Latin1 was the early default character set for encoding documents delivered via HTTP for MIME types beginning with /text . Today, only around only 1.1% of websites on the internet use the encoding, along with some older appplications. However, it is still the most popular single-byte character encoding scheme in use today. A funny thing about Latin1 encoding is that it maps every byte from 0 to 255 to a valid character. This means that literally any sequence of bytes can be interpreted as a valid string. The main drawback is that it only supports characters from Western European languages. The same is not true for UTF8. Unlike Latin1, UTF8 supports a vastly broader range of characters from different languages and scripts. But as a consequence, not every byte sequence is valid. This fact is due to UTF8's added complexity, using multi-byte sequences for characters beyond the general ASCII range. This is also why you can't just throw any sequence of bytes at it and e...
This is a good post from Bruce Schneier's blog, originally published in 2011. While I can’t claim this list represents the top five cognitive biases in an empirical sense, it certainly covers a broad spectrum of the holes that often occur in human reasoning.
- We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks.
- The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
- Personified risks are perceived to be riskier than anonymous risks.
- We underestimate risks in situations we do control, and overestimate risks in situations we don’t control.
- We estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring examples to mind. (cont.)
"...Newspapers repeat rare risks again and again. When something is in the news, it is, by definition, something that almost never happens. Things that are so common they stop becoming newsworthy—like car accidents—are what you need to worry about."
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