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Comment Re:Drone Strikes Against Spammers ? (Score 4, Interesting) 110

Every spam message that goes past the filters takes several seconds out of someone's life -- and not just the "gross" part that includes sleep, commutes, bathing, etc but of the actual productive part of the day (around 1/3 of it). Averaging batch reading of mail at the start of a day vs full context switch, let's take 5s per piece of spam. Let's assume a 95% spam filter effectiveness rate. Now the hardest part -- how big a spam campaign run is? Let's assume 100M delivery attempts (I'm doing a Fermi estimate -- or rather, pure rectal extraction -- on this number).

This means, a single spammer who did just 10 spam campaign runs effectively murdered a person -- in a death of thousand cuts.

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 4, Insightful) 218

We think (and so define in IQ calibration) that mean intelligence is the same for men and women.

And it's that calibration that's problematic here. The brains of men and women are typically very different, making them excel at different types of tasks. The modern IQ calibration manipulates weights for these tasks to give both an average score of 100. The result is politically correct, but makes IQ an even more worthless measure than it was before gender-balance calibration was introduced.

The other problem lies in people assuming that the average for a gender tells you anything about a particular individual. If women are better/worse at task X, this doesn't mean a woman who applied for a position that requires X is better or worse than a man whom you can pick or not over that woman.

The result? Giving preferential treatment to either group is wrong, and will hurt not only the group you discriminate against, but your profits as well. No matter whether your task is a biology researcher, a lumberjack or a kindergarten teacher, the only valid method of choosing is being totally gender- (and race-, and so on)-blind. That woman who applied for that lumberjack job? She probably has a clue what she does, and thus deserves a try at the chainsaw. This kind of self-selection is not free of biases, but it makes comparing averages for men-vs-women (or blacks-vs-whites-vs-polka-dotted) pointless.

Yes, such selection of merits will make your team not represent the diversity ratios of the general population -- that's expected.

Comment Re:The answer is... (Score 5, Informative) 165

For storing a single character: UCS-4 (aka UTF-32), and that's without possible combining character decoration. For everything else, UTF-8 internally, no matter what the system locale is.

wchar_t is always damage, it shouldn't be used except in wrappers that do actual I/O: you need such wrappers as standard-compliant functions are buggy to the level of uselessness on Windows and you need SomeWindowsInventedFunctionW() for everything if you want Unicode.

And why UTF-8 not UCS-4 for strings? UTF-8 takes slightly longer code:
while (int l = utf8towc(&c, s))
{
        s += l;
        do_something(c);
}

vs UCS-4's simpler:
for (; *s; s++)
{
        do_something(*s);
}

but UCS-4 blows up most your strings by a factor of 4, and makes viewing stuff in a debugger really cumbersome.

My credentials: I'm the guy who added Unicode support to Dungeon Crawl.

Comment Re:Well Then (Score 1) 148

Moving services like ssh to a higher, non-default port is not done for "security".

It won't protect you from in-depth attacks, but will save you from in-breadth ones.

Using a high port can protect even from non-thorough targetted attacks: nmap's default for example is to scan a selection of 1000 ports rather than full 64K.

Comment Re:islam (Score 1) 1350

And in fact the criminals who murdered these 12 people are not followers of Islam though they claim to do it in the name of Islam.

Sorry, but have you read the Koran? Those criminals did exactly what ordered, with the relevant commandment repeated umpteen times. These murders were no less inspired by the word of Muhammed than, say, the murder of Asma bint Marwan.

You're probably mistaking the Koran for the Bible. The latter contains so many contradictions that you can't be a Christian without a steaming pile of doublethink and cherry-picking, which makes most of us think the Koran suffers from the same. It does not: rather than a series of books written over ~700 years, it's the product of careful editing by a small team of scribes overseen by one man. It bears nearly no contradictions, basically just permissibility of alcohol (16:67 vs 2:216), whether angels are the same as jinn, and some literary devices. And even those are governed by an "upgrade clause".

So, while a majority of people with islamic cultural roots are good people, that's not thanks to Koran but despite of it. They are sinners who fail to obey the scripture, while the murderers are true believers.

Comment Re:In the name of Allah ! (Score 1) 1350

One religion in recent history has been responsible for the vast vast majority of religious inspired violence. Essentially two mainstream religions feature a scripture that preaches violence against its enemies, the Islamic and Jewish faiths. The latter does not have any prevailing interpretations advocating violence outside a small patch of land.

Holy war is an invention of Christians when they first gained power (albeit Judaism was at some points a precursor to a small degree). Beforehand, everyone was free to worship any gods he wanted, as long as he did not disrespect gods of others. What did Romans do when they prepared to war? They built temples to gods of their enemies, making sacrifices so the gods don't fear losing worship. It's only insulting gods that was forbidden, and in some societies like Rome the perpetrator usually was given a yet another chance, to make a sacrifice as an apology.

Forcing someone to abandon his gods was unheard of. Even other monotheist religions like Zoroastrians or Mithraists did not go that far. It's so-called Abrahamic religions who brought us this evil.

Comment Re:islam (Score 1) 1350

"If it quacks like a duck"... Let's take a look at Communism: prophets, check. Scripture, check. Clergy, check. Portraits of "saints" everywhere, check. Proselytism, check. Future paradise, check (earthly). Religious hymns, check. Hate towards other religions, check. Prosecution of heretics, check. Rituals and ceremonies, check. Just compare 1st May processions to ones Catholics do on Corpus Christi.

Same with Adolf and Mao. Not that different from deification of Roman emperors...

Heck, a good part of modern religiology classifies Juche as a proper religion.

It doesn't matter that adherents claim it's not a religion. It's all about dogma.

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