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Turnabout

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Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.
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ivarne
3665 days ago
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Alt text: Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.
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sandge
3665 days ago
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Solid plan.
Atlanta, GA, USA
satadru
3665 days ago
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.
New York, NY
kazriko
3665 days ago
.!
[deleted]
3655 days ago
.?

English Grammar, Make it Stop

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English Grammar, Make it Stop

Submitted by: anselmbe

Tagged: english , grammar , funny , stahp , wtf
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ivarne
3837 days ago
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11 had in a row
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Heartbleed Explanation

27 Comments and 113 Shares
Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.
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popular
3863 days ago
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ivarne
3868 days ago
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27 public comments
Jerom
3860 days ago
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Я больше шар не видел. Супер пост.
Moscow, Russia
tomazed
3862 days ago
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crystal clear
josephwebster
3865 days ago
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This is actually a very good explanation.
Denver, CO, USA
PreparedPup
3866 days ago
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XKCD explains heartbleed
San Jose, California
Lacrymosa
3866 days ago
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good simple explanation of heartbleed
Boston, MA
jchristopherslice
3866 days ago
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Computer Science 101
Clemson, SC
PaulPritchard
3867 days ago
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The best explanation of Heartbleed I've seen.
Belgium
chrisminett
3867 days ago
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xkcd does it again!
Milton Keynes, UK
katster
3868 days ago
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Simple is good.
Sactown, CA
mitthrawnuruodo
3868 days ago
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Best explanation, yet.
Wherever
mrnevets
3868 days ago
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Heartbleed: a simple explanation. It affected a huge number of websites. Be safe and change your passwords!
macjustice
3868 days ago
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Best explanation yet.
Seattle
jkevmoses
3868 days ago
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Great explanation of Heartbleed that is causing internet security issues all over the place.
McKinney, Texas
srsly
3868 days ago
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You know I'm only sharing this because I've never seen a story this shared before. 56 people! 57 now.

I should get back to work.
Atlanta, Georgia
grammargirl
3868 days ago
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Clearest explanation I've seen by FAR.
Brooklyn, NY
smadin
3868 days ago
yeah, I think this does a very good job of making clear JUST HOW BAD this is.
glindsey1979
3868 days ago
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If you aren't a techie, this will explain the Heartbleed bug to you super-simply.
Aurora, IL
chrispt
3868 days ago
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Perfect explanation of how Heartbleed works.
37.259417,-79.935122
aaronwe
3868 days ago
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Perfect.
Denver
sfringer
3868 days ago
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In a nutshell!
North Carolina USA
JayM
3868 days ago
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.
Atlanta, GA
adamgurri
3868 days ago
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nice
New York, NY
bgschaid
3868 days ago
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You can’t explain it simpler and more to the point
bogorad
3868 days ago
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Умеет!
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Covarr
3868 days ago
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Ah, now I understand.
East Helena, MT
rohitt
3866 days ago
Yes. Clear as a day
revme
3868 days ago
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This actually makes it really clear.
Seattle, WA
teh_g
3868 days ago
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Alt text: Are you still there, server? It's me Margaret.
Roseville, CA

October 24, 2013

4 Comments and 24 Shares

POW!
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ivarne
4036 days ago
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popular
4037 days ago
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irunfrombears
4037 days ago
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For future reference
DC
carsonb
4037 days ago
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Teaching kids math through hands-on experimentation.
Peoria, Illinois
petrilli
4037 days ago
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Hah!
Arlington, VA
boredomfestival
4037 days ago
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Awesome

Our Newfound Fear of Risk

5 Comments and 23 Shares

We're afraid of risk. It's a normal part of life, but we're increasingly unwilling to accept it at any level. So we turn to technology to protect us. The problem is that technological security measures aren't free. They cost money, of course, but they cost other things as well. They often don't provide the security they advertise, and -- paradoxically -- they often increase risk somewhere else. This problem is particularly stark when the risk involves another person: crime, terrorism, and so on. While technology has made us much safer against natural risks like accidents and disease, it works less well against man-made risks.

Three examples:

  1. We have allowed the police to turn themselves into a paramilitary organization. They deploy SWAT teams multiple times a day, almost always in nondangerous situations. They tase people at minimal provocation, often when it's not warranted. Unprovoked shootings are on the rise. One result of these measures is that honest mistakes -- a wrong address on a warrant, a misunderstanding -- result in the terrorizing of innocent people, and more death in what were once nonviolent confrontations with police.

  2. We accept zero-tolerance policies in schools. This results in ridiculous situations, where young children are suspended for pointing gun-shaped fingers at other students or drawing pictures of guns with crayons, and high-school students are disciplined for giving each other over-the-counter pain relievers. The cost of these policies is enormous, both in dollars to implement and its long-lasting effects on students.

  3. We have spent over one trillion dollars and thousands of lives fighting terrorism in the past decade -- including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- money that could have been better used in all sorts of ways. We now know that the NSA has turned into a massive domestic surveillance organization, and that its data is also used by other government organizations, which then lie about it. Our foreign policy has changed for the worse: we spy on everyone, we trample human rights abroad, our drones kill indiscriminately, and our diplomatic outposts have either closed down or become fortresses. In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes.

There are lots more examples, but the general point is that we tend to fixate on a particular risk and then do everything we can to mitigate it, including giving up our freedoms and liberties.

There's a subtle psychological explanation. Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us. As we have advanced technologically as a society, we have reduced many of the risks that have been with us for millennia. Fatal childhood diseases are things of the past, many adult diseases are curable, accidents are rarer and more survivable, buildings collapse less often, death by violence has declined considerably, and so on. All over the world -- among the wealthier of us who live in peaceful Western countries -- our lives have become safer.

Our notions of risk are not absolute; they're based more on how far they are from whatever we think of as "normal." So as our perception of what is normal gets safer, the remaining risks stand out more. When your population is dying of the plague, protecting yourself from the occasional thief or murderer is a luxury. When everyone is healthy, it becomes a necessity.

Some of this fear results from imperfect risk perception. We're bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones. This leads us to believe that violence against police, school shootings, and terrorist attacks are more common and more deadly than they actually are -- and that the costs, dangers, and risks of a militarized police, a school system without flexibility, and a surveillance state without privacy are less than they really are.

Some of this fear stems from the fact that we put people in charge of just one aspect of the risk equation. No one wants to be the senior officer who didn't approve the SWAT team for the one subpoena delivery that resulted in an officer being shot. No one wants to be the school principal who didn't discipline -- no matter how benign the infraction -- the one student who became a shooter. No one wants to be the president who rolled back counterterrorism measures, just in time to have a plot succeed. Those in charge will be naturally risk averse, since they personally shoulder so much of the burden.

We also expect that science and technology should be able to mitigate these risks, as they mitigate so many others. There's a fundamental problem at the intersection of these security measures with science and technology; it has to do with the types of risk they're arrayed against. Most of the risks we face in life are against nature: disease, accident, weather, random chance. As our science has improved -- medicine is the big one, but other sciences as well -- we become better at mitigating and recovering from those sorts of risks.

Security measures combat a very different sort of risk: a risk stemming from another person. People are intelligent, and they can adapt to new security measures in ways nature cannot. An earthquake isn't able to figure out how to topple structures constructed under some new and safer building code, and an automobile won't invent a new form of accident that undermines medical advances that have made existing accidents more survivable. But a terrorist will change his tactics and targets in response to new security measures. An otherwise innocent person will change his behavior in response to a police force that compels compliance at the threat of a Taser. We will all change, living in a surveillance state.

When you implement measures to mitigate the effects of the random risks of the world, you're safer as a result. When you implement measures to reduce the risks from your fellow human beings, the human beings adapt and you get less risk reduction than you'd expect -- and you also get more side effects, because we all adapt.

We need to relearn how to recognize the trade-offs that come from risk management, especially risk from our fellow human beings. We need to relearn how to accept risk, and even embrace it, as essential to human progress and our free society. The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.

This essay previously appeared on Forbes.com.

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ivarne
4088 days ago
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popular
4088 days ago
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5 public comments
silberbaer
4087 days ago
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Yes. This.
New Baltimore, MI
emdeesee
4087 days ago
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Money quote: "We're bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones."
Sherman, TX
stevenewey
4087 days ago
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I thought provoking essay I for the most part agree with.

However, I was a little uncomfortable with the statement "In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes." with no citation for this 'fact' and it's vague assertions.

I found this article (http://www.mpg.de/6347636/terrorism_traffic-accidents-USA) which suggest within 12 months there was indeed more road deaths, to the tune of approx 1,600. Certainly fewer than died in the attacks themselves.

Of course the effect will likely have lasted longer than 12 months, but I would like to see data to back up the assertions.
Bedfordshire
ramsesoriginal
4087 days ago
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Great commentary on the topic of risk assessment
Bozen/Val Gardena Italy
adamgurri
4088 days ago
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Yes, a thousand times yes.
New York, NY

The real reason Google wants to kill RSS

6 Comments and 24 Shares
Marco Arment:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

Lockdown [marco.org]

    


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ivarne
4149 days ago
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popular
4150 days ago
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6 public comments
brittany
4147 days ago
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I like to think of NewBlur as an OS freedom fighter.
San Francisco
cinebot
4149 days ago
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a worthy read.
toronto.
digitalhumor
4149 days ago
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The real reason why google killed rss.
ÜT: 28.46867,77.07026
zwenk
4150 days ago
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there is truth in it
agrant3d
4150 days ago
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Don't know how much I believe this but shutting down Reader is enough to make me like google a heck of a lot less.
Montreal, Quebec
AndyG1128
4150 days ago
Ah, but without the shutdown, I would have never have found this wonderful home we know as Newsblur. If I could use instapaper, and other aps, I'd be in rss heaven
MIU
4150 days ago
Andy: Agreed, I love newsblur, more than I liked google reader. I'm still cross at them for largely starving the RSS market and then leaving us all in the lurch, though.
MIU
4150 days ago
agrant3d: I've shifted a fair bit away from google's stuff because of this. I'm still really pissed by the whole experience.
flndr
4150 days ago
It's certainly made me think about how much I rely on Google. And, I do too much. It sucks that their offerings are just that good that I don't diversify.
flndr
4150 days ago
I dig newsblur so far, but I don't like how it handles unread items. And I really don't like how there are still issues with not marking items as read on Android. Eventually, newsblur will surpass where Reader was.
cinebot
4149 days ago
seriously, stop forcing people to use plus. it's not going to take off so quit it!
MIU
4149 days ago
cinenbot: I largely use google plus only to keep up with my friends who are google employees, heh.
cinebot
4149 days ago
me too, i think only ooglers are on plus to be honest.
Harvison
4149 days ago
I'm like most quite upset with the shutdown, but the very happy end result...I found NewsBlur. Too bad I didn't find it before.
cinebot
4149 days ago
does newsblur allow you to tag/sort your saves? i haven't found it yet. newsblur also didnt import all my tags from reader either...
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