Which is a good thing. It means if you get mugged, if your kid gets abducted, if you get stabbed, there may well be some garage or shop with CCTV who will have some useful evidence.
It's one of the reasons there's very little crime in the UK.
Not everything is quite so black and white. You shouldn't be so quick to divide people into "goodies" and "baddies".
You can be absolutely against spending public money on climate change research, whilst not being 'anti science'.
>How many memory corruption / buffer overflow exploits have there been say in the JVM?
There have actually been quite a lot. But they're generally not things that could be exploited in a typical Java network/web application. They're mostly an issue for sandbox escapes; e.g. Java applets in the browser.
They're not going to ban encryption. Seriously. Stop wasting time on misquotes taken out of context blown up by The Guardian. There's more important things to worry about.
Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll still be poor.
Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality animals/plants.
I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say this about humans.
Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is equal!" agenda.
Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material.
It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else.
I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.
I don't think it's correct to say one way or the other what the critical driver is, as to my knowledge we don't have the necessary data to make such statements. Both genetics and environment likely play a role. We as a society have decided that it is unethical / not in our societal best interest to perform the experiments necessary to further investigate the mechanism, and so we should focus our efforts on alleviating environmental drivers of the problem. With that being said, to write off theoretical heritable causes of poverty or low intelligence just because they makes us uncomfortable would be bad science. We should be transparent about the limitations of our data and admit that as a society we are content with not knowing the answer to this question.
The other issue is that society has become so detached from nature that a lot of people are completely oblivious. If you breed animals, questions like this are pretty obvious and easy to answer.
I grew up in a reasonably poor household. We certainly weren't wealthy. I couldn't care less about poverty or not poverty, it's irrelevant. I was incredibly lucky to have good parents, with 'smart' genes.
They seem to have accounted for that:
> These differences weren’t present at birth, Wolfe says. “We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family. But then as we traced them to age 4, we found areas that were developing more slowly among infants in low-income families.”
I don't think anyone discounts genetics completely. I just think for something like your mental capacity as a human will vary dramatically by your upbringing and teachings.
Take your 'high quality animal' and starve it occasionally. Wake it up with sirens. Beat it regularly and capriciously. Injure it. Compare that to one that is treated well but 'poor quality'. Also are we testing these animals in a maze or just size, speed, strength?
“We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family."
What does that show? I'm sure if you checked the sperm and egg you could say "they're basically the same". All that means is the brain isn't fully developed before the age of 1. Big whoop.
Isn't that pretty much why we have welfare - to give the poor protection money to stop them attacking? Sure, you could spend more on police, but it's probably more cost effective to just give poor people money to keep them a bit more docile.
Bread and circuses. Basic income could work even better, by giving more certainty. There's probably a better version of circuses too - it was TV, now the mainstream internet, but at least there's more opportunity to use the net to move forward.
Sounds good till you get to maintenance and scaling. Thumbor isn't as install and forget if you value being able to recreate the environment from scratch, scale out, rotate and secure the keys, solve tmp directory issues, ensure availability etc...
Having just finished several months of working with and tweaking thumbor for a large volume website I can see how just paying for a service would be appealing.
Would you mind sharing some detail about the issues you had with tmp dirs and availability? I deployed Thumbor a few months ago and it's been pretty much install and forget. I'm curious about what issues I might have in future as it scales.
Sure. For the record the Thumbor cluster I was working on needed to have 100% uptime and be configured to mitigate any potentially DDoS situation even if the secret key was leaked. It also needed facial detection and GIF (animation) resizing support.
The tmp directory is never emptied unless you restart the machine. So to get around this you have to write a cron job to remove the older downloaded and resized images. However in my load tests this caused issues with Thumbor and so I ended up having the cron job only delete files over a certain age. However this still leaves the possibility that Thumbor could fill up the entire disk and crash the machine.
Other issues were having the ability to rotate the Thumbor key. This is somewhat supported by Thumbor, in that the previous keys images will still be available but the key rotation is not done for you. I was using AWS so stored the key in a protected s3 bucket and gave roles access to pull the key and when it detected it was modified restart Thumbor.
The last an main issue was the ability to spin up a new version of Thumbor itself. In the time it took me to get it from development through to production the dependancies changed so much that facial detection broke halfway though. I fixed this initially by freezing the pip dependancies but then the underlying dependancies caused issue at a later day. In short I was unable to spin up a new version which was identical to the previous. Generally were I work we tear down and spin up fresh instances all the time so this was an issue. We resolved this by installing Thumbor in a docker container.
Don't get me wrong. A big fan of Thumbor and it was the right solution for what I needed to do but these issues really made myself and others considering paying a 3rd party for a while.
Thanks for elaborating, I appreciate it. I don't think my installation is getting enough load to see these tmp issues yet, but good to know what I might have to deal with in future. I agree that with so many dependencies, Thumbor is a great candidate for deploying with Docker.
Btw, I didn't realise you were the searchcode.com guy, great site!
Thumbor isn't as install and forget if you value being able to recreate the environment from scratch, scale out, rotate and secure the keys, solve tmp directory issues, ensure availability etc...
Nothing is install-and-forget if you value those things, because valuing those things is the opposite of wanting install-and-forget software.
I've been running it for months without issues. Yes every so often it fills up the /tmp directory - setup a cronjob or something, but it is basically install and forget.
(My install gets maybe 10-20 requests a second, so maybe I'm at the low end of usage I don't know, but it works fine for me).
It depends on if you ever need to recreate it. I was checking my ability to spin up a thumbor instance a few months after deploying it only to discover that it was not possible using the deployment scripts I had even with frozen pip requirements.
For comparison the thumbor instance I am working with does thousands.
My alternative is a digital ocean VPS with a nodejs server with the ImageMagick module. Super easy to use, but I'll say thumbnor looks like a good solution too. Thanks for the link!
