Dark matter has always struck me as a kludge. It amounts to "we don't know WTF is going on, so here's our fudge factor". There is no evidence that dark matter exists, other than the fact that gravity on large scales doesn't behave the way cosmologists expect. Two other possibilities receive too little attention:
- Our current theory of gravity does not apply on the scales we are observing, i.e., the theory is incomplete.
- Physical laws are not constant. e are looking at very distant objects, and seeing them in the distant past. Perhaps universal constants are not, in fact, constant across large spans of space and/or time.
So now they've discovered a galaxy where the kludge factor of dark matter is not needed. Maybe this will prompt more cosmologist to consider the alternatives...
Tunnel boring machines do not neatly cut out the rock. They grind it up and spit out gravel.
While one could, theoretically, cut out nice chunks of rock (assuming the place you are tunneling actual has decent rock), taking time for this would massively slow the actual digging process. And for what, exactly? It's not like quarried stone is something difficult to find.
When talking about elections, Stalin reputedly said: "It's not who votes that counts; it's who counts the votes". Whenever one of these "hate speech" articles come up, I think of something similar: It's not the hate speech that matters; it's who gets to define what hate speech is.
I live in Europe, where the equivalent to the American 1st Amendment is ridiculously watered down. The European equivalent says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.... The exercise of these freedoms... may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for..." and the list of exceptions continues...
Which means: Just like in Sri Lanka, European governments can restrict your speech based on the ruling elite's ideas of necessity, safety and morals. Which basically means that they can restrict any damned thing they please.
Censorship is evil. Speech may be uncomfortable, it may be offensive, but there are very, very few situations where it should be restricted.
Someone suggested that this is a brute-force attack (and TFA even hints at that). I don't buy that, because a brute-force attack involving opening up the phone would be nothing really new. I expect they are exploiting a vulnerability.
So sure, Apple immediately spent $30k for a license, so that they can analyze it. The fascinating question will be: Does the exploit rely on a hardware flaw or a software flaw? If the latter, it will quickly be patched. If this is ultimately relying on some weakness in the hardware, it likely won't ever patched for older phones, though the iPhone 11 may be immune.
Geez, folks, lighten up. Some of you clearly need to get lives, if a couple of days without/. cause such emotional upheavals.
As for the huge number of people telling Whipslash that you would never have had so much downtime in a migration: Shit happens, and you weren't there, so you don't know what went wrong. Even if you could have done better, guess what, you weren't there and your holy wisdom was unavailable. What, precisely, do you hope to gain by crapping on the people who just had a sleepless weekend?
People should remember that Google is not a single entity. it is a huge company with branches all over the place. While the corporate types may dream of unified policies, it is entirely possible that some parts of Google are run by extreme progressives (i.e., no whites or asians need apply), while other parts may be dominated by a different atmosphere.
The bottom line should be: hire people based on their capabilities, not their plumbing, eye color, or other irrelevant characteristics. If it turns out that clusters form, with some irrelevant characteristics clustering in certain areas, that's maybe a matter for sociologists to study, but it is otherwise unimportant.
If you want some peace (and peace of mind), restrict SSH logins by IP range. Even if your address is dynamic, your ISP only has a certain range of addresses. Find out what that range is, and set your server to only accept login attempts from those addresses. With AWS, this is part of the security setting outside the VM. Your hosting service may differ, of course...
Create a new AWS account, and create a new AWS instance. Allow normal login (not just SSH), and don't do any sort of IP restriction. Watch your logs. Your instance will be noticed very quickly, and will be flooded by bots attempting to brute-force a login. FWIW, the bots are all from Eastern Europe and Asia, or at least they were the last time I tried this (a few years ago). It's pretty crazy.
I don't know about other cloud services, but I wonder about AWS policies. You can set a warning when your monthly spend exceeds a threshold, but you cannot actually set a hard spending limit. This means that, if someone manages to hack into one of your servers (or, better, into your account), they can use as many resources as they want, until you notice and stop them. If you don't notice, they can run up massive bills, which AWS will want you to pay. Seems like a good racket, no wonder those bots are lurking...
I've long since switched to the Brave browser. Negatives first: Brave supports the idea that it can serve as a payment conduit, so that you can make micropayments to publishers. While not a bad idea, the implementation is unrealistic. But you can turn it off and ignore it.
On the good side, it already blocks ads, 3rd party cookies, and (some) fingerprinting.
The only thing remaining - and this is missing from every browser I am aware of - is to stop auto-download (and auto-play) of multimedia. Even if a browser doesn't auto-start some stupid html5 video, it is still downloading the damned thing. A switch to control that behavior belongs right next to the 3rd-party-cookie switch.
I think most people agree with you. Having the extra daylight in the evening is nice. Very few people like standard time ("Winter" time).
It's about time we abolished this idiocy. Assuming the EU actually listens to the populace, then we will all just shift to permanent DST, which is the same as shifting one time-zone to the right.
The chances of the EU listening to the populace? Variable, sort of like a lottery.
I just read the abstract. As I understand it, they have 25 data years of very noisy data. Based on this data, they have deduced a quadratic equation (think: upward-curving parabola). They then state: "simple extrapolation of the quadratic implies global mean sea level could rise 65 ± 12 cm by 2100".
Of course, extrapolation of a quadratic leads to massive increases in the Y-value. Any kid doing 9th grade geometry learns that. The question is: Why should we believe that this quadratic equation - derived from so few data points - is accurate, and wil continue unabated into the future?
This is an impossible problem to solve. There will always be the next "offensive" sentence. And anyway, who gets to define what is offensive? The only solution to this problem is to stop showing other people's searches. Which, arguably, might be a good change to make.
Regardless, I'm not seeing the problem. These are search terms. What is offensive about searching for "blacks are not oppressed"? Are you looking for evidence to support that conjecture? To refute it? As a search term, why should anyone take offense?
Or how about "islamists are not our friends"? The term "islamist" refers to a muslim who believes that Islam should be not only a religion, but also a political system. In the West, we believe in a separation of church and state. So, in fact, islamists are not our friends. Where's the offense?
We'll skip the "Hitler" searches, because the vast majority of those are not serious. Bored teens on 4chan have to do something with their spare time.
What about "feminists are sexist"? In fact, modern feminism in the West no longer seeks equality for women, it now seeks special treatment. Just as affirmative action is by definition racist, so modern feminism is sexist. Even if you disagree with this, searching for the reasons that people may believe it, is a perfectly legitimate search.
Climate change? There is, in fact, still a great deal of debate. Not about the climate warming, perhaps, but certainly about the degree of warming, about the predictions being made, and the degree to which climate change is natural or anthropogenic. Again, why should search terms be problematic?
Why would anyone pay attention to Goldman Sachs, really, on anything?
First, such a prediction is utterly self-serving: they have zero clue what to do with the cryptocurrency market, and wish that no one else did either. I expect they've had lots of inquiries from investment clients, asking questions they couldn't answer.
...even in the wimpy formerly-great Britain, knives are tools, and sharpening them is how you take care of them. Why, exactly, is that disturbing? It's something I learned to do at the age of 9 or 10.
To answer my own question: A brief search yields that names cannot be copyrighted. So really, Blizzard seems to have no basis at all for a DMCA takedown request.
Really, it seems to me (IANAL) that their own case is against individual players, if the EULA says that the clients can only be used with a Blizzard-approved server.
I hope the owner of the GitHub repo files a counterclaim, rather that just giving up.
Blizzard is really reaching here. AFAIK, this is a pure reverse-engineering effort. No code was copied. There's basically almost no case for claiming any sort of copyright infringement. In desperation, Blizzard claims, for example:
"Blizzard’s notice targets several SQL databases stating that the layout and structure is nearly identical to the early WoW databases."
Given the data to be stored, and the rules of normalization, of course the structure of the databases is similar. All that shows is that whoever designed the database was competent.
They complain that the code includes direct references to - get this - another fan-run WoW server (Nostalrius). Whose copyrights Blizzard does not own, ahem.
Some files have names that reference fantasy elements in WoW - they don't specify, but I assume things like town names. Which would make sense for the server-side implementations of these elements. Whether they can legitimately claim copyright on those names?
Lastly, they point out that "some" database record IDs are the same. Not all, but some. How many, they don't indicate. Statistically speaking, of course some of them match, though it should be very many. Of course, Blizzard does not specify a number.
"AI and data science jobs are at the top of the list, in part because they're relatively young technologies"
Nothing particularly new in any of the fields mentioned. Specific frameworks in use are different now than they were 5, 10 or 20 years ago. However, speaking as someone who has been in IT for somewhere between 30 and 40 years, there's really not a lot that's fundamentally new. Mostly, we have added more turtles. What I do see is that each new generation re-invents old ideas and slaps new labels on them. Often, they even think the ideas are new, until some old grouch like me comes along and rains on their parade.
The last real sea change was the spread of the Internet in the 1990s - enabling worldwide networking (and worldwide attacks). The actual vulnerabilities being exploited, however, are old-hat. The top security risk today's web applications is injection? This has not changed in 20 years, which ought to be embarrassing for the entire IT profession.
WHOIS is the internet-equivalent of a property registry. If I want to know who owns that building over there, I can go to the township, look in the public records, and find out. This is important, whether it's because you want to buy the building, or perhaps you have a problem with something that is happening there. Sure, in some cases, ownership will be obscured through some intermediate legal entity, but that will still be the responsible legal entity.
WHOIS should be exactly the same thing. If you are interested in a domain - for whatever reason - you should have a way to contact the legal entity responsible for it. Concerns about spam are misplaced - this happens in the physical world as well. There are scammers in the world, news at 11:00.
tl;dr: The domain registries are the property registries of the Internet, and the registrations should be public.
...but humans are lazy. To which end, note the following:
I read somewhere recently, that - since the big campaigns for CO2 reduction started - humanity has increased CO2 output at an average rate of 1.6%. Before all this attention was focused on climate change, CO2 output was increased at an averate rate of... 1.6%. Even granting that reducing CO2 output is a good thing to do, it is quite apparent that we are not going to do so. None of the sequestration technologies make much sense, none of them (other than possibly reforestation) scale, and frankly some of them are hugely dangerous in their own right.
tl;dr: There's no point in fighting the inevitable. CO2 is going to continue to increase. Fortunately, this also means that there is no longer any reason to continue making exaggerated end-of-the world claims. The planet is warming, some anthropogenic, some natural. it will probably warm by a degree or even two in the next 80 years. Figure out what impact that's going to have, and deal with it.
If this: "military operations and intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran"...is the kind of thing that John Brennen keeps on an ISPs servers, instead of secured government systems, then he needs the cell right next to Hillary.
Oh, right. They are our betters. Laws don't apply to them.
All of this, of course, is based on those oh-so-reliable models that can't account for the "pause" and generally fail to distinguish adequately between natural and anthropogenic warming. Just the kind of basis you want to use as the basis for a massive experiment with the planet's atmosphere.
First understand. Then tinker.
At the moment, the models generally fail to make any specific and falsifiable predictions. Where people have tried to make such predictions, based on the models, they have generally been wrong. It's not clear that current models are any better than the Farmer's Almanac.
The US Civil War is an excellent example of why secession should be allowed. What a cock up that was. Do remember, for example, that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, that his famous proclamation only proclaimed Confederate slaves free (even though there definitely were Union slaves), etc..
Today, it's places like Catalonia and Scotland. Why should Spain have a say, if Catalonia doesn't want to be Spanish any longer?
There's just no chance, as long as the place you are seceding from has veto power. No politician voluntarily gives up power.
Within certain constraints, seceding should be a fundamental right. Some minimum size, sensible geographic contiguity, a super-majority, done. The place you're leaving doesn't get a say.
Slashdot Mirror
Dark matter has always struck me as a kludge. It amounts to "we don't know WTF is going on, so here's our fudge factor". There is no evidence that dark matter exists, other than the fact that gravity on large scales doesn't behave the way cosmologists expect. Two other possibilities receive too little attention:
- Our current theory of gravity does not apply on the scales we are observing, i.e., the theory is incomplete.
- Physical laws are not constant. e are looking at very distant objects, and seeing them in the distant past. Perhaps universal constants are not, in fact, constant across large spans of space and/or time.
So now they've discovered a galaxy where the kludge factor of dark matter is not needed. Maybe this will prompt more cosmologist to consider the alternatives...
Tunnel boring machines do not neatly cut out the rock. They grind it up and spit out gravel.
While one could, theoretically, cut out nice chunks of rock (assuming the place you are tunneling actual has decent rock), taking time for this would massively slow the actual digging process. And for what, exactly? It's not like quarried stone is something difficult to find.
When talking about elections, Stalin reputedly said: "It's not who votes that counts; it's who counts the votes". Whenever one of these "hate speech" articles come up, I think of something similar: It's not the hate speech that matters; it's who gets to define what hate speech is.
I live in Europe, where the equivalent to the American 1st Amendment is ridiculously watered down. The European equivalent says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. ... The exercise of these freedoms ... may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for..." and the list of exceptions continues...
Which means: Just like in Sri Lanka, European governments can restrict your speech based on the ruling elite's ideas of necessity, safety and morals. Which basically means that they can restrict any damned thing they please.
Censorship is evil. Speech may be uncomfortable, it may be offensive, but there are very, very few situations where it should be restricted.
Someone suggested that this is a brute-force attack (and TFA even hints at that). I don't buy that, because a brute-force attack involving opening up the phone would be nothing really new. I expect they are exploiting a vulnerability.
So sure, Apple immediately spent $30k for a license, so that they can analyze it. The fascinating question will be: Does the exploit rely on a hardware flaw or a software flaw? If the latter, it will quickly be patched. If this is ultimately relying on some weakness in the hardware, it likely won't ever patched for older phones, though the iPhone 11 may be immune.
Geez, folks, lighten up. Some of you clearly need to get lives, if a couple of days without /. cause such emotional upheavals.
As for the huge number of people telling Whipslash that you would never have had so much downtime in a migration: Shit happens, and you weren't there, so you don't know what went wrong. Even if you could have done better, guess what, you weren't there and your holy wisdom was unavailable. What, precisely, do you hope to gain by crapping on the people who just had a sleepless weekend?
People should remember that Google is not a single entity. it is a huge company with branches all over the place. While the corporate types may dream of unified policies, it is entirely possible that some parts of Google are run by extreme progressives (i.e., no whites or asians need apply), while other parts may be dominated by a different atmosphere.
The bottom line should be: hire people based on their capabilities, not their plumbing, eye color, or other irrelevant characteristics. If it turns out that clusters form, with some irrelevant characteristics clustering in certain areas, that's maybe a matter for sociologists to study, but it is otherwise unimportant.
"Back to front, windows to aisle, and actually enforce carry on size."
And don't let idiots stop halfway to their seat, to stuff their carry-ons into someone else's space.
If you want some peace (and peace of mind), restrict SSH logins by IP range. Even if your address is dynamic, your ISP only has a certain range of addresses. Find out what that range is, and set your server to only accept login attempts from those addresses. With AWS, this is part of the security setting outside the VM. Your hosting service may differ, of course...
Create a new AWS account, and create a new AWS instance. Allow normal login (not just SSH), and don't do any sort of IP restriction. Watch your logs. Your instance will be noticed very quickly, and will be flooded by bots attempting to brute-force a login. FWIW, the bots are all from Eastern Europe and Asia, or at least they were the last time I tried this (a few years ago). It's pretty crazy.
I don't know about other cloud services, but I wonder about AWS policies. You can set a warning when your monthly spend exceeds a threshold, but you cannot actually set a hard spending limit. This means that, if someone manages to hack into one of your servers (or, better, into your account), they can use as many resources as they want, until you notice and stop them. If you don't notice, they can run up massive bills, which AWS will want you to pay. Seems like a good racket, no wonder those bots are lurking...
I've long since switched to the Brave browser. Negatives first: Brave supports the idea that it can serve as a payment conduit, so that you can make micropayments to publishers. While not a bad idea, the implementation is unrealistic. But you can turn it off and ignore it.
On the good side, it already blocks ads, 3rd party cookies, and (some) fingerprinting.
The only thing remaining - and this is missing from every browser I am aware of - is to stop auto-download (and auto-play) of multimedia. Even if a browser doesn't auto-start some stupid html5 video, it is still downloading the damned thing. A switch to control that behavior belongs right next to the 3rd-party-cookie switch.
I think most people agree with you. Having the extra daylight in the evening is nice. Very few people like standard time ("Winter" time).
It's about time we abolished this idiocy. Assuming the EU actually listens to the populace, then we will all just shift to permanent DST, which is the same as shifting one time-zone to the right.
The chances of the EU listening to the populace? Variable, sort of like a lottery.
I just read the abstract. As I understand it, they have 25 data years of very noisy data. Based on this data, they have deduced a quadratic equation (think: upward-curving parabola). They then state: "simple extrapolation of the quadratic implies global mean sea level could rise 65 ± 12 cm by 2100".
Of course, extrapolation of a quadratic leads to massive increases in the Y-value. Any kid doing 9th grade geometry learns that. The question is: Why should we believe that this quadratic equation - derived from so few data points - is accurate, and wil continue unabated into the future?
This is an impossible problem to solve. There will always be the next "offensive" sentence. And anyway, who gets to define what is offensive? The only solution to this problem is to stop showing other people's searches. Which, arguably, might be a good change to make.
Regardless, I'm not seeing the problem. These are search terms. What is offensive about searching for "blacks are not oppressed"? Are you looking for evidence to support that conjecture? To refute it? As a search term, why should anyone take offense?
Or how about "islamists are not our friends"? The term "islamist" refers to a muslim who believes that Islam should be not only a religion, but also a political system. In the West, we believe in a separation of church and state. So, in fact, islamists are not our friends. Where's the offense?
We'll skip the "Hitler" searches, because the vast majority of those are not serious. Bored teens on 4chan have to do something with their spare time.
What about "feminists are sexist"? In fact, modern feminism in the West no longer seeks equality for women, it now seeks special treatment. Just as affirmative action is by definition racist, so modern feminism is sexist. Even if you disagree with this, searching for the reasons that people may believe it, is a perfectly legitimate search.
Climate change? There is, in fact, still a great deal of debate. Not about the climate warming, perhaps, but certainly about the degree of warming, about the predictions being made, and the degree to which climate change is natural or anthropogenic. Again, why should search terms be problematic?
Why would anyone pay attention to Goldman Sachs, really, on anything?
First, such a prediction is utterly self-serving: they have zero clue what to do with the cryptocurrency market, and wish that no one else did either. I expect they've had lots of inquiries from investment clients, asking questions they couldn't answer.
Second, they were an integral part of the 2008 crisis. In fact, Goldman Sachs admitted to having defrauded investors, and paid more than $5 billion as a settlement
I think I'd trust the bum down the road more...
...even in the wimpy formerly-great Britain, knives are tools, and sharpening them is how you take care of them. Why, exactly, is that disturbing? It's something I learned to do at the age of 9 or 10.
To answer my own question: A brief search yields that names cannot be copyrighted. So really, Blizzard seems to have no basis at all for a DMCA takedown request.
Really, it seems to me (IANAL) that their own case is against individual players, if the EULA says that the clients can only be used with a Blizzard-approved server.
I hope the owner of the GitHub repo files a counterclaim, rather that just giving up.
Blizzard is really reaching here. AFAIK, this is a pure reverse-engineering effort. No code was copied. There's basically almost no case for claiming any sort of copyright infringement. In desperation, Blizzard claims, for example:
"Blizzard’s notice targets several SQL databases stating that the layout and structure is nearly identical to the early WoW databases."
Given the data to be stored, and the rules of normalization, of course the structure of the databases is similar. All that shows is that whoever designed the database was competent.
They complain that the code includes direct references to - get this - another fan-run WoW server (Nostalrius). Whose copyrights Blizzard does not own, ahem.
Some files have names that reference fantasy elements in WoW - they don't specify, but I assume things like town names. Which would make sense for the server-side implementations of these elements. Whether they can legitimately claim copyright on those names?
Lastly, they point out that "some" database record IDs are the same. Not all, but some. How many, they don't indicate. Statistically speaking, of course some of them match, though it should be very many. Of course, Blizzard does not specify a number.
"AI and data science jobs are at the top of the list, in part because they're relatively young technologies"
Nothing particularly new in any of the fields mentioned. Specific frameworks in use are different now than they were 5, 10 or 20 years ago. However, speaking as someone who has been in IT for somewhere between 30 and 40 years, there's really not a lot that's fundamentally new. Mostly, we have added more turtles. What I do see is that each new generation re-invents old ideas and slaps new labels on them. Often, they even think the ideas are new, until some old grouch like me comes along and rains on their parade.
The last real sea change was the spread of the Internet in the 1990s - enabling worldwide networking (and worldwide attacks). The actual vulnerabilities being exploited, however, are old-hat. The top security risk today's web applications is injection? This has not changed in 20 years, which ought to be embarrassing for the entire IT profession.
WHOIS is the internet-equivalent of a property registry. If I want to know who owns that building over there, I can go to the township, look in the public records, and find out. This is important, whether it's because you want to buy the building, or perhaps you have a problem with something that is happening there. Sure, in some cases, ownership will be obscured through some intermediate legal entity, but that will still be the responsible legal entity.
WHOIS should be exactly the same thing. If you are interested in a domain - for whatever reason - you should have a way to contact the legal entity responsible for it. Concerns about spam are misplaced - this happens in the physical world as well. There are scammers in the world, news at 11:00.
tl;dr: The domain registries are the property registries of the Internet, and the registrations should be public.
...but humans are lazy. To which end, note the following:
I read somewhere recently, that - since the big campaigns for CO2 reduction started - humanity has increased CO2 output at an average rate of 1.6%. Before all this attention was focused on climate change, CO2 output was increased at an averate rate of... 1.6%. Even granting that reducing CO2 output is a good thing to do, it is quite apparent that we are not going to do so. None of the sequestration technologies make much sense, none of them (other than possibly reforestation) scale, and frankly some of them are hugely dangerous in their own right.
tl;dr: There's no point in fighting the inevitable. CO2 is going to continue to increase. Fortunately, this also means that there is no longer any reason to continue making exaggerated end-of-the world claims. The planet is warming, some anthropogenic, some natural. it will probably warm by a degree or even two in the next 80 years. Figure out what impact that's going to have, and deal with it.
If this: "military operations and intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran" ...is the kind of thing that John Brennen keeps on an ISPs servers, instead of secured government systems, then he needs the cell right next to Hillary.
Oh, right. They are our betters. Laws don't apply to them.
Bad blood. It's thieves and criminals what were sent to Australia. So now they stole a piece of someone else's continent?
All of this, of course, is based on those oh-so-reliable models that can't account for the "pause" and generally fail to distinguish adequately between natural and anthropogenic warming. Just the kind of basis you want to use as the basis for a massive experiment with the planet's atmosphere.
First understand. Then tinker.
At the moment, the models generally fail to make any specific and falsifiable predictions. Where people have tried to make such predictions, based on the models, they have generally been wrong. It's not clear that current models are any better than the Farmer's Almanac.
The US Civil War is an excellent example of why secession should be allowed. What a cock up that was. Do remember, for example, that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, that his famous proclamation only proclaimed Confederate slaves free (even though there definitely were Union slaves), etc..
Today, it's places like Catalonia and Scotland. Why should Spain have a say, if Catalonia doesn't want to be Spanish any longer?
There's just no chance, as long as the place you are seceding from has veto power. No politician voluntarily gives up power.
Within certain constraints, seceding should be a fundamental right. Some minimum size, sensible geographic contiguity, a super-majority, done. The place you're leaving doesn't get a say.