A company as big as BMW should be able to hire some security experts, so this should be a bit embarrassing for them.

But the truth of the matter is, doing security is not easy. Take web programming, for instance. Back when I first learned PHP, I found over and over that whatever design or coding approach seemed most straightforward and intuitive was inherently unsecure. All sorts of escaping and manual insertion of encryption functions are required, and that clutters up the code to the point of making it hard to maintain. I did manage to implement most of it in a common PHP file that I reused over and over again, but there was a huge learning curve, and it was a pain. Since then, people tell me that it's gotten a LITTLE better. For instance, database wrappers generate the SQL queries for you and automatically escape strings. But for the most part, it still sucks.

If there were a single best book to read on cyber security, then perhaps we'd have fewer problems like what BMW had. But in reality, to get good at it, you have to have a vast familiarity with the literature and tools. You do that much reading, you might as well get a PhD. And my friends with PhDs focusing on security are in academia, not industry, so we get more security papers but not more secure devices.

I buy them because I like them. I just don't feel I should have to go out of their way to protect their trademark.

My wife and I build things out of legos together all the time. Also, we let the kids participate. If anything is interfering with sex, it's the kids, not the legos.

And yes, I did say "legos" and not "LEGO bricks." I'm going to be contrarian on this point, because we don't need a bunch of pedantic slashdotters helping LEGO preserve their trademark. They can do that very well on their own, thanks. The rest of us have genericized it. Duplo blocks are legos. Megablocks are legos. Interlocking bricks that people make houses out of are legos. Sorry if for some reason you're a shill for the corporations and therefore don't like this.

Big corporations are not altruistic. They are sociopathic money-making machines. This includes Lego. And Apple. They don't need our love or support. If you like their products, buy them, but buyer always beware. These companies are not your friends.

In a lot of cases, SSRI's aren't going to work. Celiac disease, for instance, tends to be associated with leaky gut, where the mucosal lining is eroded, and the gut is more permiable. The mucosal lining is a major location where serotonin is stored. If your serotonin storage bank is nonfunctional, then there's not enough serotonin to selectively reuptake. Therefore, such people need to supplement it more or less directly by taking something like 5HTP. This converts to serotonin (and also permiates the blood-brain barrier better than tryptophan).

In case you find this informative, and you also need to supplement norepinephrine, consider tyrosine and dessicated bovine adrenal gland. Tyrosine is precursor to several neurotransmitters.

I've found very few MDs who have any kind of listening skills. I've known some brilliant ones. But many of them are shills for the drug companies, pushing unnecessary drugs and just all-around being ineffective. We're told to revere doctors, but the reality is that MDs are not scientists -- they're technicians, and often not terribly skilled ones. These facts are not lost on their patents. People just don't trust doctors. Vaccines are just one more dubious thing that MDs push on us.

This distrust of the medical profession totally understandable, and you shouldn't call people morons for feeling this way. Most people are not scientists who can do their own research. Their only source of information is these doctors they don't like. If we want to fix the vaccination problem, we have to fix the doctors and get them to stop doing stupid things like prescribing antidepressants for autoimmune diseases. [*]

The science of vaccines is solid. As with anything, it's not entirely risk-free, but the risks are worth the benefits for protection against some serious diseases. It's also irresponsible to put other people at risk. IF (huge IF) there is any correlation with autism, that correlation is miniscule compared to the effects of the other shit we put in our bodies (horrible American diet, pollution, etc.). But people are much more willing to skip a vaccination appointment than not eat that Big Mac.

Incidentally, I heard recently something interesting about flu shots. If those who decide which viruses are being innoculated against predict them correctly, then flu shots work great. If, on the other hand, their predictions are too far off the mark, the flu shot may actually make you MORE vulnerable to viruses that they missed. Of course, you should verify this claim before deciding not to get a flu shot. This isn't a matter of effectiveness of vaccines but rather an issue of getting the right ones.

[*] In medical school doctors are expliclty taught that if someone comes in with a constellation of symptoms, especially if they have them written down, then that person is a hypochondriac. The thing is, auto-immune diseases are not exactly a 1-in-a-million phenomenon. Hashimoto's and Lupus are quite well understood. They come with constellations of symptoms, and they also come with brain fog, which basically forces people to write down their symptoms. My wife had to perform her own differential diagnosis based on the symptoms to determine (abductively) that Hashimoto's is the clear best explanation, but nevertheless, she had to fight with one of the few endocrinologists in the area just to get tested. Of course she tested positive, but even in the face of the evidence, this doctor still doesn't want to engage in any kind of treatment plan. Why? Because endocrinologists make all their money from pushing drugs on diabetics and have no interest in anything else.

Bird mitochondria are super efficient at processing energy. I have energy problems, so this would really be a boost for me.

Censoring breast pics is okay, as long it's opt-out, and there are parental controls. Google, Facebook, and the government shouldn't censor things for us that we want to look at in our own homes. (Well, certain things I take strong exception to, like child porn and snuff films because there are victims.) We should be empowered to censor things for ourselves. That being said, many common beliefs should be taken as default, like not putting full frontal nudity on highway billboards. It's not that I believe everyone _should_ be offended by that; it's just that since a vocal majority of people are offended by that, I don't mind curbing some of these things in situations where it's otherwise shoved up people's noses.

There are some middle grounds. Consider gay pride parades. I think that there should be gay pride parades that demonstrate to everyone that gay people are just normal people who want to work normal jobs and live their lives. That, sadly, is not what gay pride parades do. They are hyper-sexualized. There's public nudity and sexual acts in the streets. I don't care if you're gay or straight; I don't think this is appropriate in public. Those who engage in this display are really only hurting themselves because it perpetuates a stereotype of perversion, which is really only true for a minority of people (gay or otherwise). Fortunately, MOST people who find this offensive are able to JUST NOT GO TO SEE THE PARADE. Those who live along the nearby streets can tolerate it or go somewhere else for a few hours. So I have mixed feelings about this, because I don't like some of the stuff they do, and I'd just rather people got over their homophobia and dealt with more important issues.

Anyhow, to continue the analogy with muslims. I think that parodying Muhammad and Islam is perfectly acceptable. I also think putting it on public billboards is at the very least impolite, and at worst entirely unnecessarily offensive to certain people. But if you want to put these things in a magazine or on a website that people have to intentionally take action to find, then those who find it offensive can just not go there!

The objective here should be to maximally empower individuals to see or not see what they want. Because we have to live together, we have to make some compromises about what is publically visible in a way that can't be avoided.

Actually, science it's so bad about this. Sure, it's been wrong, but research is steadily improving. Also, there have always been nutritionists.

The biggest offenders are the MDs. The first thing that happens when you enter medical school is that you have brain surgery to remove every stich of knowledge you have about nutrition. Seriously, every MD I have ever met is totally ignorant of nutrition. The SMART MDs will at least admit that. The rest just assume that nutrition is never the problem. Magnesium, B12, and D deficiencies are rather common, actually. The American diet is HORRIBLE, so people have nutrient deficiencies and get fat eating too many calories while their bodies struggle to extract things it needs from nutrient-poor foods.

About the best the MDs can ever do is tell you to eat less. But NEVER would they consider telling you to cut out certain specific foods. Do you know how many people have gluten sensitivity? About 10% of the American population have some sensitivity whose effect can be correlated with a variety of diseases, especially auto-immune. (Do 23andme, and put the data through NutraHacker, and see if you have the genes for it. I do. However, my wife, who has celiac disease, doesn't have the gene defects, so it can be environmental too.)

Speaking of auto-immune disease, in medical school, doctors are specifically trained to assume that an ailment is all in your head if you come in and report a constellation of symptoms, ESPECIALLY if you've written them down. However, constellations of symptoms are common with auto-immune diseases like Hashimoto's and lupus, and the associated brainfog forces people to have to take notes on things, because they know they'll forget something.

I've met an immunologist who thought hashimoto's was untreatable and gastroenterologist who didn't believe in food allergies. You think these people would be better trained in their own fields!

I'm not a Zuck fanboi. I actually feel like Facebook is as invasive as the NSA, datamining your every word. I'm very careful with what I put on there; little that isn't already in my public LinkedIn profile.

However, the situation with Turkey isn't as cut and dried as some people want to make it out. Is Zuckerberg being two-faced, saying one thing and doing another? Not necessarily. He can have a strong opinion that censorship is wrong, at the same time being FORCED to do it (to the minimum extent possible) by local laws. If you were to ask him how he feels about this, he would tell you that it really sucks.

Facebook has two options with regard to Turkey. They can either pull out entirely, or they can obey shitty laws. For one thing, they ARE a business, and nobody has ever tried to claim that they're especially benevolent. The users are the product, and we that use Facebook accept that. So it makes sense for them to maintain a revenue stream from Turkish people. Secondly, remaining in Turkey and censoring a few things is better for free exchange of ideas in general than pulling out and effectively censoring EVERYTHING. Facebook is a platform for free exchange of ideas in the extreme. Your personal information and everything you say are spewed to the world whether you want it or not. So in spite of the privacy concerns, Facebook's presence is nevertheless a force for freedom.

I have some "old" computers that really aren't that old and are in fabulous condition. Is there an organization I can contact to send it to Cuba so that it ends up in the hands of people who would make good use of it (instead of one of those scams that makes it end up in a dump in China)?

For that matter, I have other things like old clothes destined for the garage sale I could send there too. Seriously. I would feel good about sending clothes that no longer fit me (I lost weight) to people who would benefit.

Quoting someone's comment on the article: "Distilled down, this is your argument for god. God set the fine scale variation so that 13.8 billions years later, we could evolve and Jesus could visit so we could kill him and save the universe. So if someone were to dispose of this error in your thinking, would you dispose of god."

What some people don't quite realize is that we can have Jesus'es without God. A Jesus is just a cultural archetype that arises in times of (societal) turmoil who teaches some (ethical) principles, which are then spread by followers. This sort of thing happens all the time, with Jesus being a particular case. There were lots of messiahs at the time of Jesus, and Jesus is just the one who became the most famous. Buddha is another Jesus. In Science, Einstein is a Jesus of sorts. Also, there are other kinds of cultural architypes besides Jesus'es.

If you restrict yourself to political and social Jesus'es, which has happened many times on Earth, it seems inevitable that Jesus will come to "visit" alien societies. The alien world will experience some very alien concept of societal difficulty. Someone (or lots of someones) will arise in this time and teach some useful lessons. One of those Jesus'es will become the most famous (although many of the others' lessons will be attributed to this individual), and some of those messages will survive in an alien religious way. This all assumes alien worlds that have "individuals," which is surely not always the case.

What is Christianity anyhow? It's just a set of ethical principles (which have been horribly bastardized by most of the followers). Everyone is created equal under the eyes of [Abstract Deity], even women and slaves. Everyone has done some bad things. Forgiveness is available to those who acknowledge that they've done bad things and truly prefer to not do bad things. Most of the rest of it (accepting Jesus as your savior, the virgin birth, his death and resurrection, various Hebrew rules, etc.) is all fluff there to perpetuate the religion, which is only maintained due to cultural natural selection (those religions without properties like this don't survive, so those things are just artifacts).

I'm using the word "idiot" as a hyperbole to refer to "people naturally disinterested in anything remotely techncal." Most people are this kind of idiot. Scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, architects, writers, and others who think abstractly are RARE.

Perpetually, many who ARE interested in technical things lament that those people seem to have missed out on the right opportunities or education, which is a sad, sad thing. The truth is that MOST people who are naturally inclined to care about technical things will learn technical things. Sure, there's the occasional person who is otherwise missed, but mostly, those efforts to educate disinterested people in technical things result only in incompetent, disinterested people CLAIMING to know technical things. Force someone disinterested to memorize a bunch of technical facts, and all they'll ever know is a bunch of disconnected facts. This does not lead to competence. Really, they still don't care and pretty much don't get it and would be better off, for everyone's sake, doing something else. You can't MAKE someone think abstractly; it's either present as a talent, or it's not.

That does not imply that everyone with abstract thinking ability will be competent. You also have to have passion for something. That's rare too.

Reminds me of a recent bad experience with Jet Blue. Not only was the flight an hour late, but when we arrived, they lost our stroller, which we had to check at the gate. We ended up leaving about 2 hours late. If it weren't for the constant screaming of our 2-year-old, that wouldn't have been so bad. I realize that people deal with a lot worse, but the $30 off our "next" flight was really lame, considering that we're unlikely to be flying with them again within the year they give us to redeem it. Really, all that discount is is lock-in to ensure they get more of our business, which makes it not really a discount.

This makes me think of the technological progress of communications between computers. (Note: This is not a totally accurate depiction of history.) First, we had serial communication, like RS232. When that wasn't fast enough, we went parallel, like Centronics. That reached a certain speed limit due to signal skew between the parallel wires. But by then, on-chip transistors were so fast that we could modulate differential serial in a way that beats the heck out of parallel. (Notice that modern highspeed interconnects, like USB3 and PCI-Express, are all differential serial, where any parallelism has decoupled phasing.)

So imagine we computed the transfer function of the "typical" record player, accounting for all the distortions in the needle, amplifier, and speaker. Then we took the waveform we WANT to get and reverse engineer exactly the groove we need on the record to get the exact sounds we want. It might take a decent amount of compute power to do it, but we could do a far better job than we ever could back in the 1970's.

There are many common algorithms at the heart of important workloads that are not parallelizable. Consider sorting and shortest path algorithms that are important for managing data and route finding. The O(n-squared) versions can be parallelized (Bellman-Ford vs. Dijkstra's), but for any useful input size, the n-log-n version will be faster on a single core than the n-squared on a supercomputer (no hyperbole there). Even for workloads that do have a lot of parallelism, the inter-process communication often dominates. Except for benchmarks with no application to reality, there is always SOMETHING that serializes computation. Amdahl's law always bites you in the ass.

So much for parallel computing.

If you have many INDEPENDENT tasks, then sure, parallel computing is great. Web servers with many clients, graphics, etc. But that's for servers.

On end-user systems, the amount of thread-level parallelism is very limited. Unless you're compiling Gentoo, you're going to top out at a handful of cores. This is not limitation of the languages people use. It's a practical limitation of the parallelism inherent (or not) in the workloads people run, and it's a hard mathematical limitation of the optimal algorithms people use for common low-level tasks.

http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/dhbpapers/twelve-ways.pdf
http://www.davidhbailey.com/dhbpapers/inv3220-bailey.pdf
http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/pubs/dispelling-ieeedt-2013.pdf

There are some people in parallel computing who need to go back to school and learn computational complexity.