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I believe there is grant money available for dissidents to counter this movement. Crazy thing is it has even been available since the 70s.

It was the Venezuelan government's attempt to quash a small edit war about who's the (legitimate) president, waged on the articles on Venezuela and President of Venezuela. AFAIK the blocking was implemented only by the state-owned ISP, which serves a large majority of domestic connections by virtue of being the only landline phone company.

Anyway seems they gave up on it, yesterday or early today:

openssl s_client -connect en.wikipedia.org:443
CONNECTED(00000005)
depth=2 OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R3, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
verify return:1
depth=1 C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
  0 s:C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
      i:C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
  1 s:C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
      i:OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R3, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
---
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- ...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
subject=C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org

issuer=C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2

---
No client certificate CA names sent
Peer signing digest: SHA512
Peer signature type: ECDSA
Server Temp Key: X25519, 253 bits
---
SSL handshake has read 3515 bytes and written 403 bytes
Verification: OK
---
New, TLSv1.2, Cipher is ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
Server public key is 256 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
No ALPN negotiated
SSL-Session:
        Protocol : TLSv1.2
        Cipher : ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
        Session-ID: ....
        Session-ID-ctx:
        Master-Key: ....
        PSK identity: None
        PSK identity hint: None
        SRP username: None
        Start Time: 1547943159
        Timeout : 7200 (sec)
        Verify return code: 0 (ok)
        Extended master secret: yes
---
DONE

In case it happens to you, there's several mirror sites:

https://en.wikipedi0.org
https://wikipediaproxy.org
https://www.wikiwand.com

In Wikipedia's case, you can use any of several mirror sites:

https://en.wikipedi0.org
https://wikipediaproxy.org
https://www.wikiwand.com

Anyway it's back up:

openssl s_client -connect en.wikipedia.org:443
CONNECTED(00000005)
depth=2 OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R3, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
verify return:1
depth=1 C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
  0 s:C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
      i:C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
  1 s:C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
      i:OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R3, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
---
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- ...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
subject=C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org

issuer=C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2

---
No client certificate CA names sent
Peer signing digest: SHA512
Peer signature type: ECDSA
Server Temp Key: X25519, 253 bits
---
SSL handshake has read 3515 bytes and written 403 bytes
Verification: OK
---
New, TLSv1.2, Cipher is ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
Server public key is 256 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
No ALPN negotiated
SSL-Session:
        Protocol : TLSv1.2
        Cipher : ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
        Session-ID: ....
        Session-ID-ctx:
        Master-Key: ....
        PSK identity: None
        PSK identity hint: None
        SRP username: None
        Start Time: 1547943159
        Timeout : 7200 (sec)
        Verify return code: 0 (ok)
        Extended master secret: yes
---
DONE

Because, you know, all those ethics courses managers take (the people who make all the decisions) are working out great!

That's one of the silliest things of today. Sexual harassment surveys. Domestic abuse billboards and NFL commercials. "Code of conduct" seminars.

It's GREAT to want to make the world a better place. However, what we're lacking is ANY SCIENTIFIC PROOF whatsoever that doing these things actually solves the problem they're trying to solve.

In fact, there WAS a study that showed the opposite. That women who were told of all the "unconscious" ways that men oppress women, the women were less likely to engage and integrate into the workplace because they were "primed" and constantly looking for harassment and were more likely to assume it was harassment even when it wasn't. Likewise, the men in the study after going to these seminars? Simply __stopped interacting with women__. [1]

Which is GREAT way to get women to powerful positions in STEM. Take all the guys currently in power, and make sure they never interact and see hardworking, intelligent women and give them raises.

You see how "feeling like your helping" doesn't actually equate to "helping"? Kind of like how like 90% of all the funds for Bono's 1985 Live Aid charity concert to help stop Ethopia famine, ended up FUNDING AN WARLORD'S ARMY.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us...
[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Li...

If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong

>That being said, no one is going to jail for not being careful enough with classified information. They will lose a security clearance though.

WTF. They sent that Navy guy to jail for the EXACT SAME kind of "unintentional" disclosure.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kr...

Where do you get your weed, I want some.

You crazies love to cite that "blacks get treated differently for the same crime" but apparently, "super-powerful, affluent, white women, married to an ex-president" don't get treated differently for the same crime?

Less government, more free market is only helpful when there's competition in the free market. Back in the 3G days and before, there was competition (GSM/TDMA, CDMA, DAMPS). 4G saw all the carriers adopting LTE. That's a pretty good sign the technology has matured and competition has found the best solution. At that point, the best course of action is usually to turn it into a public utility. Build a single set of wires (or towers in this case), but don't run any service over them. Let multiple companies provide that service, paying for use of those wires/towers. That competition keeps prices low, as well as keeps a finger in the free market pie in case someone comes up with some new breakthrough.

Electricity is a good example. When it was first developed, nobody knew if AC or DC was better for long-distance transmission. Edison (DC) and Westinghouse/Tesla (AC) built competing electrical systems - entire cities were wired up with AC or DC electricity. Since the government didn't know which was better either, the smart thing for it to do was to stay out of it and not try to regulate it.* Both systems competed, and it soon became clear that AC was superior. Pretty soon all electrical systems were AC, and that's when the government stepped in and converted it into a utility. Your local power company built, owns, and maintains the wires. But in most jurisdictions you can purchase your power from any number of electricity providers. Those providers pay the owner of the wires a fixed rate, set by the local or state's public utilities commission.

* GSM is a good example of how to screw this up. The EU government regulated too quickly when it developed GSM and mandated it as the standard all EU phone companies had to adopt. GSM was based on TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower. That worked fine in low-bandwidth applications like voice, but once cellular data became the hot commodity, it was terrible. GSM wasted data bandwidth by allocating it to phones which didn't some or all of it. Fortunately the US didn't adopt GSM and let cell phone companies come up with their own systems. A few tried CDMA - each phone transmits simultaneously, and the tower tells them apart via orthogonal coding (kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, then turning it 90 degrees and writing on it some more - the letters are orthogonal enough that you can distinguish the vertical ones from the horizontal ones). With CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise, which raises the noise floor and reduces the signal to noise ratio, automatically dividing the available data bandwidth between all transmitting phones. It completely blew GSM out of the water. Enough so that within a year GSM threw in the towel and was amended to include wideband CDMA for data. That's why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio for both voice and data.

So 5G is a good candidate for converting the cellular network into the utility model.

This wasn't exactly the kind of external reference which I was expecting (as far as this article might have been written by a person like you ...

A simple "thank you, I didn't know about the use of all these measures", or "sorry my bad, you were right all along" would have sufficed there. In ignoring a site of that "kind" you run the risk of appearing not merely to be ignorant about the subject matter, but of being willfully so. [Pro tip: Whenever you have clearly been shown to be wrong, a fortiori on a matter of fact, be big enough immediately and gracefully to admit your error and move on.]

I was expecting samples of actual usage in the kind of informal contexts where these units are meant to be used; for example, a non-technical article in a newspaper providing a graphical idea about a big volume by actually relying on swimming pools.

You mean like this article ? Or like Melbourne Water's fact sheet on the Thomson Reservoir which gives the reservoir's capacity not only as "1,068 billion litres", but also as "2x Sydney Harbours," "628 x MCGs" and "427,000 x Olympic-sized swimming pools?" [Just to reference some other measures of volume listed on that very informative page.] Do you need any more? You could always use Google yourself, you know.

And this "expectation" of yours? It was reasonably founded, no doubt, on the pertinence and quality of the external references you provided, yes?

BTW, thanks for quoting me on things which I never said/thought

Don't be disingenuous! I never "quoted" anything you didn't say, the analogous arguments which no reasonable reader could take to constitute a direct quoting notwithstanding. And I already conceded the second, in which one party (you), was insisting on the basis of some cognitive theory that a well-known measure of volume (litres in place of Olympic swimming pools per analogy) could not be a measure of volume, was the fairer. And indeed, not only it was a fair and accurate account of what you were doing, it was based largely, without any implication that those were direct quotes, on the actual words used.

Anyway, writing this last comment ...

Not apparently being a man of your word, you've promised me twice your comment was the last. Maybe it will be a case of "third time lucky?"

And since you refuse to believe me try this: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Lis...

Every GOP dominated state has severely failing economies. See Kansas as a perfect example.

Define "failing". Red states, by and large, have lower economic growth because they are more rural, and urban centers generate more economic activity. That's a generality, though. If you look at a list of states by GDP per capita, some red states rank very highly. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Li....

If you're talking about fiscal responsibility, it's pretty much exactly the opposite of what you say. The states that are on the edge of bankruptcy are nearly all blue states, while those with the healthiest governments are red states. https://www.mercatus.org/state...

Kansas, BTW, is firmly middle of the pack on both measures. Kansas is #25 of 50 in terms of GDP per capita, and according to the Mercatus rankings, they're #27. So Kansas isn't a perfect example.

You want to prevent all hacking? Just use paper ballots counted at the precinct level. India has a billion people and it works just fine. Our election is important enough that it's foolish to trust it to unauditable, easily hacked voting machines when the alternative of hand counting is not that hard.

That's an okay solution -- though somewhat vulnerable to fraud conducted by the vote counters in precincts that don't get adequate oversight -- but we have the technology to do better. For the last couple of decades academic cryptographers have been trying to solve the problem of how to ensure fair elections, and they've come up with some remarkable techniques that allow elections to be strongly verified, making any tampering obvious. And they've refined their techniques to make them quite practical as well.

Check out Scantegrity. Note that it does use paper ballots. Counting can be done at the precinct level or at any higher level; doesn't matter. If the vote isn't tabulated correctly, the error will be exposed. Individual voters can also verify that their vote was counted correctly -- but without being able to prove how they voted. It's an excellent design.

Means more room for humans. We're succeeding as a species. I suspect it wont end well for us though.

I don't see any reason to believe it will end badly, at least not for reasons related to this issue.

Homo Sapiens has proven to be an extraordinarily adaptable and successful species, a global superpredator, which has inevitably displaced many other species. The Holocene Extinction, which has been in progress for thousands of years, is the result. The rate of extinctions accelerated dramatically in the last few centuries, particularly as the human population has exploded.

However, in the last few decades humans have become aware of the issue and have begun to care about it. This isn't to say that we'll ever value other species as highly as our own, but we've begun to think that it's important to avoid destroying them. That coupled with the fact that human population is likely to peak within 30 years and then begin declining and the fact that new technology is enabling us to tread more lightly means that extinctions directly produced by human activity (e.g. habitat expansion) will slow and perhaps cease.

Indirectly-caused extinctions will likely continue for millenia, though. Global warming is going to do in a lot of species (though it may create a good number as well), as climate shifts exceed the ability of species to migrate. It may also provoke some more directly-caused extinctions as it causes humans to migrate. Not much, though, since we already live pretty much everywhere. The accommodation of human-transplanted "invasive" species is also going to take a lot of time, and transplantation is probably going to continue as much as we try to avoid it, so there's going to be a sort of homogenization effect across the globe which will wipe out a lot of species as more aggressive and capable species get moved into their area. If humans choose to begin engineering planetary climate and stabilize it, so that it stays permanently within a particular range, that large driver of new speciation will be eliminated which will also contribute to the establishment of an equilibrium that will likely contain many fewer species than the planet has had for most of life's history upon it. It's also possible that we'll begin engineering biodiversity as well. That's hard to say.

Or maybe we'll have a massive nuclear war, simultaneously removing ourselves from the picture, ending the Holocene extinction with a spike, and kicking off an explosive new round of speciation. I think that and similar humanity-caused, humanity-ending disasters are unlikely, but I am an inveterate optimist.

Since everything we do is driven by our brain, free will, if it exists, must have something to do with neuroscience.

The Conway/Kochen Free Will Theorem says that if free will exists, it derives from the free will possessed by elementary particles. It needn't arise from neuroscience if it's a more fundamental characteristic of the universe.

Note that I'm not claiming that either humans or quarks do or do not have free will, just pointing out that if we do have it, neuroscience isn't the only possible origin. Perhaps what we perceive as our free will is actually the collective free will of the subatomic particles that make up important parts of our brains... though that raises obvious and deep questions about what "free will" even is, since we tend to think of it as being goal-oriented and causal in nature, and it's not clear what kinds of "goals" subatomic particles could even have or how combinations of them could produce what we perceive as free will.

On the other hand, our pattern-matching brains tend to interpret everything in a causal/goal-focused way, to the degree that classical Aristotelian philosophy posited that *all* physical processes were a result of goals (final causes, "teloi", to use Aristotle's word). That is clearly wrong in lots of other cases, maybe this is just another example of our biases misleading us and that the truth is that free will is just how we perceive the macro-level emergent properties that result from quantum randomness. That is the most logical conclusion of the Free Will Theorem, anyway, that free will is nothing more and nothing less than quantum noise, scaled up.

Or not :P

while a free market economy is much better at allocating scarce resources than any other method(especially government controlled or regulated economy), for a truly free market to work , there should be full information and perfect competition, impossible conditions.

True, and this is why GMO labeling is a bad idea, because it's misleading and therefore reduces the information available to buyers.

What makes it misleading is that the proposed labels only cover a tiny portion of the GMO products on the shelves. The labels only address GMOs produced by one specific method, gene splicing, and ignore all of the others produced by mutation breeding. Any logical analysis of the processes has to conclude that strains produced by gene splicing must be safer than those produced by drenching organisms in radiation and mutagenic chemicals to induce large numbers of random mutations, then selecting the offspring that appear to be safe and useful.

Thus, the GMO labels highlight the "risks" of consuming safer products and imply that other, more dangerous products, are the safe ones.

Regardless, if you'd rather pull the product than relabel it then you know in advance that your product can't survive with an accurate label. People are stupid, but tough - that's just the way the market is.

There's an assumption in this statement: That the label is accurate, in the sense that it usefully distinguishes the labeled product from all of the unlabeled products. Given that the discussion is about labeling only GMOs produced by gene splicing and not all of the other GMOs produced by mutation breeding, which is the process of showering organisms with radiation and/or mutagenic chemicals in order to induce large numbers of random mutations, from which those that appear safe and useful can be selected, that assumption of accuracy is false.

If we're going to label GMOs, we should label all GMOs, not just the ones created by the safest and most controlled method.

If they're happy with it, if it has advantages they can sell the consumers, then they should sell it to consumers on its advantages.

Why would you try to conceal GMO products from the consumer? It's confirmation that the makers of GMO products have something to hide!

I have no problem with labeling, as long as we make sure we label all the GMO products, not just the ones that resulted from gene splicing. We also need to label all of the products that resulted from mutation breeding, using radiation, transposons or mutagentic chemicals to cause large numbers of random mutations. Obviously, those products are much more dangerous than the ones created by carefully altering one tiny section of the organism's DNA.

Unfortunately, there's a problem: labeling the results of mutation breeding would require labeling virtually everything in the grocery store. Mutation breeding has been widely used for a century now, and most of the strains we currently eat were produced that way. So if we labeled accurately, the labels would be uninformative.

And this is why I actually oppose labeling. If accurate labels are uninformative, then inaccurate labels can have no value whatsoever.

If you want to add a label that says something useful related to the riskiness of eating an organism, perhaps the best thing to do is to identify the age of the strain. Something we've been eating for a thousand years is likely safe (not that there's anything that old in the grocery store). Something we've been eating for 50 years is less safe, but probably safer than something that just came into existence last year, in the sense that there's a better chance we've observed the negative effects.

So, if you want to label, I'd say label by the age of the strain, whether it was created by gene splicing, mutation breeding or "natural" selective breeding (which is only different from mutation breeding in that it relies on cosmic rays and other "natural" mutagens to provide the mutations for selection). What would really be ideal is to label with an estimate of the number of people who've eaten that strain without apparent harm, perhaps weighted by how long ago they ate it, in order to increase the odds that problems would have been observed.

That would be scientifically-accurate and useful information that you could put on a label.

HTTPS isn't that safe. Any agency that can coerce one of the numerous CA's can snoop traffic quite easily.

While your concerns are real, I think they're overstated.

A coerced CA cert does allow MITM attacks, but they have to be used very carefully and on a targeted basis, because if they're used too broadly it will be noticed. A TLS MITM attack is very noticeable to anyone who is looking. Google Chrome has caught a few subverted CAs now, thanks to certificate pinning of intermediates for Google, Verisign, GeoTrust and some others. Firefox pins large numbers of intermediates, for lots of domains. I think other browsers are also getting into it.

Of course Eric Schmidt is an avid fan of the surveillance society so thats why they weren't going to back anything less centralised than CA-based HTTPS

Nice cheap shot. In fact Google has a couple of significant projects to address the shortcomings of the CA system. One is to increase pinning, but that's kind of a hack. The other is the Certificate Transparency project, which aims to ensure that any certificate produced by any CA for any domain is visible to the owner of that domain. If that succeeds covert certificate issuance will be impossible.

At bottom, the problem with the CA isn't centralization, it's more complicated than that. The CA system is decentralized in the sense that there are many CAs... but that makes every one of them a single point of failure. In some ways we'd be safer with a truly centralized CA system, because then we'd have one single point of failure rather than a few hundred. The semi-decentralized system we have is pretty decent... if we can enable the world to easily recognize improperly-issued certificates. Certificate Transparency is one good way to do that. I'm also a fan of the Convergence system, but in addition to the existing CA system, rather than as a replacement.

In any case, although the CA system has some issues, and we have seen a handful of cases where they've been exploited, by and large it works very well, securing more connections and more data than anything else ever has. We'd be foolish to replace it, but augmenting it to address the problems is a good idea.

Case in point, the famous Bridge to Nowhere, built right here in RedStateVille USA.

I just read a great essay (PDF format) by Phillip Rogaway which strongly argues exactly that we need to develop new kinds of cryptography which are aimed squarely at making mass surveillance impossible. Once mass surveillance has been shut down completely, then maybe we can talk about ways for law enforcement to "work around" encryption in very limited and controlled ways[1]. But as long as mass surveillance is feasible, this is a complete non-starter, because any mechanism for bypassing cryptographic security will be used to increase the penetration of mass surveillance. And at this point I don't think we can settle for purely political means of shutting down mass surveillance. Political restrictions on surveillance are necessary, but not sufficient. We also need technology that makes it difficult and expensive, because if it's cheap and easy it can always be done on the sly.

[1] Once mass surveillance is out of the way, then we can talk about "workarounds". But it's crucial that the workarounds not compromise the security of the result. At present, I don't think we have any cryptographic technology that enables controlled, limited access without compromising security in normal operation. Further, I don't think any such technology is possible. But until mass surveillance is shut down we can't even discuss it.

Part of the dynamic here is that the PKI is so fragile that TOFU simply works better.

Cite? I seriously doubt that TOFU would actually work better if it were used on a large scale (SSH is *not* large scale). Key rotation is particularly problematic; by default TOFU just says "no" to key rotation, which is also bad. PKI + TOFU has interesting properties, but key rotation is still a problem.

IMO, what would be best is PKI + Certificate Transparency + Convergence + (limited) TOFU. Marlinspike touts Convergence as an alternative to PKI, but I think it would work better as an additional layer. PKI works beautifully in the common case where CAs behave correctly and don't lose their keys. Adding Certificate Transparency covers the poor key management case (and would have identified these Symantec problems immediately), and Convergence provides further defense against MITM attacks. CT and Convergence server certs should be pinned, of course.

And note that in most cases there's no reason your browser needs to delay the connection while it checks the additional layers. It can go ahead and establish the connection and begin downloading content while it checks with the CT and Convergence servers. It probably should defer rendering until it completes the additional checks, to protect against malicious content... unless it has already visited this site, and seen and checked this certificate (i.e. TOFU), in which case it can proceed with rendering. Though it should probably still check CT and Convergence in the background.

It may seem like I'm suggesting just piling on layers, but each one of them addresses specific problems and each has specific tradeoffs.

Hmm. That sounds almost like you're tracking relationships. Maybe you should use... (wait for it) A RELATIONAL DATABASE.

Keep in mind that MUMPS first appeared in 1966, so it isn't exactly new.

I'm genuinely confused as to why people keep buying Apple stuff. I can get the same performance for half the price and twice the battery life from a lot of different brands.

By Spending large amount of money on something you don't have to you "prove" to others that you have large amount of money. See http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Han...

Time to start masculanism movement, because anti-male gender discrimination hit mainstream.

It exists, but isn't particularly well known.

IMO, feminism and masculinism are both inherently flawed, in that they only focus on one set of symptoms and don't try to fix the underlying issues. Both genders have issues, but the moment you try to draw attention to this people tend to take it as a competition / zero sum game. The real solution is something like egalitarianism, where the focus is on not discriminating against people regardless of their gender, etc.

Seriously sounds like they are drifting towards an apartheid education system. That students tend to do better in the US with teachers of the same race (what ever the fuck that is meant to really mean, like human teachers or dog teachers or bird teachers or dolphin teachers), is a solid indication or problems of racism in the society at large and how it is brought into the education system. Race - biological http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rac... was only extended into arbitrary human http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rac... classification purely as a result of rampant prejudice and a specific desire to exclude people from competitive access in capitalist societies. Those statistics are not a measure of better teaching that are a measure of a fractured and failing society, as people within that society seek to avoid failure and drowning in poverty by pushing others down via what ever distinctions they can craft based upon, appearance, language, religion and culture. Those results should be a real wakeup moment of a serious problem.

Seriously sounds like they are drifting towards an apartheid education system. That students tend to do better in the US with teachers of the same race (what ever the fuck that is meant to really mean, like human teachers or dog teachers or bird teachers or dolphin teachers), is a solid indication or problems of racism in the society at large and how it is brought into the education system. Race - biological http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rac... was only extended into arbitrary human http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rac... classification purely as a result of rampant prejudice and a specific desire to exclude people from competitive access in capitalist societies. Those statistics are not a measure of better teaching that are a measure of a fractured and failing society, as people within that society seek to avoid failure and drowning in poverty by pushing others down via what ever distinctions they can craft based upon, appearance, language, religion and culture. Those results should be a real wakeup moment of a serious problem.

There's a difference between elapsed time locally and globally. Locally (i.e. on a single processor), you can have some meaningful concept of absolute time (i.e. whenever the timer interrupt fires). The moment you introduce a second processor, you run into issues where they can be ticking at different rates, and the non-trivial delay in communications between them means that you can't ever hope to synchronize them to the extent you can assume they are the same.

For most applications, you can get away with fairly large tolerances. e.g. wifi is probably fine with 1% variations in your concept of how long a second is. But that only works because you're using local elapsed time. If you need to compare timestamps from multiple nodes (global absolute time), you need to use approaches like vector clocks, because otherwise there's no meaningful way to reason about whether two events happened before each other.

tldr; protocols like wifi just need elapsed time to be roughly correct. Comparing timestamps between systems is much, much more complicated, and you can't even infer an ordering for the general case without casuality. (In that sense, there are a lot of parallels with relativity.)

My physics department (I'm a physical chemist, so we collaborate) uses a Rocks cluster. The department and a neighboring university uses the same.

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roc...

The way you phrased this make it seem like you think all these things are fundamentally *good*. The reality is they are all just barriers to market entry.

Seriously.

Cars must be inspected 3 times a year. This includes safety and cleanliness, and accessibility.

If you are making money off of your vehicle, the incentive to keep it clean, safe, and accessible is higher than some government mandate telling you that you have to.

Must have a rate card with FIXED (regulated) fares (none of this surge pricing nonsense) that the fares can see

Surge pricing is a mechanism to prevent shortages. Every time the government mandates pricing, there have been shortages (for instance, the housing crisis in New York or the energy crisis in California). Furthermore, what right does the government have to tell an individual they don't deserve to be paid more for risking their safety in poor conditions, or high-traffic environments?

All drivers must have valid Taxicab Drivers Licenses

This is just a mechanism to arbitrarily limit supply. If the person already has a motor vehicle license, they have already shown they can drive. It's just another barrier to entry pushed into law by the existing industry.

Must have minimum $200,000 insurance per person

I think insurance is required for anyone who drives a vehicle anyway. Why should insurance laws be different if you operate a cab? I don't even want to touch mandated insurance...

Must operate each cab a minimum of 18 hours a day (again, none of this 'I'll only drive if the rates are high enough' crap)

This is frustrating. Why not let people drive when rates are high? If high rates encourage more drivers and thus more people can arrive at their destination more quickly, how is this a bad thing? You can even do the math: if you have 1000 people who need rides, and rides are fixed at $10, let's say you have 20 available drivers. Each ride takes 10 minutes. This means every person will arrive at their destination in 8 hours and 20 minutes. Now let's pretend rates can vary. You have 100 drivers willing to operate at $50, 80 drivers at $40, 60 at $30, 40 at $20, and 20 at $10 (keeping in mind that you only have 100 drivers total). Now let's say you have 200 people willing to pay $50, 200 willing to pay $40, 200 willing to pay $30, 200 willing to pay $20, and 200 willing to pay $10. The first 200 people are taken care of in 20 minutes. The next 200 it takes just under 30 minutes. The next 200 take just over 30 minutes. 200 more in 50 minutes, and the final 200 take an hour and 40 minutes. This gives us a grand total of just under 4 hours.

But wait! you say. The rich people got their rides first! This isn't fair!

Holy hell, man, think for a second. First, we just moved all 1000 people in *under half the time it took us before*. Second, not everyone who pays more is necessarily rich, they might just really need to get to their destination- in fact, truly rich people probably aren't using cab services. Third, you are saying you would rather it take longer for everyone to get to their destination, then for people willing/able to pay more to get a ride first. Finally, you would *prevent* the rich passenger from giving more money to the driver- if you do this, you better not complain about the 1%.

Alright, at this point I'm pretty sick of going over these point by point. The fundamental takeaway is they are bullshit, and don't actually help anyone except the entrenched industry.

When you have to work with this stuff, in the end you realize that it is mostly about what was best for the team at the time they started the project (availabe skillset, docs, etc) and at this point both frameworks are the best the open source world has to offer.

Which means that the most useful data points are the projects which went through the effort of migrating between libraries. e.g. Subsurface which moved from GTK+ to Qt, and written by Linus Torvalds (among others). The reasons for doing so are given here. This is particularly interesting given that both Linus and Dirk prefer C

In my experience, the Qt libraries and tools are just as easy to use as .NET Framework + Visual Studio, which I think is excellent (and particularly impressive, given that Qt definitely doesn't have the same resources as Microsoft). I haven't used GTK+, but looking at the Hello World tutorial for it, it doesn't seem particularly intuitive. (e.g. why is the button label set with a callback?) Admittedly, there is some bias due to familiarity here, but I think my point is valid.

There hasn't, but I wouldn't expect it to matter. I don't believe the name is actually used anywhere (everyone just uses the version number), and its only defined in a makefile that's part of the kernel git repo. I'm not even sure if there's a rule for when it should be changed - I suspect it's merely whenever Linus feels like it.

The maximum age of a star is defined by the physics of the reaction. It was so be small enough to burn slow and cool, but big enough to sustain.

There are however, stars with a *known* age older than the 13.8 billion year estimate for a big bang universe. The one I know off the top of my head is: Wikipedia, HD_140283

Good thing they have such restrictive gun laws, that way things this this won't happen....

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gun...

It all depends on the problem you're trying to solve. You're right- industries would be disrupted. It is an unfortunate side-effect of any industry moving in any direction.
It is my belief that the government has the right to impose taxes to compensate for negative externalities. Pollution and emissions are prime examples of this.

I strongly agree with Milton Friedman on this issue. Primarily, that it isn't simple or easy to solve, but also that when the government intervenes it shouldn't be through regulation or standards, it should be through a straightforward tax to pay for the costs. That's why if you had an emissions tax it would have to follow a number of basic guidelines:

1. It cannot be transferable or creditable. The entity is taxed only for its emissions, and only based upon the quantity of emissions.
2. It must be used for one of two purposes: either mechanisms to clean up the pollution and emissions, or research into more efficient and cleaner sources of energy.
3. The tax should slightly outweigh the cost for companies to reduce their emissions themselves. When a CFO looks at a balance sheet, he should see he can either fork out $50,000 for a much better engine or $51,000 for taxes on the emissions from the worse engine.

So Sony is holier than thou? Probably not. Does anyone remember the CD Player Rootkit? http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Son...

These already exist. Wikiwand is one, and there are many other less sophisticated mirrors that do not make much of an impact, as they have poor Google rankings. It's partly why the Wikimedia Foundation feels it has to expand and professionalise its software engineering effort: the Wikipedia interface looks very dated today, and as Wikipedia content is free, anyone can host it. And if anyone does it better than the Wikimedia Foundation itself, it's conceivable that readers will flock elsewhere, leaving the Foundation in the lurch. The fact that Google includes data from Wikipedia in its Knowledge Graph (the information panel on the right that appears when you Google a word) is already having an impact on Wikipedia pageviews.

One thing that has always impressed me about the Shinkansen is its near obscene punctuality:

Quote from http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Shi... :
The Shinkansen is very reliable thanks to several factors, including its near-total separation from slower traffic. In 2012, JR Central reported that the Shinkansen's average delay from schedule per train was 36 seconds. This includes delays due to uncontrollable causes, such as natural disasters.[14] The record, in 1997, was 18 seconds.

What's become clear here (see also following section) is that the Wikimedia Foundation is afraid it will lose readers to sites like WikiWand that offer Wikipedia content as a pure consumable with a much more aesthetically pleasing interface. The moment Wikipedia page views go down, the Alexa rank will go down and donations will go down, as fewer people will see the fundraising banners. The problem is that the Foundation's own efforts to create a more pleasing interface have been unsuccessful; they have the money, but simply seem to lack the talent and experience. Partly they are also hampered by the underlying coding chaos of Wikipedia – underneath the Wikipedia text, there are thousands of ad-hoc templates created in a very inconsistent manner by volunteers over the years. This is the main reason the VisualEditor failed.

This story was also covered by The Register.