See my previous reply but it's a matter of degree. Asking folks to stay at home is of a lesser degree than forcing them to vaccinate. On the one hand you're asking them to curtail certain social behaviours, on the other you're asking them to involuntarily influence the very makeup of their bodies. Given that our bodies are an extension of ourselves, that's a higher bar to overcome. As part of our very existence we acknowledge the presence of a boundary which is "us" versus "not us".

If you see humans as without self, and believe that identity is an illusion, then asking folks to disregard the bodies they inhabit probably does seem like a reasonable ask. But if self isn't important, then what does any of it matter? Without self, then you might as well let people die if it doesn't matter anyway.

If you believe that your life, if anyone's life, is important then you have to acknowledge the value of the concept of 'self'. And our sense of self is very intimately entwined with our bodies. If someone was to cut off your arm, would you take it personally? Or would you say, "that's part of the machine I inhabit. It was the result of cellular growth over a period of years which resulted in an appendage which I found useful"?

I'm not here to argue which is right, because those sort of thoughts are not the type which occupy an everyday person's existence. At the end of the day, it's important to recognize that the vast majority of the population at large recognizes their bodies as part of themselves. Which makes forcing them to modify their bodies a very very large ask, one which shouldn't be taken lightly.

Two things come to mind at this point:

1. I've formulated a very strong anti-vaxxer argument. Which, as someone who doesn't want to be plagued by disease that's avoidable through vaccination, makes me wary of the effect of this argument.

2. There's no doubt that vaccinations benefit us all. And the science says that vaccinations are not the equivalent of cutting off one's own arm, by and large they are safe and a benefit not just to society as a whole but to ourselves and our families as well.

I believe that most anti-vaxxers are proceeding from a sense of, "if everyone else believes, I don't have to, herd immunity will cover it and I can remain cautious and let everyone else take the risk."

Which, to a certain point, doesn't affect the rest of us at all. If the percentage of anti-vaxxers is below the level required to reach herd immunity then honestly we really shouldn't care if they defer, as long as the quantity of those that defer remains safe for the rest of us.

This makes vaccinations a balance between allowing people to respect the sanctity of their bodies and not allowing their numbers to materially affect the numbers required to reach herd immunity.

So it comes down to a bet.

Do you believe that:

1. Despite education, the number of people resistant to the vaccine will cause our population to fall below herd immunity, making it reasonable to forcibly require them to violate the sanctity of their bodies and hence create precedents with far reaching ramifications. See: my previous example from my other post, in addition to arguments about abortion, and so on.

or

2. We can educate enough of the populace to reach herd immunity, retain the idea that our sense of self includes our bodies, and maintain a critical part of personal freedom which allows us to enjoy life on a level that we wouldn't without it?

Given that 83% of people believe the measles vaccination is safe (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com...) I am willing to throw in with the second option. I believe that you will have a further bump with the fact that practically the whole US population is being exposed to very scary news about the virus, but even if you disregard that bump, an 83% herd immunity would result in an R0 (measure of transmissibility of the virus) of 5.88 (herd immunity = 1-1/R0). In a review of papers from densely populated China, estimations of R0 average 3.28 with a median of 2.79. In most areas of the United States, common sense tells us this number is likely much lower. That is a very comfortable margin and unless you believe that only 69.5 percent of folks would get the vaccination (to use the more conservative average number from a dense population: 1-1/3.28 = .695), then you have to err on the side of protecting individual rights. That's a very conservative scenario, mind, and the margin is probably much much safer than that for a place like the United States.

I hope this comment illustrates that even if you acknowledge the value of vaccinations in herd immunity, the likelihood that any sort of anti-vaccination sentiment would have a material impact on society's safety is very low. In light of that, it's important to not set dangerous precedents when it comes to any impingement upon what you consider to be your self.

That sort of thing is insidious, and same same to making it illegal to not get vaccinated. I don't know what logical fallacy that represents, but these sorts of things are the entrances to the slippery slopes that folks worry about. If you apply that same logic to something you personally don't want to do, maybe that helps to envision why it's a bad idea. Maybe in absence of my knowledge of the full catalog of fallacies we can just call it "the transitive property of totalitarianism".

As an example, maybe you'd be really against anyone reading your thoughts. Or your diary, if that makes it more real. You can't just say, "ok, we'll make it so you can't file your taxes unless law enforcement gets to read your diary." If everyone kept diaries (make that another requirement), and we let law enforcement read them all, surely that would reduce societal harm. If everyone was forced to keep a diary, and it was compulsory to share them with law enforcement, clever folks, not to mention natural language AIs, could detect a lot of potential crime before it happened. But even though it wasn't encoded in our constitution, we as human beings have some sense of privacy and it would be the rare person that would voluntarily submit to such a thing. If it was compulsory we as a society would be made very uncomfortable and our personal standards of ethics would not identify such a thing as just, even if the punishment wasn't jail but rather not being allowed to file taxes. As human beings, we consider our bodies to be pretty sacrosanct. It doesn't feel right to let another human being take control of our bodies, just as much as it doesn't feel right to let them read our minds.

If the goal is to get folks vaccinated, there are much better ways that respect their boundaries. Certainly education is a great one. Remember, we don't actually need *everyone* to get vaccinated for a vaccination effort to work, thanks to herd immunity. There will be some holdouts, but if you can get enough folks to vaccinate then it will be effective. My presumption, and this is admittedly non-precise due to R0 not being fully understood (which effects the percentage required to reach herd immunity and which in and of itself is affected by other behaviors), is that society can get enough folks educated on why it's important to vaccinate for vaccinations to be effective. Especially when we're looking at a threat which is so present in folks' minds due to 24/7 injection of information about what the situation is surrounding this virus.

I write this as one who takes advantage of every vaccine available, so don't take this as an anti-vaxxer argument. Instead, it's an argument that acknowledges each and every human being's personal sovereignty and suggests that there's a better way to approach this that still achieves the goal but doesn't create dangerous precedent :)

So it was faster because they hedged and used async to scan? What does that have to do with WebAssembly?

I'm not sure you can really teach someone programming. If someone really want's to learn how to code, they can just do it on their own. Download the JRE and just figure things out little-by-little. They have to want to learn it. Read stuff on the Web. And actually yes, "Google it". Last I checked, they don't teach programming in College. If you're a compsci major, you're just expected to know how to code already. So every serious coder is pretty much self-taught. Yeah, it might be nice to have some place to go and ask questions but you can't make programmers like you're making pizzas. Did these Mined Minds people really "promise" anything?

As a developer who has written drivers for DSP and other low level stuff, I can say with great certainty that this is definitely an iOS bug. The problem did not occur at all before the 11.4.0 update. As soon as that update dropped it happens without fail for the past 5 weeks. It's not background apps. I can close all apps, charge to 100%, unplug when I go to bed and in the morning it's 20%. Something is getting stuck in a loop or maybe some chip is getting bad commands. The phone gets physically warm so something is running free.

No doubt everyone that always used their iPhone a lot is going to jump in an say "me too" when their problem is that they're just using their phone a lot. So naturally that has created enough doubt to muddy the diagnosis. And Apple has not acknowledge the bug so there are a lot of responses regarding how to turn things off to improve battery. But, again, that is NOT the problem. The problem is something is running uncontrolled.

There are many theories as to the cause. Many have to do with something related to WiFi. The only pattern that I have seen is that if I shutdown and restart, the problem goes away for a while. But as soon as I use the phone for whatever reason, it comes back. It might take 6 hours. It might take a day. But eventually it always comes back and then it's stuck draining battery unless I reboot.

Note that iOS 11.4.1 was just released yesterday. But the release notes say nothing about battery anything so it remains to be seen if they have fixed it. It is discouraging that they have not acknowledged it. It makes you wonder if they're actually having trouble reproducing it. But that would almost unbelievable since they could just install 11.3 and compare. Of course we can't do that because 11.3 isn't signed anymore so it cannot be installed. Obviously it's not a trivial CPU loop or they would have spotted it quick. Running the CPU in debugging mode probably suppresses it or again they would have spotted it quick.

I'm starting to have doubts about Apple. Steve Jobs was a prick but maybe that's precisely why he was so successful.

I want to know this too please.

If they don't fix the battery drain problem (which AFAIK they have not actually acknowledged as a "problem" and it absolutely most definitely is) I will be dumping iPhone for sure. Bring on Android.

Agreed. AI used to mean a computer that could "think". At least that's what people have been lead to believe. Over the years the term "AI" has been hijacked by companies who are clearly taking advantage of the misconception with advertisements for systems that talk to people about finding viruses and "healing" networks and other such nonsense. These programs are not "thinking" like a person and I don't believe they ever will simply because they do not have human experiences. They are simply sophisticated algorithms for specific problems.

Sounds like they need to further develop their hypothesis, conduct trials to collect data, establish a control group, analyze the data and present their findings for peer review to determine precisely how much Science should be permitted at the EPA.

Many robo calls are using arbitrary numbers now. They can do that if they have a particular type of service. I know this for sure because I have received calls from myself!

Then again, I guess it wasn't my smart phone that really initiated the call.

You are gullible beyond belief. You said, "see campaign stump speeches for more information"? You must be joking. Trump is a narcissistic reality TV show personality who is a master at manipulating public opinion. You have taken the bait hook-line-and-sinker my friend. Trump is going to try to start a war by scaring people so that they rally around him to do something (war). Just watch. They are going to start to build up rhetoric about threats from NK or Iran or wherever and use the whole thing to scare people into being his followers. How ironic it is that Kim Jong Un does precisely the same thing.

I have used Linux as my primary desktop since ~1997. As a software developer it is a power platform. The shell is critical. However, as a conventional desktop it is just not competitive with Windows. And OSX isn't either. Both Linux and OSX are below 4% market share. Vertical integration is very weak. Windows has an identity management system that allows transparent filesharing, advanced group based access control, sophisticated business applications. Getting stuff like that to work on Linux is too difficult or simply not possible. So software venders focus on the Windows platform. And rightly so. I just tried and application that recently released a Beta for Linux and it was a total fail. I occasionally dabble in engineering related stuff and I have to have a Windows machine for all of the various programs for cad, PCB design, simulation. Yeah, programs like that exist for Linux but they're just not good. And I know people agree with me that the GNOME desktop has actually regressed. It used to be much more usable. But they dumbed it down for reasons that where not entirely clear. My guess would be that when new developers come along, they have a tendency to want to re-write everything from scratch. I'm not diametrically opposed to this strategy but you better come up with something that was at least as good as what you're dumping. And that didn't happen. There are other integration related issues as well. For example, for as long as I can recall there has always been a fight between X and the desktop over who should remember the positions of windows. X says applications should save that information and recall it when re-launching an app. Desktop people think it should be handled by lower level facilities. Now, whenever logout and back in, all of my terminal windows have to be re-launced and repositioned (I run 6-8 terms on 4-5 workspaces). That is something that actually used to work somewhat in GNOME. It worked in WindowMaker IIRC. The Linux desktop has been dumbed way down to the point where it's not nearly as useful as it used to be. At least not for people doing more than surfing the web and email. Might as well just get a Chomebook for that.

The reason people don't respect the W3C specs is because they don't meet application requirements. HTTP and HTML were designed to serve static documents. The W3C thought the web was going to be like a giant encyclopedia composed of book like content with chapters, paragraphs, static images and so on. The statelessness of HTTP causes all sorts of problems that have resulted in hacks like cookies. Consider that HTTP does not specify any way to even authenticate a client. There's no way to do a proper complete stand-alone authentication. So we have to process plaintext passwords on the server over HTTPS. If HTTP had a proper authentication mech, major hacks like those we hear about on the news would be significantly reduced. The whole tool-chain stinks. Nobody understands CSS. The DOM is buggy and generally not that useful. JavaScript is mess. It's all way more complicated than it needs to be. The only upside is that it's so bad, it's an inevitablility that someone will come up with a completetly different "browser" with it's own tool-chain or possibly a browser plugin that just completely replaces the whole W3C toolchain. I hope anyway.

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.