Actually it is. The article seems to describe an algorithm with a catastrophic failure mode where no (or not enough) ants return. Without retransmission the ants just hang around waiting for a returning ant. So there must be some sort of retransmission.

With no retransmission you limit the number of dead ants though. If you continue to send ants you're going to get lots of dead ants in certain situations, so you'd need a more complex algorithm than simple retransmission.

The wait-state is an interesting adaptation, I have wondered about the small ants that invade my house, they don't appear to have any kind of similar requirement. Which does lead to a lot of ant death (I feel bad about it, but I don't want them getting into my food). Which has always struck me as maladaptive - to recover a few calories of crumbs, the colony will send hundreds of ants in, yet I am sure that growing those workers took more resources than they bring back. It may be that in nature there aren't any similar situations (for these ants, at least - no anteaters in North America).

I doubt that ants care about one of them dissapearing?

They try to optimise food-collection and their algo seems quite performant there. No? They won't wait for an ant endless but they won't go searching for it neither (like someone else explained it here)

The big deal in the UK, a few years ago, was that a person would go overdrawn, deposit money to cover it immediately but then get charged an overdraft fee by an overnight process. This fee would put them overdrawn, leaving them liable for a second overdraft fee - which would be charged the next night...

This was ruled to be illegal and banks had to set up whole departments to process return claims. I suspect this is the main cause of the big headwind.

It was slightly more insidious than that - they were processing debits before credits, and charging a fee for insufficient funds if your balance dipped below zero (or below your overdraft limit) in the process:

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/commitment-high-street-banks-ret...

Also, when you had a bunch of outgoing positions a day, they (used to?) ordered them from biggest to smallest, thus hitting you with the maximum number of overdrawn transactions.

They also charged a fee for standing orders that didn't go through because of limited funds in your account. Instead of just ignoring them.

IRC and email are federated systems, they have always been that way. The nature of the federation is different, email systems talk to each other, IRC systems don't. The issue with bitcoin is purely that it solves a problem no-one has, we don't need cryptographic gold. Consensus changes happen to DNS and email all the time, because they solve actual problems and have been made flexible enough to handle change.

The task is not to make a magic free-floating decentralised system, but one which is resistant to getting central points lopped off or controlled. For that look at bittorrent, or even DNS. Whenever the US government has flexed it's muscle, trying to assert control over DNS, other countries have threatened to make their own DNS root and the US has backed down. Anyone can run a DNS root, but that alone doesn't fix the problem, it takes people actually using that fact to prevent centralisation. Bitcoin is stuck in a place where the vast majority of users have to agree to a change before change can be made.

> They made it very clear to us during HR onboarding that the only zero tolerance policy was on unauthorized access to user data.

Given that Facebook HR trawls user data to send job spam I find this claim quite ironic.

What evidence do you have of this? Particularly with respect to nonpublic data.

My inbox.

And the information they used to decide to contact you wasn't available, ever, through any other means? Even a referral from a friend or former colleague?

I don't know anyone who works for Facebook. I'm thousands of miles away from Facebook HQ. I keep careful tabs on who has what info about me and use many different email addresses.

Imagine you were to take the example further, unlocking the device required a sequence of fingerprint reads, with a precise ordering. i.e. left-ring finger, right index finger, right little finger, etc... That sequence would be a passcode, just as a precise sequence of keypresses would be. The government can insist on all your fingerprints, but not (in this argument) the correct sequence of uses of those fingerprints to unlock it. If it's only a single finger this same argument could apply.

I wonder if we can then reduce this example to a 1-finger sequence. Could a court require you to turn over all of your fingerprints, but not identify the (1 character) sequence?

Do any of them say it must be re-radiated omni-directionally as infra-red light?

Pretty much.

You can make it cooler than infra-red light (like microwaves), and you can irradiate for half a sphere, or even a bit less. But that's all.

So we can safely say that IMSI catchers have been used as a matter of routine since 2002.

It's almost certainly an offence under RIPA.

Most things are.

ITT: people who've never done an online resize