"The British government" is not a monolith. We have an incredibly dysfunctional cabinet for various dull political reasons, but there are a lot of smart and sensible people in committees and the civil service.
That's an important point that's not always visible from the outside. I worked on implementing payroll system for a federal government and it was eye-opening in my ignorance - I always thought of "The Government" as a monolith with unified voice. nothing could be further from the truth. And different parts have explicitly different goals and prerogatives so its not even necessarily contradictory if e.g. Environmental Agency and ministry for interior development have completely opposite points of view.
Trying to ban encryption while they gaslight you about privacy being important and what companies can do but, as you say, they're one of the most abusive and potentially one of the most careless in relation to the sensitive nature of the data as well (see voter leak).
Not author, but I've always wanted to approach programming from an algorithms-first perspective with younger kids. Not called algorithms, of course.
If they can create/combine algorithms to solve a problem... that's most of programming.
I'd start with the "robot" problem: have them write a set of steps to complete a simple task, and then have them (or better, someone else) go through the steps precisely (no cheating and assuming they meant something they didn't write!). Then iterate and add/remove steps until the task is actually doable. (Disclaimer: idea cribbed from someone else)
That gets them to grok the "everything needs to be in a program, and a program is only everything that's in it" idea.
The traveling salesman problem (recast in whatever form would be most interesting to the kids) and graph theory problems are also especially visual and explorable.
Interesting! I've always been most interested in conveying information to people — human-computer interactions, interface and app design, educational writing like this article. Before I got into programming I was OBSESSED with this amazing circuit-building thing called Snap Circuits as a kid (highly recommend, definitely get a starter set for your kid if you haven't already), but even with that I just wanted to build fun systems — intercoms, doorbells, security systems, robots. From that I did more advanced electronics stuff with Arduino, and that's how I got introduced to real programming.
In my experience, it's an unknown-unknown problem (don't know what we don't know).
Is it important you can recite cache eviction algorithms from memory? No.
Is it important you know there are such things as caches and roughly how they work? Yes. Because then you can quickly look up the details when/if you need them.
Is it important that you understand cache eviction algorithms well enough that you can look at a description of an algorithm and see how it applies to your system? Yes. And if memorising is the way you gain that ability, then memorising is what you need to do.
And what is it important for? Why, for making sure that your software makes efficient use of system resources. This is essential if you're writing application software that's used by other people – but if you're writing server-side code, or some one-a-month business-logic data-processing scripts, or code that's only ever going to run on five specific machines, it's not that big of a deal. I haven't needed this skill yet.
I actually kind of respect Neumann. Not in a moral/ethical way, of course, but in a defend-yourself-at-all-times way.
He never would have gotten that payout if he hadn't legally fortified his position like he did, and then successfully maintained it through SoftBank's initial due diligence.
'We paid Neumann too much to exit quickly, because we knew the company prospects were bad and we needed an IPO to exit ASAP' probably isn't a crime, assuming there weren't errors on financial disclosures.
But it's certainly dubious enough to warrant a lawsuit to see if there were false claims made.
This would have been categorically true circa-1970s.
Unfortunately, US industrial vertical integration now includes foundations placed in global low-labor-cost countries.
The crash vaccine manufacturing scaling program was possible because we were rich enough to throw mountains of money (of which we have the most) at any international supply problems.
If the Atlantic or Pacific had been hostile to commercial shipping, or countries hadn't cooperated, it would have had a very different result.
> We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.
"We" are not. Ukrainians are dying and holding their own against a much larger country, with the help of NATO surplus equipment.
20,000-50,000 Ukrainians now have at least one limb amputated as a result of the war. [0] [1]
And Russia's military is not being decimated. It's holding its own with an elastic defense, that's making progress difficult and costly for a Ukrainian army that's trained halfway between Soviet mass doctrine and Western maneuver warfare.
At some point the Ukrainians will hopefully manage to exhaust Russia's logistics sufficient to break through their defense, but that's in no way a sure thing.
Russia's military is being decimated, just not at the line of contact currently. You're watching a protracted battle play out all across the world right now between Russian interests and Western interests. Some of these include:
1. Russian/Wagner (now admitted to be the same) neocolonialism in African states, most recently Niger. Within days Niger stopped trading Uranium to France. Conveniently, France is the least dependent on Russia for energy and will force the French to buy outside of Niger and then refocus on Russia.
2. The latest naval drone hit on a Russian oil tanker in the Black Sea took place well beyond the expected range of Ukrainian capability, which likely means someone else (Turkey?) helped at least get it into launch range. This coupled with the Ukrainian position that all russian ships, and all ships trading with russia are now targets in the Black Sea is also big for the area.
Currently Russians may not be dying in droves defending their positions. However, the knock on effects for russian military capacity, industrial capacity, and naval capacity are incredible. The longer they flounder and the more they commit to Ukraine, the more their traditional enemies are able to take advantage of their weakness.
If russian gas and oil cannot flow out of the black sea safely, their PMC backed interests in Africa and South American become less effective, and the corresponding governments will look elsewhere for influence/protection/trade.
It'll be fascinating to learn whatever grey/black ops details come out after the war hopefully ends.
The naval drone question is especially fascinating.
IMHO, they have to be transported closer to impact site by some other vessel.
Ukraine doesn't have submarines, and Russia has 6(?) Kilo's in the Black Sea, so traditional submarines would be insane in that environment anyway.
And whatever transport method would need to be stealthy with respect to Russia's sensing methods: acoustic, radar, to a lesser degree visual.
Given Ukraine's technical capabilities and traditional shipbuilding expertise, I'd hazard there's a somewhat-stealthy drone carrier boat (probably also unmanned).
They could also be hiding/launching the drones directly from commercial shipping, but that's an awfully big risk for the flag country/ship owner with respect to Russia boarding and searching, or even back tracing launch points.
