I realize Jeff's just being...poetic, but really it's just an excuse to buy toys. Spend your money on what makes you happy. If more gadgets, or that 6th purse, or 20th pair of shoes does that, great. If you want to define [part of] yourself by your possessions, do that. But don't judge others by the lack of theirs.
I draw a joke distinction between a geek and a nerd like this. A geek is someone who loves technology and toys. A nerd is someone who gets utterly obsessed by a particular topic.
I usually bring this up when explaining to a fellow programmer that I'm a nerd but not a geek. Which fact I then demonstrate by pulling out my flip phone.
If they proceed to doubt that I am a nerd, I'll then offer to explain something esoteric. A good example is the differences between the Riemann integral, the Lebesgue integral, and the Generalized Riemann integral. And why if the last had been discovered earlier, we might not have needed to develop Lebesgue integration at all!
I believe "geek" typically describes someone obsessed with a particular topic and/or with media/games/tech/some-corner-of-popular culture. Conversely, "nerd" typically describes someone obsessed with a particular academic topic and/or with learning in general. It's a significant difference.
Though not typical, it's also worthwhile to remove the "socially awkward" connotations of the use of "nerd" and "geek" terms and ascribe those to "dork" instead. Many self-described geeks and/or nerds don't consider themselves socially handicapped and it's deleterious to society to muddle academic engagement with social impairment.
The categorizing is indeed irrelevant. However I find it useful as a way to explain to self-proclaimed geeks why I don't care about the things that they think geeks should care about.
If the programmers around me self-declared as nerds I would reverse the distinction. Because I don't care about the label at all. What I care about is concisely explaining why it is that you can find someone who is competent at programming who does not share a lot of the interests that they assume I should share.
Because you can be one without the other, and people frequently assume that because you're one, it means that you're the other--and predict your actions based on that (for example, by buying you stupid geek toys when you are merely a nerd.)
I don't understand what you're saying. The reason it is useful to make this distinction, is to explain to people that don't see the distinction (and thus assume that, for example, someone who likes math watches Firefly; or that someone who collects MTG cards will be able to fix their computer), that in fact there is a practical difference between the two categories, and that they should keep them in mind so as to not offend people that aren't both by assuming they have traits of a group they don't.
Do fellow programmers tend to back away slowly? :)
Both words seem to be used to describe people that like specific categories of things but are unpopular or awkward. I refuse to be labeled with either regardless of any fine distinction in meaning. To me, what you are describing is like, "no I'm a douche, not an asshole." (I think you are neither, just an analogy.)
Do fellow programmers tend to back away slowly? :)
I have definitely left some in utter disbelief.
Among unpopular and awkward technical types, I stand out as being both awkward, and exceptionally extroverted. It is an interesting combination, though best observed from a distance. Kind of like a train wreck.
But you have to work with what you've got. And somehow it does seem to work out for me in real life.
That's what I thought, until I started carrying one. Now I use it all the time for mundane tasks such as finding something that dropped under my car seat, plugging in an ethernet cable under my desk, rummaging around in the back of a closet, and so on. It really makes life easier, especially as I find my night vision isn't as good as it used to be. LED lights and Li-ion batteries last for ages, so it's hardly an inconvenience.
I find the one built into my cell phone adequate for all of that. It's brighter than the $3 filament bulb flashlights they sell at Wal-Mart, which people considered adequate for decades. I have a real flashlight (uses the same Li-Ion pack as my Bosch cordless screwdriver, 8+ hours continuous use) for something like walking at night; I don't need to carry that all the time as the phone light is plenty for all spontaneous type situations you've mentioned.
A calorie isn't a calorie. The impact that 100 calories of vodka has on your body vs, say, 100 calories of Kale is significant. The body uses different strategies to break down different types of molecules. There can be toxins. There can be impact on the gut flora. Not to mention the impact that these all have on the feeling of "fullness" (which the article mentions).
With their supposed interest in expanded outside of China, does anyone know if they are hiring? To me it is, by far, the most interesting startup right now.
I strongly disagree with it, but it's been stated a few times that it's ok to use downvote if you disagree (1). This is certainly not a new thing around here...
21 character reset was generated via 3 separate functions each generating 7 characters each. 2 of these were old and weak, resulting in a URL that could be brute forced.
Once discovered, they analyzed 3 years worth of logs to see who was exploited (not clear how they matched it..maybe scanning for brute forces?) and found 3 sites all related to bitcoin.
The weakness in the algo has been resolved by using a 2 real random functions to generate 64 random characters
As a bad but persistent cook, I'm convinced eating healthy is generally cheaper. A lot of the healthier food I eat is cheap: legumes, [sweet] potatoes and other root vegetables, broccoli, bananas, oranges, water, eggs, oats, frozen vegetables (spinach!), brown rice, tomatoes (canned if not locally cheap). I think people intentionally mix up expensive with more work...
depends on the part of the world where you live in. In Latvia where I live, tomatoes grow in July/August. The rest of the year we can have Spanish tomatoes at 3-5$/kg or locally grown in a heated greenhouse, at $10/kg
A nice piece which stands in stark contrast to the alarmist and shallow FUD that so often accompanies this topic.
It's amazing how little we know about nutrition and biology. A lot seems to come down to common sense: breast feeding is good, exposure to microbes is good, being overweight is bad.
Hopefully the era of tonsil-removing and antibiotics overdosing is behind us
I'm often amazing that there are people out there that are so extremely against breast-feeding. I'm not even talking about breast-feeding in public, either. For example, I met someone from France whose friend had to argue with the nurses in the hospital about whether or not she would be 'allowed' to breast feed her child. [According to this acquaintance there is a lot of breast-feeding == BAD sentiment in France.]
| tonsil-removing
Is tonsil-removing something in over-abundance? So far as I understand it, it's possible for your tonsils to be really infected (I've heard of holes in your tonsils that excrete puss), which would seem like a removal is a good thing.
> she would be 'allowed' to breast feed her child.
It seems that was also the thought in the 70s to mid 80s in in US. My mother in law for example (as a retired nurse even!) thinks breastfeed is "disgusting" and how "it can kill babies because they can get smothered". I was just floored when I heard that from her telling it to my wife. Now we didn't listen of course to such crazy talk. But I wonder where it came from. One suspicion is lobbying and re-education campaigns of formula manufacturers. What better way to make a pretty penny than convince women to stop feeding their children like they have since the dawn of time and instill in them the belief that it is "disgusting" and "animalistic". It would take an enormous drive and a sustained campaign to do that. But I don't really have any other explanation for it.
My mother, as an assisting nurse in the late 60s, said she could probably do a tonsilectomy in her sleep (though of course she never did one conscious either). My dad did hundreds, or thousands, of appendectomies over a career as a surgeon, but they took a lot of effort.
There's little evidence of a useful role for an appendix, and most theories involve supposition about some past role.
Whether something is easy or not should not play a role.
It's like looking for your lost keys under a street lamp, because it is lighter there. Terribly harmful food-born diseases were contained by giving the animals that became food antibiotics themselves. Yet, that meant the meat ends up giving a dose to the people who eat it, and there have been fewer studies about how those antibiotics affect our symbiotic partners (the bacteria that by count make up most of our bodies).
Once you take something that might have a small effect, but spread it across hundreds of millions or even billions of people, then there should be increased sensitivity with regard to even the most outlandish effects, and they should be studied carefully.
> There's little evidence of a useful role for an appendix, and most theories involve supposition about some past role.
Oh, the hubris of modern medicine. There is a very useful role for the appendix, but our modern (as in, last 2000 years) lifestyle has rendered it mostly ineffective. http://www.news-medical.net/news/2007/10/08/30907.aspx
While verified discoveries about the role of the appendix are quite recent (2007 or so), I've read about similar theories back in 1996, and they were old (as in, 40 years old) at the time.
As a data-disposed person, my first response to practicing physician's regular resistance to "evidence-based" medicine has often been one of astonishment. Those on the ground with patients are very careful, and also figure out how to manage incomplete information pretty well.
You may especially have missed my points that tonsils are rarely, if ever, removed anymore, and appendices are removed less often, too. I don't know if anyone knows why we need these organs, yet currently practicing physicians just choose to assume that we shouldn't remove stuff without a very grave reason.
Indeed, it was too subtle for me to detect (even on second reading, probably my bad)
> As a data-disposed person, my first response to practicing physician's regular resistance to "evidence-based" medicine has often been one of astonishment.
As an engineer and stats person, I find blind acceptance of "evidence based" medicine astonishing. The idea is robust and noble, but the execution is beyond horrible - to the point that it ISN'T clearly better than the alternatives. (It's practically impossible to compare false-negative=wrongly-rejected-treatment vs. false-positive=wrongly-accepted-treatment of today's EBM; but if the now-known-false-positives are any indication, we're in really bad shape).
> tonsils are rarely, if ever, removed anymore, and appendices are removed less often, too.
That's only true if you compare to 1940-1980. If you assume they are needed, both are still removed with alarming frequency.
> I don't know if anyone knows why we need these organs,
The functions of both are known. Tonsils are an "early warning" outpost of the immune system - they sample pathogens while still in the throat, to give a "heads up" to the immune system in the gut. Removal of tonsils is associated with higher all cause mortality (especially heart attacks). The appendix is a curated cache of the good bacteria that the body needs in the gut (and possibly in other places), and there are circumstances in which the body will release another dose of good bacteria (though those are not well characterized yet, to the best of my knowledge).
> yet currently practicing physicians just choose to assume that we shouldn't remove stuff without a very grave reason.
I don't think that's really true. For one, most physicians in the US are still antibiotics-trigger happy (for whatever reason, even though most of them surely know it's harmful). That removes symbiotic organisms much more efficiently than it does harmful organisms, causing such things as yeast infections, the low B12 epidemic, and more.
They are more careful now with surgically removing stuff, true, but only recently, and only just.
If your appendix gets infected and ruptures, you will likely die in horrible agony. The fact we know (not suspect, know) you can live a healthy, full life without an appendix means that once it begins to cause problems, there's really no reason to risk keeping it.
France scores pretty poorly in terms of breast-friendliness. I have the feeling it comes a lot from formula-making companies capitalizing on feminist movements back then.
The marketing terms are way more pervasive in France than in the US (Where I have most of my experience). This is biased, of course, but most often I heard about "Formula" here, but in France I heard: "Lait de croissance (growing up milk)", "Lait Maternise (`maternalized` milk)", "lait infantile (infantile milk)", etc...
The idea is that at some point they (being the first line) succumb to infection and can be come the site of a persistent infection that in turns causes more sore throats and re-infections.
At least that was my experience. I was advised to take them out in my mid 20's. It does seem that there is correlation, now that they are out I get less colds and sore throats.
Switched to a different doctor and went for a consultation. Complained about by frequent sore throats. He looked in and said, we should take these out. (This wasn't in US but in Europe)
I lived in the third world (Africa) and mine were taken out in 1975. Amusingly several years later a doctor looked down my throat and asked if they had been taken out. When I said yes, he said they left some behind!
Does the US risk being seen as a dog with a loud bark but no bite here? If you're going to make pronouncements that hacking will be considered an act of war (1), don't you kinda paint yourself into a corner when you get hacked?
OK, so the link you provided is a gross simplification of current thinking. Government officials have been quite clear that CNE[1] is NOT generally considered an act of war, rather, it's part of the usual intelligence operations expected during peacetime.
It's CNA (e.g. operations designed specifically to disrupt or destroy civilian or military targets) which is "on the table" for act-of-war status, particularly if there is kinetic effect. An example would be if something like Stuxnet were deployed against the U.S. power grid.
The idea is that it doesn't matter whether a power plant was disabled via a bomb or a backdoor. Both the intent and the outcome are the same. So the declaration of policy you linked to is really a clarification rather than a "change of course".
The lines are blurry when it comes to CNE and critical infrastructure. The problem you have is that if, say, 3 competing agencies are all vying for control of the same powerplant for CNE reasons (e.g. not trying to cause damage), the plant might nonetheless get taken out by accident. I'm not sure anyone is clear on what to do in that kind of a situation.
[1] We can divide "cyber" operations into the following categories (straight from wikipedia):
* Computer Network Attack (CNA): Includes actions taken via computer networks to disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy the information within computers and computer networks and/or the computers/networks themselves.
* Computer Network Defense (CND): Includes actions taken via computer networks to protect, monitor, analyze, detect and respond to network attacks, intrusions, disruptions or other unauthorized actions that would compromise or cripple defense information systems and networks. Joint Pub 6.0 further outlines Computer Network Defense as an aspect of NetOps
* Computer Network Exploitation (CNE): Includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enemy information systems or networks.
Any irrationality on our part can and will be exploited using false flag attacks. A third party who is not a friend of either US or China would benefit perhaps from hacking Chinese infrastructure then use it to launch an attack on US infrastructure -- a false flag attack.
Same applies to lower level stuff. If there is say a hypothetical an irrational policy for mandatory arrest of anyone suspected of terrorism, one shouldn't be surprised that neighbors will start reporting each other over the color of fence or wrong type of shutters installed.
Thanks for the explanation. Hopefully we can agree that it still puts the US in a precarious public spotlight...not sure that the public will make as detailed a distinction as appears to be required.
May be, not will be. Even the article you linked to is clear on that. The point is that attacks on US infrastructure using computers will not automatically be treated as less severe than dropping bombs simply by virtue of how they were carried out. That doesn't come anywhere near "all hacking == war".
I don't know why they (Obama and his advisers) ever thought that was a good idea. Whoever was planning to hack US never took that seriously anyway, and now that they've seen they won't actually do it, they can take them even less seriously.
I guess they couldn't just say "you hack us, we hack you back". Or more realistically: "We hack you first in secret. Then you hack us back in secret. And then we have an excuse to go public to get the public's support to hack you back, and get more funding and bills passed for whatever other secret operations we want to do next". Case in point: Iran.
I realize Jeff's just being...poetic, but really it's just an excuse to buy toys. Spend your money on what makes you happy. If more gadgets, or that 6th purse, or 20th pair of shoes does that, great. If you want to define [part of] yourself by your possessions, do that. But don't judge others by the lack of theirs.