For a secure communications app, the website is awfully light on details of that security. This could just be a mis-alignment issue (i.e. website aimed at "average users" who may find technical jargon a reason to avoid the app). But my initial question of "why would I use this over Signal or GPG emails?" doesn't seem answerable from the website.
The security page says:
> 3. Verified and Secure -- Widely reviewed Open Source Public Key Cryptography and App itself can be fully audited and accredited.
As a bit of feedback, this description needs some cleanup. The word "can" in here is a scary word. Has the app been audited and accredited? If it has, make that clear. (Perhaps include information about when the app was audited and by whom.) If it has not been audited and accredited, this advertising blurb is a super red flag. "We could do some security stuff in the future but have not yet" wouldn't go onto the website, but you've wrapped the statement in enough jargon that unsophisticated users may be misled.
Submitting an article but substituting in a title to make the story about yourself goes against the submission guidelines [0]. The article doesn't have a particularly informative title, but piecing together the subtitle gives: "Team creates guidelines to reduce staph infections after surgery (2013)".
That said, the paper that this UIowa article references [1] is a meta-analysis of 39 previous studies. It doesn't seem fair to credit Schweizer et al with creating the guidelines. But that's university press shops for ya.
In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.
In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.
The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
For poker it's actually negative sum at most venues outside of private games due to the fees taken by the organizer (i.e. the rake). But yes, point taken that at least within the closed system of the game poker is zero/negative sum.
My comment was more directed at the OP's assertion that poker is not 'productive' because it is zero-sum. I personally don't see how injecting corporate sponsors into otherwise zero sum games (only one team in sporting events can win, only one chess player can win the tournament) elevates competitive pursuits outside of poker to what can be considered 'productive'. OP's view could be that all of these pursuits are equally unproductive and that would be fair enough.
In order to make money at sports you have to entertain others, i.e. produce entertainment for lots of people. Theoretically, you could win at poker without producing anything, but practically, the most profitable players will be the ones who at least produce entertainment for the people they play with...
Aside: does the phrase "grasping hand" have a particular meaning in robotics jargon? (Or is there a different reason to avoid that terminology?)
To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that continuously holds an item. It might require human intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing hand") would be something that transitions from empty-handed to holding an item.
In this case the GP is making a reference to "The Mote in God's Eye". An alien species has 2 hands that are similar to humans, but they also have a 3rd arm, which leads them to say, paraphrased, "on the one hand, on the other hand, on the gripping hand" since it's strongest.
From reading through the supplementary materials for the paper [0], it seems that the authors are aware of this flaw and they found a way to make it hydrophobic. The approach they tested involved soaking the ceramic in a bath with a commercially available fluorosilane [1] that is used to make things superhydrophobic. Fig. S20 in the supplementary materials has a chart that shows the treated ceramic being very good ("solar reflectivity...remains at ~99.0%") but not quite as stellar as the untreated ceramic.
Dr. Blum is also a great professor for smaller undergraduate classes. I took his "theoretical cryptography" class, which was a semi-random walk through the history of creating and breaking crypto-systems. It was a small class (8-12 people), and his whiteboard lessons were great. That said, it took some getting used to the environment. The first problemset he assigned in that class started with the question "1. Think about the scientific method"; the "no right answer, but many wrong answers" approach was typical of most of his assignments. His extremely open-ended approach to learning was a breath of fresh air compared to other undergrad CS classes which seemed geared for memorization not understanding.
Multiple times throughout that course, the class collaboratively created a cryptosystem. Dr. Blum would inevitably see the cracks in them instantly, and then teach the principles so we could rigorously show weakness. None of our cryptosystems were any good, being a handful of novice undergraduates, but _collaboratively_ tackling hard problems in small pieces definitely helped me in my career afterwards.
The terms of the settlement[0-pdf] are kind of interesting.
Drivers in New York City proper are entitled to $17/hr for sick pay. If I'm reading it correctly, that is also the minimum wage that drivers must be compensated at.
However, drivers who begin trips in New York State _but not inside NYC_ are guaranteed pay at $26/hr [see paragraph 30 of settlement]. If I'm reading this right, drivers in Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica, Albany, etc. are all going to reap significantly higher pay from Uber while living in much lower cost-of-living areas.
I wouldn't call that a final solution to the paradox, though.
(Put on your tinfoil hats.)
Maybe the Earth-Moon system was engineered. The solar system came together from a nebular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. The great impactor hypothesis points to the mega-collision around 4.5 billion years ago. During the early days of the solar system, the system was very chaotic. By applying tiny-but-very-precisely-calculated forces in that system, you could cause an impact. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude above what humans have accomplished, but the gravity slingshots that got the Voyager missions out of the solar system are the same principle.
I'm amazed by this. Platform-independence _with the same binary_ is such a neat solution that would really have helped me at a prior job.
Some corporate IT shops manage user machines with tooling that can't deploy software specific to machine os/version/hardware/etc. This often caused problems with 32-bit vs 64-bit windows machines or differing windows versions (XP/Vista/....). We also couldn't easily make linux or osx executables available for the end-users due to corporate IT policies.
The security page says:
> 3. Verified and Secure -- Widely reviewed Open Source Public Key Cryptography and App itself can be fully audited and accredited.
As a bit of feedback, this description needs some cleanup. The word "can" in here is a scary word. Has the app been audited and accredited? If it has, make that clear. (Perhaps include information about when the app was audited and by whom.) If it has not been audited and accredited, this advertising blurb is a super red flag. "We could do some security stuff in the future but have not yet" wouldn't go onto the website, but you've wrapped the statement in enough jargon that unsophisticated users may be misled.