> however, the authors do not disclose any conflicts of interest in their scientific reports
I find it amusing the Lancet complains about this considering Peter Daszak's et al covid origins letter was published without disclosing conflicts of interest.
Compared to Australia, New Zealand has a significant Maori / Polynesian population. If you combine a part of Australia with a part of Fiji, you would get similar mix of people and also a similar economic output to New Zealand. While this obviously doesn't explain all of it, it is important to consider the historical and demographics reasons as well.
The core worry for me is that, Facebook represents the social gaming, Zynga, pay-to-grow-a-plant kind of gaming that is the antithesis of hardcore gaming which Oculus (especially with Carmack) represents. They are two fundamentally different modes of games and it will be difficult to integrate them into one company.
You have posted 10 positive Microsoft reviews in the past year which corresponds to approximately 10%-20% of your posts. Are you paid to do this or just really into the company?
So are you paid to question why people like ms products by their competitors? Accusing people like this is rather childish.. unless your 'proof' takes the form "someone likes a product which nobody is supposed to like.."
Let me get this straight. You believe that a multi-billion dollar company hires people to post multiple comments on a forum (which less than 1% of their total customers read) under the same username, and only 10% of those are positive (assuming its true, i have zero interest in digging through anyones comment history) - per year - just so a small percentage of people reading those comments might go out and buy a product without doing further research?
>Surely you know how common it is for people to be hired to pose as bloggers who are in fact paid representatives of specific companies or political causes?
No, actually, I don't know how common it is.
>As to the OP being paid to doubt your sincerity, just ask yourself what his motive might be -- who might pay for that to happen. In other words, exercise common sense.
Um.. I am not the person who posted the original comment (or the article).
>Yes, unless it's justified by evidence. It's justified by evidence.
You have a bizarre definition of evidence. The "evidence" in this case is the subjective opinion of one person who is interpreting the subjective opinion of another. There is no actual evidence that anyone was actually paid for anything. People using the "I can't think of anything else" argument don't convince me.
Guy creates a blog and his first single post is to discourage someone truly trying to innovate in the cryptography space (though admittedly more in usability aspects).
After listening to Glen Greenwald at the CCC it was quite clear that cryptography that is easier to use than PGP is really needed in this world (he almost lost the Snowden story due to it). I think that Nadim needs to be encouraged. Sure, point out any flaws but aim for constructive feedback.
The points here centre around it "not good enough". This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem and isn't really helpful.
Don't implement your own crypto. Better people than you have tried and failed. Everyone should know this by now. If you can innovate on the usability, that's great, and we really do need that - but build it on top of a well known, peer-reviewed protocol like OpenPGP. It's not like it's even any harder than rolling your own.
Even if it does, it still won't help. Crypto in the browser is like playing soccer in a minefield: either you don't move or you lose a leg. Either way, your game is hosed.
The issues are, to put it mildly, insurmountable. The environment is simply too toxic to trust. Between standard Web security flaws, timing attacks (what happens when one context can detect the timing of another? Remember, the code is slow, so your resolution doesn't have to be good), inadequate random number generators, an inability to securely manage memory (don't want key materials floating around), etc.
I'd rather trust Bob's Discount Car And Certificate Authority than JS crypto.
Well a blog is probably going to have a first article :\
I agree that the "world" could benefit from an easier to use cryptography product than PGP (event thought I'm fine with PGP) and I think that this post is valid criticism.
Disclaimer: Not a cryptography expert in any way, neither annoyed by the fact cryptography is hard and will probably benefit from processes like peer-review.
I've never heard this in my life. I don't know a single Brit who finds the term offensive. Unless you're talking the. Brit Awarss. Now there's some bollocks.
While this is an interesting piece of technology, I can't read this article without cringing. The bias towards "Chinese technology" over "European technology" and the constant comparison between the two makes this read like some sort of propaganda piece.
Going through school, I felt like I received a ridiculous pro-european level of propaganda, as though every innovation that was worth anything came from that continent. And the propaganda worked. Even though I now know better, I am still a little surprised when I hear of a technological marvel that non-europeans came up with.
Basically, you are right. Just about every civilization has produced startlingly clever innovations for their environment. Saying Chinese are clever or Europeans are clever, or Africans are clever, is a bad way of looking at the world. But I don't mind pro-other-continent bias so much because I feel like all it's doing is helping to provide some balance for the pro-europe bias I was raised with.
Pushing has far less control because the center of mass is ahead of the applied force and any eccentricity in the applied force causes rotation in a direction other than that in which the force is applied.
On the other hand, pulling a cart means that the cart will rotate toward the direction of the applied force and follow it. The direction of a pulled cart tends to be self correcting (all things being equal).
It's also easier to get it over bumps, since you're pulling upwards, rather than pushing down into the ground. I'm not 100% sure that applies so strongly to the chinese design though.
Can you imagine dumping 100lb of earth into a chinese one and tipping it out at the top of a hole - to build a canal or railway?
They are fundementally different concepts. A european wheelbarrow is an earth moving tool - essentially a bucket on wheels. A chinese wheelbarrow is a man powered cart. It's like claiming a sack trolley is better than a pallet truck because it can go down stairs
That is exactly correct. It makes no sense to conflate the two and disregard the purposes of each. In the case of the chinese wheelbarrow it is not clear that it was so superior to the european cart. A person simply can't move the same amount of material as easily as a pack animal. The chinese cart is thus tremendously labor intensive. One person must move a load that could be done by 1/4 of a pack animal on a wheeled cart.
Additionally, the one other advantage of being able to use the wheelbarrow on narrow paths instead of roads is not something that would normally matter. Roads can move people and goods much more effectively and faster than narrow paths.
The article alludes to this by referring to the collapse of the road network and the subsequent development of the wheelbarrow. Of course, if they had roads, they may never had adopted to the wheelbarrow in the first place.
What the author describes as inventiveness is really necessity borne of weakness. Only if human labor is relatively cheap would such an invention ever be considered. China fit these conditions perfectly, however. The dramatic rise in population over the course of the first millenium in China made such efficiency concerns moot. Labor intensive rice agriculture also needed large groups of people anyway.
I think your analysis is somewhat off - at the same time in western Europe, people weren't using carts, they were carrying everything by hand. So it's not wheelbarrow vs. cart, it's wheelbarrow vs. nothing.
Also, narrow tracks would be much easier to build than roads which need carts. Again, it's narrow paths vs. nothing, rather than narrow paths vs. wide paved roads.
For the requirements - a heavy but symmetric load over narrow roads - it's a pretty good solution. At least until you have to stop!
Interestingly, trading inherent stability and rigidity for more control effort to give you a lighter more manouverable design is something we have only just "reinvented" with some fighter aircraft (and the Segway ;-)
In spite of having active/computer control systems fro 30years we still do seem to stick to the 19C railway engineering mentality of - build it big/strong/stable/rigid/heavy
Depends on how far you have to move the cut to use it as fill. A few hundred meters probably isn't an issue. At a couple of kilometers transport becomes more of an issue than unloading.
For road building, transporting materials such as paving stones over long distances is an important consideration because roads are useful in places where local materials may not be suitable for quality construction. One might speculate that the Chinese wheel barrow's design helped bootstrap a network of roadways suitable for it's use.
Of course the upside of the collapse of Europe's road network may have been that it allowed localized development of the political structures upon which modern liberal states were developed.
One person holds the cart, the other fills it. Two of you dump it out where it's supposed to go. As long as your cart can carry > 2-3x the load, it should be more efficient (or you can load it with buckets).
If you look past the horrible sexism I see an actually different undercurrent going on here. The clash of cultures is not between these "brogrammers" and women, but between brogrammers and "geek culture".
Geek culture has for various reasons dominated the technology sector for the last couple of decades however the risk and reward situation involved in startups has been attracting a different type of crowd, the brogrammers. The geek culturists feel threatened by this new crowd and so attack them by accusing them of sexism (a valid criticism) as it goes against one of the core geek tenets of tolerance towards others.
I on the other hand, view the inclusion of different subcultures in the tech industry, regardless of how they act, to be a positive thing. I hope more subcultures will come along which will continue to break up the dominant stereotypes in the tech industry (and hopefully address the gender imbalance at some stage ... bring on the sisgrammers!).
Find someone to help you write your resume? Why can't you do this yourself? You are just offloading responsibility. It takes a day to do and is fairly easy.
Find a good recruiter? Cannot you just start applying for jobs now? Why do you need a recruiter? They can be helpful but as you need a job as soon as possible you shouldn't limit yourself here.
Finally, starting the job hunt in early January is procrastinating. Get up and start applying now. There is a pre-Christmas lull in many offices that make it a good time to hire.
I am inferring from your post that you are a lawyer which would give you a vested interest in against anything reducing the number of court cases. Next your anecdote rests on the loser paying an unreasonable fee for their situation ($400k). Surely the fine would be based on someone's income and act as a deterrent rather than cause bankruptcy.
I find it amusing the Lancet complains about this considering Peter Daszak's et al covid origins letter was published without disclosing conflicts of interest.