but in a general sense unless the actual source of the problem, a complete lack of laws protecting our privacy, is brought to light, I do not expect any real change.
I'm pretty sure there a plenty of laws protecting real privacy. Facebook users seem to have a different definition : not about protecting their personal individual information but protecting their clique's information. Protecting cliquishness is probably a bad thing. You'll eventually have a nation sized clique gossiping (in facebook defined privacy) about how awful neighbouring nations are.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/why-cant-planes-fly-through-volcanic-ash-because-nasa-tried-once It basically starts to eat the plane's internals
What that story really implies is that there was an ash cloud from an icelandic volcano over europe in February 2000. No air space was shutdown. And noone crashed (including the Nasa plane). They found some "scary" engine damage by examining their engine with a microscope.
(By the way, your link is dead, here is the google cache)
those who know how big a MB actually is will continue knowing, and will quickly (and eagerly) find the ways to make their computers show sizes correclty.
How big is a megabyte?
Does any binary-ist really know without reaching for their calculator? I date back to 1980's microcomputers and could recite all the powers of 2 upto 2 to the 16th (65536). I gave up after memory sizes went beyond that. I hand assembled Z80 machine code by looking up their hex codes in an opcode table. We don't live in the world where we deal directly with binary any more.
I've been a decimal-ist for a few years and early on I actually almost finished a decimal file manager (there weren't any at all back then). It used resistor notation (where k/M/G isnt at the end of the number, but in the middle replacing the decimal point [period]). It showed all the digits in the filesize, but only the first four were in black, the rest were ghosted down to gray. That way you could easily read the approximate size, or look harder and read the complete number. Eg 314159265 would appear as 314M159265
Today I changed a light bulb.
Well unless there is something else going on Rob needs to go back to school too. A simple quicksort algorithm with the comparator replaced with a random choice becomes a recursive random partition of the array. A simple inductive argument shows that this will not produce the unbalanced results he found. So the problem is elsewhere (most likely in the RNG seeding or a bias in the pivot selection, if he is running it in a tight loop and the seed is something like, current second, then the same seed may appear several times).
You do realise that quicksort is whole family of algorithms? Most library routine writers consider it a bug if you sort the same data twice and it comes up in a different order, so they tend to avoid random pivot and use median of 3 or 9 pivot instead. These will give biased shuffling. They also also switch to insertion sort for small subarrays which will lead to biased shuffling.
Closing the walls partitioning takes 1/2 to 1/3 times as many swaps as the Lomuto partitioning (which is a simple left to right for loop) so it's usually the preferred method to partition. Lomuto also goes quadratic for equal valued elements. Most closing the walls partitions use the pivot as a sentinal, but with a random comparison the indexes can walk right past the end the subarray and generate an array index error.
Besides I vaguely remember all the star trek episodes and definitely vaguely remember a series finale where Captain Bristow has to stop a big red matter ball from turning a whole city into zombies.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
