Note that this article is a lightweight edit of Asimov's original piece: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h...

In particular, the article is edited to only show you reasonable predictions, rather than all his predictions. I thought his mistakes were just as interesting, because they give us a window into what life was like in 1964. Asimov predicted that moon colonies would be common by now, for example. The overoptimism may have been due to the rate of technological growth leading up to 1964. On the other hand, perhaps it was due to the times. People were abuzz with the possibilities of the future partly because Kennedy had recently (1961) set a national goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the 1960s." So it's pretty interesting to try to see the world through the eyes of someone 50 years ago and try to diff societal trends to the modern day.

(It's also fun to imagine someone 50 years from now looking back on us. I wonder which of our societal trends will survive 50 years? It's an interesting game to try to figure out which of our current beliefs are crazy even though no one presently thinks so.)

There are many interesting aspects of Asimov's piece, so it's well worth the read. For example, does this point about future societies sound familiar?

"The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders."

He's mistaken about 2014, but only time will tell whether this is temporary.

I was also surprised that there were fewer than half as many people in 1964 than 2014. Asimov mentioned that the population is predicted to double every 40 years. I wonder it that's still the case, or if growth has slowed?

Just like to remind everyone that snapchat was aware of this exploit and dismissive in regards to it.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/27/5249304/snapchat-dismisse...

I guess I'm dating myself, but didn't we used to call that the phone book?

Text:

Burn the Fucking System to the Ground

Dec 23, 2013 By Clark. Effluvia "I'm a good judge" … said by government employee and judge Gisele Pollack who, it seems, sentenced people to jail because of their drug use…while she, herself, was high on drugs.

But, in her defense, "she’s had some severe personal tragedy in her life".

And that's why, it seems, she's being allowed to check herself into rehab instead of being thrown in jail.

…because not a single poor person or non government employee who gets caught using drugs ever "had some severe personal tragedy in her life".

I'm reminded of something I read earlier today:

techdirt.com

We've discussed the whole "high court/low court" concept here a few times before — in that those who are powerful play by one set of rules, while the rest of us have to play by a very different set of rules.

…

The end result seems clear. If you're super high up in the political chain, you get the high court. Reveal classified info to filmmakers? No worries. Not only will you not be prosecuted or even lose your job, the inspectors will scrub your name from the report and, according to the article, the person in charge of the investigation will "slow roll" the eventual release of the report until you switch jobs.

But if you're just a worker bee and you leaked the unclassified draft report that names Panetta and Vickers? Well, you get the low court. A new investigation, including aggressive pursuit by the government, and interrogations of staffers to try to find out who leaked the report.

Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. I thought that some parts of it "worked"… whatever that means. I thought that the goals were noble, even if not often achieved.

The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn't granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people's houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by "public use".

What neither side seems to realize is that the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitr.

Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the hierarchy. They can, literally, be killed with impunity … as long as the dash cam isn't running. And, hell, half the time they can be killed even if the dash cam is running. This isn't hyperbole, mother-fucker. This is literal. Question me and I'll throw 400 cites and 20 youtube clips at you.

Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons. We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We don't own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social class wants it. We don't own our own financial lives, because the education accreditation / student loan industry / legal triumvirate have declared that we can never escape – even through bankruptcy – our $200,000 debt that a bunch of adults convinced a can't-tell-his-ass-from-a-hole-in-the-ground 18 year old that (a) he was smart enough to make his own decisions, and (b) college is a time to explore your interests and broaden yourself). And if there's a "national security emergency" (defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are hauled out of their homes.

Next up from the regular peons are the unionized, disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises. Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.

A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as not too many cameras are rolling. The de facto power to confiscate cameras in case the murder wasn't well planned. A right to keep and bear arms that far exceeds that of the serf class: 50 state concealed carry for life, not just just for actual cops, but even for retired cops.

At the same level of privilege as cops, but slightly off to one side is different class of nobility: the judiciary and the prosecutors. Judges and prosecutors can't execute citizens in an alley, a parking lot, or their own homes ("he had a knife! …and I don't care what the lying video says."), but they can sentence people to decades in jail for things that any clear-minded reading of the Constitution and the 9th and 10th amendments make clear are not with in the purview of the government. They have effectively infinite resources. They orchestrate perp walks. They selectively leak information to shame defendants. They buy testimony from other defendants by promising them immunity. By exercising their discretion they make sure that the bad people are prosecuted while the good people (i.e. members of their own clan) are not.

Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs, conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay off a money losing stadium, that's a small price to pay if a politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes). If new entrants into a market are hindered and the populace ends up overpaying for coffins, or Tesla cars, or wine that can't be mail ordered, then that's a small price to pay if a connected CEO can keep his firm profitable without doing any work to help the customer. If the Google founders want to agitate for Green laws that make Joe Sixpack's daily commute more expensive at the same time that they buy discount avgas for their private flying fuck palaces, then isn't that their right? They donated to Obama's campaign after all!

I could keep myself up all night and into tomorrow by listing different groups of royalty and the ways they scam the system.

…except "scam the system" is a misnomer. I am not listing defects in a perfectable system. I am describing the system.

It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. From Ted Kennedy who killed a woman and yet is toasted as a "lion of liberalism", to George Bush who did his share of party drugs (and my share, and your share, and your share…) while young yet let other youngsters rot in jail for the exact same excesses instead of waving his royal wand of pardoning, to thousand of well-paid NSA employees who put the Stasi to shame in their ruthless destruction of our rights, to the Silicon Valley CEOs who buy vacation houses with the money they make forging and selling chains to Fort Meade, to every single bastard at RSA who had a hand in taking the thirty pieces of silver, to the three star generals who routinely screw subordinates and get away with it (even as sergeants are given dishonorable discharges for the same thing), to the MIT cops and Massachusetts prosecutor who drove Aaron Swartz to suicide, to every drug court judge who sends 22 year olds to jail for pot…while high on Quaalude and vodka because she's got some fucking personal tragedy and no one understands her pain, to every cop who's anally raped a citizen under color of law, to every other cop who's intentionally triggered a "drug" dog because the guy looked guilty, to every politician who goes on moral crusades while barebacking prostitutes and money laundering the payments, to every teacher who retired at age 60 on 80% salary, to every cop who has 50 state concealed carry even while the serfs are disarmed, to every politician, judge, or editorial-writer who has ever used the phrase "first amendment zone" non-ironically: this is how the system is designed to work.

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Merry Christmas.

"In fact, if you strip away its technological trappings -- the encryption, the peer-to-peer networks -- and Bitcoin closely resembles these earlier private efforts."

In other words if you strip away everything that makes BitCoin different and unique from its predecessors, BitCoin looks the same as its predecessors.

Snapchat devs explained how to create the database on Dez 27th:

  Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set 
  of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or 
  every possible number in the U.S., they could create a 
  database of the results and match usernames to phone 
  numbers that way.

http://blog.snapchat.com/post/71353347590/finding-friends-wi...

omg

Here's another novel idea. How about to fucking riot and repel this policy?

So far, the reaction on intrusion of privacy by the government from the people was to circumvent it, go underground. A reaction commonly expected from a country like Soviet Union where people had zero say on the rulings and had to be creative to avoid surveillance.

I'm saddened to see a similar attitude in the US.

I might be missing something, but I completely don't get this idea, especially with the examples provided by the author. I have two major concerns:

> Bind searches to domain names, eg "food in chicago" => f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com

This IMO is bad, and goes in completely wrong direction. We've invented search engines to have such phrases not bound to a particular domain. Who would handle the "#://food in chicago" domain? Would it be Google? Bing? Yelp? Local restaurant chain? Or maybe some scammers? And who would maintain the completely different website "#://food in Chicago", and why "#://Food in Chicago" wants to silently install me some malware?

The reason searching for such phrases makes sense, while having them as domains does not, is that things like "food in chicago" are poorly defined, fuzzy concepts. It would feel weird to change one letter in a query, or replace word "food" with, eg. "something to eat", and see completely different website. Moreover, major search engines are more or less egalitarian wrt. buisnesses. Yes, there's the whole SEO thing, but you can't get full control of what food joints are listed near your location just because you've managed to get the register first. I can (and do) trust listings from Google; they have both incentives and track record of being fair. I will never trust listings from random-autogenerated-squat-scam-business-site.

Which brings me to the second point,

> Good domain names are pretty scarce. It's a source of frustration for anyone who has ever tried to buy a domain.

Yes, they are, and the primary source of frustration is that they are mostly taken by various squatters and other scums of the Internet. What will happen is that, the moment there's any real possibility such hash-domain scheme is introduced, all those evil people and companies will take all the domains like "#://microsoft", "#://android" and "#://insert any popular keyword or phrase here" in order to sell them back to real businesses for boatloads of money. And then we'll be back to square one, with maybe a little bigger domain space than we have right now. Bad people win, good people loose and nothing changed.

So, again, the concepts behind this idea elude me.

Here's the hidden worst part about this they don't mention.

You think border means at the point you cross into another country.

That's not what it means. Government can now do this behavior a HUNDRED miles inland from a border. You could be just driving across town, to or from work, and they can use this border search law because you are a hundred miles from the border.

Oh and the border also includes the ocean, doesn't have to be another country.

https://d320ze5h7gg57a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/we...

100% of NY, NJ, Florida and half of Texas is subject to these searches as their state is blanketed by the hundred mile limit.

edited to correct hundred instead of hundreds, bad memory

Napa and Sonoma don't seem to mind the alcohol tourism.

>I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.

Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS.

Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target market (battery time, portability, weight), quality machining and materials, attention to small details (from multitouch touchpad to magsafe adaptor and from backlit keyboard to magnetic, non protruding, lid hinge).

These people think that because they are not speced and designed like gaming PCs they are not worthy ("I can have a better GPU for less money in my custom box, and with xeon lights on the sides too).

And they attribute their popularity to some BS "reality distortion" effect, ignoring the fact that hardcore hackers, prominent programmers and old school neckerbeards, from Rob Pike, DHH, and Duncan Davidson to Jamie Jawinsky and Miguel De Icaza (the frigging founder of the Gnome desktop) down to Linus Torvalds, who waxes poetically about his MacBook Air as the best in the market.

So, "fawning over Apple" justs translates to "did some favorable reviews of products, instead of making up BS reasons to dislike them".

I do optimal structure (and bit) packing without much thought because it is an old habit. As the article states, I have noticed that the only other people that do habitual careful structure optimization these days have been doing low-level and high-performance code as long as I have. Most programmers are oblivious to it.

The reasons you would do it today are different than a decade ago and the rules have changed because the processors have changed. To add two clarifying points to the original article:

- The main reason to do optimal structure packing today is to reduce cache line misses. Because cache line misses are so expensive it is a big net performance gain in many cases to have the code do a little more work if it reduces cache line fills; optimal structure packing is basically a "free" way of minimizing cache misses.

- On modern Intel microarchitectures, alignment matters much less for performance than it used to. One of the big changes starting with the i7 is that unaligned memory accesses have approximately the same cost as aligned memory accesses. This is a pretty radical change to the optimization assumptions for structure layout. Consequently, it is possible to do very tight memory packing without the severe performance penalty traditionally implied.

What constitutes "optimal" structure packing is architecture dependent. The original C structure rules were designed in part to allow the structures to be portable above all else. If you design highly optimized structures for a Haswell processor, code may run much more slowly or create a CPU exception and crash on other architectures, so keep these tradeoffs in mind. The article is discussing basic structure packing which typically has easily predictable behavior almost anywhere C compiles.

The concept it proves is that a string can be hashed, not the concept it presents.