The fees will be collected by a not-for-profit called Re:Sound.
That is misleading to say that Re:Sound is not-for-profit, when the apparent function of the organization is to ensure more money comes in to the music industry. And since I cannot imagine that much of that revenue is needed to fund Re:Sound, it seems like most of the money is simply profits. Which, to me, makes it seem like it exists solely for profits.
TL;DR - Company lies to try an look better. News at 11.
I am a little surprised to see "could small hydroelectric power be a key solution" instead of "could small hydroelectric power be the key solution". Surprised, but happy! It makes me feel like I am reading something with thought behind it, instead of a supermarket tabloid.
Blazing out of the sun’s gravitational well at 34,000 miles per hour
That's about like driving from San Francisco to New York City in 5 minutes, or from Madrid to Moscow in a little more than 4 minutes (via Google Maps directions), instead of a couple of days. I'm impressed.
I worked summer camps for the scouts for 12 years, and a scout for 7 years before that. What you are both saying is stereotyping, just like the ideas that all gay men talk and act in an effeminate manner, or that all religious people are crackpots, or that anyone who knows computers is a socially inept virgin. I know the following from first-hand experience:
- Yes, the Mormons use the Boy Scouts as there boy's youth program, and sometimes it almost feels like they have their entire own different type of scouting. They are such a large amount of the enrollment of the program that councils avoid stepping on their toes, but at the same time, they are far from the majority of scouts registered in the program.
- Some churches, etc. are very particular about having their denominations views strongly represented with the troops that they charter. However, there is usually another unit nearby to join, or as the case with my old troop, you can always just move your charter to be with an organization that fits you better.
- I find that some of the units that fall under the categories above have the leaders who are most dedicated to what Boy Scouts should be, and that they are very good at being scouts first when they are meeting or camping, and not just being religious indoctrination machines like the above comments claim. Then there are the majority of units which are not focused on religion, in which case you still have some bad apples where the leaders don't care, but your claims again fall flat.
- Bigotry: the Boy Scouts do not, "loves them some hatin' on the Gays and Atheists" - they do have religion, they do not approve of gay leaders, but at the same time, your comments sound like I should expect the Boy Scouts to act like the KKK. Almost every one of the people I know/knew or worked with in the scouts are very indifferent to someone being gay or agnostic (again, there are always a few exceptions). And there are quite a few people who expect that the BSA will one day in our lifetime include girls, gays and whoever, but that know that it will take time - remember, religious institutions and especially the Mormon church do make up a pretty good size of the registered units and scouts (and consequently revenue), and what organization would so easily shed a quarter (just a guess) of themselves?
- There is some fear about gay men being leaders and what that might mean for incidents of child abuse, but as it was pointed out year after year in the state-required training to recognize signs of child abuse, there is no such correlation. This was at times also noted by the instructor of the Scout's own Youth Protection Training (required for every person over 18), which usually depended on the instructor's knowledge and drive to cover more than just the bare minimum. It is worth noting that YPT, when properly followed, will eliminate pretty much all opportunity for child abuse to occur (but the "properly followed" is the catch).
So what it comes down to for me, is that your comments are are malicious as anything I ever heard from anyone I respected in the scouts ever say. Like I said before, you are taking stereotypes and running with them. Which is to say, the three parents to this comment are behaving as badly or worse (if they are just joking) as pretty much anyone in the scouts ever does. Or, if you are not joking, then I feel like you are the kind of person where I will just nod my head politely and then tell you I disagree, while thinking to myself you are a moron who does not know what they are talking about but who will gladly spout off about it anyways, and that kind of behavior is one of the worst problems in this world. (might be offensive, but so are the above posts if they are not jokes)
I did receive a rather form-letter-looking response from Michael Bennet; looks like he is in favor of the legislation (well, that sucks). But I really don't expect even that much of a reply. I figure they probably just have some system to summarize the subjects of all of the mail, email and other messages they get, and probably just present the person with a summary about what percent of voices are for and against each topic. I really can't blame them, in fact, I think it would be a waste of taxes and time to pay a staff to write a response to everyone who writes in (and even then, form letters would make a lot of sense). Mostly, I just want to make sure that there is that one additional data point for my views.
I wrote my senators and representative, and told them I oppose SOPA and PIPA. It may not be much, but it is worth it and it is ridiculously easy now that they have websites that accept messages.
Have you voiced your opinion, other than on some website that the policy makes never see?
I get that it is an important distinction between GNU/Linux and Linux, but there are very few things I find more difficult to pronounce in English than "GNU". I always feel like saying that is like tripping over a slightly raised edge in a sidewalk: moving along quite well until I suddenly stumble and feel like I am making some mistake as if I was just learning to walk (or talk). That is why I tend to just say, "Linux" (additionally, GNU/Linux will confuse a lot of people, and I do not always want to educate someone on the difference).
Educational link, I liked it (no, really, if you just saw the link and brushed it off, it is a neat collection of different news about various glaciers around the world that are growing).
However, from some of the linked articles I read, and from my basic knowledge of glaciers I live in Colorado, so it is hard to actually go see one), I have to say that they seem to be drawing from a limited pool of information. There are some broader articles, like one pointing to a study that found the Greenland ice sheet was growing thicker in areas above 1500 m in elevation. However, there are many articles that are very narrow in scope - one about how two years worth of excellent snow fall had revived 2,000 glaciers, a second about how a glacier has been growing longer since 1918 and another about how they just found 100 additional glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP). The commentary on the first of these seems to take the stance of "some glaciers are growing, so I will imply that the scientists studying this are cherry picking data to push an agenda", and not considering the scope of work that really needs to be done to figure out the total picture. There was no note in the second article (that I saw) about if the lengthening glacier was changing thickness. And most relevant to myself, the claim that 100 new glaciers had been found or formed or something in RMNP - a park which covers just over a thousand square kilometers, so these are not the kind you will see in Alaska, Norway or the Himalayas, these are glorified snow fields. If you do not believe me, check out a google image search for "St. Mary's Glacier" (which is a typical Colorado glacier) or look at the wikipedia page of Andrews Glacier, in RMNP - does this match up with what you think of when you see a glacier. Without doing the math, but having seen what glaciers in Colorado are in person and seeing pictures of the huge mountains of ice that large glaciers are, I would expect that all of the glaciers in Colorado would easily fit inside the lost volume of one of the more moderately-sized retreating glaciers in the world. Overall, I think that they give any sense of scale of the issue, which does them no good.
So I have come to the conclusion that this is just a site that makes the claim, "These data points disagree with your overall conclusion, so your conclusion is wrong!" without crunching any numbers or doing a more thorough investigation on their own, when it might very well be the case that they are only citing the 10% of evidence that is favorable to their point and ignoring the rest. Think my conclusion is not fair? Then please provide more evidence to the contrary.
Fantasy Football is D&D for people who would never be caught dead playing D&D.
Along the same lines, Fanboy-ism is rooting for the home team for people who never follow sports.
And of course, obl. xkcd relating to this. If you can't see the humor and truth in this as it relates to both of the parents, maybe you should relax a bit.
For myself, three out of the four bills (energy, internet, water/sewage/etc. and insurance) I regularly pay (last time I checked, anyways), charged a "convenience fee" that greatly exceeds what I spend on stamps, usually by two or three times as much (plus the envelope is included, and I don't have to put an address on it other than sometimes a return address). Also, it probably takes me slightly longer to write the check and walk it down to the box but I regularly got fed up when trying to pay online because I usually had to set up an account and re-enter all of the things that they already know for my billing account; only one time was it as simple as entering the billing account number, the amount being paid and the method of payment. This is good for the same reason that Google did so well - the result is the same with or without it, but I don't need or want a portal into the company's e-world in order to do so.
As with so many other systems, when it doesn't need to be connected to a network to do what it does and when connecting it to said network opens up the chance for attacks over the network, THEN LEAVE IT OF THE FSCKING NETWORK! Regardless of if it is airplane systems, nuclear centerfuges, general industrial control systems, medical equipment, cars or whatever else, if you leave it completely unconnected from a network then you have removed a very real vector of attack. And that doesn't mean you have to stop paying attention, but it does mean you are off to a good start.
I know this is in a desert, but it will rain on rare occasions; what will they do with the water that falls on the structure? I imagine it would not be worth while to collect it and transport it somewhere, since it will be so rare. I feel like they probably have considered this, and I just want to know what decision they came to. Put it all in a big gutter, feed it into a huge sump (or a lot of little ones), or what?
Also, what about dust buildup - will it get cleared by wind (like the Mars rovers' solar panels) or will someone have to go up there with a giant squeegee to clean it off every now and then? Again, I bet they have thought of it, and I am curious about what ideas they came up with.
Maybe they only clean it when it rains? Maybe every time they do clean it, it rains the next day? Who knows?
Check out Sockso (I know, weird URL, but you can verify it through some Googling if you want). Provided you can get a static IP or you find a service that will simulate one for you, you have your own personal music server anywhere the Internet can go. And then you do not have to trust a company with your data (backups or not).
Of course, this might not get around legal issues if you set it up with accounts for all of your friends or just leave it open for anyone to listen to. But I figured it is a worthwhile two cents to throw in.
Although I don't disagree with you that having a rover anywhere on Mars is great, with so much to see, I must contest the idea that it is more interesting than any surface feature on Earth - Mars may be less understood, but I can go out into a field next to my apartment and entertain myself for an hour or two just by looking at the world. Bugs or plants I have never seen or that are odd in some way, the weather around me, things other people might be doing, etc. They are just all somewhat less remarkable when you get used to them and forget how amazing of a place Earth really is. Children are really good at it; I think most people I have met begin getting too used to the world around age 12 or 13. Plenty of people try to stay captivated, but it is hard when there are so many things like work, bills and chores around the house that keep you busy (and I definitely have this problem, too). I love that space exploration can keep this sense of wonder alive in people.
This is fine and good, but to see what normally happens when you drop an iPhone out of a plane, we should be statistically rigorous. Is it possible to get a grant to drop 40 (or more) iPhones from a plane? And as long as we are doing that, how about getting a few different models of Android and Windows phones (again in a sufficiently large numbers) and sending them all plummeting to the ground in one big, glorious shower of technology?
most of my experience with so called malware is things like fake virus scanners and browser bars and weather gadgets, etc.
I worked a job with an AV company doing tech support, and this is most people's experience. And for a good reason, too - these are the ones you notice. Many of these are written in order to spook someone into thinking that they need to buy something by displaying a "Windows has detected viruses!!!!11!" message, so that they will purchase SuperWindowsAV2011 (or some other similarly named "product"). But the thing that really makes me worry is that if the malware is well written and designed to go unnoticed, as would be the goal in several cases - key logging, watching for bank info or building a bot net, for example - then we all go along as happy as can be. It is known that an AV will stop threats, but it is best at old and well understood threats, and against the newest malware they are always playing catch-up. And I am not saying that the AVs out there are bad at their job, but I am saying that they are not great at it (and the marketing folk just make the whole situation of poor perception worse by trying to make it sound like their product stops everything).
The point of this all is to say, "sure, I believe you (TFA) that 39% of computers are infected with malware that you know about, but what about estimating the size of the rest of the iceberg?"
I am all for this, so long as you are fair about it. To be fair, we need to do this for every account on the planet, though.
Also, I have to agree that using the current second seems random enough, given that each person's arrival at the choice should be random for the value of the second. Since there are 120 permutations, you could store it in an array on a server, and then the client, when ready to look at the choice, takes the current second, plus sixty if the minute is odd, and does a look-up of that location in the array. The cost of doing this for everyone would be pretty light - one mod, one addition and one request across a network; server has only a single look-up per request to do. I think this works under the assumptions that people will randomly arrive at the choice over a two minute period (I can't see why they wouldn't). I also wondered if you need to randomize the array, but if the people's requests are timed at random I don't think you do. This should even pass the test the author uses if there is two-, four-, etc. minute run time; if there is a large run time, like an hour; probably not for short, odd minute run times, and not if the assumption about random arrival times is wrong.
Not to mention that (per Wikipedia's page on the whole program) the price tag for the whole program (both rovers, test rovers back here on Earth, people to work on it, etc.) is under a billion dollars, and so the price of one rover would be only around half a billion. The Wikipedia article puts combined costs at around $944 million, which is close, but you can do a whole lot with the $56 million dollar difference. Like run the program for another three years (ish). I think that it is a great buy - driving around a vehicle on another planet for years while learning who knows what. Awesome. Or we could by like two-thirds of another fancy fighter plane. I just can't get excited about that, because we already have so many. For me it really comes down to NASA puts things on other planets and looks at things farther away than I can comprehend for fractions of the price of most of the other stuff the US government does.
In my limited slice of experience, the only times I have seen large corporations behave honestly is when a) there is a law explicitly telling them they must be (like nutritional information and ingredients in food), or b) there is some sort of marketing they can get out of it. In either case, not being honest would cost them money, and given that the sole purpose of a corporation is to generate profit it should be no surprise that the too-common view is to cut as many corners as you can to maximise that profit. Sure there are some exceptions I have seen, but when generally speaking about the corporate world, they are the candle of hope floating in the ocean of greed.
Slashdot Mirror
The fees will be collected by a not-for-profit called Re:Sound.
That is misleading to say that Re:Sound is not-for-profit, when the apparent function of the organization is to ensure more money comes in to the music industry. And since I cannot imagine that much of that revenue is needed to fund Re:Sound, it seems like most of the money is simply profits. Which, to me, makes it seem like it exists solely for profits.
TL;DR - Company lies to try an look better. News at 11.
I am a little surprised to see "could small hydroelectric power be a key solution" instead of "could small hydroelectric power be the key solution". Surprised, but happy! It makes me feel like I am reading something with thought behind it, instead of a supermarket tabloid.
All I ever really want to know when I see something like this is, "Will there be some Auroras where I am?"
Blazing out of the sun’s gravitational well at 34,000 miles per hour
That's about like driving from San Francisco to New York City in 5 minutes, or from Madrid to Moscow in a little more than 4 minutes (via Google Maps directions), instead of a couple of days. I'm impressed.
That could throw a ProcessorNotFoundException, be sure to code accordingly.
This will be great, until a ship forgets to pull up the anchor or drops it in the wrong place.
No.
I worked summer camps for the scouts for 12 years, and a scout for 7 years before that. What you are both saying is stereotyping, just like the ideas that all gay men talk and act in an effeminate manner, or that all religious people are crackpots, or that anyone who knows computers is a socially inept virgin. I know the following from first-hand experience:
- Yes, the Mormons use the Boy Scouts as there boy's youth program, and sometimes it almost feels like they have their entire own different type of scouting. They are such a large amount of the enrollment of the program that councils avoid stepping on their toes, but at the same time, they are far from the majority of scouts registered in the program.
- Some churches, etc. are very particular about having their denominations views strongly represented with the troops that they charter. However, there is usually another unit nearby to join, or as the case with my old troop, you can always just move your charter to be with an organization that fits you better.
- I find that some of the units that fall under the categories above have the leaders who are most dedicated to what Boy Scouts should be, and that they are very good at being scouts first when they are meeting or camping, and not just being religious indoctrination machines like the above comments claim. Then there are the majority of units which are not focused on religion, in which case you still have some bad apples where the leaders don't care, but your claims again fall flat.
- Bigotry: the Boy Scouts do not, "loves them some hatin' on the Gays and Atheists" - they do have religion, they do not approve of gay leaders, but at the same time, your comments sound like I should expect the Boy Scouts to act like the KKK. Almost every one of the people I know/knew or worked with in the scouts are very indifferent to someone being gay or agnostic (again, there are always a few exceptions). And there are quite a few people who expect that the BSA will one day in our lifetime include girls, gays and whoever, but that know that it will take time - remember, religious institutions and especially the Mormon church do make up a pretty good size of the registered units and scouts (and consequently revenue), and what organization would so easily shed a quarter (just a guess) of themselves?
- There is some fear about gay men being leaders and what that might mean for incidents of child abuse, but as it was pointed out year after year in the state-required training to recognize signs of child abuse, there is no such correlation. This was at times also noted by the instructor of the Scout's own Youth Protection Training (required for every person over 18), which usually depended on the instructor's knowledge and drive to cover more than just the bare minimum. It is worth noting that YPT, when properly followed, will eliminate pretty much all opportunity for child abuse to occur (but the "properly followed" is the catch).
So what it comes down to for me, is that your comments are are malicious as anything I ever heard from anyone I respected in the scouts ever say. Like I said before, you are taking stereotypes and running with them. Which is to say, the three parents to this comment are behaving as badly or worse (if they are just joking) as pretty much anyone in the scouts ever does. Or, if you are not joking, then I feel like you are the kind of person where I will just nod my head politely and then tell you I disagree, while thinking to myself you are a moron who does not know what they are talking about but who will gladly spout off about it anyways, and that kind of behavior is one of the worst problems in this world. (might be offensive, but so are the above posts if they are not jokes)
I did receive a rather form-letter-looking response from Michael Bennet; looks like he is in favor of the legislation (well, that sucks). But I really don't expect even that much of a reply. I figure they probably just have some system to summarize the subjects of all of the mail, email and other messages they get, and probably just present the person with a summary about what percent of voices are for and against each topic. I really can't blame them, in fact, I think it would be a waste of taxes and time to pay a staff to write a response to everyone who writes in (and even then, form letters would make a lot of sense). Mostly, I just want to make sure that there is that one additional data point for my views.
I wrote my senators and representative, and told them I oppose SOPA and PIPA. It may not be much, but it is worth it and it is ridiculously easy now that they have websites that accept messages.
Have you voiced your opinion, other than on some website that the policy makes never see?
I get that it is an important distinction between GNU/Linux and Linux, but there are very few things I find more difficult to pronounce in English than "GNU". I always feel like saying that is like tripping over a slightly raised edge in a sidewalk: moving along quite well until I suddenly stumble and feel like I am making some mistake as if I was just learning to walk (or talk). That is why I tend to just say, "Linux" (additionally, GNU/Linux will confuse a lot of people, and I do not always want to educate someone on the difference).
Educational link, I liked it (no, really, if you just saw the link and brushed it off, it is a neat collection of different news about various glaciers around the world that are growing).
However, from some of the linked articles I read, and from my basic knowledge of glaciers I live in Colorado, so it is hard to actually go see one), I have to say that they seem to be drawing from a limited pool of information. There are some broader articles, like one pointing to a study that found the Greenland ice sheet was growing thicker in areas above 1500 m in elevation. However, there are many articles that are very narrow in scope - one about how two years worth of excellent snow fall had revived 2,000 glaciers, a second about how a glacier has been growing longer since 1918 and another about how they just found 100 additional glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP). The commentary on the first of these seems to take the stance of "some glaciers are growing, so I will imply that the scientists studying this are cherry picking data to push an agenda", and not considering the scope of work that really needs to be done to figure out the total picture. There was no note in the second article (that I saw) about if the lengthening glacier was changing thickness. And most relevant to myself, the claim that 100 new glaciers had been found or formed or something in RMNP - a park which covers just over a thousand square kilometers, so these are not the kind you will see in Alaska, Norway or the Himalayas, these are glorified snow fields. If you do not believe me, check out a google image search for "St. Mary's Glacier" (which is a typical Colorado glacier) or look at the wikipedia page of Andrews Glacier, in RMNP - does this match up with what you think of when you see a glacier. Without doing the math, but having seen what glaciers in Colorado are in person and seeing pictures of the huge mountains of ice that large glaciers are, I would expect that all of the glaciers in Colorado would easily fit inside the lost volume of one of the more moderately-sized retreating glaciers in the world. Overall, I think that they give any sense of scale of the issue, which does them no good.
So I have come to the conclusion that this is just a site that makes the claim, "These data points disagree with your overall conclusion, so your conclusion is wrong!" without crunching any numbers or doing a more thorough investigation on their own, when it might very well be the case that they are only citing the 10% of evidence that is favorable to their point and ignoring the rest. Think my conclusion is not fair? Then please provide more evidence to the contrary.
For a sufficiently broad definition of "National Security Threat".
Fantasy Football is D&D for people who would never be caught dead playing D&D. Along the same lines, Fanboy-ism is rooting for the home team for people who never follow sports. And of course, obl. xkcd relating to this. If you can't see the humor and truth in this as it relates to both of the parents, maybe you should relax a bit.
For myself, three out of the four bills (energy, internet, water/sewage/etc. and insurance) I regularly pay (last time I checked, anyways), charged a "convenience fee" that greatly exceeds what I spend on stamps, usually by two or three times as much (plus the envelope is included, and I don't have to put an address on it other than sometimes a return address). Also, it probably takes me slightly longer to write the check and walk it down to the box but I regularly got fed up when trying to pay online because I usually had to set up an account and re-enter all of the things that they already know for my billing account; only one time was it as simple as entering the billing account number, the amount being paid and the method of payment. This is good for the same reason that Google did so well - the result is the same with or without it, but I don't need or want a portal into the company's e-world in order to do so.
I have a strong case of it, and the storm isn't supposed to hit here (Maryland) until Sunday at dawn. Thus far, I've been treated to:
. . .
2) An interview of some guy from the Discovery Channel with a supposedly hurricane-proof automobile.
I think that would probably look something like this
As with so many other systems, when it doesn't need to be connected to a network to do what it does and when connecting it to said network opens up the chance for attacks over the network, THEN LEAVE IT OF THE FSCKING NETWORK! Regardless of if it is airplane systems, nuclear centerfuges, general industrial control systems, medical equipment, cars or whatever else, if you leave it completely unconnected from a network then you have removed a very real vector of attack. And that doesn't mean you have to stop paying attention, but it does mean you are off to a good start.
I know this is in a desert, but it will rain on rare occasions; what will they do with the water that falls on the structure? I imagine it would not be worth while to collect it and transport it somewhere, since it will be so rare. I feel like they probably have considered this, and I just want to know what decision they came to. Put it all in a big gutter, feed it into a huge sump (or a lot of little ones), or what? Also, what about dust buildup - will it get cleared by wind (like the Mars rovers' solar panels) or will someone have to go up there with a giant squeegee to clean it off every now and then? Again, I bet they have thought of it, and I am curious about what ideas they came up with. Maybe they only clean it when it rains? Maybe every time they do clean it, it rains the next day? Who knows?
Check out Sockso (I know, weird URL, but you can verify it through some Googling if you want). Provided you can get a static IP or you find a service that will simulate one for you, you have your own personal music server anywhere the Internet can go. And then you do not have to trust a company with your data (backups or not). Of course, this might not get around legal issues if you set it up with accounts for all of your friends or just leave it open for anyone to listen to. But I figured it is a worthwhile two cents to throw in.
Although I don't disagree with you that having a rover anywhere on Mars is great, with so much to see, I must contest the idea that it is more interesting than any surface feature on Earth - Mars may be less understood, but I can go out into a field next to my apartment and entertain myself for an hour or two just by looking at the world. Bugs or plants I have never seen or that are odd in some way, the weather around me, things other people might be doing, etc. They are just all somewhat less remarkable when you get used to them and forget how amazing of a place Earth really is. Children are really good at it; I think most people I have met begin getting too used to the world around age 12 or 13. Plenty of people try to stay captivated, but it is hard when there are so many things like work, bills and chores around the house that keep you busy (and I definitely have this problem, too). I love that space exploration can keep this sense of wonder alive in people.
This is fine and good, but to see what normally happens when you drop an iPhone out of a plane, we should be statistically rigorous. Is it possible to get a grant to drop 40 (or more) iPhones from a plane? And as long as we are doing that, how about getting a few different models of Android and Windows phones (again in a sufficiently large numbers) and sending them all plummeting to the ground in one big, glorious shower of technology?
most of my experience with so called malware is things like fake virus scanners and browser bars and weather gadgets, etc.
I worked a job with an AV company doing tech support, and this is most people's experience. And for a good reason, too - these are the ones you notice. Many of these are written in order to spook someone into thinking that they need to buy something by displaying a "Windows has detected viruses!!!!11!" message, so that they will purchase SuperWindowsAV2011 (or some other similarly named "product"). But the thing that really makes me worry is that if the malware is well written and designed to go unnoticed, as would be the goal in several cases - key logging, watching for bank info or building a bot net, for example - then we all go along as happy as can be. It is known that an AV will stop threats, but it is best at old and well understood threats, and against the newest malware they are always playing catch-up. And I am not saying that the AVs out there are bad at their job, but I am saying that they are not great at it (and the marketing folk just make the whole situation of poor perception worse by trying to make it sound like their product stops everything). The point of this all is to say, "sure, I believe you (TFA) that 39% of computers are infected with malware that you know about, but what about estimating the size of the rest of the iceberg?"
I am all for this, so long as you are fair about it. To be fair, we need to do this for every account on the planet, though. Also, I have to agree that using the current second seems random enough, given that each person's arrival at the choice should be random for the value of the second. Since there are 120 permutations, you could store it in an array on a server, and then the client, when ready to look at the choice, takes the current second, plus sixty if the minute is odd, and does a look-up of that location in the array. The cost of doing this for everyone would be pretty light - one mod, one addition and one request across a network; server has only a single look-up per request to do. I think this works under the assumptions that people will randomly arrive at the choice over a two minute period (I can't see why they wouldn't). I also wondered if you need to randomize the array, but if the people's requests are timed at random I don't think you do. This should even pass the test the author uses if there is two-, four-, etc. minute run time; if there is a large run time, like an hour; probably not for short, odd minute run times, and not if the assumption about random arrival times is wrong.
Not to mention that (per Wikipedia's page on the whole program) the price tag for the whole program (both rovers, test rovers back here on Earth, people to work on it, etc.) is under a billion dollars, and so the price of one rover would be only around half a billion. The Wikipedia article puts combined costs at around $944 million, which is close, but you can do a whole lot with the $56 million dollar difference. Like run the program for another three years (ish). I think that it is a great buy - driving around a vehicle on another planet for years while learning who knows what. Awesome. Or we could by like two-thirds of another fancy fighter plane. I just can't get excited about that, because we already have so many. For me it really comes down to NASA puts things on other planets and looks at things farther away than I can comprehend for fractions of the price of most of the other stuff the US government does.
Boy, that's a great idea. I mean, the last couple times we meddled in Iran (with the CIA) it went so well, why not do it some more?
In my limited slice of experience, the only times I have seen large corporations behave honestly is when a) there is a law explicitly telling them they must be (like nutritional information and ingredients in food), or b) there is some sort of marketing they can get out of it. In either case, not being honest would cost them money, and given that the sole purpose of a corporation is to generate profit it should be no surprise that the too-common view is to cut as many corners as you can to maximise that profit. Sure there are some exceptions I have seen, but when generally speaking about the corporate world, they are the candle of hope floating in the ocean of greed.