The Economist Excerpts

Cannabis legalization :

1. Libertarians may ask why cannabis, which has no known lethal dose, should be regulated at all for adults who can make free, informed decisions. 
2. There are two reasons for care. First, cannabis appears to induce dependency in a minority of users, meaning the decision whether to light up is not a free one. 
3. Second, cannabis's illegality means that the research on its long-term effects is hazy, so even the most informed decision is based on incomplete information. 
4. When decisions are neither always free nor fully informed, the state is justified in steering consumers away, as it does from alcohol and tobacco.
   
5. One model is the United States after Prohibition: alcohol taxes were set low at first, to drive out the bootleggers; later, with the Mafia gone, they were ramped up.
   
6. Likewise, alluring packaging and products, such as cannabis sweets that would appeal to children, should be outlawed, just as many countries outlaw flavoured cigarettes and alcohol-spiked sweets.
   
7. Advertising should be banned.
8. A similar trade-off applies when determining what products to allow. Cannabis no longer means just joints. Legal entrepreneurs have cooked up pot-laced food and drink, reaching customers who might have avoided smoking the stuff. Ultra-strong "concentrates" are on offer to be inhaled or swallowed. Edibles and stronger strains help put the illegal dealers out of business, but they also risk encouraging more people to take the drug, and in stronger forms. The starting-point should be to legalise only what is already available on the black market. That would mean capping or taxing potency, much as spirits are taxed more steeply and are less available than beer. Again, the mix will vary. Europe may be able to ban concentrates. America already has a taste for them. If the product were outlawed there the mob would gladly step in.
   

downloading usb oem drivers for android devices

http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/oem-usb.html

Setting up the device : http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html

The Economist excerpts

1. Managing migrant crisis in EU : There is an encouraging precedent, too. When more than 1m "boat people" fled Vietnam after the communists took over in 1975, they went initially to refugee camps in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia before being sent to America, Europe, Australia and wherever else would take them. They arrived with nothing but adapted astonishingly fast: the median household income for Vietnamese-Americans, for example, is now above the national average. No one in America now frets that the boat people will not fit in.
2. Turkey - Mr Erdogan and his AK party are tightening his grip on the country by controlling Media, Judiciary, Schools etc. though Turkey's economy is improving under him. Democracy is like a train, he said once; you get off once you have reached your destination.
3. Turkey's urban growth - Istanbul is ready for its third airport. Urban growth in Turkey is as fast as India/China yet as good as Europe with even slums having tidy pavements and sanitation.
4. Turkey has been reasonably free of radical Islam. Few years ago, it set out on a mission to resolve problems with its neighbors. Has also done great by taking in 2 mil Syrian refugees.
5. Should HSBC move from London to Hong Kong? - HSBC matters. Regulators judge it to be the world's most important bank, alongside JPMorgan Chase. A tenth of global trade passes through its systems and it has deep links with Asia. (Simon Robertson, a director of the bank, is also on the board of The Economist Group.) Its record has blemishes—most notably, weak money-laundering controls in Mexico. But it has never been bailed out; indeed, it supplied liquidity to the financial system in 2008-09. It is organised in self-reliant silos, a structure regulators now say is best practice.
6. Singapore - reserving minimum number of seats for opposition.
7. Cut flower exports by Kenya are increasing though way behind Netherlands.
8. Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness
   
9. Tech and startups - Klarna, Voice-powered medical devices, Doping in racehorses, Organ preservation, Guinea-worm disease, 

ZeroMQ - batching

Source

ØMQ tries to deliver consistently low latencies combined with high throughput using the following strategy: when message flow is sparse and doesn't exceed the network stack's bandwidth, ØMQ turns all the batching off to improve latency. The trade-off here is somewhat higher CPU usage—we still have to traverse the stack frequently. However, that isn't considered to be a problem in most cases.

When the message rate exceeds the bandwidth of the network stack, in such situations it makes sense to start batching aggressively. There's nothing to lose as the latencies are already high anyway. On the other hand, aggressive batching improves throughput and can empty the queue of pending messages—which in turn means the latency will gradually drop as the queueing delay decreases. Once there are no outstanding messages in the queue, the batching can be turned off to improve the latency even further.

One additional observation is that the batching should only be done on the topmost level. If the messages are batched there, the lower layers have nothing to batch anyway, and so all the batching algorithms underneath do nothing except introduce additional latency.

ZeroMQ - latency vs throughput

Source

To make a long story short, latency and throughput are two different metrics; that much is obvious. The important thing is to understand the difference between the two and their mutual relationship. Latency can be measured only between two different points in the system; There's no such thing as latency at point A. Each message has its own latency. You can average the latencies of multiple messages; however, there's no such thing as latency of a stream of messages.

Throughput, on the other hand, can be measured only at a single point of the system. There's a throughput at the sender, there's a throughput at the receiver, there's a throughput at any intermediate point between the two, but there's no such thing as overall throughput of the whole system. And throughput make sense only for a set of messages; there's no such thing as throughput of a single message.

ZeroMQ - lock free algorithms

Source

Lock-free algorithms:

• Lock-free algorithms have been in vogue lately. They are simple mechanisms for inter-thread communication that don't rely on the kernel-provided synchronisation primitives, such as mutexes or semaphores; rather, they do the synchronisation using atomic CPU operations, such as atomic compare-and-swap (CAS). It should be understood that they are not literally lock-free—instead, locking is done behind the scenes on the hardware level.
  
• Each queue has exactly one writer thread and exactly one reader thread. If there's a need for 1-to-N communication, multiple queues are created (Figure 24.8). Given that this way the queue doesn't have to take care of synchronising the writers (there's only one writer) or readers (there's only one reader) it can be implemented in an extra-efficient way.
  
• While lock-free algorithms were more efficient than classic mutex-based algorithms, atomic CPU operations are still rather expensive (especially when there's contention between CPU cores) and doing an atomic operation for each message written and/or each message read was slower than we were willing to accept.
  
• Receiving a packet is an atomic event; you cannot get half of it. This atomic event results in the need to write 10 messages to the lock-free queue. There's not much point in doing an atomic operation for each message. Instead, you can accumulate the messages in a "pre-write" portion of the queue that's accessed solely by the writer thread, and then flush it using a single atomic operation.
  

Dhanji R. Prasanna was a developer on Google Wave

[A]s a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. […] It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.