Nice troll, registrations_suck. It's more than a little undermined by your admission that:
I ditched cable in 2009 - do not miss it at all. Don't even have Netflix, Hulu, or any other subscriptions. If I want to watch a movie, I'll rent it on Vudu, or Apple Store, or even Amazon.
What that post reveals is that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, when you say that TV "sucks".
In fact, for the past six or seven years, TV has gotten better and better. Sitcoms aside, TV shows - and I'm including here programs on all those streaming services you don't watch, as well as broadcast and cable programming - have enormously stepped up their game. Per-episode budgets are way up, permitting better sets, effects, and location shooting, in addition to adding expensive talent to their casts. As competition (especially from those aforementioned cable channels) has greatly increased, the quality of their scriptwriting has also improved. Geeky stuff like Mr. Robot, which portrays hacking in credible terms, science fiction- and superhero-based programs that employ literary devices such as unreliable narrators (Black Mirror and Legion, for example), and character-based, long-form series such as Breaking Bad and Homeland that discard entirely the notion that episodes must be self-contained, permitting them to develop storylines that aren't confined to a 42-minute storytelling prison have become the rule, rather than the exception.
And that evolution has occurred since you stopped watching TV in 2009.
Perhaps you should reconsider the wisdom of making sweeping statements regarding subjects about which you actually know nothing.
Oh, wait - I forgot this is/. By all means, then, continue declaiming through your hat...
I think the criticism here is more about how much weight Google has in de-facto web standards. That's valid, but this the open source isn't open source nonsense is a red herring.
Yep.
Note, for instance, that critic Ethan Marcotte's complaints include:
Significant features and changes require the approval of AMP's Technical Lead and one Core Committer -- and if you peruse the list of AMP's Core Committers, that list seems exclusively staffed and led by Google employees.
AFAIK, "significant features and changes" to the Linux kernel require the approval of Linus Torvalds. Full stop. Is he trying to imply that none of the Core Committers would be willing to second the approval of the Technical Lead?
I don' theeng so, Quickstraw.
Is there any bar to an outsider becoming a Core Committer? Marcotte seems to imply that there is, without bothering to provide any evidence that that's the case.
As for AMP pages being featured in the "carousel" - use an adblocker and that goes away.
So, basically, his beef is that Googlers paid to work on AMP control the "Core Committers" and Google itself touts AMP'd pages in the featured ads section of its search results. Unless he can point to somebody outside of Google who's:
a. regularly contributing usable, well-written code to the AMP base, and
b. has been denied membership in the Core Committers group
I fail to see a legitimate basis for complaint here.
(I don't have a dog in this fight, btw. AMP pages hardly matter to me, since I don't do a lot of web browsing on my phone. That might change if Firefox for mobile wasn't a giant, stinking pile of... code. But whinging about Googlers' dominance of a nominally open-source project that's apparently well within the bounds of HTML 5's published standards seems kind of pathetic to me.)
You should be talking to these people you think you hate. You'll find you have a whole lot more in common with them than hating each other because you don't talk.
Uhh... no. No, I won't.
"These people (I) hate" are racist, sexist, xenophobic morons. They can't go two minutes without sneering at "liberals" (not self-identified SJW's - liberals), sharing one of those divisive, Russian troll-authored "Like and share if you agree!" dogwhistles (and, yes, I know there are left-ish versions, too - and I hate those people just as much), quoting Faux News's latest piece of disinformation (or, worse yet, Breitbart or Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh), and generally doing everything in their power to make what they have to say as repulsive and confrontational as possible.
Mind you, there are plenty of folks with whom I disagree politically who are interesting, informed, and convival conversationalists. I'm not talking about them here. I'm talking specifically about the people I hate, on social media and off. I'm talking about Roger Stone, and Dick Cheney, and Sean Hannity, and their adoring, uncritical fans.
I live in the heart of Trump country (or, perhaps the spleen of Trump country), where the defensiveness and willful ignorance about our Tweeter-in-Chief is absolutely poisonous. You can't have a conversation that his foul stench doesn't pollute to the point of uninhabitability. (At least, I can't have such a conversation. Your gag reflex may be made of sterner stuff.) At the same time, their level of education, their interest in geopolitics, their sophistication of viewpoint are all in the bottom percentile - and this is in the USA, where a pervasive belief in our national exceptionalism has convinced the vast majority of the population that those things aren't important to begin with.
I despise these people because they hate anyone and everyone whose skin color, accent, clothing, or religious beliefs are different from their own. I hated them before Donald Chump came along, before social meda arose, before Faux News was incorporated, before Ronald Reagan entered politics, before Richard Nixon ran for president the second time - and their social media presence hasn't mellowed my disgust.
My first exposure to casual racism occurred in 1961, in Montgomery, Alabama, when I was eight years old and George Corley Wallace was running for governor. It turned my stomach then, just as it turns my stomach today.
So fuck those people. We have NOTHING in common...
Especially one where "the writing is done and most of the editing". Are conventional publishers not interested? Or is this just a means of coaxing a better deal out of publishers?
I understand crowd funding for projects to expensive to self fund yet too small for conventional venture capital. But conventional book publishing seems to have this covered. Writers write. Publishers publish and sometimes providers editors and advance payment to writers. Is there reason to believe this book would not be published were it not for the kickstarter campaign?
Here's the thing most people don't realize about the publishing industry: unless you're already a bestselling author, traditional publishing companies don't make even a token effort to promote your book. Yes. that's a sillly strategy, but it's pretty much the default for the Big Six and their eleventy-seven scrillion imprints. They don't advertise, other than to list your title in their catalogue, they don't send marketing material to radio and tv talk shows, they don't, in fact, do dick to help you sell your book. They don't even send copies to reviewers, unless those reviewers specifically request them.
Which means it's up to you, the author, to do all the marketing and advertising for your book.
You're the one who has to call tv and radio shows to pitch them on having you on as a guest. You're the one who has to contact reviewers and try to persuade them to read your book - and you'll have to send them a copy that you bought with your own money, if they agree to do so. If you want print or radio ads, or posters, or standees, or tchotkes like bookmarks, pens, coffee mugs, and the like to promote your book, you get to hire a designer, pay to have them printed, and hand them out yourself. You get to hustle bookstores and libraries to let you give readings and hold booksignings. All that stuff is on you, and if there are expenses involved, they come out of your pocket.
Basically, if you got a million-dollar advance, then your publisher will pull out all the promotional stops. But if you're just another face in the authorial crowd, then marketing and promoting your book is YOUR problem.
And that, dear erice, is why a book that's already written and in the process of being edited needs a Kickstarter campaign...
This is fun, I guess. I've seen other posts on this blog as well. It's all moderately interesting, but with the best ones filtered to the top by a human, doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
Seems like wasted research dollars, to me.
What makes the ones that are actually amusing funny is that they're non sequiturs. The ones that aren't funny - which is to say "most of them" - are simply nonsensical.
It's unclear whether that was the goal of the effort or not, but the key capture here is that none of these projected headlines is in any way truly informative in a real-world, factual context. What I think would be far more interesting (although, admittedly, probably a good deal less amusing) would be to set this AI to the task of writing headlines for actual news stories.
What would make that particularly interesting would be to compare the AI-authored headlines with those that/.'s editors wrote. Seeing which ones were more informative and factually accurate, and which were, by contrast, more misleading and/or erroneous, as well as which were clearer and more concise would be a useful gauge of the progress this AI (as opposed to those from deep-pocketed, big data organizations like Google, Facebook, and IBM) can demonstrate towards obsoleting human headline writers.
Full disclosure: as a writer myself, I'm mostly interested in figuring out how deeply and life-threateningy my personal ox is in danger of being gored...
I don't know of any other company that has a monthly release cycle for security updates, even for zero day bugs! Google you are evil, you should be like Micros... oh.
The Guardian made the ice claim. Not sure were the Guardian got it, but straight from the Guardian article - "The chasm, 50km (31 miles) long and 100 metres wide, appears to be structurally sound and its rocks may contain ice or water deposits that could be turned into fuel, according to data sent back by the orbiter, nicknamed Kaguya after the moon princess in a Japanese fairytale."
Water ice has been found near the poles, there's no particular
reason there couldn't be more around buried deep: this is
speculation but not stupid speculation.
So we agree that it's speculation - and my point that the speculation is that of the author (or the editor - with/. summaries it's hard to know which) of TFS, and that it's not mentioned in The Guardian's article, the JAXA press release, or the actual Geophysical Review Letters abstract stands...
Test?! All the time?! Millions of tons of steel?!? Every roll?!?
On September 15, 2014, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued HQ H209833, a ruling requiring Mill Test Certification documents accompany ALL bulk metal imports from foreign suppliers.
Domestically, what metal production facilities still exist in the U.S. do MTC testing on EVERY roll of high-carbon sheet steel, and EVERY run of high-carbon steel pipe routinely. And they have been doing so at least since the dawn of nuclear power in this country, because the NRC requires it for pipes used in the cooling systems of nuclear power plants both commercial and DOE-owned-and-operated.
I have a close friend who designed the first industrial-scale bar code printer for U.S. Steel Corporation back in the early 1980's, which they've used ever since to provide a certification paper trail for high-carbon structural steel products for a wide variety of applications. (Sadly, he was unable to patent it, because he was a U.S. Steel employee at the time, so his IP belonged to the company.) They do that both because for certain applications it's a requirement of federal law, and because it provides them with legal cover from liability in case of an accident that involves a product or structure that incorporates their steel.
I think we can assume that any water definitely would be in the form of ice?
The bit about water/ice being potentially present in this multi-billion-year-old system of lava tubes is pure speculation on the part of "Zorro", the submitter of TFS, and/or the/. editor msmash, who posted it to the front page. No such theory is presented in the article from The Guardian (to which TFS links), by the press release from JAXA, as published on phys.org (from which The Guardian's article is most likely drawn), or in the abstract of the actual Geophysical Research Letters article (full "text" - meaning PDF, of course - paywalled courtesy of Wiley).
Which makes that part complete bullshit, added by someone who had no basis to include it as part of TFS, other than for the purpose of enhancing its clickbait potential. Or, in other words, business as usual for the new, steadily-deteriorating/.
Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich.
Really?
I'm not questioning your assertion as it applies to hunting mosquitoes, but I'd think mosquitoes who have recently fed would be pretty calorie-rich for their size. Can I persuade you to elucidate further... ?
I agree that mosquitoes are despicable vermin. Most bugs have some purpose in the grand cycle, and I leave them alone so long as they stay outside where they belong. But I have to ask, just what the hell is the place of mosquitoes in the scheme?! Yes, if the price was agreeable, I would support the 100% elimination of this bug forever.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that mosquitoes are an important food source for insectivorous birds. Hummingbirds, in particular. And Gnatcatchers. Bats are also major predators of adult mosquitoes. Their larvae are an important food source for fish, dragonflies, crawdads, and smaller water-loving birds, as well.
Insectivorous birds are also eager predators of ticks, which are particularly important to them in winter, when many other insect adults are absent from temperate ecosystems.
Note that, having said all that, I myself hate both of them, along with every other kind of parasite you might care to name.
Measuring only people from MENSA is one hell of a confounding factor. They are a self-selected group by definition.
This. To start with.
This is about the laziest excuse for experimental design I've ever seen. Self-selected, self-reporting sample with no controls other than Mensa membership vs Mensa non-membership?
Feh.
Social "sciences" have a well-deserved reputation for straining at gnats and swallowing camels - and crap like this doesn't sure help their credibility...
This isn't about open source software, or "compliance" regarding open source software. This is about failing to do timely security updates of reused third-party software. It doesn't matter if it's open source software or not. If you use third-party software, you need to update that software when a security update happens, and you have to do it BEFORE an attacker exploits it.
This has been necessary for decades. Haven't you ever updated an operating system because a vulnerability was found in it? Of course you have. If you reuse software, and you embed it in something you use or deploy, then you need to update when the reused software has a security vulnerability. One advantage of open source software today is that there are tools that make it easier to monitor and update. But you still have to be prepared for security updates. You can do this by monitoring updates, using package managers to let you easily update, having automated tests so you can verify that the update is okay, and by having a deployment system so you can send out your update. All of this is available. Check out this video for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?....
If you don't keep your software patched in a timely way, you get p0wned. That's how it works. That's ALWAYS been how it works.
Mode parent +1 Insightful, please.
Huffing and puffing aside, this is EXACTLY what both TFA and TFS are about. (The headline, as usual, is pure clickbait trolling. Thank you for that,/. editors... )
Y'know, I'd've found that a whole lot more reassuring had Fireflop 56.0.1 not so completely fubared the most-current version of NoScript that even reinstalling the addon couldn't unfuck it. (Although, to be fair, restarting FF in "safe mode" - i.e. - with all addons disabled - then restarting it again with all addons re-enabled does seem to have fixed that problem.)
NoScript is certainly one of the most popular - and arguably the most important - addons in the FF ecosystem. To have released even a minor, general update to the browser that so thoroughly disables it that it disappears entirely from both the browser's main toolbar and its context menu (thereby rendering it impossible for it to affect script permissions - and, not incidentally, permitting ANY and EVERY script on EVERY page you visit to run unimpeded) was profoundly irresponsible, at best. Given the omnipresence of JS-based malware across the known web, it could even reasonably be construed as culpably negligent. (Note: IANAL, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, contents are packed by weight, not volume, the legal relationship between you and Mozilla.org is controlled by the end user Terms & Conditions, yadda-yadda... )
My point stands: Mozilla.org's developer hubris is driving even its most loyal users the fuck away. Soon, so many of us will have decamped that those arrogant assholes will be free to concentrate on developing and enhancng a browser that only they, themselves will use - and, if the 56.0.1 debacle is any guide, the only thing they appear interested in using it for is to test whether they have at last managed to drive a stake through the final, feeble remnant of Netscape Navigator's once-beating heart.
Add-ons are going away. What made Firefox great, is going away. Pretty much went away when Mozilla started using the major number as a minor number, breaking add-ons with each release.
This.
Mozilla.org's arrogance and seeming blind determination to ignore all user feedback has made Firefox progressively less usable as time has gone by - and I speak as someone who has for years now resisted the underhanded attempts of a wide variety of products (including Avast! and Adobe Flash) to force Chrome down my throat. The upcoming revision that will deliberately break what Mozilla's asshat developers insist on terming "legacy" addons - notably including NoScript - will likely be the very last straw for me. And once I'm forced to undergo the ordeal of migrating four Windows desktops and three laptops to Chrome, there will be no going back. I'll be done with Firefox permanently.
I very much doubt I'll be alone, either. Living in a bubble is a terrible idea. Coding in one is even worse...
Maybe/.readers shouldn't have to put up with this constant stream of clickbait horseshit from websites (i.e.- motherboard.com) that are owned by their former mutual corporate parent (dice.com), which/. editors insist on posting, despite the richly-deserved, universal scorn they elicit from those readers.
When you look up "nothingburger" on urbandictionary.com, Slashdot Media's logo ought to be the primary illustration these days - and that's a fucking tragedy...
What's even worse is that TFA is uncredited. It's clearly an editorial (i.e. - "opinion") piece, but there is no attribution to an individual writer to be found.
Prompting PCM2 to point out:
Really? The version I saw is attributed to Brenden Gallagher. Clicking on his name reveals he's written three movie/TV reviews for Motherboard.
I can't see any content on the page you link to. That's undoubtedly because, by default, NoScript blocks what looks like dozens of scripts on that page.
Very likely that's the same reason I missed the review's attribution to begin with - because it's only visible if you permit vice.com scripts to run. I don't. I won't.
So mea culpa for incorrectly accusing Motherboard of running an unattributed critique. And qui reus ex, vice.com, for hiding that attribution behind your javascript wall...
I remember Alan E. Nourse's medicine-centric science fiction as uniformly excellent. The man could write, and, being an M.D., he knew medicine, too. His novel The Bladefunner was first published as a series of short stories and novelettes in Analog that were later reworked into a novel.
I also read his non-fiction book The Intern (although, because it was published under a pseudonym, I had no idea it was by Alan Nourse). As I recall it was something of a bestseller. I found it engrossing. It was really the first work to expose the reading public to the brutal working conditions that medical interns (and, to an only slightly lesser extent, residents) must endure - in particular, the 48-hour shifts that somehow have become a sacrosanct centerpiece of the interning experience.
That practice - of forcing interns to work 48 consecutive hours at a time - has always seemed to me to be directly contrary to the best interests of both the interns themselves and the patients for whom they care. YMMV, of course, but even as a 20-something, being awake for two full days just burned me to the ground, physically and mentally. It's terrible for a young doctor's health and much, much worse for the standard of care he or she is physically capable of providing to patients. My judgement, memory, and attention all suffer markedly after just 24 hours without sleep. After 48, I wouldn't trust myself with a butter knife, much less a scalpel...
Slashdot Mirror
registrations_suck opined:
They could avoid it if TV didn't suck.
Nice troll, registrations_suck. It's more than a little undermined by your admission that:
I ditched cable in 2009 - do not miss it at all. Don't even have Netflix, Hulu, or any other subscriptions. If I want to watch a movie, I'll rent it on Vudu, or Apple Store, or even Amazon.
in a post below.
What that post reveals is that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, when you say that TV "sucks".
In fact, for the past six or seven years, TV has gotten better and better. Sitcoms aside, TV shows - and I'm including here programs on all those streaming services you don't watch, as well as broadcast and cable programming - have enormously stepped up their game. Per-episode budgets are way up, permitting better sets, effects, and location shooting, in addition to adding expensive talent to their casts. As competition (especially from those aforementioned cable channels) has greatly increased, the quality of their scriptwriting has also improved. Geeky stuff like Mr. Robot, which portrays hacking in credible terms, science fiction- and superhero-based programs that employ literary devices such as unreliable narrators (Black Mirror and Legion, for example), and character-based, long-form series such as Breaking Bad and Homeland that discard entirely the notion that episodes must be self-contained, permitting them to develop storylines that aren't confined to a 42-minute storytelling prison have become the rule, rather than the exception.
And that evolution has occurred since you stopped watching TV in 2009.
Perhaps you should reconsider the wisdom of making sweeping statements regarding subjects about which you actually know nothing.
Oh, wait - I forgot this is /. By all means, then, continue declaiming through your hat ...
AndyKron noted:
AMP: 3',5'-cyclic adenosine monophosphate
Mod parent +1 Funny, please ...
MightyYar pointed out:
I think the criticism here is more about how much weight Google has in de-facto web standards. That's valid, but this the open source isn't open source nonsense is a red herring.
Yep.
Note, for instance, that critic Ethan Marcotte's complaints include:
Significant features and changes require the approval of AMP's Technical Lead and one Core Committer -- and if you peruse the list of AMP's Core Committers, that list seems exclusively staffed and led by Google employees.
AFAIK, "significant features and changes" to the Linux kernel require the approval of Linus Torvalds. Full stop. Is he trying to imply that none of the Core Committers would be willing to second the approval of the Technical Lead?
I don' theeng so, Quickstraw.
Is there any bar to an outsider becoming a Core Committer? Marcotte seems to imply that there is, without bothering to provide any evidence that that's the case.
As for AMP pages being featured in the "carousel" - use an adblocker and that goes away.
So, basically, his beef is that Googlers paid to work on AMP control the "Core Committers" and Google itself touts AMP'd pages in the featured ads section of its search results. Unless he can point to somebody outside of Google who's:
I fail to see a legitimate basis for complaint here.
(I don't have a dog in this fight, btw. AMP pages hardly matter to me, since I don't do a lot of web browsing on my phone. That might change if Firefox for mobile wasn't a giant, stinking pile of ... code. But whinging about Googlers' dominance of a nominally open-source project that's apparently well within the bounds of HTML 5's published standards seems kind of pathetic to me.)
Arzaboa averred:
You should be talking to these people you think you hate. You'll find you have a whole lot more in common with them than hating each other because you don't talk.
Uhh ... no. No, I won't.
"These people (I) hate" are racist, sexist, xenophobic morons. They can't go two minutes without sneering at "liberals" (not self-identified SJW's - liberals), sharing one of those divisive, Russian troll-authored "Like and share if you agree!" dogwhistles (and, yes, I know there are left-ish versions, too - and I hate those people just as much), quoting Faux News's latest piece of disinformation (or, worse yet, Breitbart or Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh), and generally doing everything in their power to make what they have to say as repulsive and confrontational as possible.
Mind you, there are plenty of folks with whom I disagree politically who are interesting, informed, and convival conversationalists. I'm not talking about them here. I'm talking specifically about the people I hate, on social media and off. I'm talking about Roger Stone, and Dick Cheney, and Sean Hannity, and their adoring, uncritical fans.
I live in the heart of Trump country (or, perhaps the spleen of Trump country), where the defensiveness and willful ignorance about our Tweeter-in-Chief is absolutely poisonous. You can't have a conversation that his foul stench doesn't pollute to the point of uninhabitability. (At least, I can't have such a conversation. Your gag reflex may be made of sterner stuff.) At the same time, their level of education, their interest in geopolitics, their sophistication of viewpoint are all in the bottom percentile - and this is in the USA, where a pervasive belief in our national exceptionalism has convinced the vast majority of the population that those things aren't important to begin with.
I despise these people because they hate anyone and everyone whose skin color, accent, clothing, or religious beliefs are different from their own. I hated them before Donald Chump came along, before social meda arose, before Faux News was incorporated, before Ronald Reagan entered politics, before Richard Nixon ran for president the second time - and their social media presence hasn't mellowed my disgust.
My first exposure to casual racism occurred in 1961, in Montgomery, Alabama, when I was eight years old and George Corley Wallace was running for governor. It turned my stomach then, just as it turns my stomach today.
So fuck those people. We have NOTHING in common ...
erice inquired:
Especially one where "the writing is done and most of the editing". Are conventional publishers not interested? Or is this just a means of coaxing a better deal out of publishers?
I understand crowd funding for projects to expensive to self fund yet too small for conventional venture capital. But conventional book publishing seems to have this covered. Writers write. Publishers publish and sometimes providers editors and advance payment to writers. Is there reason to believe this book would not be published were it not for the kickstarter campaign?
Here's the thing most people don't realize about the publishing industry: unless you're already a bestselling author, traditional publishing companies don't make even a token effort to promote your book. Yes. that's a sillly strategy, but it's pretty much the default for the Big Six and their eleventy-seven scrillion imprints. They don't advertise, other than to list your title in their catalogue, they don't send marketing material to radio and tv talk shows, they don't, in fact, do dick to help you sell your book. They don't even send copies to reviewers, unless those reviewers specifically request them.
Which means it's up to you, the author, to do all the marketing and advertising for your book.
You're the one who has to call tv and radio shows to pitch them on having you on as a guest. You're the one who has to contact reviewers and try to persuade them to read your book - and you'll have to send them a copy that you bought with your own money, if they agree to do so. If you want print or radio ads, or posters, or standees, or tchotkes like bookmarks, pens, coffee mugs, and the like to promote your book, you get to hire a designer, pay to have them printed, and hand them out yourself. You get to hustle bookstores and libraries to let you give readings and hold booksignings. All that stuff is on you, and if there are expenses involved, they come out of your pocket.
Basically, if you got a million-dollar advance, then your publisher will pull out all the promotional stops. But if you're just another face in the authorial crowd, then marketing and promoting your book is YOUR problem.
And that, dear erice, is why a book that's already written and in the process of being edited needs a Kickstarter campaign ...
TheCarp opined:
A solid show maybe but, there was less Star Trek in the free episode I saw than in the first five minutes of the average Orville episode.
Agreed. And you're far from alone in that assessment ...
enigma32 observed:
This is fun, I guess. I've seen other posts on this blog as well. It's all moderately interesting, but with the best ones filtered to the top by a human, doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
Seems like wasted research dollars, to me.
What makes the ones that are actually amusing funny is that they're non sequiturs. The ones that aren't funny - which is to say "most of them" - are simply nonsensical.
It's unclear whether that was the goal of the effort or not, but the key capture here is that none of these projected headlines is in any way truly informative in a real-world, factual context. What I think would be far more interesting (although, admittedly, probably a good deal less amusing) would be to set this AI to the task of writing headlines for actual news stories.
What would make that particularly interesting would be to compare the AI-authored headlines with those that /.'s editors wrote. Seeing which ones were more informative and factually accurate, and which were, by contrast, more misleading and/or erroneous, as well as which were clearer and more concise would be a useful gauge of the progress this AI (as opposed to those from deep-pocketed, big data organizations like Google, Facebook, and IBM) can demonstrate towards obsoleting human headline writers.
Full disclosure: as a writer myself, I'm mostly interested in figuring out how deeply and life-threateningy my personal ox is in danger of being gored ...
I requested:
Mod parent +1 Funny, please ...
Prompting thegarbz to respond:
I appreciate the support. I have to admit it did not occur to me that a moderator may not have a sense of humour and may need instructions.
In my experience, most people do not, in fact, possess an actual sense of humor. That's why laugh tracks exist.
You're welcome, btw - and I'm gratified to see that some moderators have followed my advice, regardless of whether they required it or not ...
thegarbz quipped:
I don't know of any other company that has a monthly release cycle for security updates, even for zero day bugs! Google you are evil, you should be like Micros... oh.
Mod parent +1 Funny, please ...
Thirty4 noted:
The Guardian made the ice claim. Not sure were the Guardian got it, but straight from the Guardian article - "The chasm, 50km (31 miles) long and 100 metres wide, appears to be structurally sound and its rocks may contain ice or water deposits that could be turned into fuel, according to data sent back by the orbiter, nicknamed Kaguya after the moon princess in a Japanese fairytale."
Thanks for clarifying that.
doom commented:
Water ice has been found near the poles, there's no particular reason there couldn't be more around buried deep: this is speculation but not stupid speculation.
So we agree that it's speculation - and my point that the speculation is that of the author (or the editor - with /. summaries it's hard to know which) of TFS, and that it's not mentioned in The Guardian's article, the JAXA press release, or the actual Geophysical Review Letters abstract stands ...
fubarr quipped:
Hydrokarbons are for hipsters, real men fly on pentaborane + chlorine pentafluoride
Mod parent +1 funny, please ...
Test?! All the time?! Millions of tons of steel?!? Every roll?!?
On September 15, 2014, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued HQ H209833, a ruling requiring Mill Test Certification documents accompany ALL bulk metal imports from foreign suppliers.
Domestically, what metal production facilities still exist in the U.S. do MTC testing on EVERY roll of high-carbon sheet steel, and EVERY run of high-carbon steel pipe routinely. And they have been doing so at least since the dawn of nuclear power in this country, because the NRC requires it for pipes used in the cooling systems of nuclear power plants both commercial and DOE-owned-and-operated.
I have a close friend who designed the first industrial-scale bar code printer for U.S. Steel Corporation back in the early 1980's, which they've used ever since to provide a certification paper trail for high-carbon structural steel products for a wide variety of applications. (Sadly, he was unable to patent it, because he was a U.S. Steel employee at the time, so his IP belonged to the company.) They do that both because for certain applications it's a requirement of federal law, and because it provides them with legal cover from liability in case of an accident that involves a product or structure that incorporates their steel.
So, yes: EVERY roll, EVERY time ...
I think we can assume that any water definitely would be in the form of ice?
The bit about water/ice being potentially present in this multi-billion-year-old system of lava tubes is pure speculation on the part of "Zorro", the submitter of TFS, and/or the /. editor msmash, who posted it to the front page. No such theory is presented in the article from The Guardian (to which TFS links), by the press release from JAXA, as published on phys.org (from which The Guardian's article is most likely drawn), or in the abstract of the actual Geophysical Research Letters article (full "text" - meaning PDF, of course - paywalled courtesy of Wiley).
Which makes that part complete bullshit, added by someone who had no basis to include it as part of TFS, other than for the purpose of enhancing its clickbait potential. Or, in other words, business as usual for the new, steadily-deteriorating /.
Damn, I miss CmdrTaco ...
brianerst confided:
Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich.
Really?
I'm not questioning your assertion as it applies to hunting mosquitoes, but I'd think mosquitoes who have recently fed would be pretty calorie-rich for their size. Can I persuade you to elucidate further ... ?
glitch! wondered:
I agree that mosquitoes are despicable vermin. Most bugs have some purpose in the grand cycle, and I leave them alone so long as they stay outside where they belong. But I have to ask, just what the hell is the place of mosquitoes in the scheme?! Yes, if the price was agreeable, I would support the 100% elimination of this bug forever.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that mosquitoes are an important food source for insectivorous birds. Hummingbirds, in particular. And Gnatcatchers. Bats are also major predators of adult mosquitoes. Their larvae are an important food source for fish, dragonflies, crawdads, and smaller water-loving birds, as well.
Insectivorous birds are also eager predators of ticks, which are particularly important to them in winter, when many other insect adults are absent from temperate ecosystems.
Note that, having said all that, I myself hate both of them, along with every other kind of parasite you might care to name.
Fleas, for instance ...
phantomfive pointed out:
Measuring only people from MENSA is one hell of a confounding factor. They are a self-selected group by definition.
This. To start with.
This is about the laziest excuse for experimental design I've ever seen. Self-selected, self-reporting sample with no controls other than Mensa membership vs Mensa non-membership?
Feh.
Social "sciences" have a well-deserved reputation for straining at gnats and swallowing camels - and crap like this doesn't sure help their credibility ...
dwheeler commented:
This isn't about open source software, or "compliance" regarding open source software. This is about failing to do timely security updates of reused third-party software. It doesn't matter if it's open source software or not. If you use third-party software, you need to update that software when a security update happens, and you have to do it BEFORE an attacker exploits it.
This has been necessary for decades. Haven't you ever updated an operating system because a vulnerability was found in it? Of course you have. If you reuse software, and you embed it in something you use or deploy, then you need to update when the reused software has a security vulnerability. One advantage of open source software today is that there are tools that make it easier to monitor and update. But you still have to be prepared for security updates. You can do this by monitoring updates, using package managers to let you easily update, having automated tests so you can verify that the update is okay, and by having a deployment system so you can send out your update. All of this is available. Check out this video for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... .
If you don't keep your software patched in a timely way, you get p0wned. That's how it works. That's ALWAYS been how it works.
Mode parent +1 Insightful, please.
Huffing and puffing aside, this is EXACTLY what both TFA and TFS are about. (The headline, as usual, is pure clickbait trolling. Thank you for that, /. editors ... )
slashmydots inquired:
Do I need to patch my Windows PC, my router, both, or exactly one of the two but it's not important which.
If you're running Windows 9/10 and aren't blocking updates, your PC is already patched - so you're safe.
But, when and as an update for your router becomes available, you really should patch it too. Remember: belt, suspenders, AND staples ...
I predicted:
The upcoming revision that will deliberately break what Mozilla's asshat developers insist on terming "legacy" addons - notably including NoScript ...
Prompting fahrbot-bot to point out:
NoScript is migrating to a WebExtensions API version: https://blog.mozilla.org/addon...
Y'know, I'd've found that a whole lot more reassuring had Fireflop 56.0.1 not so completely fubared the most-current version of NoScript that even reinstalling the addon couldn't unfuck it. (Although, to be fair, restarting FF in "safe mode" - i.e. - with all addons disabled - then restarting it again with all addons re-enabled does seem to have fixed that problem.)
NoScript is certainly one of the most popular - and arguably the most important - addons in the FF ecosystem. To have released even a minor, general update to the browser that so thoroughly disables it that it disappears entirely from both the browser's main toolbar and its context menu (thereby rendering it impossible for it to affect script permissions - and, not incidentally, permitting ANY and EVERY script on EVERY page you visit to run unimpeded) was profoundly irresponsible, at best. Given the omnipresence of JS-based malware across the known web, it could even reasonably be construed as culpably negligent. (Note: IANAL, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, contents are packed by weight, not volume, the legal relationship between you and Mozilla.org is controlled by the end user Terms & Conditions, yadda-yadda ... )
My point stands: Mozilla.org's developer hubris is driving even its most loyal users the fuck away. Soon, so many of us will have decamped that those arrogant assholes will be free to concentrate on developing and enhancng a browser that only they, themselves will use - and, if the 56.0.1 debacle is any guide, the only thing they appear interested in using it for is to test whether they have at last managed to drive a stake through the final, feeble remnant of Netscape Navigator's once-beating heart.
Monster_user observed:
Add-ons are going away. What made Firefox great, is going away. Pretty much went away when Mozilla started using the major number as a minor number, breaking add-ons with each release.
This.
Mozilla.org's arrogance and seeming blind determination to ignore all user feedback has made Firefox progressively less usable as time has gone by - and I speak as someone who has for years now resisted the underhanded attempts of a wide variety of products (including Avast! and Adobe Flash) to force Chrome down my throat. The upcoming revision that will deliberately break what Mozilla's asshat developers insist on terming "legacy" addons - notably including NoScript - will likely be the very last straw for me. And once I'm forced to undergo the ordeal of migrating four Windows desktops and three laptops to Chrome, there will be no going back. I'll be done with Firefox permanently.
I very much doubt I'll be alone, either. Living in a bubble is a terrible idea. Coding in one is even worse ...
Maybe /.readers shouldn't have to put up with this constant stream of clickbait horseshit from websites (i.e.- motherboard.com) that are owned by their former mutual corporate parent (dice.com), which /. editors insist on posting, despite the richly-deserved, universal scorn they elicit from those readers.
When you look up "nothingburger" on urbandictionary.com, Slashdot Media's logo ought to be the primary illustration these days - and that's a fucking tragedy ...
oic0 observed:
No one is doing a thing about it other than going wahhh wahh wahh.
Prompting EndlessNameless to point out:
No one except the President can do anything about it. Pai is appointed, not elected.
Oh, that I had mod point available ...
I complained:
What's even worse is that TFA is uncredited. It's clearly an editorial (i.e. - "opinion") piece, but there is no attribution to an individual writer to be found.
Prompting PCM2 to point out:
Really? The version I saw is attributed to Brenden Gallagher. Clicking on his name reveals he's written three movie/TV reviews for Motherboard.
I can't see any content on the page you link to. That's undoubtedly because, by default, NoScript blocks what looks like dozens of scripts on that page.
Very likely that's the same reason I missed the review's attribution to begin with - because it's only visible if you permit vice.com scripts to run. I don't. I won't.
So mea culpa for incorrectly accusing Motherboard of running an unattributed critique. And qui reus ex, vice.com, for hiding that attribution behind your javascript wall ...
I remember Alan E. Nourse's medicine-centric science fiction as uniformly excellent. The man could write, and, being an M.D., he knew medicine, too. His novel The Bladefunner was first published as a series of short stories and novelettes in Analog that were later reworked into a novel.
I also read his non-fiction book The Intern (although, because it was published under a pseudonym, I had no idea it was by Alan Nourse). As I recall it was something of a bestseller. I found it engrossing. It was really the first work to expose the reading public to the brutal working conditions that medical interns (and, to an only slightly lesser extent, residents) must endure - in particular, the 48-hour shifts that somehow have become a sacrosanct centerpiece of the interning experience.
That practice - of forcing interns to work 48 consecutive hours at a time - has always seemed to me to be directly contrary to the best interests of both the interns themselves and the patients for whom they care. YMMV, of course, but even as a 20-something, being awake for two full days just burned me to the ground, physically and mentally. It's terrible for a young doctor's health and much, much worse for the standard of care he or she is physically capable of providing to patients. My judgement, memory, and attention all suffer markedly after just 24 hours without sleep. After 48, I wouldn't trust myself with a butter knife, much less a scalpel ...