it can't pass on the patent protection granted by paying for this so there is no way for firefox to offer this.
Here I have the feeling I'm still missing something. Why can FF not offer H.264 video? I understand it can not be built in (though they could make two versions of it, with native H.264 for jurisdictions outside software patent land). It's something that comes up all the time.
Not so long ago I have been playing YouTube videos in H.264 right in FF using mplayer-plugin. There is some greasemonkey script for that, youtube without flash. Maybe not as technically charming as native but for the end user what counts is: it works.
And before anyone starts riling about plugins: why are plugins bad while add-ons are good? From a user pov they're the same. Just a different name. Both add functionality to a browser that it doesn't do natively.
Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers. Or any other browsers - which may be because the rest is too small to count.
Interesting. I don't know how touch screens detect the touch.
The videos do not play for me (probably a Flash issue, I'm looking forward to have that replaced with something more reliable), though the article mentions "standard board game play pieces and patterned paper". Neither are commonly conductive. The pieces shown on the images have a metal base, so should be detectable. Those bases look quite identical, so how to recognise individual pieces is a mystery to me. I would expect a dot-pattern on the bottom, or shaped bottoms. The same for the pieces that stand on their legs (let's assume they are made of some conductive material, not standard plastic).
Of course there are basically two issues here to make it work: how to detect the touch (what objects could be detected - you say must be conductive for starters), and how a touch is communicated to the internal system (as a pattern - a list of pixels that are touched, or just a mean coordinate of the centre of a touch). To be able to detect which object is placed where and facing which direction, one would have to be able to get an "image" of the touch and then do pattern recognition on that image.
And I am still wondering how many touches at the same time an iPad's touch screen can actually detect and work with. That could be another limitation.
Comments attached to TFA indicate it may be a hoax, after watching the videos carefully.
Without more details or having this app actually for download it's hard to say whether real or fake. Indeed it sounds too good to be true, so it probably is.
If after hundreds of resumes you still have no-one that "fits the criteria" maybe you're looking for someone who doesn't exist. Or they are not willing to pay enough for someone who can fulfil their obviously very high expectations.
They are a startup, developing tech "that changes the way how people store and access data" (wow, they must be up to something), and are now looking for people to help them with it. Well the criteria are not listed so hard to say where the problem lies, but finding people with experience in their database tech well that will be hard of course.
Great they found the people they need now, from the article it seems to me that not only did they change the way they were looking for people, they also changed their selection criteria and the way they were looking AT potential candidates.
And I am aware it is not ON ground zero, but nearby (thanks for the map SpinyManiac - didn't know the distance was that much, thought it was even less.
Also many Muslims say those fundamentalists are not real Muslims. Most Muslims that I know are pretty peaceful. And as long as they respect I don't believe in Allah they can go on believing in it.
And I'm very aware they would happily kill one another, especially if the other Muslim is another "type" like shi-ite or sunni or whatever they call it.
It remains simply sad that some people like to vent their personal grudge against other people, having no problem in killing people they do not know just because they happen to be US nationals for example, and abusing a religion to justify their actions.
They shouldn't complain too hard. Before Facebook sued them I had never heard of the web site. Now I know about them. Free publicity!
The trouble is of course if Facebook really wants to bring it to court they may have a problem fighting it even though it sounds to me like a nonsense suit from Facebook's side.
The student said that she doesn't want to be a terrorist (fair enough), but quite strongly implied that she didn't even want to consider how an actual terrorist would think.
"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about it" definitely doesn't exclude the idea of pretending to be one, trying to think like one. It's like acting: you can act like a murderer, think like a murderer, and do that all without ever becoming one. This statement is a reaction to an assignment that includes thinking like a terrorist - she rejects it with this statement, as if doing this assignment would make one a terrorist.
The problem here is that she obviously doesn't want to think outside of her comfort zone. And that's the problem here. Her statement implies to me an underlying thought of "terrorism is bad, terrorism is scary, I don't want to think about it really".
In Dutch we always say "you have to speak the language of the enemy".
In a literal sense (during the war it helped many resistance fighters to speak German, and to speak it well, if only to understand what the enemy is saying to each other),and in a more figurative sense (knowing their tactics and way of doing).
OP is quite right: student obviously missed most of the lesson.
Terrorism has a few faces that can be taught about, including why people commit these acts, how they are committed, what we can do to prevent such attacks (acting on both the how and why questions), and the result of attacks.
Seriously thinking about how they are committed (from the linked article: "The task included choosing the best time to attack and explaining their choice of victims") can give great insight ways to mitigate such attacks, and dealing with them if they occur. Coming up with a terrorist attack plan is doing just that, it makes one think about how an attack could be done. It makes you look at it from the other side.
I know it can be challenging for a 15yo to actually go deeper in matter than the face value of what the teacher produces. It's out of their comfort zones. And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely. Stepping into the mind of a terrorist is a very good way to think about the matter, and if that student thinks that merely thinking about terrorist attacks, how they were done, how they could be done, and why they are done, makes him a terrorist then this student himself might need some urgent counseling to stop his terrorist tendencies.
And about WW2: in my history lessons I have learned quite a bit about tactics used, particularly related to the invasion of The Netherlands (my home country). About how the Jews were deported and killed. Why this was done too. How the Dutch helped rounding up the Jews. it doesn't make me a crazy statesman like Hitler at all, on the contrary even. The same for such a lesson on terrorism: it won't make children into terrorists.
Many people say traditional news papers are obsolete. You can read the paper on the train on your iPad instead.
True, but screen resolution is lower than newsprint, and the screen size is less. Reading a traditional paper is easier than reading it on a screen. And my daily newspaper costs just HK$7, the cheapest iPad HK$3888. That's 555 papers for one iPad. Or almost two years of buying newspapers, not counting the cost of buying the electronic version instead (they do not come free here). And by then today's iPad (if it survives that long) is definitely obsolete.
So while there is newer tech, the traditional paper is not exactly obsolete. Same for magazines.
Many people also say news agencies are obsolete. Everything you want to know you can find on Google News. The problem here is: how do you know what to search for in the first place? That's why you still need those news agencies.
You and AC poster obviously do not get what OP is talking about.
It is the key on how to retrieve the messages. E.g. you want to use those Flickr images. Then how do your recipients know which images to download? That there is a message in the first place? How to recover the message from those images? That information is your steganographic key. You may or may not put encryption on top of that: encrypt the message, then hide it steganographic.
That is the steganographic key that has to be transmitted one way or another. And that may be a problem.
However I can imagine that traditional encryption would do for that. Ssh is pretty robust against MITM, so the key could be transmitted over such a channel. Only a one-time direct (detectable) communication would be necessary, and a one-time communication is not really suspicious. It seems to me the safest way to get such a key over. No matter what it has to be done, and it does leave a trace.
More likely in such situations, a government finds out that someone using the e-mail address dissident1989@yahoo.com is publishing stuff they don't like - on a blog, communicating with other users, whatever. With that information they could go to Yahoo and ask for the further details that belong to that account - such as the IP address(es) used to access it, or even complete access to all e-mail stored on Yahoo's servers.
I have to look up the situation where Yahoo was asked to turn over information to the Chinese government but I believe it was that way around. First they got their hands on the offending user name, then the tried to figure out who belongs to that user name. I'm quite sure in most situations when it comes to criminal or other investigation it works that way around.
Of course when someone is already a known dissident who is suspected of trying to start a revolution or whatever, then it's another matter. But then the subject would have to take stronger measures to keep their messages from being read.
As long as governments do not start to wholesale listen in on telephone calls, e-mail conversations, etc (like the US government is known to have done!) you're OK. And even then https will probably do just fine. Use a few web mail accounts for various purposes of which only one for the offending purpose, and you have deniability (I'm not dissident1989@yahoo.com! No idea who that is! My account is bravecitizen888@yahoo.com!).
And when it comes to sessions: I very often log in to Yahoo to play games. I don't have (at least don't use) a yahoo mail account. If I were to have a mail account there my login times to Yahoo would not match the e-mail login times.
I watched it for the 3D effects, and the 3D effects only. It looks beautiful. Though the only reason this movie will be remembered for longer than the time it's in the cinemas is because it's the first mainstream feature in 3D. And that part was pretty well done. For the rest... meh. Can't be interesting to watch on a flat screen. In 3D it was boring enough.
Looking at this I was just thinking on how fast our technology moves.
15 years ago CRT screens were still the norm, 10 years ago they were still going strong against the flat screen competition. Now we have screens that are so flat and cheap that they can be added to a magazine page.
15 years ago playing video on your PC started to work, mostly. Not too high resolution and you're fine. Now we play video smoothly on our mobile phones. Video processors are now small enough to fit in a magazine page. The same for storage, even low res video requires a relatively large amount of memory.
15 years ago my simple mobile phone needed recharging of its bulky battery at least every two days, when not using it much. Now batteries have the capacity to run a video player, a small screen, for a significant period of time, all while being small enough to fit in a magazine page.
15 years ago I had a 120 MB hard disk in my computer, a quite reasonable size at the time. It served me well. Software came typically on small stacks of 1.44 MB floppy disks. Nowadays a magazine page can fit larger amounts of storage, at a mere fraction of the price.
It is simply absurd how fast this tech is moving these days. A video in a magazine page was pure science fiction at the time. The idea that you would go to a web page (that did exist already) and click on a link to watch a video without the need for a lengthy download.
I suppose they will try to do so, assuming such data sets are available. Now only one US and one German lab. Would be nice to have an Australian lab in the mix. However I can imagine that not many labs will do this kind of measurements in high precision on a routine basis for long periods of time.
This appears to be a minute difference, so further research is definitely required. Also whether it affects different isotopes and different elements differently, and what would be the cause of this effect.
If you can measure three significant digits, and your effect is in the fifth, then you do not see it. However a more precise measuring apparatus may measure up to six significant digits, and there the effect may become visible.
Only when the effect becomes visible you can start saying anything about statistical significance.
For example, I'm measuring the distance between two points. This distance is say 850 meters, and with my yardstick I can measure accurate to the meter. I do this every week for ten years and will not realise there is a fault line in between these points and they are moving apart.
However someone else is doing the exact same measurement with laser equipment that measures to the tenth of a millimetre. He will notice that we start off at 849.8452 meters, and that ten years later it has slowly increased to 849.8473 meters.
The first measurement reaching three significant digits does not see any effect, and quite rightfully says the distance has not changed. It indeed barely has. The second measurement that reaches seven significant digits however does see an effect. The sixth and seventh digit slowly but surely increase over the years.
So here you see why the number of significant digits, the precision of your measurements does have an effect to whether you can see an effect or not. If your measurement is not precise enough then the effect (the slow movement of the earth's crust) disappears in the noise.
And to come back on my previous comment: this is why the measurements on both the spacecraft (no effect) and on earth (have effect) can both be correct, and do not necessarily contradict. As half life has long been considered a constant for a certain isotope I'm sure this effect is really really small. It was pretty hard to see, and it appears only noticeable when you really start looking for it. Otherwise you will miss it. This effect seems to be on the edge of our current capabilities, and small enough to be dismissed as noise by most researchers.
If software is written properly it doesn't have to be told in advance that this is going to happen, it will just see it happen (getting a strange time from the system) and deal with it. This way only NTP has to know it's going to happen, and the rest will simply follow.
I get the idea but I think it's not that great an example.
Pi is irrational - but also a constant. And can easily be approximated; for many applications 3.14 is accurate enough. And with modern computers it's trivial to go for higher accuracy.
Time, as in UTC, is moving. Not a constant, but always moving, always changing, and thanks to leap seconds not fully predictable in its values. And this unpredictability is what apparently breaks some software.
I wonder where the real problem lies... is it that the software encounters an illegal time? Then the software writer should account for that possibility: this can be called a bug as the "illegal time" is in fact legal. Or is there something else, like the application trying to count seconds since a certain time and then running into a mismatch with the system software? Again something that can and should be fixed on application level.
To me it seems to be very much something that software programmers that are working with time on a level that leap seconds are an issue, should know about. And thus be able to account for that they may happen - without knowing in advance when it will be.
Two interesting points are missing (maybe I should go and read TFA).
1) The actual variation measured in decay of Si-32 and Ra-226. How small is small? Second, third, fourth significant digit? Even smaller maybe?
2) The experimental precision of the Pu-238 experiment.
The precision of 2) should be at least an order of magnitude better than the precision of 1) to be able to reasonably rule out solar effects in case of 2). Considering experiment 2) is done on board a space craft and 1) is done on earth, I don't expect this to be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
it can't pass on the patent protection granted by paying for this so there is no way for firefox to offer this.
Here I have the feeling I'm still missing something. Why can FF not offer H.264 video? I understand it can not be built in (though they could make two versions of it, with native H.264 for jurisdictions outside software patent land). It's something that comes up all the time.
Not so long ago I have been playing YouTube videos in H.264 right in FF using mplayer-plugin. There is some greasemonkey script for that, youtube without flash. Maybe not as technically charming as native but for the end user what counts is: it works.
And before anyone starts riling about plugins: why are plugins bad while add-ons are good? From a user pov they're the same. Just a different name. Both add functionality to a browser that it doesn't do natively.
Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers. Or any other browsers - which may be because the rest is too small to count.
Interesting. I don't know how touch screens detect the touch.
The videos do not play for me (probably a Flash issue, I'm looking forward to have that replaced with something more reliable), though the article mentions "standard board game play pieces and patterned paper". Neither are commonly conductive. The pieces shown on the images have a metal base, so should be detectable. Those bases look quite identical, so how to recognise individual pieces is a mystery to me. I would expect a dot-pattern on the bottom, or shaped bottoms. The same for the pieces that stand on their legs (let's assume they are made of some conductive material, not standard plastic).
Of course there are basically two issues here to make it work: how to detect the touch (what objects could be detected - you say must be conductive for starters), and how a touch is communicated to the internal system (as a pattern - a list of pixels that are touched, or just a mean coordinate of the centre of a touch). To be able to detect which object is placed where and facing which direction, one would have to be able to get an "image" of the touch and then do pattern recognition on that image.
And I am still wondering how many touches at the same time an iPad's touch screen can actually detect and work with. That could be another limitation.
Comments attached to TFA indicate it may be a hoax, after watching the videos carefully.
Without more details or having this app actually for download it's hard to say whether real or fake. Indeed it sounds too good to be true, so it probably is.
Maybe their requirements are an issue.
If after hundreds of resumes you still have no-one that "fits the criteria" maybe you're looking for someone who doesn't exist. Or they are not willing to pay enough for someone who can fulfil their obviously very high expectations.
They are a startup, developing tech "that changes the way how people store and access data" (wow, they must be up to something), and are now looking for people to help them with it. Well the criteria are not listed so hard to say where the problem lies, but finding people with experience in their database tech well that will be hard of course.
Great they found the people they need now, from the article it seems to me that not only did they change the way they were looking for people, they also changed their selection criteria and the way they were looking AT potential candidates.
The statement by itself is not the problem.
Using it as argument to reject the assignment is the problem.
I was joking.
And I am aware it is not ON ground zero, but nearby (thanks for the map SpinyManiac - didn't know the distance was that much, thought it was even less.
Also many Muslims say those fundamentalists are not real Muslims. Most Muslims that I know are pretty peaceful. And as long as they respect I don't believe in Allah they can go on believing in it.
And I'm very aware they would happily kill one another, especially if the other Muslim is another "type" like shi-ite or sunni or whatever they call it.
It remains simply sad that some people like to vent their personal grudge against other people, having no problem in killing people they do not know just because they happen to be US nationals for example, and abusing a religion to justify their actions.
No that's just to protect the new WTC. Those muslim terrorists wouldn't risk hitting one of their own would they?
They shouldn't complain too hard. Before Facebook sued them I had never heard of the web site. Now I know about them. Free publicity!
The trouble is of course if Facebook really wants to bring it to court they may have a problem fighting it even though it sounds to me like a nonsense suit from Facebook's side.
The student said that she doesn't want to be a terrorist (fair enough), but quite strongly implied that she didn't even want to consider how an actual terrorist would think.
"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about it" definitely doesn't exclude the idea of pretending to be one, trying to think like one. It's like acting: you can act like a murderer, think like a murderer, and do that all without ever becoming one. This statement is a reaction to an assignment that includes thinking like a terrorist - she rejects it with this statement, as if doing this assignment would make one a terrorist.
The problem here is that she obviously doesn't want to think outside of her comfort zone. And that's the problem here. Her statement implies to me an underlying thought of "terrorism is bad, terrorism is scary, I don't want to think about it really".
In Dutch we always say "you have to speak the language of the enemy".
In a literal sense (during the war it helped many resistance fighters to speak German, and to speak it well, if only to understand what the enemy is saying to each other),and in a more figurative sense (knowing their tactics and way of doing).
OP is quite right: student obviously missed most of the lesson.
Terrorism has a few faces that can be taught about, including why people commit these acts, how they are committed, what we can do to prevent such attacks (acting on both the how and why questions), and the result of attacks.
Seriously thinking about how they are committed (from the linked article: "The task included choosing the best time to attack and explaining their choice of victims") can give great insight ways to mitigate such attacks, and dealing with them if they occur. Coming up with a terrorist attack plan is doing just that, it makes one think about how an attack could be done. It makes you look at it from the other side.
I know it can be challenging for a 15yo to actually go deeper in matter than the face value of what the teacher produces. It's out of their comfort zones. And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely. Stepping into the mind of a terrorist is a very good way to think about the matter, and if that student thinks that merely thinking about terrorist attacks, how they were done, how they could be done, and why they are done, makes him a terrorist then this student himself might need some urgent counseling to stop his terrorist tendencies.
And about WW2: in my history lessons I have learned quite a bit about tactics used, particularly related to the invasion of The Netherlands (my home country). About how the Jews were deported and killed. Why this was done too. How the Dutch helped rounding up the Jews. it doesn't make me a crazy statesman like Hitler at all, on the contrary even. The same for such a lesson on terrorism: it won't make children into terrorists.
Many people say traditional news papers are obsolete. You can read the paper on the train on your iPad instead.
True, but screen resolution is lower than newsprint, and the screen size is less. Reading a traditional paper is easier than reading it on a screen. And my daily newspaper costs just HK$7, the cheapest iPad HK$3888. That's 555 papers for one iPad. Or almost two years of buying newspapers, not counting the cost of buying the electronic version instead (they do not come free here). And by then today's iPad (if it survives that long) is definitely obsolete.
So while there is newer tech, the traditional paper is not exactly obsolete. Same for magazines.
Many people also say news agencies are obsolete. Everything you want to know you can find on Google News. The problem here is: how do you know what to search for in the first place? That's why you still need those news agencies.
You and AC poster obviously do not get what OP is talking about.
It is the key on how to retrieve the messages. E.g. you want to use those Flickr images. Then how do your recipients know which images to download? That there is a message in the first place? How to recover the message from those images? That information is your steganographic key. You may or may not put encryption on top of that: encrypt the message, then hide it steganographic.
That is the steganographic key that has to be transmitted one way or another. And that may be a problem.
However I can imagine that traditional encryption would do for that. Ssh is pretty robust against MITM, so the key could be transmitted over such a channel. Only a one-time direct (detectable) communication would be necessary, and a one-time communication is not really suspicious. It seems to me the safest way to get such a key over. No matter what it has to be done, and it does leave a trace.
More likely in such situations, a government finds out that someone using the e-mail address dissident1989@yahoo.com is publishing stuff they don't like - on a blog, communicating with other users, whatever. With that information they could go to Yahoo and ask for the further details that belong to that account - such as the IP address(es) used to access it, or even complete access to all e-mail stored on Yahoo's servers.
I have to look up the situation where Yahoo was asked to turn over information to the Chinese government but I believe it was that way around. First they got their hands on the offending user name, then the tried to figure out who belongs to that user name. I'm quite sure in most situations when it comes to criminal or other investigation it works that way around.
Of course when someone is already a known dissident who is suspected of trying to start a revolution or whatever, then it's another matter. But then the subject would have to take stronger measures to keep their messages from being read.
As long as governments do not start to wholesale listen in on telephone calls, e-mail conversations, etc (like the US government is known to have done!) you're OK. And even then https will probably do just fine. Use a few web mail accounts for various purposes of which only one for the offending purpose, and you have deniability (I'm not dissident1989@yahoo.com! No idea who that is! My account is bravecitizen888@yahoo.com!).
And when it comes to sessions: I very often log in to Yahoo to play games. I don't have (at least don't use) a yahoo mail account. If I were to have a mail account there my login times to Yahoo would not match the e-mail login times.
(everyone I know who is serious about 3D has said that Avatar is the best 3D film to date)
That probably says more about the poor quality of the others than about the quality of Avatar.
In the current state of 3D movies you do not have to be good. Just less bad than the rest.
I watched it for the 3D effects, and the 3D effects only. It looks beautiful. Though the only reason this movie will be remembered for longer than the time it's in the cinemas is because it's the first mainstream feature in 3D. And that part was pretty well done. For the rest... meh. Can't be interesting to watch on a flat screen. In 3D it was boring enough.
I thought this discussion was about Avatar, or am I missing something?
Looking at this I was just thinking on how fast our technology moves.
15 years ago CRT screens were still the norm, 10 years ago they were still going strong against the flat screen competition. Now we have screens that are so flat and cheap that they can be added to a magazine page.
15 years ago playing video on your PC started to work, mostly. Not too high resolution and you're fine. Now we play video smoothly on our mobile phones. Video processors are now small enough to fit in a magazine page. The same for storage, even low res video requires a relatively large amount of memory.
15 years ago my simple mobile phone needed recharging of its bulky battery at least every two days, when not using it much. Now batteries have the capacity to run a video player, a small screen, for a significant period of time, all while being small enough to fit in a magazine page.
15 years ago I had a 120 MB hard disk in my computer, a quite reasonable size at the time. It served me well. Software came typically on small stacks of 1.44 MB floppy disks. Nowadays a magazine page can fit larger amounts of storage, at a mere fraction of the price.
It is simply absurd how fast this tech is moving these days. A video in a magazine page was pure science fiction at the time. The idea that you would go to a web page (that did exist already) and click on a link to watch a video without the need for a lengthy download.
We definitely live in exciting times for techies!
Should be the case, indeed.
I suppose they will try to do so, assuming such data sets are available. Now only one US and one German lab. Would be nice to have an Australian lab in the mix. However I can imagine that not many labs will do this kind of measurements in high precision on a routine basis for long periods of time.
This appears to be a minute difference, so further research is definitely required. Also whether it affects different isotopes and different elements differently, and what would be the cause of this effect.
Both are important.
If you can measure three significant digits, and your effect is in the fifth, then you do not see it. However a more precise measuring apparatus may measure up to six significant digits, and there the effect may become visible.
Only when the effect becomes visible you can start saying anything about statistical significance.
For example, I'm measuring the distance between two points. This distance is say 850 meters, and with my yardstick I can measure accurate to the meter. I do this every week for ten years and will not realise there is a fault line in between these points and they are moving apart.
However someone else is doing the exact same measurement with laser equipment that measures to the tenth of a millimetre. He will notice that we start off at 849.8452 meters, and that ten years later it has slowly increased to 849.8473 meters.
The first measurement reaching three significant digits does not see any effect, and quite rightfully says the distance has not changed. It indeed barely has. The second measurement that reaches seven significant digits however does see an effect. The sixth and seventh digit slowly but surely increase over the years.
So here you see why the number of significant digits, the precision of your measurements does have an effect to whether you can see an effect or not. If your measurement is not precise enough then the effect (the slow movement of the earth's crust) disappears in the noise.
And to come back on my previous comment: this is why the measurements on both the spacecraft (no effect) and on earth (have effect) can both be correct, and do not necessarily contradict. As half life has long been considered a constant for a certain isotope I'm sure this effect is really really small. It was pretty hard to see, and it appears only noticeable when you really start looking for it. Otherwise you will miss it. This effect seems to be on the edge of our current capabilities, and small enough to be dismissed as noise by most researchers.
If software is written properly it doesn't have to be told in advance that this is going to happen, it will just see it happen (getting a strange time from the system) and deal with it. This way only NTP has to know it's going to happen, and the rest will simply follow.
I get the idea but I think it's not that great an example.
Pi is irrational - but also a constant. And can easily be approximated; for many applications 3.14 is accurate enough. And with modern computers it's trivial to go for higher accuracy.
Time, as in UTC, is moving. Not a constant, but always moving, always changing, and thanks to leap seconds not fully predictable in its values. And this unpredictability is what apparently breaks some software.
You don't have any software running on your system that is more than six months old?
I wonder where the real problem lies... is it that the software encounters an illegal time? Then the software writer should account for that possibility: this can be called a bug as the "illegal time" is in fact legal. Or is there something else, like the application trying to count seconds since a certain time and then running into a mismatch with the system software? Again something that can and should be fixed on application level.
To me it seems to be very much something that software programmers that are working with time on a level that leap seconds are an issue, should know about. And thus be able to account for that they may happen - without knowing in advance when it will be.
Two interesting points are missing (maybe I should go and read TFA).
1) The actual variation measured in decay of Si-32 and Ra-226. How small is small? Second, third, fourth significant digit? Even smaller maybe?
2) The experimental precision of the Pu-238 experiment.
The precision of 2) should be at least an order of magnitude better than the precision of 1) to be able to reasonably rule out solar effects in case of 2). Considering experiment 2) is done on board a space craft and 1) is done on earth, I don't expect this to be the case.