Yes, I was hacked. Hard.

Ok, not me but this guy:

http://www.emptyage.com/post/28679875595/yes-i-was-hacked-hard

Abandoning Algebra

Andrew Hacker is a bad person:

In an opinion piece for the New York Times on Sunday, political science professor Andrew Hacker asks, “Is Algebra Necessary?” and answers, “No.” It’s not just algebra: geometry and calculus are on the chopping block, too. It’s not that he doesn’t think math is important; he wants the traditional sequence to be replaced by a general “quantitative skills” class, and perhaps some statistics.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/30/abandoning-algebra-is-not-the-answer/

Productivity vs. Guilt and Self-Loathing

The not getting stuff done sucks, but the guilt and self-loathing is where you really get into trouble. You likely don't say it out loud, but you think it. You might not tell your spouse, but you think it. I suck. Man, I suck. I'm just not getting a damn thing done.


http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoathing.aspx

Chaos Monkey

This is a Netflix service that helps test your cloud based applications.

Failures happen and they inevitably happen when least desired or expected. If your application can't tolerate an instance failure would you rather find out by being paged at 3am or when you're in the office and have had your morning coffee? Even if you are confident that your architecture can tolerate an instance failure, are you sure it will still be able to next week? How about next month? Software is complex and dynamic and that "simple fix" you put in place last week could have undesired consequences. Do your traffic load balancers correctly detect and route requests around instances that go offline? Can you reliably rebuild your instances? Perhaps an engineer "quick patched" an instance last week and forgot to commit the changes to your source repository?

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html

Halide image programming language

I could use some help looking into this:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/better-programming-language-for-image-processing-0802.html

Cybersecurity bill stopped by a senator who admits he can't use email

John McCain led the Republican opposition to block the cybersecurity bill that would have encouraged businesses to protect themselves from attacks.  The original version of the bill which would have required businesses to put safeguards in place was watered down to make them optional, then blocked all together.

McCain has admitted that his wife checks his email for him because he doesn't know how previously has sponsored legislation to end network neutrality and now has helped block this bill at the urging of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut who is chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and the bill’s other sponsors, including the committee’s ranking member Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, had worked for the past several years to pass cybersecurity legislation.

At a meeting last week, Mr. Lieberman got into an argument with Mr. McCain, his closest ally and friend in the Senate, about his opposition to the bill. Mr. Lieberman questioned why Mr. McCain was doing the bidding of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and what Mr. McCain would say if the nation was crippled by a cyberattack.

Mr. McCain angrily said his reputation on national security issues was unquestionable.

Putting short term greed ahead of long term national security seems very questionable to me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/us/politics/cybersecurity-bill-blocked-by-gop-filibuster.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/johnmccain/2403704/John-McCain-technology-illiterate-doesnt-email-or-use-internet.html

Update:

In Silicon Valley, “regulation” is often treated like a four-letter word. But the Valley seems to have made an exception for cybersecurity, where a sort of Wild Wild West has taken hold.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/silicon-valley-sounds-off-on-failed-cybersecurity-legislation/

Quantum mechanics and computer science

In an interactive proof, a questioner asks a series of questions, each of which constrains the range of possible answers to the next question. The questioner doesn’t have the power to compute valid answers itself, but it does have the power to determine whether each new answer meets the constraints imposed by the previous ones. After enough questions, the questioner will either expose a contradiction or reduce the probability that the respondent is cheating to near zero.

Multiprover proofs are so much more efficient than single-respondent proofs because none of the respondents knows the constraints imposed by the others’ answers. Consequently, contradictions are much more likely if any respondent tries to cheat.

But if the respondents have access to particles that are entangled with each other — say, electrons that were orbiting the same atom but were subsequently separated — they can perform measurements — of, say, the spins of select electrons — that will enable them to coordinate their answers. That’s enough to thwart some interactive proofs.

The proof that Vidick and Ito analyzed is designed to make cheating difficult by disguising the questioner’s intent. To get a sense of how it works, imagine a graph that in some sense plots questions against answers, and suppose that the questioner is interested in two answers, which would be depicted on the graph as two points. Instead of asking the two questions of interest, however, the questioner asks at least three different questions. If the answers to those questions fall on a single line, then so do the answers that the questioner really cares about, which can now be calculated. If the answers don’t fall on a line, then at least one of the respondents is trying to cheat.

“That’s basically the idea, except that you do it in a much more high-dimensional way,” Vidick says. “Instead of having two dimensions, you have ‘N’ dimensions, and you think of all the questions and answers as being a small, N-dimensional cube.”

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/interactive-proofs-work-even-if-quantum-information-is-used-0731.html