My biggest problem with Europe's mandatory cookie warning is that the solution is worse than the problem.
I'm aware that once I enter somebody's site there's a gazillion ways for that somebody to get data about me. If cookies are blocked they'll find another way.
But thanks to Europe's feeling they need to nanny me, I get those obnoxious cookie warning popups on every site I visit. Worse, I can't opt out of the popups. Infuriatingly, Europe didn't ask me if I _want_ to be protected like this.
Of the many problems with the Internet and Web sites, I feel Europe has fixed the most trivial, in the most obnoxious possible way. Thanks for nothing, Europe!
What the EU didn't ask you wasn't whether you "wanted to be protected", it was whether you wanted a choice regarding being tracked or not. What's so upsetting about being offered a choice?
The party who is making "the solution worse than the problem" and implementing the obnoxious procedures for you to express your choice are the businesses who have the most to gain from blaming the EU on how terrible it is that they can no longer do it without the users' consent.
The solution as imagined wouldn't be worse than the problem. There should be a simple, easily accessible "reject all" (or the individual choices should default to reject). This is an issue with inforcement.
You make it sound like the cookie consents are the only think the EU tackled, ignoring that it is only one small aspect of the EU's data privacy & protection legislation, which is having a big effect globally, not just in Europe. If you look at the GDPR penalties & fines so far you won't find any about cookie consent but you will find a lot of examples of bad governance, incompetence and bad data use, which people should be concerned about. Your "nothing" in this case if actually quite a lot of oversight which many people are happy about (even it it's a constant consideration for some of us working with data).
Your example of other ways to gain data about somebody is ALSO covered by GDPR. What's called the cookie consent is about customer data in general. All data provided directly or indirectly by a site visitor is subject to GDPR consideration, regardless of method.
As to not being asked if you personally want a law to exist or affect you: that's not how laws & governments work. If you're in the EU, then it's part of the governing institutions that we contribute to. If you're outside the EU, then it's the choice of the website you're visiting if they provide different experiences for you vs European visitors but again, you have an individual choice about if you visit those sites but your individual opinion doesn't get to decide how somebody else's web site operates and which legislation they adhere to.
It sounds like this is more an issue of personal inconvenience, which most of us share. The problem here is the implementation (e.g. it could have been more directed at browser vendors to implement global privacy controls) but while the current execution is bad the underlying reasoning for data protection is sound.
I think there's just one lesson, a no-brainer, to be learned here: That any halfway competent author can make his character appear superior in whatever way he chooses, because he obviously and literally has complete control of the narrative.
Implying that the rational character of Sherlock Holmes is morally challenged when compared with a character acting predominantly on his gut feelings is, I think, a contemptible insult to rationality and those people who choose to act rationally. A decent argument can be crafted that rational behavior is moral behavior more often than not, but I doubt that Mr. Foster, as a fan of religious apologist (i.e. "Liar for Jesus") Chesterton, could be brought to understand it.
I grew up a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. But as I have gotten older (39 in a couple of months), I much prefer Philip Marlowe and the writing of Raymond Chandler.
Sure, Marlowe is the quintessential hard-boiled private detective, but when you read the books you discover that he is largely an intuitive/emotional detective. He applies logic/reasoning and his knowledge of the world he lives in to his intuition/emotions but he's not all-knowing. Marlowe doesn't have the mystery solved on page 23 when the reader still has 174 pages left to go.
While still a fantasy, I tend to think Marlowe is a more realistic detective than Holmes ever was - or at least, one with whom I can identify more readily.
I think there is always a temptation, a danger, for those of us in STEM careers to hold our own feelings and emotions (not to mention those of others) in contempt, as if they are somehow invalid by definition.
We shouldn't do that! Instead, we should accept the emotional and intuitive aspects of ourselves and try to reason through them, understand where those feelings are coming from and make conscious decisions about how to move forward.
Sorry to preach! I just love fictional detectives and the applicability of the lessons they can teach us to the real world. :)
> I think there is always a temptation, a danger, for those of us in STEM careers to hold our own feelings and emotions (not to mention those of others) in contempt, as if they are somehow invalid by definition.
> Instead, we should accept the emotional and intuitive aspects of ourselves and try to reason through them, understand where those feelings are coming from and make conscious decisions about how to move forward.
I agree completely. I'm distrustful of my emotions (if I feel uncomfortable with someone, is it because of things I know, or things I assume? Both are possible), but it's a fact that I experience them, and that they affect my day to day. Reason isn't what gets me out of bed in the morning. Emotions likely evolved because they were useful for survival. They can be very useful for directing our attention, or they can mislead us. If I feel something, I try to figure out if it's based on things I know instead of things I imagine, and then I try to act.
I love how Marlowe popped up on HN. Very attached and at the same time detached character. I like the noir style desperation in these book. Also like to drop Lew Archer here. 'The Ivory Grin' is so depressing it is sometimes hard to stand. But I like this somehow. Makes my own little world seem very colorful and cheerful. I'm not into the lofty superiority of Holmes and other. Not as a book. As a movie I find it quite entertaining, though.
Yes, they are both very entertaining characters, but their mysteries are very much tailored to their strengths. (Conan Doyle at least had Watson mention that there were many cases Holmes was not able to solve, but of course they were not worth documenting - Brown is nigh infallible).
The Father Brown stories can have some very amusing insights about human nature, though it seems that while one might be able to have a stab at employing Holmes' method one would have little chance of ever learning Brown's (which was basically to put yourself so firmly into the mind of the perpetrator as to make the solution obvious).
Interesting point. Intuition could also just be another name for "appropriately weighted priors".
Holmes tends to arrive at the correct conclusion, presumably by Bayesian reasoning. If he didn't have any useful priors (i.e. an understanding of human motivation, thought, emotion and behavior) the observable evidence alone might not be enough to make any hypothesis sufficiently likely.
Where the characters supposedly inform their priors differs (if I can trust this article as representative of Father Brown since I haven't read the books). Holmes has a habit of disguising himself to infiltrate and eavesdrop on people. I posit that there is less selection bias in that process than building a theory of crime based on the confessions of english catholic church-goers. But maybe that group is a diverse enough population that the model would generalize?
I guess a 'good' character is ultimately one that serves its narrative and perhaps in that they are equal?
Yes, but that's irrelevant to your parent commenter's point. I'll explain that in simpler terms: If the object has the slightest bit of (linear) momentum then it also has a non-zero velocity, which will over time move it away from said Lagrange point.
I'll add that even with zero velocity, the Lagrange points are stable only in an ideal system where the only gravitational influence is from the two bodies between which the Lagrange points sit. An object sitting on a Lagrange point could still be perturbed by attraction from other planets or passing asteroids. Given enough time, no orbit stays stable.
No, you're confusing with unstable Lagrange points and Lissajous orbits. Stable Lagrange points have forces that move back the object if it's perturbed. So, perturbed slightly, the object can move around the exact Lagrange point in various ways, but come back.
There are a few things to keep in mind - and I'm probably forgetting a bunch of important factors.
First think about solar wind. light shining provides a real force on everything the sun shines on, not much, but not zero - an 800m^2 sail is about 5 newtons. about as much as holding a full pint glass above the bar, constantly, forever. It takes some effort to overcome that force. Smaller things, smaller forces - but the force is always there.
Second, think about a marble in a bowl - the object at the Lagrange point. it'll sit at the bottom of the bowl. but if you constantly move the bowl in little circles the marble will little by little pick up momentum, go a little faster and faster, then start to climb the walls of the bowl. (this is like the sun shining on the object at the Lagrange point. eventually, it'll go so fast the marble gets kicked out.
A big heavy ball bearing will take a whole lot longer to pick up that momentum, and may never get enough to escape. I'm not sure how much friction there is in space (or stuff that acts like friction) but I'd believe the big heavy rocks really can't get kicked out by just solar wind, thus natural trojans.
Anyway - this is pretty hand-wavy but the math is the same. The sun is constantly applying force, you gotta deal with that somehow. small profile from the point of view of the sun, and high density probably work out great.
Looking at "Core Language" I was dismayed not to find any builtin floating point data type.
In "Phix vs Conventional Languages" I'm told that "1/2 is always 0.5". And "Library Routines" / "Math" includes sin, cos and tan. What's going on here?
The type "atom"[1], is described in "Core Language" as follows:
> An atom can hold a single floating point numeric value, or an integer
I don't know why it isn't called "number", but it exists.
The page on atom also mentions:
> It can also hold a raw pointer, such as allocated memory or a call_back address, but that is typically only used when interfacing to external code in a .dll or .so file.
But that still leaves the ASCII tree diagram agreeing with the sentence "Phix has just five builtin data types:" while showing (and describing, in the following bullet point list) five data types that don't include "number" or a floating-point type.
So what's left is a minor but consistently repeated error in the doc, on the "Core Language" page.
In the original article, the author claims that lots of repeated strings turn out to be beneficial insofar as they make compression (gzip or whatever) more effective. According to him, it doesn't make sense to manually de-redundantize code when the compressor will achieve the same gain or better.
It's anticipated that at least millions, more likely hundreds of millions of humans will die to the consequences of climate change including effects of extreme weather, flooding and (especially) famine. This won't extinct all of humanity but can be expected to severely impact civilization(s), with a chance of this impact being fatal to individual cultures.
For a prospectus of what could happen, I point to the large-scale devastation of (ancient) civilization attributed to the Sea Peoples (https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-sea-peoples). They're believed to have toppled the Hittite Empire and severely weakened the Egyptian one. "some historians believe they had been displaced from their homeland by famine or natural disasters." -- the parallels to the anticipated effects of climate change should be clear.
Large-scale political unrest, very possibly including a WW3, is something I feel justified in considering "an existential crisis." Your mileage may vary.
100's of millions is not necessarily an existential crisis because it already happened in the 1900's due to war, disease, and famine. Even if that absolute scale of deaths happens again because of climate change, it will be proportionally smaller due to the global population being an order of magnitude larger.
Do you have a reference to that prediction of it probably killing 100's of millions of people? On it's own, it doesn't really mean much because what time scale and what's the no-climate-change number to compare to?
Famine, meteorites, large scale war, atomic bombs, infectious disease, the plague - all survivable by society at large. With your definition almost nothing qualifies as existential crisis.
The author's expressing a personal opinion, and not supporting it very well. That this low-value piece complains about disinformation reeks of unintended irony.
Here's my personal opinion: blaming technology for failures of humanity is something stupid people do.
Yes, people are angry on the Internet. That's not the Internet's fault, it's the fault of societies whose top products, recently, are profits and poverty. When simple people support a guy whose slogan was "Make America Great Again," they're acting on a legitimate gripe.
"America great" could mean a lot of things, but I think the simplest rendition of it could be a society where a single full-time job was enough to support a family, pay its medical bills and save up for college for the kids. Are people wrong to be angry that this scenario is increasingly out of reach?
What society desperately needs are smarter people. Or at least better informed people. Or better educated people who are able to make smarter choices about their sources of information.
This is a challenge to society, to the education system, and it's one that desperately needs to be met. Not by partitioning, walling and gating the Internet, because nothing assures us that the "new net" wouldn't quickly succumb to the same basic problems. The solution to bad information is not making less information accessible, but more.
People need to learn to distinguish fake news from the real McCoy; this is increasingly becoming a survival skill. That being so, pressed by necessity, people can and will learn. There are growing pains, but the Internet isn't making the sky fall any more than steam engines did in their day.
I'm aware that once I enter somebody's site there's a gazillion ways for that somebody to get data about me. If cookies are blocked they'll find another way.
But thanks to Europe's feeling they need to nanny me, I get those obnoxious cookie warning popups on every site I visit. Worse, I can't opt out of the popups. Infuriatingly, Europe didn't ask me if I _want_ to be protected like this.
Of the many problems with the Internet and Web sites, I feel Europe has fixed the most trivial, in the most obnoxious possible way. Thanks for nothing, Europe!