious incompetence. These are pretty much all 3rd world countries.
Are these your peers? The first two Western countries that appear are Finland and Switzerland, at a third of your rate. Switzerland, for one, has had interesting stats wrt to gun suicides and issuance of weapons to military reservists.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/09/military-suicides-switzerland-gun-suicide-prevention/
>when you have a larger population these things are bound to happen, this statement is from facts.
This is deaths per 100000, so how does a larger population figure into it???
I actually have a fair bit of sympathy for the US on this. The Constitution is an admirable document, the amount of coercion needed to effect strict gun control would be off the charts, and there are no easy fixes at this point - too many guns are already in the system to quickly fix this. What looks obvious to the rest of us would be anything but in practice, even if there was the political will.
But claiming "guns don't kill people" is disingenuous and ignores the practical experience of most countries with similar wealth/governance as the US.
>I think the UK has one of the highest knife crime ratings per capita of anywhere.
Canada has a lot of problems with stabbings too. And, guess what, when you look at our homicide rates, it's way lower than the US's. Guns make it too easy to kill, psychologically and also in terms of practical ease.
Of course, if you don't have guns, knives are next. What did you expect, genius? Teeth?
I'll trade my "inability to defend myself" and our "knife problems" anyday over your recurring bloodbaths. And I like guns myself, just would rather give up that access than live in the fear and paranoia you've all legislated yourself into.
>Always, always be skeptical of diet / nutrition / risk studies if they violate good common sense.
I agree with that opening statement, but the rest of it is overly broad generalizations, IMHO.
You're not wrong to be skeptical about diets, but I see a lot of categorical statements that could do with a lot more qualifications on your part.
Wrong about red meat, wrong about salt, wrong about this and wrong about that => all diet science is junk, to have you believe it.
Yes, it does seem like dietary research is full of contradictions. @jmch, in the 2nd post here, nails the reasons why.
Yes, you are right to say that the (lucrative) gluten fad is just that, at least for most people that don't have a real intolerance. Vegans are... vegans, no need for elaboration. Don't get me started on GMO and organic wars - lots of noise, not much science.
But using a few, valid, observations, coupled with a few contrary studies, some of which are probably contradicted by others, to "debunk" dietary research is hardly very scientific either. The Eskimo example has some easy to spot flaws: First were Eskimos' life expectancies actually high on their traditional diets? Second, by non-Eskimo metrics, would what they've added to their diet be considered healthy? Or are they mostly eating junk food? There's a clue in what fresh food can cost up North.
http://www.businessinsider.com/food-prices-high-northern-canada-2017-9
Third, how much can we generalize findings from a racial subgroup that has evolved very specific adaptations to their environment, including processing vitamin D very differently from other people?
The broad strokes are pretty obvious though: a lot of salt, sugar and fat is not good for most people, under most conditions.
In Westernized diets these have been higher than they would have been in the past. In Europe 500 yrs ago, which is relatively recent in evolutionary terms -unlike the Eskimos with at least 10K years and wheat-based diets in Europe with nearly as long - sugar as we know it barely existed, salt was a premium product and too many people were on the edge of starvation to make me think a lot of calories were consumed through animal fat or vegetal oils, at least outside of the noble classes. Retaining excess calories as body fat was an survival advantage.
Seems odd to say, but until the science has settled down, Michael Polan's admonition not to trust something that your grandmother (or someone else's) may have recognized seems valid enough. Limit your fat, salt, sugar, avoid foods with too many ingredients listed on the back. Don't sweat the GMO/organic/vegan/raw diet scaremongering until those groups manage to come up with some real peer-reviewed science. Cook from base ingredients. Aim for more vegetables and fruits in your diet but don't forget your proteins.
Don't trust authors, bloggers, or companies with vested financial interests to sell you their viewpoints.
Be cautious and critical, but don't practice excessive distrust of actual scientific research. Science is a process and studies contradicting each other is part of that.
interesting. apparently nitrates/nitrites are healthy enough, but can change into nastier compounds when heated a lot. that's something we already know about meat in general.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/are-nitrates-and-nitrites-harmful#section5
(maybe you Brits were onto something when you boiled everything)
so you might be right. :-( - I was feeling better about celery-added bacon.
Well, it's got a ton of holes in it, for sure. As others have remarked, deli bakery bread is not ultra-processed (now with more electrolytes!) but packaged bread would be.
Take it with a grain of salt. But, if you'd looked at studies regarding trans fats, a lot of the conclusions may have looked shady 10-20 yrs ago. Still, now that Denmark has been off them for a while, the findings look more solid: http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(15)00328-1/abstract
Ditto nitrites/nitrates in food. 30 yrs ago, a coworker told me that his advisor, he trained as a food manufacturing engineer, told him anyone in the industry already knew they were carcinogens.
For me, this has nothing to do with organic/non-organic, GMO/non-GMO and other scares. Diet matters, a lot, and it is not all pseudo-science by the gullible brigade.
This is only a teaser telling us we should look deeper.
~10% extra cancer risk for ~10% extra processed food is high enough to care, it's not like processed food is really yummy to start with and can't be done without.
"Well do you ever reintroduce the tigers?"
And she goes "Well, no, because their habitat can't sustain them."
And immediately I thought to myself
'There's so many extra children advertisers, we could just feed the children advertisers, to these tigers.'
We don't need them. We're not doing anything with them.
With txs to Neko Case
p.s. Wonder how BBC will fare out of this. Lately, at least in Canada, their ads are pretty intrusive.
>But present-day cars do not need a network connection to operate, although autonomous vehicles are generally being designed to rely on one.
Are you 100% sure? British Columbia, for one, is so empty that, once you leave the cities and the main highway corridors, cell coverage can be spotty.
https://www.telus.com/en/bc/mobility/network/coverage-map.jsp
Whatever little reamjob our advertising overlords are planning to cook up for us, I have a hard time believing that cars will need a network to function all the time. There are whole swathes of North America, to say nothing of developing countries, that are under-served by coverage, so making those inaccessible to your vehicles seems like solid foot shooting.
Reference?
>Its consumer versions you have to opt out of it on
Yes, please do provide us with the Win 10 navigation options we can use to ask MS to entirely turn off all telemetry, using its own tools and configuration, on Home/Pro versions.
"Opt out" doesn't count as MS-offered if you have to install all sorts of hacks and workarounds from 3rd parties, including hacking your router because MS doesn't respect /etc/hosts when it comes to its telemetry.
In that case, "workaround" is the word you're looking for.
>Anything which you can stuff in an .ova file can be run on any platform
Not really. I'd assume your over-the-counter-purchased Win 10 can't host its old Win 7 license as guest, unless you have enterprise/site licensing or whatever.
You can't use a single-use license Windows to host itself. i.e. if I buy Windows 10 Pro/Home, I can't have a VM running that license again as guest, even as an older release, I have to buy another license. If that has changed, feel free to downvote me, it's a small price for learning something new.
And that's a big difference. Hence Linux VMs. Even Mac VMs can do that, they only restrict you on the hardware.
>However, in order to prevent him from taking an unfair advantage of your work,
As I see, that is the core difference between permissive licenses and GPL. It's a reasonable difference of opinion, but the people choosing permissive licenses are aware that they "can be taken advantage of".
There are 3 possible actors in open source projects
- the original developer(s) and contributors
- end users, meaning anyone who will not release derivative works
- other developers/corporates that want to base their offerings on the project
End users who use a BSD project have the same abilities to play with the code as under the GPL. So do the original developers.
The 3rd bunch is what irks the FSF. These are free-riders if they don't release the code back to the community.
And that includes people just viewing the code, which by some interpretations would be a GPL violation if they then based a non-GPL product on what they had seen.
Choosing BSD is a conscious decision by the first group that they give up the control to compel the third group to release code back. It may happen or it may not. To proponents of permissive licenses, lowering the barriers to code adoption is more compelling than preventing unfair advantage. There is a risk, and an opportunity, for group 1 in leaving group 3 unfettered.
Going back to the FSF's cherished user freedoms, there is one additional risk, to the second, user group, in using BSD products. Anyone with sufficient influence can take un-BSD a project or a part of it. They can't stop forking, but they could easily stop publishing their future code and place paywalls or restrict code visibility from that point on. And that includes taking in any contributions that users make and incorporate them into their now restricted-source offering. Or the developers could easily build a freemium model where some of the stuff is open source, some is not. Yes, you can do that with GPL, but are more legal restrictions around that process.
But I would expect that BSD/MIT projects lacking transparency and fairness will lose mindshare rapidly so there is a natural community-driven limit to how much group 1 can "rip-off" group 2.
I don't object to the GPL per se, but it aims to compel people to behave by its rules once the code is released under it. That's a totally valid and acceptable choice. And we should respect that when we interact with GPL code.
But it's not something I am interested in doing with my own code, both because of the limits it puts on code adoption and on the limits it puts on how I can get paid for my work. That's a conscious decision on my part, not just some ethical oversight as some would have it.
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