Actually, in math I think a closed mind is often more helpful than an open mind. That way you don't give up so easily. It's not as if math proofs aren't generally reasonably easy to validate...I believe it can even be done mechanically. Constructing the proof is a lot more difficult.
The only difficulty with this is when new approaches are used. In that case it can (and has in the recent past) require years of effort to translate the new approach into the older methods. And, of course, the proof checkers need to be able to validate the theorems and corollaries referenced. I believe this was a problem in the case I'm referring to because the references were all in Japanese math journals, and the proof engines weren't familiar with them. I should remember the guy's name, but I'm monolingual English and Japanese names just don't stick easily. And when it comes to math, I'm a programmer. I haven't even remembered enough details to google it. (And I am talking about using the Google search engine, it's not a generic reference.)
Well, I generally didn't like Phillip K. Dick, though I admit he was a good writer, just not one to my taste. But I wasn't surprised in not being impressed by the movie. Most people seem to think "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" a good book, and almost never does a good book make a good movie. They always end up trivializing it, and ruining a good idea because it doesn't make good visuals. OTOH, bad books have occasionally made good movies...probably for the same reason (though I haven't seen enough of them to be sure).
In this case using a pay phone is a trivial thing to complain about. The problem I found with it was there wasn't anything really good about it. I was impressed by the visuals, but that's not what a good story is about. I'm not going to see it again because I don't want to give the MPAA it's rake-off.
As John W. Campbell, Jr. once said, if a story tries to predict all the advances that are likely, it will be unintelligible. Even if you could correctly predict how everything would change, to do so would be a horrendous mistake for an author, because nobody (including the editor) would understand the story.
I've got to admit that I don't remember blade-runner, it didn't really impress me. The pictures were nice, but the projected future was trite. (OTOH, I've been reading Science Fiction since the 1950's, and so am not the target audience.) So this is a criticism of the point made in the summary.
That said, if you want to understand how poorly we can predict things, look at "A Logic Named Joe" https://www.google.com/search?... for an early guess as what the internet might be like if it were ever invented. There the internet is an important background element that's reasonably well developed, not just something incidental, but also not the central story element. If you want to understand why, read Ray Kurtzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". (That was written long enough ago that you can judge how valid you think his arguments are.)
But the real thing is, when making predictions we tend to predict things that we currently feel are important, whether good or bad, but a lot of the decisions are made by other people who see other possibilities. Henry Ford never set out to revise the sexual mores of the world, but that's one of the things he did.
Why not? Sugar is a poison, even the simple ones. But so is oxygen.
Also, to bring up a car analogy, if your gas measure is too rich in your carburetor you'll foul your cylinders.
As with everything, it's pretty much a matter of proportions and quantity. A tiny bit of sugar is no problem. Too much and things start to go to hell. But the same is true of proteins (kidney problems) and fats (triglyceride levels). The body is designed to cope with these things, and with large variations in the food supply, but coping generally comes at a cost, and the cost is measured in life expectancy.
In my case I OD'ed on sugars and carbs for decades before it caught up with me, so for me it's important that I *really* limit the proportion of sugars and carbs (except fiber) in my diet. I tried the Atkins diet for 6 months, and while it helped me lose a bit of weight it sent my triglycerides through the roof. Strangely, that's when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I've modified my diet now to something where sugar is essentially absent, non-fiber cars are *strongly* limited, and fats, especially saturated fats, are limited. Limiting fats has as an immediate result also limiting animal protein. (I suppose I could eat lots of rabbit or some such, but that's too much bother.) My triglycerides are back under control. Cholesterol was never a problem (my body chemistry generates low cholesterol as the problem). Etc.
If you do this right you can even have breads, though you need to cook them yourself, as no commercial version is low in starches. My preferred mix is to replace flour with a combination of wheat bran, wheat germ, and wheat gluten....all essentially free of starch. You make things interesting by using different mixes of spices with each batch. Cocoa is good, but I prefer either pumpkin pie spice or curry. If you want to make yeast bread you need to pick ingredients that don't bother the yeast. With tomato sauce you need to add a bit of xanthan gum to avoid having bubbles that are so sharp you cut your mouth when you eat the bread. Some people like to add nut flours, but I prefer peanut butter.
But note that this is necessary because I was an ice cream junkie for a long time. And cookies. Etc. If you have a different dietary history, you'll need a different correction, and it's easier if you can do it before you have a breakdown...of course, after the breakdown motivation is stronger.
"Go on from there" is a bit vague. If you'd said "then go on to limit starches" you'd have a good point, but one that needs careful elaboration.
I find, personally, that essentially eliminating sugar and replacing starches with a mix of wheat germ and wheat bran (gluten optional) works well.
OTOH, I also limit saturated fats. I'm not sure this is necessary, but it seems to help. FWIW, I didn't start experimenting with this diet until after I was diagnosed with diabetes (non-insulin dependent), and if I hadn't had *strong* motivation I probably couldn't have switched to it, however since switching it's been little problem. (Less problem than my wife's almost no salt diet.)
All that said, it's still true that I can't get my glucose level down where I want it. My doctor is satisfied, but I'm not. I want to get it down to the point where there is evidence that the pancreas starts regenerating (averaging below 100 with spikes below 125).
Making this kind of diet acceptable depends heavily on creative use of spices and... strangely... dill pickles. (I wonder how important the salt is?) Currently I'm experimenting with marinated cucumbers.
But while I trust the results of the experiment as reported in the summary, I think that I could design an experiment describable in the exact same terms that would show the opposite results. There's LOTS of variables.
There was a case in (I believe it was) West Virginia where an officer was talking someone out of being a problem, and appearantly being successful. Some other officers showed up and shot the now quiet "perpetrator". They were praised. The officer who talked the guy down was.... here I can't quite believe my memory. So I looked it up. http://ktla.com/2017/05/12/law...
Well, this doesn't directly address the use of tasers, but it addresses how justified I assume the use of force often is. I know that good people join the police force, but it often seems that either they don't stay around, or they get corrupted.
FWIW, insurance claims don't substantiate the claim the being a policeman is unreasonably dangerous compared to other professions. It *is* dangerous compared to being a computer programmer, but not compared to being a forester or, I believe, an electric company lineman. (I'd really need to check the list of more dangerous professions again to be certain, but policeman wasn't in the top 10.)
Well, it's happened that way more than once, but I don't think there is much evidence that it's frequent.
OTOH, there's considerable evidence that tasers are use with reckless abandon. Saying it's malicious assault is probably more than the evidence usually justifies, but it often sure looks that way, and sometimes that's clearly what happens, even when the guy doesn't end up dead.
OTOH, there are LOTS of incidents, and we presumably only hear about the outliers. But the incidence of violence appears to have increased since the police started using tasers. This *may* be only appearance, but I wouldn't put any money on that.
Unfortunately, this isn't really certain. Venus started off not that different from Earth. And the sun has warmed over time.
The real truth is that we don't *KNOW* that we won't set off a run-away greenhouse effect which doesn't end up with the oceans boiling off into space (slowly, admittedly, but water vapor in the ionosphere tends to loose hydrogen under the influence of solar ultraviolet). We tend to *believe* that this won't happen, but our models aren't good enough to prove this outside of the range under which they have been validated. (Even where they've been validated, they tend to have large error bars, but once you get outside that area...just don't count on them.)
That's the real reason that the limit of 2 degrees was set. (Well, that and being easy to communicate.) We really don't expect a sudden change at 2 degrees, which is quite fortunate as there's no way we're going to stay within those bounds, but the models become less reliable as you get further away from where they've been tested. And we know for sure that the change won't be evenly distributed.
IIUC, Antarctica *HAS* been relatively stable in it's position for an extremely long time. Back through the Jurassic. I also doubt that the North American plate has crossed the equator twice...unless you mean a projection from it crossed the equator and then retreated. The major continental drift has been away from what is now the central Atlantic ocean, though there was certainly a lot of rotational movement as well, and India moved quite rapidly away from Africa and is now ploughing into Asia.
It *is* true that Africa and Australia were once (LONG ago) connected via Antarctica, and that Antarctica was relatively warm at that time. (Temperate forest.) But the days in that forest were about 6 months long, so it was in the same position. I presume that it was warmed by ocean currents the same way Iceland, Ireland, and the west coast of North America are.
But the continental drift happens on a different time scale that the growth of vegetation in the permafrost area. What probably happened (this is a guess) was that the position of Greenland shifted from an earlier position in which the Gulf Stream was directed all the way up into the Arctic Ocean, causing the pole to be a lot warmer. Slowly Greenland drifted to it's current position where the channel up past Hudson's Bay is too narrow to allow significant flow (and then it iced up which really stopped things). This caused the Arctic Ocean to freeze. The problem with this is there are some indications that at least in some areas the freeze happened quite rapidly, so some details are clearly missing or wrong.
---- separator ---- line ---- encountered ---- lameness ---- filter ---- The following part is a guess. Don't believe it, but take it seriously.
But note that in the current permafrost area the vegetation that ended up under the permafrost was annuals rather than perennials (like trees), so imagine that for a long time it was an area that was swampy during the summer and frozen during the winter, and chilly all the way to the bottom of the bog. In fact a good model would probably be the colder Irish peat bogs. Then it really froze, and the decomposition slowed to a crawl. But this allowed more oxygen to diffuse into the mess, because now life processes were too slow to use it up. So when it melts not ALL the decomposition will be anaerobic. This will be important because aerobic processes are more energetically efficient, but it will be limited, because not that much oxygen is around. This means a rapid bloom followed be a slow continuation.
Planting trees is good, especially if you then bury them under anaerobic conditions where they won't be exposed for millennia. Second best is to really fireproof them and then use them in construction. Third best is convert them to acid neutralized paper and use them to print libraries. (Books don't last as long as buildings, and buildings don't last as long as well buried stuff...which will turn into coal.)
The thing is, you've got to remove the carbon from the cycle. And one generation of trees won't come near to sufficing for what's needed.
Do note, however, that the process we're discussion will take multiple centuries...and probably a large multiple. In the mean time things are likely to get a bit warm, and possibly dry. (Check out the current fires in British Columbia.)
It may be the best argument, but it's not a good one. A better one is that people are really short-sighted, and unreasonably discount future costs. And even better argument is that the decision makers won't be the ones hurt. And an even better argument is that the decision makers won't be hurt as much, and so they'll be relatively better off.
Well, it's not exactly coherent reasoning, but there is an orbital oscillation that is having a minor effect. (I'm not sure sun spots have anything to do with this, though, and the orbit of Mars doesn't shift it's oscillation in parallel with Earth, so the argument fails even though it's talking about a real, if minor, effect.)
Check out http://www.indiana.edu/~geol10... . But also note that I have no idea where we are in the cycle...except that based solely on that cycle we should have been re-entering an ice age during the last century. So some other effect is swamping it.
The evidence, IIUC, was not "Russians messing with the U.S. election", it was "someone using a Russian IP address messing with the U.S. election". So it *could* have been Russians, and it *could* have been the Russian government. But the IP address could have been spoofed. It could have been a hacker working under contract. Etc.
Running Linux alone does not suffice. You also need to avoid the installation of Flash, to avoid javascript, and a few other choices...like not installing applications you don't need. Even that isn't 100% protection, but that's not available anywhere on the planet, probably anywhere in the universe.
If you want to be even more secure (this thing is layered) run some version of BSD with the same restrictions. And then you run the applications that you need to run in a virtualized environment. And that's not the end. You could air-gap all your systems, and remove all wi-fi capabilities. You could run your systems inside a Faraday cage. You could run your power through an AC->DC->AC converter to keep signals from escaping through the power grid.
For my purposes Linux appears safe enough...if I don't trust foreign software, and do reasonable backups. And don't enable known-dangerous extensions. I'm really dubious about HTML5. It looks like it comes with embedded vulnerabilities, as opposed to earlier HTML dialects where the vulnerabilities were part of common extensions that you could remove.
Well, you've got two problems there...make that three. 1) False positives. Just because something is flagged as a virus/trojan/etc. doesn't mean it really is, just that it has a high probability of being one. (And, of course, there are also false negatives.) 2) The manufacturer's site could be infected. 3) The manufacturer could be intentionally shipping spyware embedded in their product. (I've seen EULAs where they demanded the right to do so.)
Then there's problem 4: 4) The anti-virus could, itself, be some variety of malware.
It is my expectation that if you're running MSWindows, you are infected with Malware. Their EULA demands the right for the company to install such...and they have in the past done so intentionally. (So has Sony. Probably also other companies that I didn't hear of or don't remember.) With Apple it's less clear. They certainly demand the right, but I don't recall that they've ever been caught using it. The Debian repository has been infected once that i've heard of, and IIRC it was cleaned up within hours of the infection, but it could have been as long as a couple of days. Ubuntu, OTOH, has built spyware into their system. I believe that they removed it after an outcry, and they didn't hide that they were doing it. (For that matter, Debian has optional spyware that sends usage information back to them, and probably some other information. But it's opt-in.)
If the original compiler is written in C, or, better, a C subset, then it MUST be possible to write a compiler for the language in itself. Demanding that the original compiler for the language be written in the language is just being silly. You'd need to have a compiler for the language to use the source code...and assembler is less portable than C.
N.B.: This is one of the standard ways that self-hosting compilers work. It is quite rare (almost unheard of) for the reference implementation to be in the language itself. Algol, IIRC, was implemented originally via an Algol subset that was written in assembler, and Forth. Probably LISP and Fortran. Possibly COBOL. But note that these languages all date back to the 1950's or quite early 1960's. (I've never heard how the original BASIC was written, but i believe it was an interpreter.) However, after C really took hold, nobody wanted to bother with that non-portable approach.
Python is not a C replacement. Perhaps you meant Pascal? Pre-Delphi Pascal had many of the features that I think the C replacement should have, though it was missing lots of them that are present in C. C's scope rules, e.g., are superior to those of Pascal.
FWIW, no language with objects built in, and no language that requires an interpreter or a virtual machine is a viable C replacement.
OTOH, my sister never did learn how to reliably set up her "smart TV". Neither did I, so it wasn't obvious, but, OTOH, the only "TV" in the house is used as a computer monitor. But after seeing my sister's TV, I went with ViewSonic rather than Samsung. (I think it's a TV anyway, but I'm not sure, as I only use it as a monitor.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in math I think a closed mind is often more helpful than an open mind. That way you don't give up so easily. It's not as if math proofs aren't generally reasonably easy to validate...I believe it can even be done mechanically. Constructing the proof is a lot more difficult.
The only difficulty with this is when new approaches are used. In that case it can (and has in the recent past) require years of effort to translate the new approach into the older methods. And, of course, the proof checkers need to be able to validate the theorems and corollaries referenced. I believe this was a problem in the case I'm referring to because the references were all in Japanese math journals, and the proof engines weren't familiar with them. I should remember the guy's name, but I'm monolingual English and Japanese names just don't stick easily. And when it comes to math, I'm a programmer. I haven't even remembered enough details to google it. (And I am talking about using the Google search engine, it's not a generic reference.)
Well, I generally didn't like Phillip K. Dick, though I admit he was a good writer, just not one to my taste. But I wasn't surprised in not being impressed by the movie. Most people seem to think "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" a good book, and almost never does a good book make a good movie. They always end up trivializing it, and ruining a good idea because it doesn't make good visuals. OTOH, bad books have occasionally made good movies...probably for the same reason (though I haven't seen enough of them to be sure).
In this case using a pay phone is a trivial thing to complain about. The problem I found with it was there wasn't anything really good about it. I was impressed by the visuals, but that's not what a good story is about. I'm not going to see it again because I don't want to give the MPAA it's rake-off.
As John W. Campbell, Jr. once said, if a story tries to predict all the advances that are likely, it will be unintelligible. Even if you could correctly predict how everything would change, to do so would be a horrendous mistake for an author, because nobody (including the editor) would understand the story.
I've got to admit that I don't remember blade-runner, it didn't really impress me. The pictures were nice, but the projected future was trite. (OTOH, I've been reading Science Fiction since the 1950's, and so am not the target audience.) So this is a criticism of the point made in the summary.
That said, if you want to understand how poorly we can predict things, look at "A Logic Named Joe" https://www.google.com/search?... for an early guess as what the internet might be like if it were ever invented. There the internet is an important background element that's reasonably well developed, not just something incidental, but also not the central story element. If you want to understand why, read Ray Kurtzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". (That was written long enough ago that you can judge how valid you think his arguments are.)
But the real thing is, when making predictions we tend to predict things that we currently feel are important, whether good or bad, but a lot of the decisions are made by other people who see other possibilities. Henry Ford never set out to revise the sexual mores of the world, but that's one of the things he did.
Why not? Sugar is a poison, even the simple ones. But so is oxygen.
Also, to bring up a car analogy, if your gas measure is too rich in your carburetor you'll foul your cylinders.
As with everything, it's pretty much a matter of proportions and quantity. A tiny bit of sugar is no problem. Too much and things start to go to hell. But the same is true of proteins (kidney problems) and fats (triglyceride levels). The body is designed to cope with these things, and with large variations in the food supply, but coping generally comes at a cost, and the cost is measured in life expectancy.
In my case I OD'ed on sugars and carbs for decades before it caught up with me, so for me it's important that I *really* limit the proportion of sugars and carbs (except fiber) in my diet. I tried the Atkins diet for 6 months, and while it helped me lose a bit of weight it sent my triglycerides through the roof. Strangely, that's when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I've modified my diet now to something where sugar is essentially absent, non-fiber cars are *strongly* limited, and fats, especially saturated fats, are limited. Limiting fats has as an immediate result also limiting animal protein. (I suppose I could eat lots of rabbit or some such, but that's too much bother.) My triglycerides are back under control. Cholesterol was never a problem (my body chemistry generates low cholesterol as the problem). Etc.
If you do this right you can even have breads, though you need to cook them yourself, as no commercial version is low in starches. My preferred mix is to replace flour with a combination of wheat bran, wheat germ, and wheat gluten....all essentially free of starch. You make things interesting by using different mixes of spices with each batch. Cocoa is good, but I prefer either pumpkin pie spice or curry. If you want to make yeast bread you need to pick ingredients that don't bother the yeast. With tomato sauce you need to add a bit of xanthan gum to avoid having bubbles that are so sharp you cut your mouth when you eat the bread. Some people like to add nut flours, but I prefer peanut butter.
But note that this is necessary because I was an ice cream junkie for a long time. And cookies. Etc. If you have a different dietary history, you'll need a different correction, and it's easier if you can do it before you have a breakdown...of course, after the breakdown motivation is stronger.
"Go on from there" is a bit vague. If you'd said "then go on to limit starches" you'd have a good point, but one that needs careful elaboration.
I find, personally, that essentially eliminating sugar and replacing starches with a mix of wheat germ and wheat bran (gluten optional) works well.
OTOH, I also limit saturated fats. I'm not sure this is necessary, but it seems to help. FWIW, I didn't start experimenting with this diet until after I was diagnosed with diabetes (non-insulin dependent), and if I hadn't had *strong* motivation I probably couldn't have switched to it, however since switching it's been little problem. (Less problem than my wife's almost no salt diet.)
All that said, it's still true that I can't get my glucose level down where I want it. My doctor is satisfied, but I'm not. I want to get it down to the point where there is evidence that the pancreas starts regenerating (averaging below 100 with spikes below 125).
Making this kind of diet acceptable depends heavily on creative use of spices and ... strangely ... dill pickles. (I wonder how important the salt is?) Currently I'm experimenting with marinated cucumbers.
But while I trust the results of the experiment as reported in the summary, I think that I could design an experiment describable in the exact same terms that would show the opposite results. There's LOTS of variables.
I didn't expect to like his politics. It's nice that it sounds like he picked someone competent for a change.
There was a case in (I believe it was) West Virginia where an officer was talking someone out of being a problem, and appearantly being successful. Some other officers showed up and shot the now quiet "perpetrator". They were praised. The officer who talked the guy down was .... here I can't quite believe my memory. So I looked it up. http://ktla.com/2017/05/12/law...
Well, this doesn't directly address the use of tasers, but it addresses how justified I assume the use of force often is. I know that good people join the police force, but it often seems that either they don't stay around, or they get corrupted.
FWIW, insurance claims don't substantiate the claim the being a policeman is unreasonably dangerous compared to other professions. It *is* dangerous compared to being a computer programmer, but not compared to being a forester or, I believe, an electric company lineman. (I'd really need to check the list of more dangerous professions again to be certain, but policeman wasn't in the top 10.)
Well, it's happened that way more than once, but I don't think there is much evidence that it's frequent.
OTOH, there's considerable evidence that tasers are use with reckless abandon. Saying it's malicious assault is probably more than the evidence usually justifies, but it often sure looks that way, and sometimes that's clearly what happens, even when the guy doesn't end up dead.
OTOH, there are LOTS of incidents, and we presumably only hear about the outliers. But the incidence of violence appears to have increased since the police started using tasers. This *may* be only appearance, but I wouldn't put any money on that.
Unfortunately, this isn't really certain. Venus started off not that different from Earth. And the sun has warmed over time.
The real truth is that we don't *KNOW* that we won't set off a run-away greenhouse effect which doesn't end up with the oceans boiling off into space (slowly, admittedly, but water vapor in the ionosphere tends to loose hydrogen under the influence of solar ultraviolet). We tend to *believe* that this won't happen, but our models aren't good enough to prove this outside of the range under which they have been validated. (Even where they've been validated, they tend to have large error bars, but once you get outside that area...just don't count on them.)
That's the real reason that the limit of 2 degrees was set. (Well, that and being easy to communicate.) We really don't expect a sudden change at 2 degrees, which is quite fortunate as there's no way we're going to stay within those bounds, but the models become less reliable as you get further away from where they've been tested. And we know for sure that the change won't be evenly distributed.
IIUC, Antarctica *HAS* been relatively stable in it's position for an extremely long time. Back through the Jurassic. I also doubt that the North American plate has crossed the equator twice...unless you mean a projection from it crossed the equator and then retreated. The major continental drift has been away from what is now the central Atlantic ocean, though there was certainly a lot of rotational movement as well, and India moved quite rapidly away from Africa and is now ploughing into Asia.
It *is* true that Africa and Australia were once (LONG ago) connected via Antarctica, and that Antarctica was relatively warm at that time. (Temperate forest.) But the days in that forest were about 6 months long, so it was in the same position. I presume that it was warmed by ocean currents the same way Iceland, Ireland, and the west coast of North America are.
But the continental drift happens on a different time scale that the growth of vegetation in the permafrost area. What probably happened (this is a guess) was that the position of Greenland shifted from an earlier position in which the Gulf Stream was directed all the way up into the Arctic Ocean, causing the pole to be a lot warmer. Slowly Greenland drifted to it's current position where the channel up past Hudson's Bay is too narrow to allow significant flow (and then it iced up which really stopped things). This caused the Arctic Ocean to freeze. The problem with this is there are some indications that at least in some areas the freeze happened quite rapidly, so some details are clearly missing or wrong.
---- separator ---- line ---- encountered ---- lameness ---- filter ----
The following part is a guess. Don't believe it, but take it seriously.
But note that in the current permafrost area the vegetation that ended up under the permafrost was annuals rather than perennials (like trees), so imagine that for a long time it was an area that was swampy during the summer and frozen during the winter, and chilly all the way to the bottom of the bog. In fact a good model would probably be the colder Irish peat bogs. Then it really froze, and the decomposition slowed to a crawl. But this allowed more oxygen to diffuse into the mess, because now life processes were too slow to use it up. So when it melts not ALL the decomposition will be anaerobic. This will be important because aerobic processes are more energetically efficient, but it will be limited, because not that much oxygen is around. This means a rapid bloom followed be a slow continuation.
Planting trees is good, especially if you then bury them under anaerobic conditions where they won't be exposed for millennia. Second best is to really fireproof them and then use them in construction. Third best is convert them to acid neutralized paper and use them to print libraries. (Books don't last as long as buildings, and buildings don't last as long as well buried stuff...which will turn into coal.)
The thing is, you've got to remove the carbon from the cycle. And one generation of trees won't come near to sufficing for what's needed.
Do note, however, that the process we're discussion will take multiple centuries...and probably a large multiple. In the mean time things are likely to get a bit warm, and possibly dry. (Check out the current fires in British Columbia.)
It may be the best argument, but it's not a good one. A better one is that people are really short-sighted, and unreasonably discount future costs. And even better argument is that the decision makers won't be the ones hurt. And an even better argument is that the decision makers won't be hurt as much, and so they'll be relatively better off.
I seem to be a bit of a cynic.
Well, it's not exactly coherent reasoning, but there is an orbital oscillation that is having a minor effect. (I'm not sure sun spots have anything to do with this, though, and the orbit of Mars doesn't shift it's oscillation in parallel with Earth, so the argument fails even though it's talking about a real, if minor, effect.)
Check out http://www.indiana.edu/~geol10... . But also note that I have no idea where we are in the cycle...except that based solely on that cycle we should have been re-entering an ice age during the last century. So some other effect is swamping it.
When is the last time that a corporation went to jail for murder?
You misunderstand.
If they don't give *ME* evidence, why should *I* trust them. They don't have a very good track record for trustworthiness.
When a liar tells you something, it might be true. But since you know he's a liar you shouldn't readily believe him without evidence.
The evidence, IIUC, was not "Russians messing with the U.S. election", it was "someone using a Russian IP address messing with the U.S. election". So it *could* have been Russians, and it *could* have been the Russian government. But the IP address could have been spoofed. It could have been a hacker working under contract. Etc.
You can only sue the US government (in a US court) if you first get their permission.
Running Linux alone does not suffice. You also need to avoid the installation of Flash, to avoid javascript, and a few other choices...like not installing applications you don't need. Even that isn't 100% protection, but that's not available anywhere on the planet, probably anywhere in the universe.
If you want to be even more secure (this thing is layered) run some version of BSD with the same restrictions. And then you run the applications that you need to run in a virtualized environment. And that's not the end. You could air-gap all your systems, and remove all wi-fi capabilities. You could run your systems inside a Faraday cage. You could run your power through an AC->DC->AC converter to keep signals from escaping through the power grid.
For my purposes Linux appears safe enough...if I don't trust foreign software, and do reasonable backups. And don't enable known-dangerous extensions. I'm really dubious about HTML5. It looks like it comes with embedded vulnerabilities, as opposed to earlier HTML dialects where the vulnerabilities were part of common extensions that you could remove.
Well, you've got two problems there...make that three.
1) False positives. Just because something is flagged as a virus/trojan/etc. doesn't mean it really is, just that it has a high probability of being one. (And, of course, there are also false negatives.)
2) The manufacturer's site could be infected.
3) The manufacturer could be intentionally shipping spyware embedded in their product. (I've seen EULAs where they demanded the right to do so.)
Then there's problem 4:
4) The anti-virus could, itself, be some variety of malware.
It is my expectation that if you're running MSWindows, you are infected with Malware. Their EULA demands the right for the company to install such...and they have in the past done so intentionally. (So has Sony. Probably also other companies that I didn't hear of or don't remember.) With Apple it's less clear. They certainly demand the right, but I don't recall that they've ever been caught using it. The Debian repository has been infected once that i've heard of, and IIRC it was cleaned up within hours of the infection, but it could have been as long as a couple of days. Ubuntu, OTOH, has built spyware into their system. I believe that they removed it after an outcry, and they didn't hide that they were doing it. (For that matter, Debian has optional spyware that sends usage information back to them, and probably some other information. But it's opt-in.)
For government computers, yes. For your own??? Which government is more likely to be a threat to you?
So the question is, "Who is more dangerous to you, personally, the KGB or the CIA/FBI/NSA?".
And that's assuming that I accept your assertion which, I admit, is plausible.
If the original compiler is written in C, or, better, a C subset, then it MUST be possible to write a compiler for the language in itself. Demanding that the original compiler for the language be written in the language is just being silly. You'd need to have a compiler for the language to use the source code...and assembler is less portable than C.
N.B.: This is one of the standard ways that self-hosting compilers work. It is quite rare (almost unheard of) for the reference implementation to be in the language itself. Algol, IIRC, was implemented originally via an Algol subset that was written in assembler, and Forth. Probably LISP and Fortran. Possibly COBOL. But note that these languages all date back to the 1950's or quite early 1960's. (I've never heard how the original BASIC was written, but i believe it was an interpreter.) However, after C really took hold, nobody wanted to bother with that non-portable approach.
Python is not a C replacement. Perhaps you meant Pascal? Pre-Delphi Pascal had many of the features that I think the C replacement should have, though it was missing lots of them that are present in C. C's scope rules, e.g., are superior to those of Pascal.
FWIW, no language with objects built in, and no language that requires an interpreter or a virtual machine is a viable C replacement.
OTOH, my sister never did learn how to reliably set up her "smart TV". Neither did I, so it wasn't obvious, but, OTOH, the only "TV" in the house is used as a computer monitor. But after seeing my sister's TV, I went with ViewSonic rather than Samsung. (I think it's a TV anyway, but I'm not sure, as I only use it as a monitor.)
You mean the company that sold phones that wouldn't work if you held them normally?