No, that is not a realistic possibility.

According to the GDPR, the data subject has the right to know what sort of data are collected, and for what purpose. If they ask the data controller about it (Google, in this case), the controller has to explicitly say "no data are collected".

In other words, the lack of an answer is not the equivalent of "nothing is collected". It is merely an indication of the fact that the controller does not allow the data subjects to exercise their rights.

It just occurred to me that there's something else that should be said in this context - why is poetry not so popular?

My guess is that this is rooted in our educational system. At least in my area (Moldova, in Eastern Europe), we had to learn poems by heart and recite them in class. Though I understand that some people enjoy it, I didn't see the fun in it.

Some poets would write romantic verses about their feelings - to me, at that age, it meant nothing. I understood the words, but I could not relate to that at all, I simply had no life experience that was remotely close to what the poems were about. Now imagine that on top of that - you have to learn the thing by heart. Ehh..

However, many years later I had life experiences that brought me to the same mental states and at last - I could identify with protagonists I didn't care about decades ago.

It turns out that the last poem I wrote was about love and how it is falsely presented to us: http://railean.net/index.php/h...

Unless you can read the original in Romanian, here's an automated translation that I tweaked a bit:

{
And yet let me tell you what love is,
because the truth is complicated.
Love is not how poets write in hymns
nor how the great craftsmen painted [it].

And it's not like the troubadour sings,
nor as explained in the novels.
It's nowhere near what it looks like in [social] "networks",
and the movies have disoriented us too...

And if you were to listen to what people say
to accept how it is given to you, distorted,
to get ready for disappointment,
for your flight will be abruptly shortened.

And yet let me tell you what love is,
there's a way out of the impasse:
exclude everything you know it's not,
And then love is all that's left.
}

I assure you it sounds nice in Romanian :-)

Yes, people read poetry and buy poetry books.

I cannot tell whether one can have a sustainable life by focusing on poetry as their main activity. However, lots of people do this as a "side quest".

Writing poetry is a challenge - you have to think of what you want to say, then you have to encode it in a way that rhymes and sounds nice, takes word-play into account. As a bonus, you can bake in hidden references to certain events or things that only some readers will understand (which enables them to perceive the poem in a different way).

There are many different styles, you can give a try to some short "grooks" by Piet Hein (a scientist, so poetry was just a secondary quest). Here are a few:

THE ROAD TO WISDOM

The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
      Err
      and err
      and err again
      but less
      and less
      and less.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP

Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.

No - not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping

CIRCUMSCRIPTURE

  As Pastor X steps out of bed
        he slips a neat disguise on:
that halo round his priestly head
        is really his horizon.

Sometimes I write poetry for fun - to learn some words in a foreign language, or to express some thoughts related to a problem I was dealing with. Every now and then I write one as a challenge - to emulate someone' style. Usually it is a little bit of everything.

In this example I was thinking about a friend that I haven't seen since early childhood. Coincidentally, Iremembered a story by Richard Feynman about a philosophy course, where he submitted an essay that ended with something that later sounded as "a wagga wa awaga wagga" :-) http://railean.net/index.php/p...

Personally, I don't go to recitals, I think they're silly. For me, poetry is a solitary activity.

You're right, narrow columns improve readability. However, I believe the question we should consider is "is 'readability' in a newspaper and 'readability' in code defined in the same way?".

I think the answer is negative. For example, typefaces with serifs, ligatures and variable widths improve readability, but when it comes to programming - we prefer monospace fonts. Do newspapers come with "dark mode"? :-) Perhaps there are other differences too.

Code is not always read like prose. One could argue that the programmer operates in several modes, each at different levels of abstraction:

• (a) high-level: "iterate over a list"
• (b) low-level: "this is a for loop that begins at 0 and ends at X, and increments the counter with 1 at each step"

(b) is necessary when you're debugging it, but once the code was written and tested, subsequent reads of it can go at level (a).

For example, this Python chunk would be autoformatted by black ("the uncompromising code formatter"); note that you might have to zoom out a bit to make sure Slashdot doesn't add its own line breaks:

for route_id, route_number, name in curs:
        result[route_id] = Route(route_id, route_number, name)
        result[route_id].stations = self.load_route_stations(route_id)
        result[route_id].station_ids = [station.station_id for station in result[route_id].stations]
        result[route_id].checkpoints = self.load_route_checkpoints(route_id)
        result[route_id].checkpoint_ids = [entry.checkpoint_id for entry in result[route_id].checkpoints]

to:

for route_id, route_number, name in curs:
        result[route_id] = Route(route_id, route_number, name)
        result[route_id].stations = self.load_route_stations(route_id)
        result[route_id].station_ids = [
                station.station_id for station in result[route_id].stations
        ]
        result[route_id].checkpoints = self.load_route_checkpoints(route_id)
        result[route_id].checkpoint_ids = [
                entry.checkpoint_id for entry in result[route_id].checkpoints
        ]

In the top code excerpt, the programmer sees it as "each line sets an attribute of the object in question", mode (a). Whereas in the bottom excerpt some of these logical operations span across multiple lines and you're forced into mode (b), because you're not sure if these several lines are a part of the same logical operation or not, until you read them.

This reminds me of the "Thinking fast and slow" dichotomy, where "system 1" makes a fast decision, while "system 2" makes a slow one. In my experience, quite often when long lines are broken down into multiple lines I am forced to deal with them using "system 2" when "system 1" would suffice.

So, there are cases when long lines are appropriate.

Thanks for sharing the link. I am aware of a related project that might go well with your service: https://github.com/code4moldov...

It is a Telegram bot that notifies volunteers about a person in their area who requested assistance. The chat-based interface provides the ability to respond to such requests and submit some information about the beneficiary's status (whether they have any symptoms, what their mood is, etc.).

The benefit of Telegram is that it adds push notifications and gives you clients for iOS and Android for free.

Has anyone found a scientific paper that documents the process of how they evaluated the font?

The claim is interesting, but where is the evidence to back it up?

Could you recommend some specific works that cover these subjects? I would greatly appreciate it if you could point out the sequence in which these materials should be read (if it matters).

Thank you in advance.

The comparison is not fair.

One doesn't need to know how an IRC server works in order to use it. You can create a friendlier client GUI and thus lower the entry barrier so even the folks on your Facebook list can use it with ease.

Yes, the OP mentioned setting up one's own servers, but only a fraction of those on IRC are responsible for running the infrastructure - the others are just people who want to chat.

In my area, back in the days, a lot of people just said "mirc" when they referred to chatting online. To them, it was not an IRC server, not a protocol, not a network - they didn't care. It was all about the "pacman-like" icon of a particular client that happened to be popular. So, one could argue that IRC is not only for geeks.

If that happens again, try to start the Task Manager, and then type the name of the EXE (even if the window itself is not visible) and press DEL + ENTER.

The idea is that the Task Manager's window may not be visible for some reason, but it still has focus - so you can try to interact with it.

If you call Windows API functions from your code, then you are tied to this API. In other words, a pure Java program would indeed be able to run anywhere; but if one explicitly ties it to an environment - well, they depend on that environment.

I believe there is a difference, which makes Slashdot a much better place - it doesn't go out on a limb to make you stay on the site.

Here we have many interesting comments and we spend a lot of time reading them because they're thought-provoking, and because their authors invested some cognitive effort into putting them together.

On Facebook you're most likely doing "micro-interactions" - likes, smiles or very short, tweet-like comments, that take almost no intelligence to construct. There are exceptions, of course. But overall - Facebook is a place with shiny toys, optimized to appeal to that part of your personality that isn't much of a thinker.

I've discovered many great things by reading Slashdot comments - references to great books, interesting documentaries, programming languages and useful technologies. Slashdot also shaped my thinking - I've learned to spot logical fallacies by reading people's responses to other people's responses. The ROI for my time on Slashdot is great, this site has influenced my career trajectory in very important ways.

With Facebook the ROI is not just zero... it's negative! Like I said, there are exceptions, and there are useful groups there too - but that little kernel of utility cannot be enjoyed without exposing yourself to photos of someone's fancy breakfast, check-ins and piles of useless junk. The signal-to-noise ratio is just not worth it.

It's quite challenging to get out of there. I have my hosts file redirect that domain to localhost, on all my devices. I've changed the password to a random one that I store in a password manager, so I cannot get there easily even if I could not resist the temptation. Only after taking these measures I was able to reach the "Facebook escape velocity".

The same method?

His brother contacted the police, telling them that the manifesto is something that reminds him of his brother's style. The methods are different, there's no mass surveillance in Kaczynski's case.

Next time express contrasting ideas with words that have a greater Hamming distance; otherwise this is a recipe for a disaster.

i.e. you have one hour to test 1000 variations of this number. By distributing the "test load" across a thousand online stores, each of those sites will "think" it is the first incorrect attempt to enter the digits, thus have no reason to flag it as suspicious.

  This can be easily automated, therefore it can be done on a large scale.

You might be interested in reading about the Piraha tribe in South America. They have no creation stories or myths, nor do they have religion.

This is an interview where Daniel Everett, a researcher who spent many years living with those people and studying their language, in which he shares some interesting highlights: http://7thavenueproject.com/po...

His book "Don't sleep in the jungle, there are snakes" provides a more detailed picture of the Piraha culture and lifestyle.

Their language has a few interesting features, tenses are one of them. They use one form of a verb to talk about things they've seen themselves, and another form for expressing ideas which they have heard from someone who has had first-hand experience.

This makes the language unsuitable for expressing abstract thought (have you ever seen a "derived class" or a "variable" or "cosine of X^2"?). This is also why they have no religion and attempts to christianize them were not successful. "Have you _seen_ Jesus walk on water?" turned out to be a very effective filter for them.