Is there a list online somewhere of all the crazy shit that can legally happen to you in the US? How long you can be detained for, what data can be extracted from you, and so on? Like if you had a really bad day and the authorities exercised all of the powers over you they legally have.
I think they got him confused with the officers that unloaded 20 rounds in a no-knock warrant, killing an EMT not involved in the investigation, and resulting in no evidence
In that rare instance charges were filed, but there is yet to be a conviction. There is a vast system in place to protect police officers in these situations, up to and including federal law.
That’s fair except I’d say even good standards can cause a big slowdown in feature releases, and not everyone values the adherence to the standard as much as the features. It still seems better to just spin out the standard into a set of optional adapters and let library maintainers and users pick their own trade-offs in terms of when to adopt breaking changes, how / whether to smooth over idiosyncrasies across multiple libraries.
Even a good standard has costs and this particular case does not seem like it has good arguments in favor of a wide standard, but many arguments against it.
No, it's easy for library maintainers to offer a compat API in addition to however else they feel they need to differentiate and optimize the interfaces for array operations. People can contribute such APIs directly to libraries once instead of creating many conditionals in every library-utilizing project or requiring yet another dependency on an adapter / facade package that's not kept in sync with the libraries it abstracts.
If a library chooses to implement a spec compatability API, they do that once (optimally, as compared with somebody's hackish adapter facade which has very little comprehension of each library's internals) and everyone else's code doesn't need to have conditionals.
Each of L libraries implements a compat API: O(L)
Each of U library utilizers implements conditionals for every N places arrays are utilized: O(U x N_)
Each of U library utilizers uses the common denominator compat API: O(U)
The days are counted from the release of a fix. If something been known for two years but a fix was released on 11th August, then it was a zero-day for the two years until 11th August and it's a "day-6" vulnerability today.
IIRC the term was introduced to contrast with day-1 attacks with exploits developed by reverse engineering patches on the day they are released and attempting to exploit systems in the gap until they get patched.
Completely agree! The article is blinkered to the security aspect. But imagine if compilers didn't create reproducible builds. Debugging would be a nightmare!
Uh? Is that sarcasm?
Compilers don't produce reproducible builds.
If you try to investigate a core dump using a binary recompiled from sources instead of the original binary, it's very likely you won't be able to analyze the core..
By default you're not guaranteed the exact same output in two compiled binaries. There's a lot of variable bits[1] that make into binaries from C and C++. Different languages/compilers have different levels of variable bits.
Yes that would be reproducibility iff the environment is identical. However "identical environment" is a complicated issue.
Differing file paths, timestamps, and host date/time can all easily make their way into a binary through macros in several languages without explicit compiler/linker flags. If compiled artifacts are bundled into a container (like a jar file) their metadata need to deterministically set or else the container as an artifact won't be deterministic.
So yes doing all the work to make build deterministic enables reproducibility but it's not free or automatic. Then doing the work to ensure the build environment is deterministic is an additional task that's not free or automatic.
Since when don't compilers produce reproducible builds? We did that at my last workplace with appropriate MSVC compiler options.
In any case, maybe parent is referring to using centralized debug symbols which can work for anybody in the org because their compilers all generate the same output.
> They made a fairly useful gadget that sold well.
Perhaps a little bit breathless, but it was an amazing thing at the time. I remember buying one (a DX) from Malyasia, (because they weren't available in Australia), through a reseller (some company who bought stacks of them and resold them around the world). It was a talking point for a long time - people would ask me about it on the train etc. I still have it and still marvel at its amazingness occasionally.
Edit: remembered some more - laptops at the time had awful battery life, this thing could carry thousands of books and last weeks from one charge. I could download any book (mostly) instantly, before that I'd order books from the states, they'd take weeks to arrive and cost a fortune. It was an amazing thing.
>Perhaps a little bit breathless, but it was an amazing thing at the time.
I bought the first kindle and I thought it was great but "amazing" is a bit much. E-readers already existed, Amazon's main selling point was their catalog and aggressive pricing. I mean the Sony Reader predates the Kindle and is technically fairly similar AFAIK: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Sony_Rea...
On top of that e-paper readers so far have effectively been a fad, conventional smartphones and tablets have taken over pretty dramatically. Paper books are also going nowhere. So the impact of the Kindle is negligible when compared to something like the iPhone, that completely changed the standard for a mobile phone.
>On top of that e-paper readers so far have effectively been a fad, conventional smartphones and tablets have taken over pretty dramatically.
Yeah. I like my Paperwhite well enough for certain uses but I'm not even sure I would replace it if it broke tomorrow. And I'm a little surprised at the degree to which people have stuck with physical books even when it's just flowing text. I'm at the point where a new book means a book I have needs to be donated. I'd much rather books that are just text are digital. But then, in normal times, I'm traveling most of the time.
E-books really haven't ended up being that much of a revolution and certainly dedicated readers are not.
Somebody would have created an ebook if not for Amazon. They were just well placed to do so, but they didn't invent any of the technology or concepts.
Much like Apple and touchscreen phones, or Tesla and electric cars. The might have advanced the tech by a couple of years but they were profiting off the inevitable.
IIRC from the Everything Store there was some conjecture that the Amazon "read the first chapter" feature paved the way to mass digitalization of books. So they were well positioned to launch with decent selection and ramp up faster than if they relied on the pace of distributors.
If any amazonians from around that time could confirm that would be cool...
Could be, there were other ebook readers around at the time, but it was Amazon that integrated it with the business of buying books and made them cheap. So, yes, eventually some one would have done it, but by then the iPad may have been around, would a kindle have been viable, after the iPad? hard to say.
My issue with it is the same as with anyone trying to reverse engineer Steve Jobs' work -- you probably can't cargo-cult greatness. Take: "everyone told him it was a distraction, he ignored them" and "set unrealistic expectations". These are terrible pieces of advice in the general case, and what's more, I can't imagine that they're advice that Bezos himself follows very regularly. However, in these specific cases, he was right, and he won big.
he might even have been "right", just won. so many "successful" products/services won despite the complete clownness of their founders.
sure, probably there are some small degree of correlation (and maybe even some kind of causal influence) between being a hard to work with hard worker (eg being a stubborn visionary who can kind of execute their vision), but that's probably due to how the world is currently set up, those are not universal rules of success. they worked in those scenarios, but might be completely maladaptive in others. (Eg Theranos trying to fake it till making it was a big no-no, but Uber sort of hit gold with it in the US.)
> He talks as if his work revolutionized the world and Jeff Bezos is a god among men.
I read the Tweets as an appreciation for Bezos’ vision, specifically acting on a non-consensus prediction at a moment when the core businesses was struggling.
The Kindle ecosystem includes the store and the reader apps, not just the e-ink reader. New business models that cannibalize existing core businesses are non-trivial to implement in a large company.
Totally agree. Having to think about how I need to organise my thoughts as the same time as coming up with the thoughts themselves always seems like a burden!
