Finally, about the scam artist: that's not an assumption, he really is one. Again, from the source you cited yourself: Casey also has no background in climate science, possessing only an undergraduate degree in physics and math and a master's in management. Since we pointed that out in 2010, Casey has pumped up his biography, adding that he is "one of America's most successful climate change researchers and climate prediction experts," even though he does not appear to have ever published a single peer-reviewed paper on the subject. Instead he wrote a self-published book on climate change "put together" with the help of an astrologer-cum-thoroughbred horse-racing advocate who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of Ernest Hemingway.
The Forbes article: congratulations, the writer just regurgitated most used climate myth #5. On a side note, he's the Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, which makes him close to the last person I would consider a credible source in climate science.
As for the other 3 news articles, you only read the headlines, didn't you? If you just would have taken the time to read the first few sentences, you would have seen the study they refer to directly opposes your standpoint.
From the USA Today article: That leveling off fed part of the skepticism toward global warming predictions in recent years, but researchers behind the new report see this "hiatus" as a pause in an inevitable climb. "Our results strongly confirm the role that (man-made) emissions are having on the climate," says climate scientist Shang-Ping Xie, senior author on the Nature journal study. "At one point over the long term, the effect we are seeing in the Pacific will stop. I'm confident the bigger increases in warming will resume."
From the NBC article: But scientists said a series of naturally occurring La Nina weather events in the Pacific in recent years, which bring cooler waters to the surface, had masked the global heat-trapping effect of rising emissions of greenhouse gases. "Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La Nina-like decadal cooling," according to the study by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie at the University of California, San Diego. "Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase," they wrote in the journal Nature.
From The Guardian: The scientists, using computer models, compared their results with observations and concluded that global average annual temperatures have been lower than they would otherwise have been because of the oscillation. But the observed higher summer temperatures of recent years show more of the true effects of global warming, according to the research. Global average temperatures are taken over the whole year, obscuring the effect of this seasonal variation.
Shang-Ping Xie, professor of environmental science at Scripps, said: "In summer, the equatorial Pacific's grip on the northern hemisphere loosens, and the increased greenhouse gases continue to warm temperatures, causing record heat waves and unprecedented Arctic sea ice retreat."
Dr Alex Sen Gupta, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who was not part of the study team, said: "The authors have set up some elegant experiments using a climate model to test whether a natural oscillation that has gone through a large swing in the tropical Pacific Ocean over the last decade can explain the recent halt in surface global warming the new simulation accurately reproduces the timing and pattern of changes that have occurred over the last four decades with remarkable skill. This clearly shows that the recent slowdown is a consequence of a natural oscillation."
(...)
The slowdown in the upward march of global average temperatures has been greeted by climate sceptics as evidence that the climate is less affected by greenhouse gases than thought. But climate scientists are much more cautious, pointing out that the trend is still upwards, and that the current temperature rises are well within the expected range. Past temperature records and computer predictions both show that periods of slower rises are to be expected as part of the natural variability of the planet's climate.
To put it simple, La Niña stirred up some cold water from the depths of the Pacific that has been acting as a heat sink, temporarily slowing down (not reversing!) the warming. But there's only so much heat that can be absorbed by this phenomenon before the temperatures will continue rising just like before.
"Appeal to authority: you said that because an authority thinks something, it must therefore be true. It's important to note that this fallacy should not be used to dismiss the claims of experts, or scientific consensus. Appeals to authority are not valid arguments, but nor is it reasonable to disregard the claims of experts who have a demonstrated depth of knowledge unless one has a similar level of understanding and/or access to empirical evidence. However it is, entirely possible that the opinion of a person or institution of authority is wrong; therefore the authority that such a person or institution holds does not have any intrinsic bearing upon whether their claims are true or not."
Now can we please extend Godwin's law to absurd "communist" and "soviet" references?
Hint: psychology != psychiatry. The former studies mental functions and behaviors in general (including the perfectly normal but somewhat undesirable ones TFA is talking about), while the latter studies mental disorders. Wikipedia is just a few mouse clicks away - educate yourself.
No, it isn't. If it were, then one would assume court, police or military action would be able able to prevent phenomena such as hyperinflation. Hyperinflation - which is essentially a breakdown of public trust - happened many times in many places, and the court, police or military were the last to be able to do anything about it.
Pot, meet kettle. There is little in your post suggesting you are better informed than GP. Both of you seem to believe in fairy tales, albeit from a different source.
To cut down carbon emissions fast enough to make a difference will take the wind out of the economic sails of most of the G20.
Bullshit. Cutting down at any rate will make a difference. We might not be able to cut down fast enough to avoid a serious impact, but we can certainly cut down fast enough to avoid a disastrous impact with little negative (or perhaps even positive) economic consequences. All that's needed is some political goodwill and for people to stop listening to fossil fuel lobby FUD. What you're saying falls into the same category as "we can't save all the victims so why even try to save anyone at all?"
Thank you, thank, you, thank you. This is what I always have been proclaiming for the last year or so; now I have a reference to back my claims.
I would go even further though, by claiming that not only the focus on impact factors is misplaced, but the focus on number of publications as well. It is almost common practice in some fields of science to write a new paper for every insignificant incremental progress made. These papers are exceedingly boring to read because 80% of their content is filler an/or has been published before and only 20% is slightly novel. Accordingly, the number of citations they gather is low. So there are all these scientists wasting bucketloads of time pumping out papers with little merit (yes, publishing is very time-consuming), while if they would accumulate scientific progress for a somewhat longer period of time, they would be publishing more interesting papers and at the same time be able to spend more time on, you know, doing actual science. The problem is made dramatically worse by open-access journals publishing papers only based on technical soundness, not on (the reviewer's perception of) "interest to the scientific community". Don't get me wrong; I think this is a good policy and the way forward. My point is that it happens to be exacerbating a problem the underlying cause of which direly needs to be removed. Indeed, the problem could easily be fixed in the same effort as getting rid of impact factors by switching to a different personal performance metric, such as times cited over the last 12 months (or else the H-index or something like that). There's very little risk that this will overly incentivize people to slow down progress by sitting on results (as opponents often argue), because if you sit on really interesting science for too long, you'll inevitably get scooped and can kiss your citations bye-bye... What it does is disincentivize wasting time on publishing uninspired stuff nobody really cares about.
Your lack of vision is appalling. We're very close to being able to artificially create any desired possible human characteristic through direct genetic manipulation, and that includes pollution tolerance, radiation tolerance, arbitrary disease immunity, and much greater intelligence. Why wait 5 or 500 generations when the necessary changes can be made in a year?
I believe either you're reading too much Science Fiction or you're using a very generous definition of "very close". Some of the traits you're talking about, and applying them to a complex organism with a success rate that would be high enough to be acceptable to society, that's orders of magnitude more difficult that what we've accomplished so far in genetic manipulation. Especially intelligence and the immune system are very poorly understood (note that immunity in plants is completely and fundamentally different from immunity in animals).
Perhaps you've never had the experience of accompanying a person in the last year of Parkinson's or some similar hideous age-related disease; there's no other excuse for the hideous cruelty of calling someone shallow for wanting that to end.
Quite the opposite. I've seen family members' health degrade to the point that I felt relieved when they finally died because I couldn't bear seeing them suffer any longer. And I'm probably in for the same - likely at a younger age than the average person. I've thought about this a lot, and learned to accept it as part of life. Whenever there's life, there's suffering. Good, lovable people will die before their time, or die in ways that are painful to even look at. The only way to end that is by ending life itself. You're probably right that I was too harsh to call GGP "shallow" - at an emotional level, who wouldn't want such suffering to end? I think the word "naive" is better - there's no way to end suffering, aging and death, and I believe one can live a happier life by not deceiving oneself about this.
Coming to death need not involve intense suffering, and one way to achieve that is to defeat aging.
I work in the biomedical sciences, and anyone who claims aging can be cured completely is either a quack looking for gullible investors or an idiot. At best, we will find new ways to slow down the process, but the end will be just as nasty - possibly drawn out even longer. There is no aspect of the human body that has evolved to keep on functioning significantly longer than its "warranty". Yes, we can mess with the telomers or telomerases to allow the cells to continue dividing beyond their programmed number of iterations. But that would increase the risk of cancer, which is already a big age-related killer and the least-likely disease to become fully curable (as long as you don't consider old age and death a disease). So we can try to counteract this by increasing the reliability of DNA replication and bolstering DNA repair mechanisms. But that would make cell division slower and less efficient. Our skin would become less damage-resistant and we would develop stomach lining problems. So we need to get a thicker skin and make gastric juice weaker. But then our digestion will be slower, so we either have to increase the size of our stomach or lower our metabolic rate. The latter would also be benificial in decreasing oxidative damage, but would also make us slower, negating the advantage of living longer. And that 's just one of the many problems. Again, the human body is a more complex piece of machinery than anything humanity has ever made, and every part of it degrades with age. The pumps, the ducts, the valves, the wiring, everything. We'd need to find a way to prevent gunk from accumulating in our blood circulation. We could eat more fish, but at the genetic level, known remedies will negatively affect coagulation, exacerbating any hemorrhage. Same thing with the brains - old brain cells die and not every bit of them gets cleaned up. As rubbish accumulates, less
Rocks is the very worst. RHEL is already very far behind the bleeding edge due to their obsession with testing and stability. Then RHEL is adapted by CentOS, introducing more lag. By the time CentOS is adapted by Rocks, it looks like you're running a stoneage kernel and system libraries (maybe that's why they call it Rocks, hur hur hur). Rocks is clusters for people who can't do clusters. Or as the Rocks "About" page puts it: "We have been driven by one goal: make clusters easy."
Here's our experience. The scientists had been complaining about Rocks' antiquated userspace for a long time. When we discovered we could make our workload run an unbelievable ~35% faster by moving to a more up-to-date distro (jumping several years ahead in the kernel, libraries and compiler versions), the decision was taken to move off Rocks. This was a lot of cursing and a huge learning experience for our sysadmin because he had to configure a whole lot of things himself that Rocks otherwise takes care of, but in the end, even he is happy we made the move because he feels more in control and the scientists are not nearly bugging him as much anymore.
With that attitude, you might want to consider switching to a job that doesn't involve supporting scientists. Science is by definition bleeding-edge, so it sounds like scientists are gonna be a an eternal blight on your existence.
Also, seems like we're blessed with a more competent sysadmin than you are. Although the relentless requests for new libraries do from time to time get on his nerves as well, he does succeed to keep 100s of nodes with bleeding-edge kernels and libraries running stable for years (if you don't count hardware problems).
This is not treehugging or New Age; this is hard science (and if you don't classify evolution as hard science, that's your problem). Not reproducing leaves humanity in a vulnerable state. If a mass extinction event or nuclear war occurs, we'll be left with a demographic that is not very fit for repopulating the earth (even more so if you have their tubes cut, as you put it). Also, if we stop reproducing, we stop evolving. We won't adapt to a slow buildup of toxic gases in the atmosphere in case of a mass extinction event. We won't develop radiation resilience in case of a nuclear war. If an infectious disease evolves that has the potential of wiping out a large percentage of the population, we won't evolve resistance. And even if nothing goes wrong (which I don't think is a realistic assumption in light of history) we won't be getting any smarter. If we ever meet alien civilization, we'll be the dumbasses.
Moving to a slightly more philosophical level, the cycle of life and death, as GP put it, is a necessity. Nature^H^H^H^H^H^HThe universe is not kind on organized matter; everything that comes into existence eventually gets destroyed, whether by attrition or by unfortunate accident. Life has found a clever loophole around this rule: renewal. Kill me all you want, cruel universe, there will always be my wailing offspring staring you in the face.
The sheer, inexpressible horror of the world and destiny left to us by "nature" has stripped it of any say in the matter.
Wow, you really have the spiritual depth of a teaspoon, don't you? Learn to accept the fact that you and everyone around you has to die, learn to enjoy the moments in-between, and to keep things enjoyable for everyone else as well, and maybe you'll feel less unhappy.
They'll just have to compete with me, and my vast experience.
Hahaha you must be a comedian! Good luck getting an IT job if you're 200, oh wait, 50 years old. My wailing offspring will laugh at your inability to cram the popular programming paradigm du jour into your overcrowded brain. Or did you believe your capacity to learn things is limitless? Think of it, there are only so many neurons there...
Scientific Linux seems to be a popular desktop OS with people who are more into science than into system administration. For our medium-sized computing cluster, it seems to be poorly suited. See also this post.
Probably I should mention that performance-wise, I'm talking in the context of multiple-week number-crunching jobs running on a medium-size computing cluster. Though neither image processing nor astronomy are my field, the tools you're linking to appear to be rather lightweight, and suitable for desktop use. Also note that I never saw a big supercomputer running Scientific Linux. Wouldn't you think there might be a reason for that?
If you think RHEL and Fedora are the only distros in the universe, then this will blow your mind. I happened to be talking something *gasp* debian-based that happens to have a life span of many years. Also, if you're OK with less-that-optimal performance, good for you. We aren't.
Just exercising my journalism skills by putting an eye-catching headline on top of a moderate post to lure people into reading it. These days, everyone seems to do it (especially the Slashdot editors/submitters). It seemed to work, too. Though I was kinda wondering if someone would call me out on it;)
At some point, we got a ~20% speedup on one of our clusters by installing new compilers and recompiling key libraries and software. And another ~15% speedup by upgrading our kernel to a new version. (Before you start calling me a ricer, on the scale of a medium-size computing cluster, these speedups represent 10000s USD worth of hardware each.) While I'm sure all this can also be done under RHEL/CentOS, it's much easier on many levels to install a distro that keeps things more up-to-date in the first place.
Plus switching distro got us an rsync version with which one can pull data from multiple source directories on a remote machine, a tar version with baked-in xz support,... Life's to short to bother installing all these things, but they're really nice to have, so there are definite advantages to the less conservative distros.
I can't say I enjoy working with RHEL (or its derivatives); I'm known for making a sour face whenever RHEL or CentOS are even mentioned. I can see why it's so popular (extensively validated rock-stable code), but these very same attributes make it very poorly suited for our needs (scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware).
But ask me about the company Red Hat? I'm a big fan of them. They have a relatively pure Open Source business model, and are showing the world that good money can be made out of it too. Not to mention their attitude. "Wanna clone our operating system? Be our guest, you'll only make us stronger."
On a more serious note, they're probably right about CentOS cementing their position. See also this very insightful post.
You're dodging my points. I said building on pylons is more expensive than expropriating land, as shown by the current high-speed rail project (as well as most high-speed rail projects in other countries) not being built on pylons. Your answer:
Actually, I do think there are some political considerations and non-engineering reasons for the extreme costs as well as comparatively slow speed that the California "high speed rail" system is being developed. Those political considerations in particular are the kind of thing escalating the costs making it unaffordable, just like similar spiraling costs are killing NASA.
Oh yeah, because every politician knows expropriating land can make you insanely popular. I bet politicians stand in line to show voters they have the spine to expropriate large swathes of land... not!
There are legitimate concerns about this project that can be raised, but raise those objections based upon knowledge.... by at least reading the f'ing paper that describes the project in the first place. Being closed minded that it is impossible for Elon to ever pull this off or that others can't run with the idea and try to build it is also just as stupid as those who may be claiming that Elon is Tony Stark and can turn all into gold.
After skimming the paper, searching it for information relevant to my reservations, and reading some more technical commentaries, I'm more convinced than ever that his cost estimates are far, far too low. Along with the engineering margins on some structural details. Also, you're strawmanning me. I never said that "it is impossible for Elon to ever pull this off". I never even raised any technical objections against it being possible. All I ever said is that his cost estimates are laughably optimistic and it will turn out to be more expensive than the current high-speed rail project. By a huge margin. I'm willing to bet good money on this. But given your own reservations about budget, I take it you won't accept the bet;)
Bottom line: I'm as excited as the next guy to see this coming true. Just don't think for a second it will come cheap. In fact, in light of the willingness of American taxpayers to spend big on hi-tech public infrastructure, China, Japan or France will likely beat the US to it.
You guys (as well as the mods who modded me down) have no idea how strong a large-diameter pipe needs to be to withstand a partial vacuum that is high enough to make the speeds he's talking about feasible. An airplane/rocket/spaceship body simply doesn't compare; it's much easier to keep pressure in than to keep pressure out. That's because the pressure in an overpressurized tube will counteract any deformation/buckling initiated by random forces (such as a capsule traveling through it), while the pressure in an underpressurized tube will amplify it. Think a submarine body or a particle accelerator. Neither are particularly light or cheap. I can assure you Mr. Musk's tube will have to be incredibly strong and therefore either heavy or very expensive.
Also, there's nothing stopping a 1000-miles-long high-speed rail track from being built on poles above a major highway. That is, nothing but the horrible cost of doing so, which is way higher than buying people's land. Or, populist soundbites aside, did you think the planners of the high-speed rail project are complete idiots?
Yes, and I know Mr. Musk's track record. I do not, however, believe in appeal to authority. When he got the idea of doing SpaceX, I thought: "good idea, he may pull it off". When he got the idea of selling electric cars, I thought: "good idea, he may pull it off". But this just makes me think "what has he been smoking?" After his previous successes in the face of adversity, he must have become overconfident.
People like you, who think they know something about security but really don't, are the reason why this bug occurred in the fist place.
/dev/urandom is not a cryptographically secure source of random numbers./dev/random is (when correctly implemented). In fact, it's supposed to be better than the frivolous combining-bits-and-hashing scheme you propose. And with all its sensors, a smartphone should have a pretty nice inflow of high-quality entropy.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. And to those Americans who'll answer: "well duh, we don't want to lower our standard of living to China's level": Germany and Japan are at roughly half the US level and the UK, Italy and France are even lower.
Finally, about the scam artist: that's not an assumption, he really is one. Again, from the source you cited yourself:
Casey also has no background in climate science, possessing only an undergraduate degree in physics and math and a master's in management. Since we pointed that out in 2010, Casey has pumped up his biography, adding that he is "one of America's most successful climate change researchers and climate prediction experts," even though he does not appear to have ever published a single peer-reviewed paper on the subject. Instead he wrote a self-published book on climate change "put together" with the help of an astrologer-cum-thoroughbred horse-racing advocate who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of Ernest Hemingway.
The Forbes article: congratulations, the writer just regurgitated most used climate myth #5. On a side note, he's the Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, which makes him close to the last person I would consider a credible source in climate science.
As for the other 3 news articles, you only read the headlines, didn't you? If you just would have taken the time to read the first few sentences, you would have seen the study they refer to directly opposes your standpoint.
From the USA Today article:
That leveling off fed part of the skepticism toward global warming predictions in recent years, but researchers behind the new report see this "hiatus" as a pause in an inevitable climb. "Our results strongly confirm the role that (man-made) emissions are having on the climate," says climate scientist Shang-Ping Xie, senior author on the Nature journal study. "At one point over the long term, the effect we are seeing in the Pacific will stop. I'm confident the bigger increases in warming will resume."
From the NBC article:
But scientists said a series of naturally occurring La Nina weather events in the Pacific in recent years, which bring cooler waters to the surface, had masked the global heat-trapping effect of rising emissions of greenhouse gases. "Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La Nina-like decadal cooling," according to the study by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie at the University of California, San Diego. "Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase," they wrote in the journal Nature.
From The Guardian:
The scientists, using computer models, compared their results with observations and concluded that global average annual temperatures have been lower than they would otherwise have been because of the oscillation. But the observed higher summer temperatures of recent years show more of the true effects of global warming, according to the research. Global average temperatures are taken over the whole year, obscuring the effect of this seasonal variation.
Shang-Ping Xie, professor of environmental science at Scripps, said: "In summer, the equatorial Pacific's grip on the northern hemisphere loosens, and the increased greenhouse gases continue to warm temperatures, causing record heat waves and unprecedented Arctic sea ice retreat."
Dr Alex Sen Gupta, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who was not part of the study team, said: "The authors have set up some elegant experiments using a climate model to test whether a natural oscillation that has gone through a large swing in the tropical Pacific Ocean over the last decade can explain the recent halt in surface global warming the new simulation accurately reproduces the timing and pattern of changes that have occurred over the last four decades with remarkable skill. This clearly shows that the recent slowdown is a consequence of a natural oscillation."
(...)
The slowdown in the upward march of global average temperatures has been greeted by climate sceptics as evidence that the climate is less affected by greenhouse gases than thought. But climate scientists are much more cautious, pointing out that the trend is still upwards, and that the current temperature rises are well within the expected range. Past temperature records and computer predictions both show that periods of slower rises are to be expected as part of the natural variability of the planet's climate.
To put it simple, La Niña stirred up some cold water from the depths of the Pacific that has been acting as a heat sink, temporarily slowing down (not reversing!) the warming. But there's only so much heat that can be absorbed by this phenomenon before the temperatures will continue rising just like before.
Appeal to authority = logical fallacy.
let's look it up, shall we?
"Appeal to authority: you said that because an authority thinks something, it must therefore be true. It's important to note that this fallacy should not be used to dismiss the claims of experts, or scientific consensus. Appeals to authority are not valid arguments, but nor is it reasonable to disregard the claims of experts who have a demonstrated depth of knowledge unless one has a similar level of understanding and/or access to empirical evidence. However it is, entirely possible that the opinion of a person or institution of authority is wrong; therefore the authority that such a person or institution holds does not have any intrinsic bearing upon whether their claims are true or not."
Source: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority
Now can we please extend Godwin's law to absurd "communist" and "soviet" references?
Hint: psychology != psychiatry. The former studies mental functions and behaviors in general (including the perfectly normal but somewhat undesirable ones TFA is talking about), while the latter studies mental disorders. Wikipedia is just a few mouse clicks away - educate yourself.
No, it isn't. If it were, then one would assume court, police or military action would be able able to prevent phenomena such as hyperinflation. Hyperinflation - which is essentially a breakdown of public trust - happened many times in many places, and the court, police or military were the last to be able to do anything about it.
Pot, meet kettle. There is little in your post suggesting you are better informed than GP. Both of you seem to believe in fairy tales, albeit from a different source.
To cut down carbon emissions fast enough to make a difference will take the wind out of the economic sails of most of the G20.
Bullshit. Cutting down at any rate will make a difference. We might not be able to cut down fast enough to avoid a serious impact, but we can certainly cut down fast enough to avoid a disastrous impact with little negative (or perhaps even positive) economic consequences. All that's needed is some political goodwill and for people to stop listening to fossil fuel lobby FUD. What you're saying falls into the same category as "we can't save all the victims so why even try to save anyone at all?"
Holy ad hominem, batman! Focus on the observations, not the person making them.
Thank you, thank, you, thank you. This is what I always have been proclaiming for the last year or so; now I have a reference to back my claims.
I would go even further though, by claiming that not only the focus on impact factors is misplaced, but the focus on number of publications as well. It is almost common practice in some fields of science to write a new paper for every insignificant incremental progress made. These papers are exceedingly boring to read because 80% of their content is filler an/or has been published before and only 20% is slightly novel. Accordingly, the number of citations they gather is low. So there are all these scientists wasting bucketloads of time pumping out papers with little merit (yes, publishing is very time-consuming), while if they would accumulate scientific progress for a somewhat longer period of time, they would be publishing more interesting papers and at the same time be able to spend more time on, you know, doing actual science. The problem is made dramatically worse by open-access journals publishing papers only based on technical soundness, not on (the reviewer's perception of) "interest to the scientific community". Don't get me wrong; I think this is a good policy and the way forward. My point is that it happens to be exacerbating a problem the underlying cause of which direly needs to be removed. Indeed, the problem could easily be fixed in the same effort as getting rid of impact factors by switching to a different personal performance metric, such as times cited over the last 12 months (or else the H-index or something like that). There's very little risk that this will overly incentivize people to slow down progress by sitting on results (as opponents often argue), because if you sit on really interesting science for too long, you'll inevitably get scooped and can kiss your citations bye-bye... What it does is disincentivize wasting time on publishing uninspired stuff nobody really cares about.
Your lack of vision is appalling. We're very close to being able to artificially create any desired possible human characteristic through direct genetic manipulation, and that includes pollution tolerance, radiation tolerance, arbitrary disease immunity, and much greater intelligence. Why wait 5 or 500 generations when the necessary changes can be made in a year?
I believe either you're reading too much Science Fiction or you're using a very generous definition of "very close". Some of the traits you're talking about, and applying them to a complex organism with a success rate that would be high enough to be acceptable to society, that's orders of magnitude more difficult that what we've accomplished so far in genetic manipulation. Especially intelligence and the immune system are very poorly understood (note that immunity in plants is completely and fundamentally different from immunity in animals).
Perhaps you've never had the experience of accompanying a person in the last year of Parkinson's or some similar hideous age-related disease; there's no other excuse for the hideous cruelty of calling someone shallow for wanting that to end.
Quite the opposite. I've seen family members' health degrade to the point that I felt relieved when they finally died because I couldn't bear seeing them suffer any longer. And I'm probably in for the same - likely at a younger age than the average person. I've thought about this a lot, and learned to accept it as part of life. Whenever there's life, there's suffering. Good, lovable people will die before their time, or die in ways that are painful to even look at. The only way to end that is by ending life itself. You're probably right that I was too harsh to call GGP "shallow" - at an emotional level, who wouldn't want such suffering to end? I think the word "naive" is better - there's no way to end suffering, aging and death, and I believe one can live a happier life by not deceiving oneself about this.
Coming to death need not involve intense suffering, and one way to achieve that is to defeat aging.
I work in the biomedical sciences, and anyone who claims aging can be cured completely is either a quack looking for gullible investors or an idiot. At best, we will find new ways to slow down the process, but the end will be just as nasty - possibly drawn out even longer. There is no aspect of the human body that has evolved to keep on functioning significantly longer than its "warranty". Yes, we can mess with the telomers or telomerases to allow the cells to continue dividing beyond their programmed number of iterations. But that would increase the risk of cancer, which is already a big age-related killer and the least-likely disease to become fully curable (as long as you don't consider old age and death a disease). So we can try to counteract this by increasing the reliability of DNA replication and bolstering DNA repair mechanisms. But that would make cell division slower and less efficient. Our skin would become less damage-resistant and we would develop stomach lining problems. So we need to get a thicker skin and make gastric juice weaker. But then our digestion will be slower, so we either have to increase the size of our stomach or lower our metabolic rate. The latter would also be benificial in decreasing oxidative damage, but would also make us slower, negating the advantage of living longer. And that 's just one of the many problems. Again, the human body is a more complex piece of machinery than anything humanity has ever made, and every part of it degrades with age. The pumps, the ducts, the valves, the wiring, everything. We'd need to find a way to prevent gunk from accumulating in our blood circulation. We could eat more fish, but at the genetic level, known remedies will negatively affect coagulation, exacerbating any hemorrhage. Same thing with the brains - old brain cells die and not every bit of them gets cleaned up. As rubbish accumulates, less
Oh yeah, and it's usually more than 1%. By more than an order of magnitude in many cases.
Rocks is the very worst. RHEL is already very far behind the bleeding edge due to their obsession with testing and stability. Then RHEL is adapted by CentOS, introducing more lag. By the time CentOS is adapted by Rocks, it looks like you're running a stoneage kernel and system libraries (maybe that's why they call it Rocks, hur hur hur). Rocks is clusters for people who can't do clusters. Or as the Rocks "About" page puts it: "We have been driven by one goal: make clusters easy."
Here's our experience. The scientists had been complaining about Rocks' antiquated userspace for a long time. When we discovered we could make our workload run an unbelievable ~35% faster by moving to a more up-to-date distro (jumping several years ahead in the kernel, libraries and compiler versions), the decision was taken to move off Rocks. This was a lot of cursing and a huge learning experience for our sysadmin because he had to configure a whole lot of things himself that Rocks otherwise takes care of, but in the end, even he is happy we made the move because he feels more in control and the scientists are not nearly bugging him as much anymore.
With that attitude, you might want to consider switching to a job that doesn't involve supporting scientists. Science is by definition bleeding-edge, so it sounds like scientists are gonna be a an eternal blight on your existence.
Also, seems like we're blessed with a more competent sysadmin than you are. Although the relentless requests for new libraries do from time to time get on his nerves as well, he does succeed to keep 100s of nodes with bleeding-edge kernels and libraries running stable for years (if you don't count hardware problems).
This is not treehugging or New Age; this is hard science (and if you don't classify evolution as hard science, that's your problem). Not reproducing leaves humanity in a vulnerable state. If a mass extinction event or nuclear war occurs, we'll be left with a demographic that is not very fit for repopulating the earth (even more so if you have their tubes cut, as you put it). Also, if we stop reproducing, we stop evolving. We won't adapt to a slow buildup of toxic gases in the atmosphere in case of a mass extinction event. We won't develop radiation resilience in case of a nuclear war. If an infectious disease evolves that has the potential of wiping out a large percentage of the population, we won't evolve resistance. And even if nothing goes wrong (which I don't think is a realistic assumption in light of history) we won't be getting any smarter. If we ever meet alien civilization, we'll be the dumbasses.
Moving to a slightly more philosophical level, the cycle of life and death, as GP put it, is a necessity. Nature^H^H^H^H^H^HThe universe is not kind on organized matter; everything that comes into existence eventually gets destroyed, whether by attrition or by unfortunate accident. Life has found a clever loophole around this rule: renewal. Kill me all you want, cruel universe, there will always be my wailing offspring staring you in the face.
The sheer, inexpressible horror of the world and destiny left to us by "nature" has stripped it of any say in the matter.
Wow, you really have the spiritual depth of a teaspoon, don't you? Learn to accept the fact that you and everyone around you has to die, learn to enjoy the moments in-between, and to keep things enjoyable for everyone else as well, and maybe you'll feel less unhappy.
They'll just have to compete with me, and my vast experience.
Hahaha you must be a comedian! Good luck getting an IT job if you're 200, oh wait, 50 years old. My wailing offspring will laugh at your inability to cram the popular programming paradigm du jour into your overcrowded brain. Or did you believe your capacity to learn things is limitless? Think of it, there are only so many neurons there...
Scientific Linux seems to be a popular desktop OS with people who are more into science than into system administration. For our medium-sized computing cluster, it seems to be poorly suited. See also this post.
Probably I should mention that performance-wise, I'm talking in the context of multiple-week number-crunching jobs running on a medium-size computing cluster. Though neither image processing nor astronomy are my field, the tools you're linking to appear to be rather lightweight, and suitable for desktop use. Also note that I never saw a big supercomputer running Scientific Linux. Wouldn't you think there might be a reason for that?
If you think RHEL and Fedora are the only distros in the universe, then this will blow your mind. I happened to be talking something *gasp* debian-based that happens to have a life span of many years. Also, if you're OK with less-that-optimal performance, good for you. We aren't.
Just exercising my journalism skills by putting an eye-catching headline on top of a moderate post to lure people into reading it. These days, everyone seems to do it (especially the Slashdot editors/submitters). It seemed to work, too. Though I was kinda wondering if someone would call me out on it ;)
At some point, we got a ~20% speedup on one of our clusters by installing new compilers and recompiling key libraries and software. And another ~15% speedup by upgrading our kernel to a new version. (Before you start calling me a ricer, on the scale of a medium-size computing cluster, these speedups represent 10000s USD worth of hardware each.) While I'm sure all this can also be done under RHEL/CentOS, it's much easier on many levels to install a distro that keeps things more up-to-date in the first place.
Plus switching distro got us an rsync version with which one can pull data from multiple source directories on a remote machine, a tar version with baked-in xz support,... Life's to short to bother installing all these things, but they're really nice to have, so there are definite advantages to the less conservative distros.
I can't say I enjoy working with RHEL (or its derivatives); I'm known for making a sour face whenever RHEL or CentOS are even mentioned. I can see why it's so popular (extensively validated rock-stable code), but these very same attributes make it very poorly suited for our needs (scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware).
But ask me about the company Red Hat? I'm a big fan of them. They have a relatively pure Open Source business model, and are showing the world that good money can be made out of it too. Not to mention their attitude. "Wanna clone our operating system? Be our guest, you'll only make us stronger."
On a more serious note, they're probably right about CentOS cementing their position. See also this very insightful post.
You're dodging my points. I said building on pylons is more expensive than expropriating land, as shown by the current high-speed rail project (as well as most high-speed rail projects in other countries) not being built on pylons. Your answer:
Actually, I do think there are some political considerations and non-engineering reasons for the extreme costs as well as comparatively slow speed that the California "high speed rail" system is being developed. Those political considerations in particular are the kind of thing escalating the costs making it unaffordable, just like similar spiraling costs are killing NASA.
Oh yeah, because every politician knows expropriating land can make you insanely popular. I bet politicians stand in line to show voters they have the spine to expropriate large swathes of land... not!
There are legitimate concerns about this project that can be raised, but raise those objections based upon knowledge.... by at least reading the f'ing paper that describes the project in the first place. Being closed minded that it is impossible for Elon to ever pull this off or that others can't run with the idea and try to build it is also just as stupid as those who may be claiming that Elon is Tony Stark and can turn all into gold.
After skimming the paper, searching it for information relevant to my reservations, and reading some more technical commentaries, I'm more convinced than ever that his cost estimates are far, far too low. Along with the engineering margins on some structural details. Also, you're strawmanning me. I never said that "it is impossible for Elon to ever pull this off". I never even raised any technical objections against it being possible. All I ever said is that his cost estimates are laughably optimistic and it will turn out to be more expensive than the current high-speed rail project. By a huge margin. I'm willing to bet good money on this. But given your own reservations about budget, I take it you won't accept the bet ;)
Bottom line: I'm as excited as the next guy to see this coming true. Just don't think for a second it will come cheap. In fact, in light of the willingness of American taxpayers to spend big on hi-tech public infrastructure, China, Japan or France will likely beat the US to it.
It is clearly stated in the source, that /dev/urandom produces cryptographically strong random numbers.
Oh, really? Guess they'll have to update the Linux man page then...
http://stackoverflow.com/a/3690285
http://linux.die.net/man/4/urandom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random#Linux
You guys (as well as the mods who modded me down) have no idea how strong a large-diameter pipe needs to be to withstand a partial vacuum that is high enough to make the speeds he's talking about feasible. An airplane/rocket/spaceship body simply doesn't compare; it's much easier to keep pressure in than to keep pressure out. That's because the pressure in an overpressurized tube will counteract any deformation/buckling initiated by random forces (such as a capsule traveling through it), while the pressure in an underpressurized tube will amplify it. Think a submarine body or a particle accelerator. Neither are particularly light or cheap. I can assure you Mr. Musk's tube will have to be incredibly strong and therefore either heavy or very expensive.
Also, there's nothing stopping a 1000-miles-long high-speed rail track from being built on poles above a major highway. That is, nothing but the horrible cost of doing so, which is way higher than buying people's land. Or, populist soundbites aside, did you think the planners of the high-speed rail project are complete idiots?
Yes, and I know Mr. Musk's track record. I do not, however, believe in appeal to authority. When he got the idea of doing SpaceX, I thought: "good idea, he may pull it off". When he got the idea of selling electric cars, I thought: "good idea, he may pull it off". But this just makes me think "what has he been smoking?" After his previous successes in the face of adversity, he must have become overconfident.
People like you, who think they know something about security but really don't, are the reason why this bug occurred in the fist place.
/dev/urandom is not a cryptographically secure source of random numbers. /dev/random is (when correctly implemented). In fact, it's supposed to be better than the frivolous combining-bits-and-hashing scheme you propose. And with all its sensors, a smartphone should have a pretty nice inflow of high-quality entropy.