How many people are really being unlawfully spied upon? I am not saying that even 1 would be acceptable. But do we have any numbers on that? Because it seems that there was 10,000 unlawful account being spied upon. This is a very small "collateral damage" on the size of the population. There are 313,000,000 people in the US. We are talking about 0.003% which seems "somewhat reasonnable"

Maybe the article was talking about only a single program. But how vast this "mass surveillance" really is?

I think there is an even larger ethical concern than just using facebooker (?) as test subject. This research is of the kind that ultimately leads to brain washing, emotional control, and more generally population control. Rather than asking whether it is OK to perform this research on unaware subjects, I think it is more important to ask whether it is OK to do this research at all.

Nop, you can not just use --. because many commands do not understand --

Here is an article by dwheeler (a frequent slashdotter; often cited for his technique countering the trusting trust problem) about filenames.
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays...

I believe he is mostly right. We should move to file systems that do not allow "stupid" names and be done with it.

also auto-vectorization is a dream. You can only vectorize code if the memory is properly layed out. Every compilers knows how to vectorize automatically. The quetion is only, is the memory layed out in a way that enables vectorization. And from what I saw, there is nothing smart in Swift to enable that.

What you need is to teach developpers about the vectorizatino problem. Most developpers do not know or care about it. The most basic point is whether you should use Structure of Array or Array of Structure (SoA or AoS). And most don't know what that means.

I grew up in France and have been living in the US for a few years. So I feel like I can answer these questions. But first, the current federal minimum wage is around $7/h, few cities or state have it around $10/h. Also working more than 30 hours a week is sometimes difficult. Overall, it is not possible to convert salaries from one country to another and claim value/lifestyle equivalence.

What is happening is that your gross income in France and in the US are different. In France, it includes "charge patronale" which are various things your employer pays on your behalf: retirement, health insurance. Minimal wage worker in the US have to pay for that out of their income or not get it at all. (Recently obamacare helped on the insurance side by giving minimum wage worker benefits on these which lowers price significantly for them.)

In France, education is pretty much free. In the US, higher education is not, you are going to have to pay for it, which means that people tend to take on large loans.

There is almost no public transportation in the US and the cities are spreads which means that pretty much everybody needs a car. It also incurs insurance and gas. Because gas used to be inexpensive (it rose a lot in the last years), cars in the US have not so good mileage. Also people drive a lot (consequence of the spread of the cities). So car expenses actually get high.

Internet and cell phones aren't really luxury since so many things are done over the internet or over the phone, including searching for job, health insurance policies, taxes, ...

Hi dwheeler,

This is a great article. It covers many common software development and testing techniques. But also some "on live system" techniques. It was a pleasure to read, I'll recommend it to various places.

(obvisouly I did not RTFA.)

When I took Simulations in gradschool 10 years ago, one of our assignment was to train a markov chain to predict the player next move at rock-paper-scissors. Using simply as state "lastmove, lastoutcome" is enough to learn what humans (read the students of the class) do.

And to go with that: "concrete mathematics" which gives lots of basics many grad students lack.
http://www.amazon.com/Concrete...

I worked at the same place as lucas in the past. Clearly he knows his stuff and knows to deal with complex situations. He did a lot for QA in Debian.

Welcome to the world of PR and marketing. If there is any kind of involvement from a famous party, no matter how small the involvement, the famous party always gets the credit. MIT is more famous than University of Maryland so they get the credit.

Note that I have no clue how much each person contributed to this particular project. But if it is done by somebody famous (or at a famous entity), it becomes great, if you had done the same thing, nobody would talk about it.

Well, there are two issues here. You might not be to blame for the accident in the sense that you are not the one initiating the collision, but you might have been able to avoid it if you weren't distracted. So the information of how "involvement" is still meaningful. Though, as pointed out by many slashdotters, the main problem is that we do not have a point of reference. Is the rate of cell phone use lower or higher than the rate of accidents involving cell phones?

Well, that statistic is not very useful because it does not take into account many biaises. It is not clear that male and female have the smae driving hours. If male were to drive more during peak hours, it would be logical that they tend to get into more accidents and more fatal accidents.

Not that GP was not a complete douche, but let's not use statistics to say what they do not say.

The only thing that surprised me is that he did not already have won that award.

So that's how it is spelled! Thanks!

Most people that drive in paris do not live in paris. They typically live in the suburbs (which are different towns) and drive to paris.