Yes, well, Trump attempts to dictate "Thou shalt not purchase from company XYZ". No proof, just an assertion that they are not trustworthy. Because the country caught intercepting Cisco shipments and introducing backdoors into them is soooo trustworthy.
He's being an arrogant ass, continuing the usual foreign policy of the American government. Individuals Americans may be nice, but the US government is full of itself (and has been for decades, nothing to do with the current president).
Occasional Cortex may be cuter than Bernie, but that doesn't make socialism work any better. Just like it's close se cousin, communism, the ideas sound great right up until the smash head first into reality. Human nature does not work that way.
In Bernie's case, though, he can at least debate and defend his ideas. Have you ever heard AOC trying to answer real questions? Not puff pieces where she gets to use answers written by someone else, but questions that reveal what she, herself, actually knows?
The woman is an idiot. She's a puppet, playing a role. Her handlers mostly manage to keep her out of situations where she can screw up the script, but it's obvious if you're paying attention.
1. So you need to be close to the black hole. Except for the very largest black holes, the tidal forces will rip you apart. See the answer to problem 3 in this exercise: solar mass black hole, distance roughly 30 times the radius, tidal forces on a human-sized object of 50,000g. Good luck with that.
2. Aside from that, they are relying on a "slingshot" effect for the laser beam. But the photons are already travelling at light speed, so they cannot speed up. They energy increase will go into frequency: you'll be transforming light into hard gamma radiation. Enough energy to accelerate you to relativistic speeds is more likely to simply vaporize your ship.
3. If you survive the tidal forces and the radiation and actually get to relativistic speeds, you're going to need to target another black hole to slow down, by reversing the whole process.
4. Meanwhile, you still have to travel interstellar distances by some other means, to get to and from the black holes.
This isn't science. It isn't even science fiction. Heck, I expect more realism in bad space opera.
I've just started listening. As a fan of Tangerine Dream, I have to say, this is pretty good stuff. I think it will be great as background music for things like programming.
I moved to OwnCloud when Dropbox screwed up their Linux support last Fall.
Owncloud is not difficult to set up on your own server. Tedious, maybe, but not difficult. The worst of it is that you will probably need a dynamic DNS solution. Then you have your data on your own hardware - not someone else's. Combine with a sensible backup plan, and you're all set.
Typical idiotic AC post, but I'll answer anyway. Of course Germany overproduces power - in the summer, on sunny days. Sun produces solar power, news at 11:00.
The problem comes on cloudy days in January, when Germany is importing power from all over Europe to power their industry. Nuclear in France? Check. Coal in Eastern Europe? Check.
Dunno where you get the idea that Germany makes money doing this, because they don't. There's a reason that German household power prices are around $0.30 / kwh. What do you pay?
I used to live in New Mexico. Lovely place, but not terribly wealthy, which makes me wonder when I see legislation like this. If you read it, much of the legislation is about handing out money to various parties: incentives, but also reparations to plants and workers that will have to close. Bet: these handouts will be exploited to suck on the public teat.
That aside, here's the core message:
"...'renewable energy resource' means electric or useful thermal energy:
solar, wind and geothermal
hydropower
fuel cells that do not use fossil fuels to create electricity
biomass resource [n.b. this includes timber up to 8 inches in diameter]
landfill gas and anaerobically digested waste biomass
...does not include electric energy generated by use of fossil fuel or nuclear energy"
So it's the usual greenie idiocy: spend other people's money on a pipe dream. Solar, of course, would be great in the high desert - except for the minor little problem that the sun doesn't shine at night. None of the named technologies can possibly produce enough power 24/7, except possibly razing and burning the forests.
They could take a lesson from parts of Australia or Germany that have already made the same damned mistake: They wind up giving their solar power away, when they have too much of it. At night, or when it's cloudy, they have to import power, sometimes at outrageous prices.
Look, it's entirely possible that certain Russian groups are having fun screwing with the US. I mean, the US has mucked around in other people's countries for decades, so why not?
That said, it's pretty stupid to blame the Russians for the current, divisive politics in the US. The locals (I'm in Europe, so I'm not involved here)...the locals are doing a bang-up job all by themselves. Decades ago, conservatives didn't much approve of liberal opinions. Downright Puritan, sometimes. Then came the 60's and 70's, and the progressive movement was born and grew. Since roughly the 80's, the progressives have defined whole new levels of intolerance. If you disagree with them, you are not only wrong, you are evil. It's the reaction to this intolerance, not any sort of Russian hacking, that got Trump elected.
The progressives just cannot imagine that half of the country actually disagrees with them. It's so much easier to find some external enemy to blame - it's not that the progs are wrong, or that they've alienated half the country - it's those damned Ruskies.
A few years ago, I thought that the growing backlash might result in some self-examination and a grudging-but-peaceful retreat from this intolerance. Sadly, the idea that the progressives themselves have become the intolerant ones - that differing opinions can legitimately exist - this seems to be beyond their comprehension. Which means that the way forward is likely to be increasingly vicious and even violent.
It ain't the Russians driving this, it's the progressive agenda, and the intolerant people who support it.
The problem is: you are defining a class, it's just hidden from you. Lambdas in Java look like functional programming, but it's only a syntactical illusion. Java is not functional; the closest it comes is the pale shadow you see in reflection.
Lambdas are convenient, but IMHO fundamentally evil.
Grumpy old man here, but a Java developer. Java is not, and never will be a functional language. Nonetheless, Java 8 just had to introduce lambda expressions, so that wannabes could kinda, sorta pretend that Java was functional. The main effect of lambdas, however, is to hide data types, so that weak developers don't actually know what interfaces and data types they are using.
So, doubling down on stupid, they introduce "var", so those weak developers really don't have to know what types they're using. Java will figure it out, or you can play pinball till it works.
Project Jigsaw, was it really necessary? Maybe, but I'm not entirely convinced. Certainly, the new module system is a PITA, since you now have to deal with both module-paths and class-paths, plus of course getting the permissions right.
Now, I know that Java is used for a lot of backend stuff, but JavaFX finally made Java actually really good at GUIs. Swing was a buggy mess that no one seemed to want to fix, but JavaFX got a lot of things really right. So, of course, Java 11 removed JavaFX from the core, making it a PITA precisely because of the module system introduced in Java 9.
- - - - -
Here's the important bit: Nowadays, I am a college professor, and I am faced with a problem: Students new to programming can no longer start with a current version of Java - the changes in Java 9/10/11 have made things just too complex for new users. I have rolled back to Java 8 for the moment. I have spoken with a number of other college level Java instructors, all of whom feel the same way.
The long term question will be: what language do we teach in our programming courses? It is entirely possible that we will move to a different language.
When your language is no longer being taught in schools, well, that's the beginning of the end.
In all fairness, this should have nothing to do with the Internet giants. Given the massive degree of internationalization today, *all* companies should be taxed where they generate their revenue, rather than allowing stupid games with tax havens.
That said, what France is doing is borderline corrupt: targetting specific companies that (they think) represent untapped sources of sweet, sweet tax money. France is basically broke, attempts to further tax the populace led to the yellow-vests, and cutting bureaucracy or public services is politically impossible. They need more bread and circuses to stave off the collapse...
I use PIA as well, and I am pretty happy with the service. It's generally fast, it's easy to pick an end-point in whatever country you want to be in. They do get blacklisted by some organizations (example: BBC), but that's life.
The only thing I don't like is that PIA is US-based, land of secret courts and secret warrants.
But then, I'm not doing anything illegal, I just don't particularly want my ISP nosing around in my browsing, and sometimes I want to access services that are geo-blocked for no good reason (like US sites that don't understand the GDPR). For all that, PIA is good...
A DIY VPN in not really a solution, at least, not beyond the trivial case of dialing in to your home server. If you want an encrypted connection with an exit point in country X, are you going to buy and pay for a server in country X? What about country Y? How are you going to pay for and maintain those exit points anonymously? And anyway, if only you and maybe a few friends/family are using it, traffic analysis can make the VPN encryption pretty much useless.
The point of a commercial VPN service is not only the encryption, but also the anonymity that occurs when your traffic is mixed with thousands of other users.
Maybe we never had a chance, but - as techies - we failed to keep the Internet out of the hands of national governments.
Once, some of us had hopes that the scope and reach of the Internet would weaken national governments, especially the totalitarian ones. Instead, even the (theoretically) democratic governments of the West are getting in on the censorship and restriction games.
The proponents of "green" energy always point to the early wins. There are a lot of easy wins early on in the process, when most energy still comes from nuclear, coal, or whatever. Those existing plants can adjust their output to allow for the massive fluctuations of solar and wind generation, as long as the solar/wind is a minor part of the grid.
Things change when solar/wind become a large part of the generation capacity. On sunny summer days, Germany doesn't know what to do with all it's solar energy, and they've been know to pay other countries to take it. In bad weather, they import energy. Renewable energy on the massive scale Germany has implemented It only works, because they can leech off the capabilities of the countries around them. Germany's energy looks cleaner, because someone else is burning extra coal. If Germany is really does close their nuclear plants, the situation will get massively worse.
Unless large scale energy storage is solved, renewable energy will remain limited in its potential. In addition, we will always need something to handle baseline load, for which nuclear remains the greenest and safest option.
Consider a small, isolated community: If someone acts like a jackass, they will be socially shunned. If they persist in acting like a jackass, someone bigger and meaner will take them out behind the shed and "learn 'em". If they still persist, they will ultimately be run out of town.
In more civilized climes, the community hands over some of this responsibility to the government. There are laws about stalking harrassment, and the like. Ultimately, the punishments aren't all that different.
The problem in public, online communities is the lack of hard-and-fast identity, so that punishments can be applied. Sure, an account gets banned - but the person just makes another account. There's no "shed", and no real way to run the perp out of town. Moderation becomes nothing but a gigantic game of whac-a-mole - it's almost completely pointless.
It seems to me that part of the solution is to regain those small communities, by making online communities mostly private. Participants have to be invited; which means that they can easily be permanently disinvited. Just creating a new account won't garner an invitation to join.
Taking Facebook as the example (since it's the subject of TFA): Why should any profile be open to public comments? Let a profile show enough information for people to find you. But any interaction - posting or whatever - should require an explicit invitation. No invite for the asshat, and the person will never know they exist. And if you're a member of a group where people are saying bad things? Leave, problem solved.
If some asshat wants to post unpleasant stuff, they are absolutely free to do so - on their own profile, where only the people they invite will ever see it. It won't bother anyone else. But, but...what if they post something I don't like? Waaah!
- Fake news? Unpopular opinions? Let the invite-only groups entertain themselves. It's no one's business, and any intervention is really just censorship. Stupid people exist, and who knows, maybe we're actually the stupid ones. Maybe it really is turtles all the way down.
- Illegal material? Call the police, that's why they exist. Don't moderate - that's evidence tampering. Do what the police request, whether that's deleting the material, or leaving it up as evidence.
While other drugs may be an issue, the elephant in the room is agriculture. For vegetable, big ag uses all sort of pesticides and fertilizers that wind up polluting the water. For animals, they use antibiotics.
The antibiotics are not even meant to preserve animal health, although that's a nice side effect. Weirdly, animals on antibiotics gain weight more quickly, which is (afaik) the real motivation. But these antibiotics wind up in the waste, and from there in the runoff and in the rivers.
What we need is simple: an absolute prohibition on medicating animals that are not sick. Period.
p.s. It's a bit off-topic here, but: the prices for the antibiotics have to be cheap, for this to work economically. The exact same antibiotics for people are generally massively higher. An interesting comment on big pharma.
I have to wonder about programs that are supposed to get ordinary teachers to teach CS. I expect many of us had teachers (especially in primary school) who were teaching stuff they personally did not like or understand. Seems to me that's the likely result here: take someone who doesn't really like CS, and doesn't really understand it either - and have them try to teach it. Seems like a great way to turn students off.
Anyone have practical experience with these programs, who can comment?
In Space: 1999 it was the moon that was blasting around the universion. As sci-fi shows went, the acting and plots were ok, but I could never get over the utter stupidity of the premise. No, you are not going to drive around the universe on a planet.
On the Earth, just think what happens to the oceans when you accelerate. *slosh*
I don't know anything about the system, but what kind of statement is this, from Lewis (the primary person interviewed):
"Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised."
That's true of any security protocoll I can imagine. Anyway, "wire the thing in the wrong place"? This is the way a supposed security professional describes software vulnerabilities?
Then Matthew Green (the other person interviewed) says: "At this point I think the only appropriate way to evaluate it is through a professional evaluation by someone trained in this sort of advanced cryptography." Well, as it happens, even TFA states "the system has undergone three audits by auditing giant KPMG - among them an audit of the end-to-end encryption". So what problem is he pointing out again?
In addition the code is available to anyone who wants it, and there's now a public penetration test, which lots of people are signing up for. Seems like they're doing everything right. So back to Lewis, who says "Even if you sat down and read every line and determined everything was good, the code still wouldn’t pass the bar for being good code." Um...so good code is not good? Huh?
Again, I know nothing about the voting system being discussed - maybe it's good, maybe it's not. But TFA is just crap, and we have two security researchers who either don't know what they're talking about, or else they have some personal agenda in play.
It seems to me that this is yet another reason to get rid of "proof of work" and go to "proof of stake". With proof of stake, you still have a possible 51% attack, but you have no motivation to do so. If some group owns 51% of a currency, and starts stealing, they will tank the value of their own stake.
Being a teacher, this kind of thing is important to me. And this article irritates me, because I think they get things exactly backwards. The article specifically examines the performance of two groups of students: white/asian vs. black/latino/native-american. The latter group is implicitly assumed to be disadvantaged by the fact that their average, group intelligence is lower than the first group. The hypothesis being that, if your teacher thinks you're less intelligent, you will do more poorly in class that you should.
Interestingly: the article states that there was no discernable grouping amongst the teachers. Teachers and their beliefs were evenly distributed across all ethnicities, genders, ages, etc.. So this isn't a claim of racism or genderism, but simply a claim that teachers with particular views are poorer teachers. This is measured by the fact that their students received poorer grades.
I think this is the critical flaw in the study: Those grades are assigned by the teachers themselves. There is no objective measure of student capability. Teachers with "tough" courses will, on average, give out lower grades. And lower still to the less capable students.
I teach introductory courses - filter courses - at my university. An essential part of my job is to fail students who are unlikely be unable to complete the course of study. Hence, I give lower grades than instructors in other courses later in the program, after the incapable students have been eliminated. I've been doing this a long time, and I have come to the view that students either have certain aptitudes, or they don't. I submit that I have come to this "fixed mindset" view by observation: teaching thousands of students, failing those who cannot develop the necessary skills, and passing those who can. My role as a teacher is precisely that: to help them develop skills. If they are incapable of doing so despite my best efforts? Then they are in the wrong program of study.
In other words, it's not a "fixed mindset" that causes an instructor to hand out poor grades, but the other way around: someone who teaches teaches tough courses will come to recognize that student aptitudes are largely inherent. There are exceptions: I've seen talented students fail through laziness, and marginal students get through with sheer grit and determination. Those exceptions, by their very rarity, serve to underscore the general pattern.
Finally, one must comment on the student evaluations. Students in courses that handed out better grades were more likely to have liked the course. That's not a surprise, that comes close to a law of nature. However, the study misses a great opportunity here. The authors admit that my theory (about tough courses being the root cause) might be true:
"It is possible that faculty who endorse fixed mindset beliefs create more demanding coursesâ"requiring students to spend more time studying and preparing for their course. If this is true, then differences in studentsâ(TM) performance and psychological experiences might be explained by the demands of these courses (instead of professorsâ(TM) mindset beliefs)."
One of the questions in student evaluations ("how much time did this course require?") would have been a good indication of course difficulty. Unfortunately, the study does not seem to have tested this hypothesis, or at least, the paper makes no mention of it. A cynic might wonder if they did do the analysis, but perhaps it didn't support the desired results. After all: "tough courses lead to lower grades" would hardly be a conclusion worthy of publication.
There they go again: politicians buying votes with other people's money.
If they have a genuine interest in protecting people's data, all they need is to copy the GDPR. It's one of the few truly good things to come out of the EU parliament: companies must have your explicit permission in order to collect and use your data.
But that's not what this proposal in California is about. This is about sounding good, winning political brownie points by promising to hand out someone else's money.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, well, Trump attempts to dictate "Thou shalt not purchase from company XYZ". No proof, just an assertion that they are not trustworthy. Because the country caught intercepting Cisco shipments and introducing backdoors into them is soooo trustworthy.
He's being an arrogant ass, continuing the usual foreign policy of the American government. Individuals Americans may be nice, but the US government is full of itself (and has been for decades, nothing to do with the current president).
Occasional Cortex may be cuter than Bernie, but that doesn't make socialism work any better. Just like it's close se cousin, communism, the ideas sound great right up until the smash head first into reality. Human nature does not work that way.
In Bernie's case, though, he can at least debate and defend his ideas. Have you ever heard AOC trying to answer real questions? Not puff pieces where she gets to use answers written by someone else, but questions that reveal what she, herself, actually knows?
The woman is an idiot. She's a puppet, playing a role. Her handlers mostly manage to keep her out of situations where she can screw up the script, but it's obvious if you're paying attention.
n/t
Just a few, teeny tiny problems:
1. So you need to be close to the black hole. Except for the very largest black holes, the tidal forces will rip you apart. See the answer to problem 3 in this exercise: solar mass black hole, distance roughly 30 times the radius, tidal forces on a human-sized object of 50,000g. Good luck with that.
2. Aside from that, they are relying on a "slingshot" effect for the laser beam. But the photons are already travelling at light speed, so they cannot speed up. They energy increase will go into frequency: you'll be transforming light into hard gamma radiation. Enough energy to accelerate you to relativistic speeds is more likely to simply vaporize your ship.
3. If you survive the tidal forces and the radiation and actually get to relativistic speeds, you're going to need to target another black hole to slow down, by reversing the whole process.
4. Meanwhile, you still have to travel interstellar distances by some other means, to get to and from the black holes.
This isn't science. It isn't even science fiction. Heck, I expect more realism in bad space opera.
I've just started listening. As a fan of Tangerine Dream, I have to say, this is pretty good stuff. I think it will be great as background music for things like programming.
I moved to OwnCloud when Dropbox screwed up their Linux support last Fall.
Owncloud is not difficult to set up on your own server. Tedious, maybe, but not difficult. The worst of it is that you will probably need a dynamic DNS solution. Then you have your data on your own hardware - not someone else's. Combine with a sensible backup plan, and you're all set.
Typical idiotic AC post, but I'll answer anyway. Of course Germany overproduces power - in the summer, on sunny days. Sun produces solar power, news at 11:00.
The problem comes on cloudy days in January, when Germany is importing power from all over Europe to power their industry. Nuclear in France? Check. Coal in Eastern Europe? Check.
Dunno where you get the idea that Germany makes money doing this, because they don't. There's a reason that German household power prices are around $0.30 / kwh. What do you pay?
I used to live in New Mexico. Lovely place, but not terribly wealthy, which makes me wonder when I see legislation like this. If you read it, much of the legislation is about handing out money to various parties: incentives, but also reparations to plants and workers that will have to close. Bet: these handouts will be exploited to suck on the public teat.
That aside, here's the core message:
"...'renewable energy resource' means electric or useful thermal energy:
So it's the usual greenie idiocy: spend other people's money on a pipe dream. Solar, of course, would be great in the high desert - except for the minor little problem that the sun doesn't shine at night. None of the named technologies can possibly produce enough power 24/7, except possibly razing and burning the forests.
They could take a lesson from parts of Australia or Germany that have already made the same damned mistake: They wind up giving their solar power away, when they have too much of it. At night, or when it's cloudy, they have to import power, sometimes at outrageous prices.
Look, it's entirely possible that certain Russian groups are having fun screwing with the US. I mean, the US has mucked around in other people's countries for decades, so why not?
That said, it's pretty stupid to blame the Russians for the current, divisive politics in the US. The locals (I'm in Europe, so I'm not involved here)...the locals are doing a bang-up job all by themselves. Decades ago, conservatives didn't much approve of liberal opinions. Downright Puritan, sometimes. Then came the 60's and 70's, and the progressive movement was born and grew. Since roughly the 80's, the progressives have defined whole new levels of intolerance. If you disagree with them, you are not only wrong, you are evil. It's the reaction to this intolerance, not any sort of Russian hacking, that got Trump elected.
The progressives just cannot imagine that half of the country actually disagrees with them. It's so much easier to find some external enemy to blame - it's not that the progs are wrong, or that they've alienated half the country - it's those damned Ruskies.
A few years ago, I thought that the growing backlash might result in some self-examination and a grudging-but-peaceful retreat from this intolerance. Sadly, the idea that the progressives themselves have become the intolerant ones - that differing opinions can legitimately exist - this seems to be beyond their comprehension. Which means that the way forward is likely to be increasingly vicious and even violent.
It ain't the Russians driving this, it's the progressive agenda, and the intolerant people who support it.
The problem is: you are defining a class, it's just hidden from you. Lambdas in Java look like functional programming, but it's only a syntactical illusion. Java is not functional; the closest it comes is the pale shadow you see in reflection.
Lambdas are convenient, but IMHO fundamentally evil.
Grumpy old man here, but a Java developer. Java is not, and never will be a functional language. Nonetheless, Java 8 just had to introduce lambda expressions, so that wannabes could kinda, sorta pretend that Java was functional. The main effect of lambdas, however, is to hide data types, so that weak developers don't actually know what interfaces and data types they are using.
So, doubling down on stupid, they introduce "var", so those weak developers really don't have to know what types they're using. Java will figure it out, or you can play pinball till it works.
Project Jigsaw, was it really necessary? Maybe, but I'm not entirely convinced. Certainly, the new module system is a PITA, since you now have to deal with both module-paths and class-paths, plus of course getting the permissions right.
Now, I know that Java is used for a lot of backend stuff, but JavaFX finally made Java actually really good at GUIs. Swing was a buggy mess that no one seemed to want to fix, but JavaFX got a lot of things really right. So, of course, Java 11 removed JavaFX from the core, making it a PITA precisely because of the module system introduced in Java 9.
- - - - -
Here's the important bit: Nowadays, I am a college professor, and I am faced with a problem: Students new to programming can no longer start with a current version of Java - the changes in Java 9/10/11 have made things just too complex for new users. I have rolled back to Java 8 for the moment. I have spoken with a number of other college level Java instructors, all of whom feel the same way.
The long term question will be: what language do we teach in our programming courses? It is entirely possible that we will move to a different language.
When your language is no longer being taught in schools, well, that's the beginning of the end.
In all fairness, this should have nothing to do with the Internet giants. Given the massive degree of internationalization today, *all* companies should be taxed where they generate their revenue, rather than allowing stupid games with tax havens.
That said, what France is doing is borderline corrupt: targetting specific companies that (they think) represent untapped sources of sweet, sweet tax money. France is basically broke, attempts to further tax the populace led to the yellow-vests, and cutting bureaucracy or public services is politically impossible. They need more bread and circuses to stave off the collapse...
I use PIA as well, and I am pretty happy with the service. It's generally fast, it's easy to pick an end-point in whatever country you want to be in. They do get blacklisted by some organizations (example: BBC), but that's life.
The only thing I don't like is that PIA is US-based, land of secret courts and secret warrants.
But then, I'm not doing anything illegal, I just don't particularly want my ISP nosing around in my browsing, and sometimes I want to access services that are geo-blocked for no good reason (like US sites that don't understand the GDPR). For all that, PIA is good...
A DIY VPN in not really a solution, at least, not beyond the trivial case of dialing in to your home server. If you want an encrypted connection with an exit point in country X, are you going to buy and pay for a server in country X? What about country Y? How are you going to pay for and maintain those exit points anonymously? And anyway, if only you and maybe a few friends/family are using it, traffic analysis can make the VPN encryption pretty much useless.
The point of a commercial VPN service is not only the encryption, but also the anonymity that occurs when your traffic is mixed with thousands of other users.
Maybe we never had a chance, but - as techies - we failed to keep the Internet out of the hands of national governments.
Once, some of us had hopes that the scope and reach of the Internet would weaken national governments, especially the totalitarian ones. Instead, even the (theoretically) democratic governments of the West are getting in on the censorship and restriction games.
The proponents of "green" energy always point to the early wins. There are a lot of easy wins early on in the process, when most energy still comes from nuclear, coal, or whatever. Those existing plants can adjust their output to allow for the massive fluctuations of solar and wind generation, as long as the solar/wind is a minor part of the grid.
Things change when solar/wind become a large part of the generation capacity. On sunny summer days, Germany doesn't know what to do with all it's solar energy, and they've been know to pay other countries to take it. In bad weather, they import energy. Renewable energy on the massive scale Germany has implemented It only works, because they can leech off the capabilities of the countries around them. Germany's energy looks cleaner, because someone else is burning extra coal. If Germany is really does close their nuclear plants, the situation will get massively worse.
Unless large scale energy storage is solved, renewable energy will remain limited in its potential. In addition, we will always need something to handle baseline load, for which nuclear remains the greenest and safest option.
Consider a small, isolated community: If someone acts like a jackass, they will be socially shunned. If they persist in acting like a jackass, someone bigger and meaner will take them out behind the shed and "learn 'em". If they still persist, they will ultimately be run out of town.
In more civilized climes, the community hands over some of this responsibility to the government. There are laws about stalking harrassment, and the like. Ultimately, the punishments aren't all that different.
The problem in public, online communities is the lack of hard-and-fast identity, so that punishments can be applied. Sure, an account gets banned - but the person just makes another account. There's no "shed", and no real way to run the perp out of town. Moderation becomes nothing but a gigantic game of whac-a-mole - it's almost completely pointless.
It seems to me that part of the solution is to regain those small communities, by making online communities mostly private. Participants have to be invited; which means that they can easily be permanently disinvited. Just creating a new account won't garner an invitation to join.
Taking Facebook as the example (since it's the subject of TFA): Why should any profile be open to public comments? Let a profile show enough information for people to find you. But any interaction - posting or whatever - should require an explicit invitation. No invite for the asshat, and the person will never know they exist. And if you're a member of a group where people are saying bad things? Leave, problem solved.
If some asshat wants to post unpleasant stuff, they are absolutely free to do so - on their own profile, where only the people they invite will ever see it. It won't bother anyone else. But, but...what if they post something I don't like? Waaah!
- Fake news? Unpopular opinions? Let the invite-only groups entertain themselves. It's no one's business, and any intervention is really just censorship. Stupid people exist, and who knows, maybe we're actually the stupid ones. Maybe it really is turtles all the way down.
- Illegal material? Call the police, that's why they exist. Don't moderate - that's evidence tampering. Do what the police request, whether that's deleting the material, or leaving it up as evidence.
While other drugs may be an issue, the elephant in the room is agriculture. For vegetable, big ag uses all sort of pesticides and fertilizers that wind up polluting the water. For animals, they use antibiotics.
The antibiotics are not even meant to preserve animal health, although that's a nice side effect. Weirdly, animals on antibiotics gain weight more quickly, which is (afaik) the real motivation. But these antibiotics wind up in the waste, and from there in the runoff and in the rivers.
What we need is simple: an absolute prohibition on medicating animals that are not sick. Period.
p.s. It's a bit off-topic here, but: the prices for the antibiotics have to be cheap, for this to work economically. The exact same antibiotics for people are generally massively higher. An interesting comment on big pharma.
I have to wonder about programs that are supposed to get ordinary teachers to teach CS. I expect many of us had teachers (especially in primary school) who were teaching stuff they personally did not like or understand. Seems to me that's the likely result here: take someone who doesn't really like CS, and doesn't really understand it either - and have them try to teach it. Seems like a great way to turn students off.
Anyone have practical experience with these programs, who can comment?
In Space: 1999 it was the moon that was blasting around the universion. As sci-fi shows went, the acting and plots were ok, but I could never get over the utter stupidity of the premise. No, you are not going to drive around the universe on a planet.
On the Earth, just think what happens to the oceans when you accelerate. *slosh*
I don't know anything about the system, but what kind of statement is this, from Lewis (the primary person interviewed):
"Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised."
That's true of any security protocoll I can imagine. Anyway, "wire the thing in the wrong place"? This is the way a supposed security professional describes software vulnerabilities?
Then Matthew Green (the other person interviewed) says: "At this point I think the only appropriate way to evaluate it is through a professional evaluation by someone trained in this sort of advanced cryptography." Well, as it happens, even TFA states "the system has undergone three audits by auditing giant KPMG - among them an audit of the end-to-end encryption". So what problem is he pointing out again?
In addition the code is available to anyone who wants it, and there's now a public penetration test, which lots of people are signing up for. Seems like they're doing everything right. So back to Lewis, who says "Even if you sat down and read every line and determined everything was good, the code still wouldn’t pass the bar for being good code." Um...so good code is not good? Huh?
Again, I know nothing about the voting system being discussed - maybe it's good, maybe it's not. But TFA is just crap, and we have two security researchers who either don't know what they're talking about, or else they have some personal agenda in play.
It seems to me that this is yet another reason to get rid of "proof of work" and go to "proof of stake". With proof of stake, you still have a possible 51% attack, but you have no motivation to do so. If some group owns 51% of a currency, and starts stealing, they will tank the value of their own stake.
Sometimes I am really glad I don't live in the US anymore. It was once a nice country, at least, in my rose-tinted memories...
It's not even that this guy is a Republican. The Democrats have their very own totalitarian tendencies.
Here is the full article: STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes
Being a teacher, this kind of thing is important to me. And this article irritates me, because I think they get things exactly backwards. The article specifically examines the performance of two groups of students: white/asian vs. black/latino/native-american. The latter group is implicitly assumed to be disadvantaged by the fact that their average, group intelligence is lower than the first group. The hypothesis being that, if your teacher thinks you're less intelligent, you will do more poorly in class that you should.
Interestingly: the article states that there was no discernable grouping amongst the teachers. Teachers and their beliefs were evenly distributed across all ethnicities, genders, ages, etc.. So this isn't a claim of racism or genderism, but simply a claim that teachers with particular views are poorer teachers. This is measured by the fact that their students received poorer grades.
I think this is the critical flaw in the study: Those grades are assigned by the teachers themselves. There is no objective measure of student capability. Teachers with "tough" courses will, on average, give out lower grades. And lower still to the less capable students.
I teach introductory courses - filter courses - at my university. An essential part of my job is to fail students who are unlikely be unable to complete the course of study. Hence, I give lower grades than instructors in other courses later in the program, after the incapable students have been eliminated. I've been doing this a long time, and I have come to the view that students either have certain aptitudes, or they don't. I submit that I have come to this "fixed mindset" view by observation: teaching thousands of students, failing those who cannot develop the necessary skills, and passing those who can. My role as a teacher is precisely that: to help them develop skills. If they are incapable of doing so despite my best efforts? Then they are in the wrong program of study.
In other words, it's not a "fixed mindset" that causes an instructor to hand out poor grades, but the other way around: someone who teaches teaches tough courses will come to recognize that student aptitudes are largely inherent. There are exceptions: I've seen talented students fail through laziness, and marginal students get through with sheer grit and determination. Those exceptions, by their very rarity, serve to underscore the general pattern.
Finally, one must comment on the student evaluations. Students in courses that handed out better grades were more likely to have liked the course. That's not a surprise, that comes close to a law of nature. However, the study misses a great opportunity here. The authors admit that my theory (about tough courses being the root cause) might be true:
"It is possible that faculty who endorse fixed mindset beliefs create more demanding coursesâ"requiring students to spend more time studying and preparing for their course. If this is true, then differences in studentsâ(TM) performance and psychological experiences might be explained by the demands of these courses (instead of professorsâ(TM) mindset beliefs)."
One of the questions in student evaluations ("how much time did this course require?") would have been a good indication of course difficulty. Unfortunately, the study does not seem to have tested this hypothesis, or at least, the paper makes no mention of it. A cynic might wonder if they did do the analysis, but perhaps it didn't support the desired results. After all: "tough courses lead to lower grades" would hardly be a conclusion worthy of publication.
There they go again: politicians buying votes with other people's money.
If they have a genuine interest in protecting people's data, all they need is to copy the GDPR. It's one of the few truly good things to come out of the EU parliament: companies must have your explicit permission in order to collect and use your data.
But that's not what this proposal in California is about. This is about sounding good, winning political brownie points by promising to hand out someone else's money.