sugarfactory

It seems that you (like a great number of other people) assume that an ordinary person without special skills cannot comprehend what some code does once it is compiled. But that assumption is fortunately wrong. It is easier than you think to learn to read disassembly of machine code. It would be much easier to read higher level bytecode such as Android VM's smali.

So don't fear compilation. What is truly worrying is any attempt to restrict access to code that is run by a computer. Even a highly skilled reverse engineer cannot do anything if there is no way to access code.

Even though my intuition tells me that I should support neurodiversity my reasoning keeps failing to justify it without introducing "diversity is unconditionally good" as an axiom. I find it difficult to add it to the list of axioms I support because it seems like hypocrasy to endorse diversity considering the history of humans.

Almost every human has the ability to learn and speak language, which is unique to mankind. (What media often reports as an animal language is not a language in that it doesn't have recursion -- the ability to handle it is, Chomsky and his supporters believe, unique to humans)

But shortly after language was born, in the very first stage of evolution of language, there must have been significant percentage of people who could not learn language. Where did they go? The answer is: they went extinct, failing to reproduce. And that's why we all can learn and speak language. The ancestors of us are those who could speak it. By making it difficult to reproduce for those who couldn't speak language, through the process of natural selection, we managed to build society where almost all of the members can speak it. Having autism in this era is analogous to being non-verbal in the early stage of humans.

With that said, endorsing diversity seems to be denial of evolution to me, denial of how we have come this far. It is by putting selection pressure on those who cannot adapt to society. And the sad reality is, you cannot stop it from happening. Autistic people will go extinct, even without the gene-editing technology, just like non-verbal people went extinct.

It might be the right thing to do to torture, to add more pain to, someone who already feels so much pain that she attempts suicide, by some standard that I cannot comprehend. We might have to accept such a standard as the cost of diversity.

However it seems obvious to me that it is impossible for any sound-thinking person to argue that it is justifiable to obstruct suicide attempts. One of the values upon which capitalism society is based is the notion of private property, which entails that we have exclusive control of things we own. If it is justifiable to obstruct suicide attempts, that would imply that we do not own our bodies. Well, there's a name for such people: slaves.

It's just funny that it is still called "natural selection" even when the environment that selects individuals is created by nothing but ourselves. I think it'd be much more accurate to call it "social selection" because for humans the environment is not nature, but society.

With that in your mind, those of you who are clever might wonder: what is the fundamental difference between "social selection" and eugenics, which many consider morally wrong? My answer is: they are essentially the same thing. It's because if we define eugenics as society deciding who to reproduce and who not to, that's exactly what is happening now.

I meant HTTP but I have to admit it was not clear. What I had in my mind when I wrote that was there needs to be something that forces people to provide semantics of web pages. By which I mean HTTP is too liberal, allowing any kind of document including documents without semantic annotations to be transferred. Therefore I thought people would provide page semantics if HTTP required documents be annotated with semantics just like HTTP requires Content-Type be given.

Extracting machine-understandable meaning from web pages is much analogous to extracting text from images.

Fortunately, we usually don't need to process web pages using fancy yet hardly accurate algorithms in order to extract machine-readable text from web pages. Why? It's because we agreed to use character codes to codify letters and most of the time text is encoded using some character code, which makes it unnecessary to OCR pictures of hand-written letters to programatically process text from web pages.

These kinds of program wouldn't be needed if only the same thing had happened for page structures, if HTTP included page semantics.

You can read Wikipedia articles without letting them know which article you're reading by downloading the database dump of Wikipedia, which can be obtained at dumps.wikimedia.org.

Google developed SPDY, an efficient binary representation of HTTP messages. Maybe they will do the same thing but for HTML. It would be much more efficient if one could design a binary representation of HTML that can only express well-formed HTML.

It'd be great if it were implemented as a peer-to-peer protocol as it'd make taking the service down much more difficult.

EDIT:

Although making the service completely peer-to-peer might be impossible, it is possible to distribute articles in a peer-to-peer way. I'm considering an architecture which consists of a peer-to-peer network to share articles, and servers to download articles and put them on the network. In this architecture, even if all the servers got taken down at least the articles which have been shared would be accessible provided that the peer-to-peer network is alive.

I suppose not. I presume the way would be vulnerabilities in code handling untrusted data streams such as USB, Wi-Fi, or BlueTooth. Although the amount of time it takes might be getting longer, every major iOS update eventually has had jailbreaks, which implies for an organization with larger budget than jailbreak hackers would likely be able to discover 0-day vulnerabilities in iOS.

I quite agree. However I have seen a great many registration forms that only accept a short password. If passwords are handled properly there's no reason to limit password length because a password will get converted to a fixed-length string due to hashing before storing it to a database. So I suspect many people prefer storing passwords in plaintext.

I think Apple and all other tech companies that support it move as the FBI (or whoever controls the FBI) expected or wanted.

What was revealed a few years ago was the fact that big tech companies betrayed people's trust. So quite naturally they should attempt to regain that trust. Because if majority of people stop trusting tech companies and start using end-to-end encryption, use of encryption stops working as a signifier that indicates a higher likelihood that the user's doing something wrong. Thus it's crucial to keep ordinary people away from using encryption. In order to achieve this, it's important to make people trust big tech companies again.

In my opinion, this is what the writer of the plot of the dispute between the FBI and Apple thinks.

I think Daylight Saving Time is a bad idea in the same sense that (abusing) global variables is a bad idea in programming.

In programming, changing a global state in order to achieve something is almost always a bad practice because it affects everywhere and sometimes in unpredictable ways. Instead of abusing global states, we invented object-oriented programming, which I consider as a way to keep states locally (inside objects).

So if someone wants to save daylight, that should be achieved locally for example by changing school schedules.