Nah, that's what the NSA is for. See, they don't build one file on every citizen. That's not how search engines work. The files are created from the data they have if ever they "like you" for a crime, or dislike your political stance. Ask the anti-war, women's rights, or civil rights activists about the counter intelligence program trying to silence them. Land of the Free -- So long as you choose to think how we say.
Yes. What's your point? Since they were created we've known that's what the FBI is up to.
The DHS is the enforcement arm of the "national security" secret police, so the FBI is moving up in the world. The DHS is already showing up a ball games, I wouldn't be surprised if they start replacing local cops -- Or, those offices just get re-branded, they're already being militarized. Anything to don the prestigious cloak of national secrecy.
Kind of makes the NSA redundant though, eh? Nothing to worry about though, eh? They're not checking for our "papers, please", they're just building dossiers on everyone of us just in case.
In the absence of Gerrymandering, perhaps it might work sometimes -- depending on who counts the votes, how susceptible they are to manipulation by the powers that be (Oh goodie! digital votes, why not ask the NSA directly who should win?), how un-tainted the media is, etc. You're silly for using the term "perfectly". Voting hasn't ever worked perfectly well, or even reasonably well.
The congress critters are in someone's pocket, and it's not we the people, those that aren't compromised are marginalized by the media, there's just too much evidence to ignore that. Really, if you look to see the root of any great political change it comes from public outrage, not election day votes. Go be an activist. Oh, right, they know how to handle those folks too
The point of the rubber sheet analogy is to discuss the SHAPE of the surface which is a stand in for forces of gravitation.
As such, even if following the analogy you shouldn't use an actual rubber sheet because it will be distorted by the marble itself.
Will that be perfect? Probably not but will be less of a failure then this spandex idea.
Failure? Really? Sure you can compensate somewhat in the shape of the hard surface to make the orbit more like reality, but spandex is dynamic and a simple elegant demonstration. Note: The fact that "orbiting" marbles deform "space-time" rubbers allows them to have smaller orbiting bodies too, like a moon.
So, basically the space-time rubber-sheet comparison is like a car analogy? You don't have to know much of what's under the hood to get started, and it can be a vehicle of understanding between point A and B, but when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of things, it starts to break down.
I think the booth babes will disappear when they are no longer profitable and when this fact is clear to the companies that currently hire them.
You thought wrong. Both women and men like looking at women's hips and breasts. Youth and beauty are signals for fertility. Advertising leverages this innate human response to associate products with desirability. When you've undone millions of years of instinctual evolution and sexual selection pressure, there won't be any "booth babes", because there won't be any damn booths.
Why not eliminate the engine completely? Just aim in the direction of the destination, detonate, and surf the pressure wave. With the engine-less car you can't take it with you, but if you don't make it on the first shot you won't be around to care.
Then effort doesn't go into 'engines' - It goes into energy storage solutions that have the weight / energy capacity of gasoline.
Why ignore the inefficiency of internal combustion? Are you seriously saying that putting effort into more efficient motors is advancing energy storage solutions? That sounds imbecilic to me.
Achieving equivalent energy density isn't required if more efficient motors and/or transmission methods are discovered and/or utilized. You're not seriously putting forth that, say, mag-lev trains, or the hyper-loop are applications of "energy storage solutions with the weight / energy capacity of gasoline", are you? Energy density would already be high enough for a hybrid solutions whereby inductive charging supplements existing electric energy storage -- The effort here is going into "energy storage with the weight / energy capacity of gasoline"? No. Not unless you conflate storage with transmission. Take a look next to damn near any road you're driving on for the power line.
Also, burning things should be avoided, not just "fossil fuel". However, better gasoline engines while transitioning to other fuels still helps -- no need for a false dichotomy. Next time don't be absolutists. It makes you both sound like morons.
Worst case scenario, we need to pursue solutions which involve leaving the planet entirely if it is rendered uninhabitable for a period long enough to exterminate us.
What if I told you: That's not how survival works. One does not simply walk into outer space due to impending doom; You strike out in multiple directions long before nature's empire strikes back. Afterwards you morn the loss of Ceres Station 9, Mars One, or Earth, etc. and when the great disturbance in the forces of nature have passed it's safe for the return of the kings, or knights, peasants, etc. Developers begin assuming direct control and estimate reoccurrence to determine if they rebuild it, so they will come or instead boldly go where no one has gone before.
In other words: You can lead a horse to water but they have to swim for themselves. Spreading humanity across the universe to explore under pain of death from hypothetical disaster won't work. Just look at the fools rebuilding New Orleans instead of abandoning ship and deeming it a wildlife habitat. It's the same coin, but different sides as the folks opposing manned space exploration funding. Why you're so resistant to just go -- save yourself -- from extinction realizing you can't take it all with you is beyond me. That's why, despite the poor bastards being doomed, we have to cheer Mars One folks as pioneers and champions of the world -- even if they leverage reality TV gimmicks to pull it off, it can't be helped.
IMO, although a moon base is too close for comfort to Earth to escape a gamma death ray or solar flare (esp. during a the magnetic pole flip -- which we're 500,000 years over-due for, BTW), all your base needs is to begin developing the tech for survival outside the magnetosphere -- The surface is hard, but you can dig it and live like mole people or just have the habitat be buried alive in regolith. It's more within reach than Mars.
That humans have the right stuff for space programs and yet wasted four decades without leaving the nest is a much more advanced and persistent threat to the survival than any other singular threat of extinction, including super-volcanoes. If the magnetosphere flips you off during a perfect storm of solar flares, or another disaster extincts you: You have no one to blame but yourselves. You had your chance to survive, but did not make your time count. No matter how many prime directives embedded in your culture, you just wouldn't get your ass to Mars.
Making it even worse, different languages are not only designed to solve different technical problems, but they are designed to solve different HR problems.
I agree. That does make them worse. C++ wouldn't be where it is today if it didn't incorporate C -- This is both a good and a horrible thing to realize if you look at the state of things.
However, the "different language for different people" problem is one created by humans. You see, C is the way it is because it tries to minimally abstract the operations common to Von Neumann machine architecture. Nearly all modern languages fail in two respects: They are either too abstract and dynamic or too concrete. Humans therefore select a language matching the problem space's requirement, and simply ignore the deeper problem.
The problem is in the encoding of the language itself: The preconceived paradigms / use cases. Take JavaScript for example. It's dynamic variables and prototype design create huge problems for performance, but it was created to be a "glue" between web pages and Java, so performance wasn't a design goal. Java did a lot of things right language wise, but its runtime is too bloated because the use case was assumed to be anything: Instead of an applet being an embedded isolated Java program with only resources its containing browser gave it they included the whole kitchen sink and the massive exploit surface thereof. Take C for example: It has a quite foolish function stack based assumption whereas heap based functions can easily be coroutines and have closures. However, given the limitations of older hardware it was a good assumption of the use case. It's the difference between a full featured garbage collector (Lisp) and a mark/release garbage collector (C) -- We're garbage collecting function call instances.
Many humans are so arrogant or ignorant that they proclaim the language domain to be what makes or breaks a language, meanwhile completely ignoring that over the years the x86 chipset has been modified to better optimize for C's function-stack paradigm, see the ENTER and LEAVE opcodes for instance. ARM even has these restrictions. This makes some languages perform terribly compared to others because some follow the same assumed use case as the hardware and some languages do not. For instance, one of my toy languages doesn't use ENTER and LEAVE since it operates in an OS that isolates stack variables and parameters from the function return pointers, and thus a near identical batch of code in C runs many times faster. So, you must consider the extreme effect the hardware domain has on the language domain, and vise versa.
Failure to completely embrace the a use case (in the name of being "general purpose" hardware, yeah right) leads to retardation of progress in many respects: Notably the majority of exploit vectors is due to the moronic decision to maintain a single stack for instruction pointers and data. This is reinforced by hardware in the ENTER and LEAVE instructions themselves. You see, the instruction pointer can not be directly manipulated, the humans at least got that part right, but then they failed to create a separate dedicated return instruction pointer stack. Granted the instruction pointer is isolated not for security's sake, but you can see why it's foolish to embrace a function-stack approach and not also isolate the return pointers thereof from the parameter data.
Hardware even dictates the type of OS design that is practical: A single bit of execution privilege ring (Kernel or User) on ARM means it will be host to monolithic kernels due to their hardware supported security offerings. On x86 I have 2 bits (4 rings) thus can create microkernels and isolate plugins from user processes too: (Kernel, Driver, User, Plugin). These can run on ARM, but I sacrifice my guarantees in many respects -- Treating drivers, users, and plug-ins as all user mode processes using memory for isolation can create unnecessary complications and performance penalties. The po
Automakers, why waste time, effort and money re-engineering around Android and other OSs?
Humans frequently focus on a single interval of time, but these do not exist in reality. Sometimes a technology will have several milestones or prerequisites prior to adoption; Some along the path are more useful than others, but the aim is to provide at least some usefulness at each juncture. Allow me to expand your mind briefly by increasing your mental interval of consideration: Self Driving Cars.
It's not meant to be incompletely unhackable. Think of it as adding another factor of authentication. So, with three factor authentication there will be something you know (your password), something you have (your ID card / token), and something you are (a nerd). This adds a fourth factor: Something you did (forgot what that was and called tech support).
The genius of this system is that it relies on the existing proven security of the questions over-seas help desk personnel usually ask you like: How long has it been since you logged in? What's your favorite sports team? What kind of accent is that? What's your mother's maiden name? What are you wearing? Etc.
The distinctive new system opens the way for testing a concept behind general relativity known as the equivalence principle, which relates two different conceptions of mass. An object's inertial mass quantifies how it resists pushing or pulling: It's easier to start a stroller rolling than a car because the stroller has less inertial mass. A thing's gravitational mass determines how much a gravitational field pulls on it: A barbell is heavier than a feather because it has more gravitational mass.
The simplest version of the equivalence principle says inertial mass and gravitational mass are equal. It explains why ordinary objects like baseballs and bricks fall to Earth at the same rate regardless of their mass—as legend claims Galileo showed by dropping heavier and lighter balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The strong equivalence principle takes things an important step further. According to Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, energy equals mass. So an object or system's mass can be generated by the energy in the gravitational fields within the system itself. The strong equivalence principle states that even if one includes mass generated through such "self-gravitation," gravitational and inertial mass are still equal.... By tracking the system's evolution, Ransom and colleagues should be able to tell whether either the inner white dwarf or the pulsar falls faster toward the outer white dwarf and test strong equivalence about 100 times as precisely as before, Damour says.
"Gravitational Field"... space-time curvature "field"? Uhm, "gravitational mass" vs "inertial mass" equivalence... "explains why" o_O? Shh! The astrophysicists are over. Don't mention the Higgs!
In all seriousness, we know damn well Einstein's equations are simply better approximations / explanations than Newton's approximations are -- It's only a matter of time before we prove them "wrong" (but still damn good and useful approximations, like Newton's) -- We just need some elusive experimental evidence to prove it, and this could be it due to the large gravitational coefficients and a steady measurement scale provided in the pulsar. That is, unless Einstein's approximation turns out to be more accurate than our observations of this system. It shouldn't be any more of a "revolution", as TFA states, if the observations prove to be in violation of the equations: We should be trying to find better equations anyway thanks to that whole Standard Model thing, and we are. Physics seems to goes through these periods where a bunch of new theories explain various things to a precision, the precision is surpassed in observations, and then someone like Newton, Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, etc. comes along and presents elegant / unifying equations to explain the disparate pieces better. Looks like we're still in the middle of the very important prove old-theories "wrong" (read: inaccurate, conflicting with some observations) and scratch our head over tests for new hypotheses to fit more accurate measurements stage.
but if you fixed every other problem you would start to get cancer at some point in their lifespan
I'm not sure you're following along. If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer. A mutation can occur, sure, but if the mutant cells that would form a cancer by replicating unchecked are killed by your body before they can do so, then yes, you can actually never get cancer. If the DNA replication itself had a bit more CRC checking going on -- possibly even by the surrounding cells themselves, then the cancer can't form. You want to equate cancer to individual cells being mutants in a specific way, but that's not what cancer is. It's a bit more persistent than a single cell division and death. Those do happen by the way, and we don't call them cancer.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned.
Please explain how natural selection cares not about those born as my little brother to a 35 year old mother and a 45 year old father. So, are you saying that longevity and quantity of offspring have nothing to do with breeding. Are you seriously presenting that once you hit 25 or so evolution doesn't care about how long you can viably produce children for? And for the record, you idiot, evolution doesn't care about fucking one bit. Evolution cares about the quantity an SURVIVABILITY of OFFSPRING -- I might point out that care and raising of offspring extends well beyond the act of a good screw. If you seriously believe that evolution doesn't care about your body after you've popped a kid out, then you're a fucking moron, sorry, you are.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned. Natural selection doesn't care one bit about what happens to you after you procreate (the male preying mantis is a perfect example of this)
Hey, dipshit. The mutation of cells replicating in the body has fuck all to do with the reproductive cell mutations that evolution is concerned with. What a nitwit.
The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.
Slaves being considered 3/5ths of a man was not against the law. Jim Crow was legal. The laws are to be assumed incorrect and wrong unless proven otherwise. That's why jurry nullification exists, it's why citizens are assumed innocent unless proven guilty -- Because the prosecuters, police, accusers, judges, etc. governmental and legal systems are assumed wrong by default.
Where the letter of the law is held above the spirit of the law you will discover tyranny, despotism and oppression; Soon a new amendment will be born to correct this disparity, if not only a procession of grave actions is left to the citizens. Emergency session of congress for a vote of no confidence, Impeachment and replacement of heads of military and state, etc.
The technicalities of law are the sources of all its evils.
If there was an uprising of people inside the USA against the government and it's policies, they would be deemed terrorists and all killed or imprisoned.
You need to read up on some history of protests which occurred in the U.S. during the Viet Nam war. Mass protests DID happen, and the government ( Johnson was president at the time ) DID NOT kill or imprison them all. Rather, the government changed its policies with respect to Viet Nam.
Just because you are a spineless pessimist doesn't mean all US citizens are, and you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT speak for anyone but yourself with your cowardly prognostications.
What a great copy-paste job you did there shill. Hey, what the fuck is COINTELPRO? It's government counter intelligence program that seeks to silence anti-war activism, women's rights activism, and civil rights activism, and others they deem "radicals" -- You know, like using PRISM to expose porn habits, etc. That evil shit is still going on you dolt. Get real you moronic shill.
Wait, so your solution to young managers not having experience is to delay them getting experience until they're older? How does that solve anything apart from pissing on young people?
Well, it goes like this: The older folks who are being discriminated against in favour of the young wheel-re-inventing over-time-seeking no-family-life having folks for the positions of programmers, or working the assembly line, etc. general activity of actually doing the (with an unfortunate tendency towards working harder instead of smarter) should be promoted to team-leaders to pass their experience to the green-horn rookies; And as these age a bit more, move them up into management positions where their knowledge of the actual processes involved and possible physical or time-limited incapability to do the more demanding grunt work makes them perfect candidates for managerial positions. Meanwhile freeing up lower positions for the new crew who may have new ideas about how things should be done and time to test the might-be-crazy-enough-to-work processes so that they can move up in rank and the company can benefit as a whole.
That's how it solves many problems that stem from managers not knowing what the job really entails and thus not fighting the right fights or not making informed decisions, meanwhile not requiring the young people to be pissed on any more than any of the other low-men on the totem pole were when they were that same age/experience level. You know, requiring some real experience with the management of the company rather than just applying some largely inapplicable and generalized tripe that business schools trick young dip-shits into paying for courses about? This way they could study something actually productive and fulfilling instead of brown-nosery and social justice warring imbecility.
Protip: If you want to learn the fundamentals of business management -- architecture of information flow and decision making thereupon -- you need to take a course in Cybernetics instead of business. You see, the experience sought is not in the management position itself, it's experience with the processes beneath that upper position which is beneficial to the managerial position thereof. If you live in the Information Age and go against the nature of information theory, and thus against the very laws of the universe itself, you're going to have a bad time, mkay?
everyone who gives a shit and thinks this is news worthy raise your hand..
Yep. I don't have any stock in Amazon or its competitors. It's about as tech related as Steve Jobs' health or lack thereof. I mean, it would be as relevant to tech news as, say, if Steve Ballmer was possibly Microsoft, or if Google CEOs were saying terrifying things about privacy. Absolutely no consequence whatsoever. I mean really. Next thing you know they'll be listing news about video games I don't play or, alternate operating systems I don't use, or political rights online I haven't had since the 80's.
I'm strictly opposed to this continuing trend of presenting news only a small segment of nerds gives a shit about. If this is what Slashdot is cumming to then count me out. If it doesn't interest everyone, it shouldn't be news for anyone!
Kidney stones supposedly hurt like hell (no personal experience here), but it's not something people generally die from.
They sure can be fatal. I would have died from a kidney stone if it weren't for modern medical technology. A stone which is too large to pass obstructs the ureter, which prevents the kidney from draining urine into the bladder.
Yep. Kidney stones are scary as hell, I was pissing myself in terror before realizing it was a relief.
Oh, cancer is an evolutionary compromise of multi-cellular life? Yeah, right. It's a product of mutation, but it runs counter to reproductive fitness, and it's not like our bodies don't have immune systems which reject other foreign (differently mutated) cells, so, Checkmate, moron.
If cancer is so damn inherent in the very fabric of complex life then we probably wouldn't find any species on the planet that doesn't get cancer... Like Naked Mole Rats. Some studies I've seen suggest cancer has less to do with an evolution-wide compromise, and instead may have something to do with the fact we have live young -- Which isn't intrinsic to complex life. Compared to labor and live delivery this seems a bit of a back-asswards path; Probably a product of having too big of a brain to be as overcome with instinctual drives as is required for protecting a nest, but not a big enough brain to build artificial incubators with automated laser defense systems. Well, that and maybe an advantage to survive in colder climates, or migrate during gestation. Then again isn't there eggs in Antarctica -- Penguins, eh?
So, no. Cancer exists because our immune system isn't picky enough, you dolt. Just like we use gene therapy to cure extreme allergy "bubble boy" types when they're young, we'll likely eventually be able to fix up our immune system with a way to sick our own white blood cells on cancer, or cause our bodies to produce anti-cancer sugar in our cellular matrix like the naked mole-rats do.
So, yeah, it seems this fool is just ignorant of the very field they're researching. That's what happens when you over-specialize: You're likely to think your own studies are so damn important that you develop a penchant for making grandiose claims that seem moronic to everyone else even remotely in the know. When combined with a largely ignorant populace (who specialized in other fields) it's a breeding ground for this sort of stupidity.
More hippy FUD. "....according to the National Cancer Institute and other health agencies, there's no sound scientific evidence that any of the artificial sweeteners approved for use in the U.S. cause cancer or other serious health problems."
Ah, well, there's no scientific evidence that an extremely small china teapot doesn't orbit the sun between here and Mars. I guess it must exist. Oh! There's no scientific evidence that invisible intangible unicorns shit dreams into the heads of sleeping people. Guess that's what dreams are made of: Mystical horse shit.
Now, here's the thing: If you want to sell me something and claim it's not harmful and good for me, then I need evidence for that shit. The burden of proof is on the claimant, fool. I agree it's bullshit to claim causal relationships where none exist, however, realize that the claim it's safe to eat hasn't been sufficiently proven for some people -- Especially those with insulin issues, where replacing sugars with artificial sweeteners can indeed be harmful. If it claims to be a sugar substitute but isn't, then I'm not buying their claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, that's what the NSA is for. See, they don't build one file on every citizen. That's not how search engines work. The files are created from the data they have if ever they "like you" for a crime, or dislike your political stance. Ask the anti-war, women's rights, or civil rights activists about the counter intelligence program trying to silence them. Land of the Free -- So long as you choose to think how we say.
Yes. What's your point? Since they were created we've known that's what the FBI is up to.
The DHS is the enforcement arm of the "national security" secret police, so the FBI is moving up in the world. The DHS is already showing up a ball games, I wouldn't be surprised if they start replacing local cops -- Or, those offices just get re-branded, they're already being militarized. Anything to don the prestigious cloak of national secrecy.
Kind of makes the NSA redundant though, eh? Nothing to worry about though, eh? They're not checking for our "papers, please", they're just building dossiers on everyone of us just in case.
Voting works perfectly well
In the absence of Gerrymandering, perhaps it might work sometimes -- depending on who counts the votes, how susceptible they are to manipulation by the powers that be (Oh goodie! digital votes, why not ask the NSA directly who should win?), how un-tainted the media is, etc. You're silly for using the term "perfectly". Voting hasn't ever worked perfectly well, or even reasonably well.
The congress critters are in someone's pocket, and it's not we the people, those that aren't compromised are marginalized by the media, there's just too much evidence to ignore that. Really, if you look to see the root of any great political change it comes from public outrage, not election day votes. Go be an activist. Oh, right, they know how to handle those folks too
The point of the rubber sheet analogy is to discuss the SHAPE of the surface which is a stand in for forces of gravitation.
As such, even if following the analogy you shouldn't use an actual rubber sheet because it will be distorted by the marble itself.
Will that be perfect? Probably not but will be less of a failure then this spandex idea.
Failure? Really? Sure you can compensate somewhat in the shape of the hard surface to make the orbit more like reality, but spandex is dynamic and a simple elegant demonstration. Note: The fact that "orbiting" marbles deform "space-time" rubbers allows them to have smaller orbiting bodies too, like a moon.
So, basically the space-time rubber-sheet comparison is like a car analogy? You don't have to know much of what's under the hood to get started, and it can be a vehicle of understanding between point A and B, but when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of things, it starts to break down.
I think the booth babes will disappear when they are no longer profitable and when this fact is clear to the companies that currently hire them.
You thought wrong. Both women and men like looking at women's hips and breasts. Youth and beauty are signals for fertility. Advertising leverages this innate human response to associate products with desirability. When you've undone millions of years of instinctual evolution and sexual selection pressure, there won't be any "booth babes", because there won't be any damn booths.
Why not eliminate the engine completely? Just aim in the direction of the destination, detonate, and surf the pressure wave.
With the engine-less car you can't take it with you, but if you don't make it on the first shot you won't be around to care.
Then effort doesn't go into 'engines' - It goes into energy storage solutions that have the weight / energy capacity of gasoline.
Why ignore the inefficiency of internal combustion? Are you seriously saying that putting effort into more efficient motors is advancing energy storage solutions? That sounds imbecilic to me.
Achieving equivalent energy density isn't required if more efficient motors and/or transmission methods are discovered and/or utilized. You're not seriously putting forth that, say, mag-lev trains, or the hyper-loop are applications of "energy storage solutions with the weight / energy capacity of gasoline", are you? Energy density would already be high enough for a hybrid solutions whereby inductive charging supplements existing electric energy storage -- The effort here is going into "energy storage with the weight / energy capacity of gasoline"? No. Not unless you conflate storage with transmission. Take a look next to damn near any road you're driving on for the power line.
Also, burning things should be avoided, not just "fossil fuel". However, better gasoline engines while transitioning to other fuels still helps -- no need for a false dichotomy. Next time don't be absolutists. It makes you both sound like morons.
Worst case scenario, we need to pursue solutions which involve leaving the planet entirely if it is rendered uninhabitable for a period long enough to exterminate us.
What if I told you: That's not how survival works. One does not simply walk into outer space due to impending doom; You strike out in multiple directions long before nature's empire strikes back. Afterwards you morn the loss of Ceres Station 9, Mars One, or Earth, etc. and when the great disturbance in the forces of nature have passed it's safe for the return of the kings, or knights, peasants, etc. Developers begin assuming direct control and estimate reoccurrence to determine if they rebuild it, so they will come or instead boldly go where no one has gone before.
In other words: You can lead a horse to water but they have to swim for themselves. Spreading humanity across the universe to explore under pain of death from hypothetical disaster won't work. Just look at the fools rebuilding New Orleans instead of abandoning ship and deeming it a wildlife habitat. It's the same coin, but different sides as the folks opposing manned space exploration funding. Why you're so resistant to just go -- save yourself -- from extinction realizing you can't take it all with you is beyond me. That's why, despite the poor bastards being doomed, we have to cheer Mars One folks as pioneers and champions of the world -- even if they leverage reality TV gimmicks to pull it off, it can't be helped.
IMO, although a moon base is too close for comfort to Earth to escape a gamma death ray or solar flare (esp. during a the magnetic pole flip -- which we're 500,000 years over-due for, BTW), all your base needs is to begin developing the tech for survival outside the magnetosphere -- The surface is hard, but you can dig it and live like mole people or just have the habitat be buried alive in regolith. It's more within reach than Mars.
That humans have the right stuff for space programs and yet wasted four decades without leaving the nest is a much more advanced and persistent threat to the survival than any other singular threat of extinction, including super-volcanoes. If the magnetosphere flips you off during a perfect storm of solar flares, or another disaster extincts you: You have no one to blame but yourselves. You had your chance to survive, but did not make your time count. No matter how many prime directives embedded in your culture, you just wouldn't get your ass to Mars.
Making it even worse, different languages are not only designed to solve different technical problems, but they are designed to solve different HR problems.
I agree. That does make them worse. C++ wouldn't be where it is today if it didn't incorporate C -- This is both a good and a horrible thing to realize if you look at the state of things.
However, the "different language for different people" problem is one created by humans. You see, C is the way it is because it tries to minimally abstract the operations common to Von Neumann machine architecture. Nearly all modern languages fail in two respects: They are either too abstract and dynamic or too concrete. Humans therefore select a language matching the problem space's requirement, and simply ignore the deeper problem.
The problem is in the encoding of the language itself: The preconceived paradigms / use cases. Take JavaScript for example. It's dynamic variables and prototype design create huge problems for performance, but it was created to be a "glue" between web pages and Java, so performance wasn't a design goal. Java did a lot of things right language wise, but its runtime is too bloated because the use case was assumed to be anything: Instead of an applet being an embedded isolated Java program with only resources its containing browser gave it they included the whole kitchen sink and the massive exploit surface thereof. Take C for example: It has a quite foolish function stack based assumption whereas heap based functions can easily be coroutines and have closures. However, given the limitations of older hardware it was a good assumption of the use case. It's the difference between a full featured garbage collector (Lisp) and a mark/release garbage collector (C) -- We're garbage collecting function call instances.
Many humans are so arrogant or ignorant that they proclaim the language domain to be what makes or breaks a language, meanwhile completely ignoring that over the years the x86 chipset has been modified to better optimize for C's function-stack paradigm, see the ENTER and LEAVE opcodes for instance. ARM even has these restrictions. This makes some languages perform terribly compared to others because some follow the same assumed use case as the hardware and some languages do not. For instance, one of my toy languages doesn't use ENTER and LEAVE since it operates in an OS that isolates stack variables and parameters from the function return pointers, and thus a near identical batch of code in C runs many times faster. So, you must consider the extreme effect the hardware domain has on the language domain, and vise versa.
Failure to completely embrace the a use case (in the name of being "general purpose" hardware, yeah right) leads to retardation of progress in many respects: Notably the majority of exploit vectors is due to the moronic decision to maintain a single stack for instruction pointers and data. This is reinforced by hardware in the ENTER and LEAVE instructions themselves. You see, the instruction pointer can not be directly manipulated, the humans at least got that part right, but then they failed to create a separate dedicated return instruction pointer stack. Granted the instruction pointer is isolated not for security's sake, but you can see why it's foolish to embrace a function-stack approach and not also isolate the return pointers thereof from the parameter data.
Hardware even dictates the type of OS design that is practical: A single bit of execution privilege ring (Kernel or User) on ARM means it will be host to monolithic kernels due to their hardware supported security offerings. On x86 I have 2 bits (4 rings) thus can create microkernels and isolate plugins from user processes too: (Kernel, Driver, User, Plugin). These can run on ARM, but I sacrifice my guarantees in many respects -- Treating drivers, users, and plug-ins as all user mode processes using memory for isolation can create unnecessary complications and performance penalties. The po
I completely agree.
Automakers, why waste time, effort and money re-engineering around Android and other OSs?
Humans frequently focus on a single interval of time, but these do not exist in reality. Sometimes a technology will have several milestones or prerequisites prior to adoption; Some along the path are more useful than others, but the aim is to provide at least some usefulness at each juncture. Allow me to expand your mind briefly by increasing your mental interval of consideration: Self Driving Cars.
Fast, Cheap, and Good.
Pick two.
IT WAS CHEAP AND good.
Indeed.
Pretty shitty compared to damn near any infrared setup, but theirs doesn't require goggles.
It's not meant to be incompletely unhackable. Think of it as adding another factor of authentication. So, with three factor authentication there will be something you know (your password), something you have (your ID card / token), and something you are (a nerd). This adds a fourth factor: Something you did (forgot what that was and called tech support).
The genius of this system is that it relies on the existing proven security of the questions over-seas help desk personnel usually ask you like: How long has it been since you logged in? What's your favorite sports team? What kind of accent is that? What's your mother's maiden name? What are you wearing? Etc.
The summary is light on any details, so here:
The distinctive new system opens the way for testing a concept behind general relativity known as the equivalence principle, which relates two different conceptions of mass. An object's inertial mass quantifies how it resists pushing or pulling: It's easier to start a stroller rolling than a car because the stroller has less inertial mass. A thing's gravitational mass determines how much a gravitational field pulls on it: A barbell is heavier than a feather because it has more gravitational mass.
The simplest version of the equivalence principle says inertial mass and gravitational mass are equal. It explains why ordinary objects like baseballs and bricks fall to Earth at the same rate regardless of their mass—as legend claims Galileo showed by dropping heavier and lighter balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The strong equivalence principle takes things an important step further. According to Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, energy equals mass. So an object or system's mass can be generated by the energy in the gravitational fields within the system itself. The strong equivalence principle states that even if one includes mass generated through such "self-gravitation," gravitational and inertial mass are still equal. ...
By tracking the system's evolution, Ransom and colleagues should be able to tell whether either the inner white dwarf or the pulsar falls faster toward the outer white dwarf and test strong equivalence about 100 times as precisely as before, Damour says.
"Gravitational Field"... space-time curvature "field"? Uhm, "gravitational mass" vs "inertial mass" equivalence... "explains why" o_O? Shh! The astrophysicists are over. Don't mention the Higgs!
In all seriousness, we know damn well Einstein's equations are simply better approximations / explanations than Newton's approximations are -- It's only a matter of time before we prove them "wrong" (but still damn good and useful approximations, like Newton's) -- We just need some elusive experimental evidence to prove it, and this could be it due to the large gravitational coefficients and a steady measurement scale provided in the pulsar. That is, unless Einstein's approximation turns out to be more accurate than our observations of this system. It shouldn't be any more of a "revolution", as TFA states, if the observations prove to be in violation of the equations: We should be trying to find better equations anyway thanks to that whole Standard Model thing, and we are. Physics seems to goes through these periods where a bunch of new theories explain various things to a precision, the precision is surpassed in observations, and then someone like Newton, Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, etc. comes along and presents elegant / unifying equations to explain the disparate pieces better. Looks like we're still in the middle of the very important prove old-theories "wrong" (read: inaccurate, conflicting with some observations) and scratch our head over tests for new hypotheses to fit more accurate measurements stage.
but if you fixed every other problem you would start to get cancer at some point in their lifespan
I'm not sure you're following along. If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer. A mutation can occur, sure, but if the mutant cells that would form a cancer by replicating unchecked are killed by your body before they can do so, then yes, you can actually never get cancer. If the DNA replication itself had a bit more CRC checking going on -- possibly even by the surrounding cells themselves, then the cancer can't form. You want to equate cancer to individual cells being mutants in a specific way, but that's not what cancer is. It's a bit more persistent than a single cell division and death. Those do happen by the way, and we don't call them cancer.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned.
Please explain how natural selection cares not about those born as my little brother to a 35 year old mother and a 45 year old father. So, are you saying that longevity and quantity of offspring have nothing to do with breeding. Are you seriously presenting that once you hit 25 or so evolution doesn't care about how long you can viably produce children for? And for the record, you idiot, evolution doesn't care about fucking one bit. Evolution cares about the quantity an SURVIVABILITY of OFFSPRING -- I might point out that care and raising of offspring extends well beyond the act of a good screw. If you seriously believe that evolution doesn't care about your body after you've popped a kid out, then you're a fucking moron, sorry, you are.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned. Natural selection doesn't care one bit about what happens to you after you procreate (the male preying mantis is a perfect example of this)
Hey, dipshit. The mutation of cells replicating in the body has fuck all to do with the reproductive cell mutations that evolution is concerned with. What a nitwit.
The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.
Slaves being considered 3/5ths of a man was not against the law. Jim Crow was legal. The laws are to be assumed incorrect and wrong unless proven otherwise. That's why jurry nullification exists, it's why citizens are assumed innocent unless proven guilty -- Because the prosecuters, police, accusers, judges, etc. governmental and legal systems are assumed wrong by default.
Where the letter of the law is held above the spirit of the law you will discover tyranny, despotism and oppression; Soon a new amendment will be born to correct this disparity, if not only a procession of grave actions is left to the citizens. Emergency session of congress for a vote of no confidence, Impeachment and replacement of heads of military and state, etc.
The technicalities of law are the sources of all its evils.
If there was an uprising of people inside the USA against the government and it's policies, they would be deemed terrorists and all killed or imprisoned.
You need to read up on some history of protests which occurred in the U.S. during the Viet Nam war. Mass protests DID happen, and the government ( Johnson was president at the time ) DID NOT kill or imprison them all. Rather, the government changed its policies with respect to Viet Nam.
Just because you are a spineless pessimist doesn't mean all US citizens are, and you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT speak for anyone but yourself with your cowardly prognostications.
What a great copy-paste job you did there shill. Hey, what the fuck is COINTELPRO? It's government counter intelligence program that seeks to silence anti-war activism, women's rights activism, and civil rights activism, and others they deem "radicals" -- You know, like using PRISM to expose porn habits, etc. That evil shit is still going on you dolt. Get real you moronic shill.
Wait, so your solution to young managers not having experience is to delay them getting experience until they're older? How does that solve anything apart from pissing on young people?
Well, it goes like this: The older folks who are being discriminated against in favour of the young wheel-re-inventing over-time-seeking no-family-life having folks for the positions of programmers, or working the assembly line, etc. general activity of actually doing the (with an unfortunate tendency towards working harder instead of smarter) should be promoted to team-leaders to pass their experience to the green-horn rookies; And as these age a bit more, move them up into management positions where their knowledge of the actual processes involved and possible physical or time-limited incapability to do the more demanding grunt work makes them perfect candidates for managerial positions. Meanwhile freeing up lower positions for the new crew who may have new ideas about how things should be done and time to test the might-be-crazy-enough-to-work processes so that they can move up in rank and the company can benefit as a whole.
That's how it solves many problems that stem from managers not knowing what the job really entails and thus not fighting the right fights or not making informed decisions, meanwhile not requiring the young people to be pissed on any more than any of the other low-men on the totem pole were when they were that same age/experience level. You know, requiring some real experience with the management of the company rather than just applying some largely inapplicable and generalized tripe that business schools trick young dip-shits into paying for courses about? This way they could study something actually productive and fulfilling instead of brown-nosery and social justice warring imbecility.
Protip: If you want to learn the fundamentals of business management -- architecture of information flow and decision making thereupon -- you need to take a course in Cybernetics instead of business. You see, the experience sought is not in the management position itself, it's experience with the processes beneath that upper position which is beneficial to the managerial position thereof. If you live in the Information Age and go against the nature of information theory, and thus against the very laws of the universe itself, you're going to have a bad time, mkay?
everyone who gives a shit and thinks this is news worthy raise your hand..
Yep. I don't have any stock in Amazon or its competitors. It's about as tech related as Steve Jobs' health or lack thereof. I mean, it would be as relevant to tech news as, say, if Steve Ballmer was possibly Microsoft, or if Google CEOs were saying terrifying things about privacy. Absolutely no consequence whatsoever. I mean really. Next thing you know they'll be listing news about video games I don't play or, alternate operating systems I don't use, or political rights online I haven't had since the 80's.
I'm strictly opposed to this continuing trend of presenting news only a small segment of nerds gives a shit about. If this is what Slashdot is cumming to then count me out. If it doesn't interest everyone, it shouldn't be news for anyone!
They sure can be fatal. I would have died from a kidney stone if it weren't for modern medical technology. A stone which is too large to pass obstructs the ureter, which prevents the kidney from draining urine into the bladder.
Yep. Kidney stones are scary as hell, I was pissing myself in terror before realizing it was a relief.
Oh, cancer is an evolutionary compromise of multi-cellular life? Yeah, right. It's a product of mutation, but it runs counter to reproductive fitness, and it's not like our bodies don't have immune systems which reject other foreign (differently mutated) cells, so, Checkmate, moron.
If cancer is so damn inherent in the very fabric of complex life then we probably wouldn't find any species on the planet that doesn't get cancer... Like Naked Mole Rats. Some studies I've seen suggest cancer has less to do with an evolution-wide compromise, and instead may have something to do with the fact we have live young -- Which isn't intrinsic to complex life. Compared to labor and live delivery this seems a bit of a back-asswards path; Probably a product of having too big of a brain to be as overcome with instinctual drives as is required for protecting a nest, but not a big enough brain to build artificial incubators with automated laser defense systems. Well, that and maybe an advantage to survive in colder climates, or migrate during gestation. Then again isn't there eggs in Antarctica -- Penguins, eh?
So, no. Cancer exists because our immune system isn't picky enough, you dolt. Just like we use gene therapy to cure extreme allergy "bubble boy" types when they're young, we'll likely eventually be able to fix up our immune system with a way to sick our own white blood cells on cancer, or cause our bodies to produce anti-cancer sugar in our cellular matrix like the naked mole-rats do.
So, yeah, it seems this fool is just ignorant of the very field they're researching. That's what happens when you over-specialize: You're likely to think your own studies are so damn important that you develop a penchant for making grandiose claims that seem moronic to everyone else even remotely in the know. When combined with a largely ignorant populace (who specialized in other fields) it's a breeding ground for this sort of stupidity.
More hippy FUD.
"....according to the National Cancer Institute and other health agencies, there's no sound scientific evidence that any of the artificial sweeteners approved for use in the U.S. cause cancer or other serious health problems."
Ah, well, there's no scientific evidence that an extremely small china teapot doesn't orbit the sun between here and Mars. I guess it must exist. Oh! There's no scientific evidence that invisible intangible unicorns shit dreams into the heads of sleeping people. Guess that's what dreams are made of: Mystical horse shit.
Now, here's the thing: If you want to sell me something and claim it's not harmful and good for me, then I need evidence for that shit. The burden of proof is on the claimant, fool. I agree it's bullshit to claim causal relationships where none exist, however, realize that the claim it's safe to eat hasn't been sufficiently proven for some people -- Especially those with insulin issues, where replacing sugars with artificial sweeteners can indeed be harmful. If it claims to be a sugar substitute but isn't, then I'm not buying their claims.