For one, you can copyright a schematic but the copyright is on the schematic itself. To keep someone from building what the schematic describes or their own twist on it, you need a patent.
But the point of open x is that you don't want to keep someone from building what the schematic describes.
Yes, there are "open source" licenses that tries to limit what you can do with the source, but the main point is always that you can take the source and improve upon it.
That copyright is needed to enforce this is newspeak from the GPL camp.
Are you kidding? You can't have "licenses" for things you don't own. If the work doesn't have copyright protection, then its in the public domain. If you try to force me to obey some "license" I can simply choose to ignore your license and use the work anyway. Copyright is necessary to enforce the license, like say the GPL. Without that license, I can take your "open" software and do anything I want with it, including adding my own modifications to it and selling the entire thing without giving anyone any right to see the source or anything else. And you can't do anything to stop me legally. Since one of the primary principles of open source is the "share and share alike" principle where if you use it, you yourself have to contribute under similar license, that principle can only be enforced if you can enforce anything at all, and that requires legal protection. Copyright provides that protection.
The problem that Bruce has identified with Open hardware is that the only way to enforce anything with hardware requires patent protection analogous to the copyright protection that allows open software licenses to work, or extending copyright protections into new areas. But the problem is that both using patents in this way and trying to extend copyright protections instead of patents both seem to have legal gotchas that don't exist to the same extent with software. The problem is if the Open hardware movement tries to leverage either patent protections into designs or copyright protection into implementations it will either not work because the law won't evolve correctly, or worse they might evolve in such a way to allow Open hardware licenses to work but create a new form of legal ammunition that unscrupulous entities could use in entirely different ways to gain new IP protection rights they don't currently have.
It's a vast field, and expertise of people is usually just a subset. I'm not even sure what the answer you you expected was, but I'd say: I'd use your public key to encrypt the file to you and then send it to you. Personally, I wouldn't know which commands to invoke to do this, but I know that's the theory.
So, should any developer know this? That is debatable. I've had very competent developers who had next to no clue about how DNS works. They could do their job just fine with that. Me? Personally, I'm not up to snuff with the finer points of SQL queries and all the joins that exists and when it makes sense to create an index, etc. Could I find out? Most likely, but I haven't had the need to recently.
The problem is, that you are mapping your knowlegde to "what people must know". I used to do that too, and I probably still do often enough. The DNS example above didn't come from nowhere: I had the case, and I was really thinking "how could such a competent person not know this", but then this person could probably enlighten me about dozens of things I don't know well enough.
It all comes down to what you define as "general knowgledge" for a developer should be and that is highly subjective.
TL;DR Hiring people is hard. Especially, technical people.
Although the title of the post said "developer" the content said "developer/architect." Unless they were hiring a programmer that could also design houses, I'm assuming they mean IT infrastructure architect. I would presume a systems architect would be familiar with how internet protocols work (like DNS), how common physical network infrastructure works (like switches), how fundamental concepts like client-server architectures and encryption work, and the issues involved in major ares of system design (storage, virtualization, wide area networking, etc).
Programmers just need to know how to write computer code. Software engineers need to know how software systems work. Architects have to know how the pieces of systems work that they will eventually be the architect for. Perhaps the problem right up front is that unless this is some small company where everyone wears a ton of hats, "Programmer/Architect" is not a proper job designation in the first place. "Programmer/Software Architect" might be more applicable, in which case the applicant should fundamentally understand how to code and what common software design methodologies are. If the intended target application(s) are internet-based, an additional requirement to understand the problem domain would also be reasonable (familiarity with medicine if you're writing medical software, internet protocols if you are writing large scale internet applications, human resources if you're being hired to be a Peoplesoft app developer, etc).
In any case, the subject question was "what portion of developers are bad at what they do" which is a different question than the one posed by the actual post. The answer to that question is, in my experience, most of them. Note that I'm not saying most developers are bad at writing software. I'm saying most developers are bad at what they do. What they do tends to be, whether its their own fault or someone else's, significantly outside their actual area of expertise whatever that might be.
The rate of measles infection was going down drastically before the vaccine was created.
The antibiotics are for the secondary problems, not the measles. Better general health and healthcare will also have atbig impact on modern cases.
Just because you aren't aware of the latest studies on the effectiveness of multiple vaccinations does not make it incorrect.
I am fully aware. You are almost certainly referencing the McLean study which showed a potential reduction in effectiveness due to repeated vaccination controlled for a single virus strain. However, that study reiterated previous studies which showed no statistically significant vaccination interference between consecutive years of vaccination. They suggested the potential for such interference over significantly longer timeframes such as five years but also explicitly stated that the data in their study could not draw that conclusion given many other possible explanations for their results.
Assuming ignorance from refutation is another characteristic of the phenomenon I characterized earlier. In either case, there are reasons for repeated vaccination due to the nature of how the vaccine is constituted that would override this result even if it was conclusive. Furthermore, the study did not suggest escalating resistance which would incur the risk of the vaccine eventually becoming ineffective. They suggested the potential for successive interference which would more reasonably mandate switching to longer vaccination schedules instead.
As to the rate of measles infection going down, public health improvements did reduce the rate of measles infection in the early part of the twentieth century, but only by incrementally small amounts due to the highly contagious nature of measles. Mandated vaccination in the 1960s dropped the infection rate almost immediately to very low levels. There was no recorded trend that would have reduced the rate to current levels prior to mass vaccination in the United States. That is not even remotely credibly in dispute. Given the mortality statistics, mass vaccination has saved literally tens of thousands of lives in the last fifty years, and eliminated hundreds of thousands of cases severe enough to require hospitalization.
This measles scare is just that, a scare. 50 something cases this year, 650 cases last year. I didn't hear about them. Measles is not a bad disease, our parents got it as a routine thing during their childhood. Very few turn serious or deadly, especially when you have modern medical care such as antibiotics.
According to the CDC, prior to mass vaccination in the 1960s the annual rate of measles infection was about half a million cases were reported in the US annually. Of those, just under ten percent required hospitalization, about a thousand had chronic disability and about five hundred died. That's per year.
Also, measles is caused by a virus, which means antibiotics have no effect on the infection. Treatment with antibiotics only occurs in cases with serious complications involving secondary bacterial infections, which by definition is not a minor case.
Plus, each time you get a vaccine they are less and less effective. People who get the flu vaccine each year are going to be in trouble when they are elderly and really need the extra protection if that is true.
That's a frighteningly wrong set of what I hesitate to call "information."
Science denial is probably more strongly correlated with politics/emotions not intelligence level. The left and the right merely have different things they are in denial about, different things that touch on their politics and their emotions. And emotions lead people to stand by their beliefs regardless of rational thought and evidence, both on the left and the right.
In my experience, there's science denial, and then there's the more likely phenomenon occurring here which is the belief that one's personal interpretation of the evidence is vastly superior to anyone else's. If an anti-vax article sounds reasonable to them, its far more likely to their thinking that everyone else who considers it rubbish is wrong, because their own understanding is far superior.
That's not exactly science denial, that's narcissism masquerading as science denial. And this general belief is, in my experience, extremely prevalent in the various technology industries, particularly IT.
Be that as it may... I submit a specific alternate to your postulate that a leader willing to put large forces under arms in harm's way is the only method to effect fundamental change. The alternate is a new Gandhi. The general principle worked well enough for Martin Luther King, Jr. This is not say we won't get our hair mussed a bit, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a 1775 style revolution with cannons mowing down rows of sons and would-be masters.
I never said or implied that change required armed forces. What I said was it required someone willing to stick to their principles without compromising them even if it meant people had to die. Gandhi was in fact one such leader who preached non-violence to such an extent he told his own supporters they needed to be willing to die non-violently rather than kill or fight back to convince the British that they would never be able to break their resolve. That is entirely analogous to what I mentioned above that it would take a leader willing to say they would rather see Americans (or other citizens) die at the hands of terrorists rather than destroy their civil rights trying to protect them. Gandhi was able to convince huge numbers of people that it was better to die in the pursuit of freedom than live under oppression. It would take that kind of leader, I think, to reverse the trend of using ever stronger government controls to fight terrorism and other crimes.
When the government says "because of Apple's iPhone encryption one day a child will die" the people have to say "I'd rather a child die than the American people be oppressed." A leader has to convince them to say it and believe it. Gandhi actually managed to do it, so its possible. But its not easy to find Gandhis.
An all out revolt is probably the only way this will change at this point. Society has been on a downward spiral for a while now. Historically the only way to recover was lots of bloodshed. People in power never want to relinquish power or money, which is essence is what the mass surveillance is all about. Squashing descent, getting a leg up on any one selling things you want to sell, putting competition out of business, etc..
Its easy to paint the situation as the masses being dominated by the people in power but the truth is that a revolt is unlikely to work for the simple reason that the average person really isn't just a passive observer; they really want much of what they claim they don't want. In terms of the specifics, its easy to claim that one doesn't want mass surveillance but that's just a symptom of a more fundamental truth. The truth is that given the choice presented to the people in power, most people would choose the same thing: namely given a choice between using every means at one's disposal to stop terrorism or not, most people would in fact choose to use every means at one's disposal, even if it infringed on personal freedom.
And the reason why a revolt is unlikely is the same reason why the Occupy Movement didn't generate lasting results in the same way many other movements did. Revolutions require people willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a result, often without the kinds of compromise that people normally engage in. A revolution to stop people from doing whatever it takes to achieve a goal is difficult to achieve when backed only by people unwilling to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.
George Washington famously assumed enormous military, and thus political power when he became the leader of the Continental Army, and his hands were not entirely clean when wielding it. But without him, there probably is no revolution that survives. When the war was over he surrendered that power by resigning his commission. The number of people both willing and able to exercise such vast power to achieve an end which results in surrendering that power entirely (even if only temporarily) is exceedingly small. Most people willing to do the latter have no capacity to do the former and vice versa.
To put it another way, what you need is a leader willing to say "I would rather see Americans die than surrender their freedom" that is also so popular he isn't immediately driven out of the country by pitchforks the next day, and can convince the average American (or for that matter any other citizen of any other country) to accept those values. Until such a person arrives, all revolutions to change the situation will fail, because none will genuinely have the support of the people.
Someone will probably come along and say that's a false choice, but that's missing the point. The point is that is the general perception: you either have the values that say "do everything you possibly can, pushing the envelope as far as you can" or you don't. If you don't, someone will always come along and say they would do more, and they would be correct, and because there's no way to prove it with certainty you'd always take the blame for the next person killed. That's just reality. You did everything possible, or you didn't. Leaders don't want to say they didn't, and citizens don't want excuses for why they didn't. That needs to change somehow, but most people I think don't really want that to change, deep down.
So, what I wonder is how the railguns fit into this. It seems that they'd be prone to very effectively making a couple of small holes in whatever they hit and delivering most of the energy into the sea or ground. Unless you actually hit the engines or some other critical piece, a ship, especially a warship can survive a surprisingly large number of holes before it is put out of action.
I believe the primary potential advantage of railguns is that they allow for a higher number of rounds to be carried and potentially fired at a higher rate, and have the defensive aspect of removing a critical vulnerability aboard ship. Its a significant advantage if, as you imply, the enemy will have a hard time sinking you because you don't have a magazine to detonate.
On the subject of ammunition, railguns are probably less efficient in general, but its probably a lot easier to store more fuel and less intrinsically explosive ordinance. Its not just that your ammunition is smaller because it doesn't need propellant, its likely the lower safety requirements would allow you to store your rounds at a higher space density over all. Naval vessels that are already nuclear don't need to even worry about higher fuel requirements, but even diesel ships are probably easier to design as carrying more fuel than more ammunition.
Thinking about efficiency, I wonder how much conventional ammunition is destroyed when it is not used for a significant length of time? I would imagine naval artillery shells have a "best used by" date of some kind, and their propellant and/or warheads don't have infinite shelf stable lifetimes. A railgun bullet could last a lot longer without degrading, and if your propellant is fundamentally diesel fuel (indirectly converted to electricity) then your diesel fuel remains constantly refreshed whether you fire your weapons or not. In terms of energy density cordite might be more efficient than railgun power, but the actual logistics of having a single fuel and using electricity might be in the long run cheaper than building and periodically recycling old ammunition.
Seems odd to me, though. I would think any improperly obtained evidence should be contestable.
It can be. But "improperly" requires context. Its not improper for the police to search servers. It is illegal for them to search servers in violation of fourth amendment protections. But the fourth amendment only applies when the search violates your rights. You have no right to prevent the police from searching property that is not yours.
No you CAN assert improper search whilst claiming a frame up. If a cop busts into your house without a warrant, pulls a bag of coke out of his pocket and says "This is yours", you can both claim the cop had no right to be in there AND that the drugs where not yours anyway. The same applies with the server. He can claim that access was gained improperly AND it wasn't his anyway.
No, he can't. In the first case, the defendant can claim the drugs were not his but *the house* was his and his privacy rights *to his home* were violated by the illegal search of his home.
But if the cops break into the house across the street and find drugs there and claim its yours, you cannot simultaneously claim the house and its contents are not yours *and* your right to privacy in that house was violated by an illegal search. You have no such right to have other people's houses not searched. *The owner* would have some legal recourse, but even then if the drugs were not used against him, he would not have a fourth amendment challenge because nothing is being used against him. He would have the right to sue for illegal trespass only.
What you're asserting is precisely why you should generally take advice of legal counsel rather than try to defend yourself based on incomplete knowledge of the law. The average person's actual understanding of the law tends to be woefully incomplete and inaccurate, because the law tends to be misrepresented in popular discussion. For example, the belief that the US Constitution grants the right to free speech, when it actually only asserts a right for speech to be free from government restrictions (and implicitly only unreasonable ones that do not prevent other Constitutional duties from being executed) is probably the most commonly misrepresented element of US law.
The biggest question not answered in the trial is how the servers were found. The defense didn't challenge on that point (no one knows why).
The answer to many questions about the defense strategy during the trial seem to be that either Ulbricht or his attorney or both thought they were engaged in an internet debate and not a criminal trial. His lawyer repeatedly failed to follow proper procedure during the trial that every trial lawyer knows, and used legal strategies that weirdly precluded them from offering certain lines of defense. For example, a critical defense assertion seems to have been that many of the pieces of evidence the prosecution used against Ulbricht were not owned by him or not his property. By making that assertion, he couldn't simultaneously assert that his rights were violated when they were acquired because he claimed they were not his in the first place. When his lawyer tried to do so, he was explicitly told he couldn't do that, as if he didn't even know.
Its almost as if the defense believed that since the prosecution bears the burden of proof, anything that had *any* alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely or illogical, automatically prevented proof beyond reasonable doubt. Which is ridiculous. I have a sneaking suspicion that most of this strategy was forced upon defense counsel by Ulbricht himself. It looks from the outside less like something an (even incompetent) attorney would do, and more like someone used to internet board sparring would think should work.
Not even that, Scott Adams doesn't know a scientist from a self-proclaimed and popular expert.
If Scott Adams thinks Science has failed him because of all the weird diet experts in the world, he probably thinks Medicine has failed him because of Doctor Oz, Psychology has failed him because of Dr. Phil, and the US Justice system has failed him because of Judge Judy.
I don't have a problem with the credibility of Science. On the other hand, I don't think Scott Adams career as a cartoonist grants a lot of credibility speaking about Science.
We used to wonder what in the hell was making these ultra-bright quasars; now we believe that they are "active" galactic cores which are in the process of forming a supermassive black hole in the centers. It's possible that two such black holes might form and orbit their mutual centers of gravity, but eventually they would merge. This merging is probably the source of the gamma ray bursts.
Most GRBs have a signal that's inconsistent with that scenario because of the size of the black holes: basically most GRBs have signals consistent with much smaller objects than galactic black holes.
The original theory, and one which still explains some GRBs, are the gamma ray emissions from two neutron stars merging. Binary stars are common, and in some cases both stars eventually become neutron stars. When their orbits decay, they can merge to form black holes and in the process convert a huge amount of mass into gamma ray energy. But the prevailing theory that best explains the majority of the rest of them are a special class of supernova that emits a huge amount of its energy in two narrow jets. When those jets happen to be pointed in our general direction, they appear to be a GRB.
Some GRBs emit so much energy that for a while astronomers couldn't reconcile their energy output with the limits on their size: even total conversion of all the matter in an object of that size into energy seemed to be insufficient to generate the kind of energy a GRB produces. When it was discovered that supernova can sometimes emit jets rather than explode outward equally in all directions, that provided a way for something of that size to appear to emit more energy than possible. Astronomers were calculating the energy reaching us from the GRBs, and assuming the object sent that much energy in all directions. Astronomers now think we only see a small fraction of all GRBs that detonate, and most jet their energy in directions we can't see.
Let me know when you can find a way to dispatch a tech to swap a hard drive in a tier 1 datacenter for a buck.
It doesn't cost a buck. It costs 5 bucks, but has a 20% chance of occurring in the 4 year lifetime of each HDD. Also, you would not "dispatch a tech". Instead you would send out a tech with a cart of, say, 50 HDDs. The the tech would walk down the aisles, pulling and inserting disks. That would be his full time job. If he could do 50 in an 8 hour shift, and is paid $30/hour, that is about $5/disk.
No, you would not. The problem with this is that the whole point of the paper was to analyze ways to improve the reliability of disk arrays. You can do what you're describing if there was no specific timeframe in which hard drives need to be replaced: you just replace them whenever you get around to it, rather than soon after they fail. But that only works in environments where actual disk reliability is not important. In environments where actual array reliability is important, delaying the swapping of drives widens the window of vulnerability for an array, even one with hot spares, because of the need to survive the rare cases of multiple drives failing in a short span. That isn't likely, but when you're dealing with five nines of uptime requirement, those unlikely events have to be accounted for.
I'm also trying to imagine implementing a system whereby a $30/hr tech just walks down aisles and pulls blinking drives and replaces them, and I'm thinking anyone who does that deserves the uptime they get.
One of the possible conclusions is we may actually be the first intelligent species to hit space flight in our galaxy.
So we're the older more advanced civilization we're looking for? That's so amazing and depressing at the same time.
Or we're just the oldest in the neighborhood. The really cool kids might simply be too far away for us to have met them yet.
On the subject of books, Stephen Baxter wrote a series of fiction novels designed to tackle the Fermi Paradox, each one of which containing similar characters but set in a different universe with a different answer to the paradox. In Manifold Time, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is basically "we were the first, and because we take over the universe quickly enough we also become the only." In Manifold Space, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is comparable to the subject being discussed: advanced civilizations pop up all the time but they get wiped out by massive cosmic disasters repeatedly throughout the history of the universe. Manifold Origin is a bit harder to summarize, but I guess the best way to put it is that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that evolution to advanced civilizations is contrary to our guesses so improbable, even we shouldn't be here but we didn't arrive by chance, we were "shepherded" into being here.
But once a civilization has achieved the Iron Age of technology, such a civilization is likely to achieve space faring status within a thousand years
It took humans 3200 years. Why do you assume that the average species is *way better* than humans?
In any case though, I thought it was pretty clearly talking about nipping things in the bud, sterilizing all life at any point in the massive timeline between the first self-replicator to a civilization capable of avoiding or defending against gamma ray bursts. The amount of time it actually takes is probably some random variable, and all things considered, how long it took us is probably around average. Earth life existed about 3.5 billion years or more before we came along.
Yeah, its a statistical thing. The point isn't that GRBs obliterate all technological civilzations. Its that by reducing the odds of a planet achieving a technological civilization capable of surviving GRBs to very low levels, the odds of us having ever encountered one drop for very likely to extremely unlikely. And that's all that's necessary to resolve Fermi's Paradox.
Now, what does it cost to swap it? Let's say the chance of failure is 20%, it takes ten minutes, and you pay the admin $30/hour (I just made up all these numbers). ($30/hour * 1/6 hour * 0.2 failures) = $1.
So unless I made a mistake in either my math or my assumptions, it looks like swapping is still a win, unless the number of additional disks is less than 5%.
Let me know when you can find a way to dispatch a tech to swap a hard drive in a tier 1 datacenter for a buck.
Apple arguably makes the best phones and when using Android phones you notice little things here and there that aren't quite a nice, but these are rather rare and mostly insignificant.
It feels strange that Apple is making such a profit with a rather smallish that may be 12% of the market and no particularly eye-popping new products since the Steve Jobs era, just a series of well-engineered refinements.
Then again, certain shoe and apparel companies do this and have done this for decades. Seems odd to see this in technology sector that historically has been very market-share, volume and dominance oriented. However historically, this was the method employed since the early days of Apple (premium pricing).
Well, first I think you're underestimating Apple's marketshare. If you measure Apple's marketshare relative to all smartphones everywhere on Earth, its marketshare could be that low. But Apple doesn't directly compete with most of those smartphones: it competes in the high-end smartphone market where it still has substantial marketshare. Supposedly, Apple shipped more phones in China last quarter than any other smartphone manufacturer, which means its marketshare is not insubstantial.
But I think more importantly, people - especially within the technology space - tend to look at Apple as a vanilla consumer tech company, when it is anything but. Asking why people are willing to pay so much for Apple when at best their products are marginally better is like asking why people pay so much for Air Jordans which are marginally better, or why people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for dresses that have no practical benefit over a $79 dress from Target. It comes down to brand loyalty and brand consciousness.
People keep saying Apple was going to fail in China because their phones were twice as expensive as the competition; that if they didn't make a budget priced phone Apple would be irrelevant in China. What those people are completely clueless about is that much of the sales of Apple iPhones in China were *because* its the expensive phone, not *in spite of* the fact its the most expensive phone. Its the Cadillac of phones, the Ferrari of phones. But as expensive as an iPhone is, its a lot easier to buy than a Cadillac, and far more useful day to day.
People have been misunderstanding Apple's strategy for years now, and show no signs of learning their lesson. The correct way to look at Apple is not to compare them to Samsung or Microsoft or Dell. Rather, its to compare them to Michael Kors or Calvin Klein or Nike. Imagine if Nike was the *only* company making shoes with celebrity athletes endorsing the product, and *everyone else* was marketing budget sneakers. They would probably never sell as much shoes as the budget sneaker companies, but think of the stranglehold Nike would have on the high-end shoe market, on mindshare, and most importantly on profits. Now look at Apple, saying "we're stylish and pricey" and everyone else, for the most part, saying "we are just as good but a lot cheaper." In the traditional tech space, Apple would be doomed. But in the high-end shoe market, they would be King. Apple isn't winning because they are playing the game better, Apple is winning because they are playing a completely different game and no one else is even bothering to suit up and play them.
Which is the amount they couldn't find a way to avoid. Their profits would be taxed at around 40% in the US, but they funnel them to Ireland (the famous "Double Irish") and pay 0% on them. What they do pay is made up of sales tax, employment taxes, and tax on things like property that they can't pretend does not exist in any taxable jurisdiction.
This is somewhat misleading. The US is special in that its the only country that actually taxes income that isn't even earned in the country. Most countries will tax someone on the income generated in the country, but not tax income generated outside the country. That includes both corporations and *people*. If you are a US citizen and you go outside the country and earn income, you're required to pay US income tax on that income, even though it was earned entirely outside the country. To repeat: that's something practically unique to the US.
The US does provide an exception: if that income was already taxed by another country, you're allowed to declare that because you already paid taxes on that money to someone else, you don't have to *also* pay taxes to the US. Again: that's not just for corporations like Apple, but also for individuals.
Apple is required to, and does pay US income taxes on net income it earns in the US: it cannot simply "funnel" the income to another country to dodge taxes, and everyone saying that simply is confused or mistaken. If that was possible every corporation would do it and no one would pay any taxes. What companies like Apple *can* do, however, is a) pay taxes on that income in another country, particularly one with a much lower tax rate and b) don't bring the money back to the US, where they would then have to pay US tax on it.
Is this "dodging taxes?" Yes. But not really *US* taxes. The countries with the biggest beef with Apple are really European countries for whom Apple doesn't pay taxes on income generated in those countries because that revenue is funneled into Ireland. But that money would *not* be "taxed at around 40% in the US" because if Apple didn't funnel that income to Ireland (where it has special sweetheart deals that Ireland gave to many companies, to the chagrin of many other EU countries), it would then be taxed in the individual countries it was earned, and the US would still not see a dime of it.
As to dodging taxes by not explicitly transferring that money earned overseas back to the US? It has yet to be explained why a company that earns money overseas has an obligation to transfer that money to the US explicitly for the sole purpose of paying US taxes on it, and for no other reason. That's simply illogical.
But as to the income Apple generates in the US by its business operations in the US: for the most part, it pays taxes on that income just like every other corporation.
The NSA has metadata (and most likely recordings) of most of the phone calls in the entire world. The FBI (and a bunch of other unnamed government agencies) can and do tap phones without court orders. Cell phones can be used to track individuals 24/7. And yet somehow between the FCC and all the phone companies no one can figure out who is making robocalls. Really?
What's actually going on is that phone companies love robocalls because they make money on them and the FCC doesn't give a damn and/or is too "pro-business" to do anything for consumers.
Just stop lying and pretending that this is a hard problem. It's bad enough that this crap goes on in the first place. Pretending that nothing can be done is adding insult to injury. STFU and admit that it happens on purpose and nothing will change because you like the status quo. Stop lying to us!
Who said its hard to figure out who is making robocalls? Its not difficult to figure that out. The problem is that it is not illegal to make robocalls. The concern is that some robocalls violate the law by calling people that are registered on do not call lists and do not have a valid legal reason for calling, and other robocalls are perfectly legal but the recipient doesn't want to answer them anyway. Services like nomorobo and others are intended for people who want to control the kinds of telemarketing and other robocalls they receive.
I use nomorobo myself, and given that its a free service I don't have to maintain myself, I think it works very well. It doesn't catch and block everything, but it blocks a surprising number of them and every one it blocks is a call I don't have to answer or alternatively listen to ring the phone over and over until voicemail picks it up. It doesn't block all robocalls, but its not supposed to. When my drugstore calls to tell me my prescriptions are ready for pickup, that's a robocall but not one I want blocked. If the service just blocks the worst offenders, that's still plenty valuable just as anti-spam filters don't have to block 100% of all email spam to still be worthwhile.
They further estimate that GRBs prevent complex life like that on Earth in 90% of the galaxies.
So, life possible on 10% of the galaxies means that those are none at all? What about our own one? This smells of clickbait.
The Fermi paradox basically states that if life on Earth is the typical result of similar conditions, the probability is far higher that there are older, more advanced civilizations, and eventually on timescales far smaller than the universe has existed we should eventually have bumped into one of them as they spread throughout the galaxy, even the universe.
The paper suggests two effects of gamma ray bursts that alter that calculation. First, a given location was more likely to be exposed to a gamma ray burst at earlier times in the universe, when the population of large hot stars was higher and overall density of the universe was higher. Therefore, its possible that even though the universe is 14 billion years old during a significant percentage of that time the universe was too dense and the frequency of gamma ray bursts too high to allow a sufficiently high technological civilization to arise. That's why there aren't any really old civilizations, or alternatively why there are so few that they tend to be very far away statistically. Second, even after the universe had expanded enough to make gamma ray bursts less likely to completely sterilize all planets everywhere its still the case that most parts of most galaxies are still too dense to avoid getting hit by them.
So its possible the reason why we have not yet seen a very old highly advanced civilization is that the actual probability of one being old enough, and close enough, for us to have bumped into (or rather for them to have bumped into us) is a lot lower than we might assume, even if the conditions to initiate life are pretty common. Nearly all of them have been wiped out before they could advance to the point of being able to colonize on an interstellar level and avoid being driven to extinction by gamma ray bursts.
when did we become a nation of wimps?
we dealt with snowstorms for decades without shutting down at the mere hint of a blizzard.
this country is going soft catering to whiners.
We dealt with cholera for even longer without all this public sanitation bling.
Why would LibreOffice or GIMP ever be dependent on systemd? They have nothing to do with the startup or shutdown of the system - they are plain vanilla applications (same most likely goes for JBoss and KDE, though they may provide some 'system-like' services). Seriously, folks. It's just this kind of hyperbole from systemd haters that makes me think it must be good...
The root of the worry comes from the fact that the history of systemd's development is not "lets address this one thing" but rather "wouldn't it be great if?" Systemd doesn't adapt to or reuse other things as often as a lot of people are comfortable with: they displace syslog with journald because its better for them, because they now have control over logging rather than have to work with anyone else to get the features they want. The issues with Gnome are due to systemd saying "wouldn't it be great if" they could extend boot startup services to session start up services, which then gets you to login and window managers and so on. And while they assert - correctly - that *technically* speaking these things aren't dependent on systemd, its clear they are trying to displace the other things because they think they can do them better.
And maybe they can. The most pernicious thing about systemd is that in many respects, what they displace they improve on (at least to an extent): that's what makes it possible at all for them to expand the system. But its still unnerving to many. The answer to the question "why would LibreOffice ever be dependent on systemd" is "if systemd developers decide that they can offer a service to LibreOffice that would be beneficial, there doesn't seem to be anything in their dna that says maybe we should stay in our lane." Maybe one day systemd will want to act as a gateway to special network file services, or whatever. I can't imagine what that could be, but then again I never imagined that an init replacement would be replacing system logging and hooking into session startup. That's the problem: they've already defied expectations on how much reach systemd is intended to have.
Honestly, the gist I get from the interview itself is "if we think we can do it better, why not go for it." That's an understandable point of view, but its also very provocative to many in the open source community.
Anyone believing the "terrorist" propaganda must somehow also believe that the DPRK has millions of bomb strapping terrorists stationed in the US ready to flock into Star and AMC to bomb people for watching a comedy.
Anyone who thinks that is nuts. But that's the problem. There's no way to predict how many nuts out there think this would actually happen, and decide they want to get in on the action. 13,000 theaters being attacked by North Koreans is a really bad sequel to Red Dawn, not a credible threat. But a couple dozen crazy people attacking theaters because they heard about the North Korean threat is still a lot of potential casualties. That is a legitimate risk worth thinking about.
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For one, you can copyright a schematic but the copyright is on the schematic itself. To keep someone from building what the schematic describes or their own twist on it, you need a patent.
But the point of open x is that you don't want to keep someone from building what the schematic describes. Yes, there are "open source" licenses that tries to limit what you can do with the source, but the main point is always that you can take the source and improve upon it. That copyright is needed to enforce this is newspeak from the GPL camp.
Are you kidding? You can't have "licenses" for things you don't own. If the work doesn't have copyright protection, then its in the public domain. If you try to force me to obey some "license" I can simply choose to ignore your license and use the work anyway. Copyright is necessary to enforce the license, like say the GPL. Without that license, I can take your "open" software and do anything I want with it, including adding my own modifications to it and selling the entire thing without giving anyone any right to see the source or anything else. And you can't do anything to stop me legally. Since one of the primary principles of open source is the "share and share alike" principle where if you use it, you yourself have to contribute under similar license, that principle can only be enforced if you can enforce anything at all, and that requires legal protection. Copyright provides that protection.
The problem that Bruce has identified with Open hardware is that the only way to enforce anything with hardware requires patent protection analogous to the copyright protection that allows open software licenses to work, or extending copyright protections into new areas. But the problem is that both using patents in this way and trying to extend copyright protections instead of patents both seem to have legal gotchas that don't exist to the same extent with software. The problem is if the Open hardware movement tries to leverage either patent protections into designs or copyright protection into implementations it will either not work because the law won't evolve correctly, or worse they might evolve in such a way to allow Open hardware licenses to work but create a new form of legal ammunition that unscrupulous entities could use in entirely different ways to gain new IP protection rights they don't currently have.
It's a vast field, and expertise of people is usually just a subset. I'm not even sure what the answer you you expected was, but I'd say: I'd use your public key to encrypt the file to you and then send it to you. Personally, I wouldn't know which commands to invoke to do this, but I know that's the theory.
So, should any developer know this? That is debatable. I've had very competent developers who had next to no clue about how DNS works. They could do their job just fine with that. Me? Personally, I'm not up to snuff with the finer points of SQL queries and all the joins that exists and when it makes sense to create an index, etc. Could I find out? Most likely, but I haven't had the need to recently.
The problem is, that you are mapping your knowlegde to "what people must know". I used to do that too, and I probably still do often enough. The DNS example above didn't come from nowhere: I had the case, and I was really thinking "how could such a competent person not know this", but then this person could probably enlighten me about dozens of things I don't know well enough.
It all comes down to what you define as "general knowgledge" for a developer should be and that is highly subjective.
TL;DR Hiring people is hard. Especially, technical people.
Although the title of the post said "developer" the content said "developer/architect." Unless they were hiring a programmer that could also design houses, I'm assuming they mean IT infrastructure architect. I would presume a systems architect would be familiar with how internet protocols work (like DNS), how common physical network infrastructure works (like switches), how fundamental concepts like client-server architectures and encryption work, and the issues involved in major ares of system design (storage, virtualization, wide area networking, etc).
Programmers just need to know how to write computer code. Software engineers need to know how software systems work. Architects have to know how the pieces of systems work that they will eventually be the architect for. Perhaps the problem right up front is that unless this is some small company where everyone wears a ton of hats, "Programmer/Architect" is not a proper job designation in the first place. "Programmer/Software Architect" might be more applicable, in which case the applicant should fundamentally understand how to code and what common software design methodologies are. If the intended target application(s) are internet-based, an additional requirement to understand the problem domain would also be reasonable (familiarity with medicine if you're writing medical software, internet protocols if you are writing large scale internet applications, human resources if you're being hired to be a Peoplesoft app developer, etc).
In any case, the subject question was "what portion of developers are bad at what they do" which is a different question than the one posed by the actual post. The answer to that question is, in my experience, most of them. Note that I'm not saying most developers are bad at writing software. I'm saying most developers are bad at what they do. What they do tends to be, whether its their own fault or someone else's, significantly outside their actual area of expertise whatever that might be.
The rate of measles infection was going down drastically before the vaccine was created. The antibiotics are for the secondary problems, not the measles. Better general health and healthcare will also have atbig impact on modern cases. Just because you aren't aware of the latest studies on the effectiveness of multiple vaccinations does not make it incorrect.
I am fully aware. You are almost certainly referencing the McLean study which showed a potential reduction in effectiveness due to repeated vaccination controlled for a single virus strain. However, that study reiterated previous studies which showed no statistically significant vaccination interference between consecutive years of vaccination. They suggested the potential for such interference over significantly longer timeframes such as five years but also explicitly stated that the data in their study could not draw that conclusion given many other possible explanations for their results.
Assuming ignorance from refutation is another characteristic of the phenomenon I characterized earlier. In either case, there are reasons for repeated vaccination due to the nature of how the vaccine is constituted that would override this result even if it was conclusive. Furthermore, the study did not suggest escalating resistance which would incur the risk of the vaccine eventually becoming ineffective. They suggested the potential for successive interference which would more reasonably mandate switching to longer vaccination schedules instead.
As to the rate of measles infection going down, public health improvements did reduce the rate of measles infection in the early part of the twentieth century, but only by incrementally small amounts due to the highly contagious nature of measles. Mandated vaccination in the 1960s dropped the infection rate almost immediately to very low levels. There was no recorded trend that would have reduced the rate to current levels prior to mass vaccination in the United States. That is not even remotely credibly in dispute. Given the mortality statistics, mass vaccination has saved literally tens of thousands of lives in the last fifty years, and eliminated hundreds of thousands of cases severe enough to require hospitalization.
This measles scare is just that, a scare. 50 something cases this year, 650 cases last year. I didn't hear about them. Measles is not a bad disease, our parents got it as a routine thing during their childhood. Very few turn serious or deadly, especially when you have modern medical care such as antibiotics.
According to the CDC, prior to mass vaccination in the 1960s the annual rate of measles infection was about half a million cases were reported in the US annually. Of those, just under ten percent required hospitalization, about a thousand had chronic disability and about five hundred died. That's per year.
Also, measles is caused by a virus, which means antibiotics have no effect on the infection. Treatment with antibiotics only occurs in cases with serious complications involving secondary bacterial infections, which by definition is not a minor case.
Plus, each time you get a vaccine they are less and less effective. People who get the flu vaccine each year are going to be in trouble when they are elderly and really need the extra protection if that is true.
That's a frighteningly wrong set of what I hesitate to call "information."
Science denial is probably more strongly correlated with politics/emotions not intelligence level. The left and the right merely have different things they are in denial about, different things that touch on their politics and their emotions. And emotions lead people to stand by their beliefs regardless of rational thought and evidence, both on the left and the right.
In my experience, there's science denial, and then there's the more likely phenomenon occurring here which is the belief that one's personal interpretation of the evidence is vastly superior to anyone else's. If an anti-vax article sounds reasonable to them, its far more likely to their thinking that everyone else who considers it rubbish is wrong, because their own understanding is far superior.
That's not exactly science denial, that's narcissism masquerading as science denial. And this general belief is, in my experience, extremely prevalent in the various technology industries, particularly IT.
Be that as it may ... I submit a specific alternate to your postulate that a leader willing to put large forces under arms in harm's way is the only method to effect fundamental change. The alternate is a new Gandhi. The general principle worked well enough for Martin Luther King, Jr. This is not say we won't get our hair mussed a bit, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a 1775 style revolution with cannons mowing down rows of sons and would-be masters.
I never said or implied that change required armed forces. What I said was it required someone willing to stick to their principles without compromising them even if it meant people had to die. Gandhi was in fact one such leader who preached non-violence to such an extent he told his own supporters they needed to be willing to die non-violently rather than kill or fight back to convince the British that they would never be able to break their resolve. That is entirely analogous to what I mentioned above that it would take a leader willing to say they would rather see Americans (or other citizens) die at the hands of terrorists rather than destroy their civil rights trying to protect them. Gandhi was able to convince huge numbers of people that it was better to die in the pursuit of freedom than live under oppression. It would take that kind of leader, I think, to reverse the trend of using ever stronger government controls to fight terrorism and other crimes.
When the government says "because of Apple's iPhone encryption one day a child will die" the people have to say "I'd rather a child die than the American people be oppressed." A leader has to convince them to say it and believe it. Gandhi actually managed to do it, so its possible. But its not easy to find Gandhis.
An all out revolt is probably the only way this will change at this point. Society has been on a downward spiral for a while now. Historically the only way to recover was lots of bloodshed. People in power never want to relinquish power or money, which is essence is what the mass surveillance is all about. Squashing descent, getting a leg up on any one selling things you want to sell, putting competition out of business, etc..
Its easy to paint the situation as the masses being dominated by the people in power but the truth is that a revolt is unlikely to work for the simple reason that the average person really isn't just a passive observer; they really want much of what they claim they don't want. In terms of the specifics, its easy to claim that one doesn't want mass surveillance but that's just a symptom of a more fundamental truth. The truth is that given the choice presented to the people in power, most people would choose the same thing: namely given a choice between using every means at one's disposal to stop terrorism or not, most people would in fact choose to use every means at one's disposal, even if it infringed on personal freedom.
And the reason why a revolt is unlikely is the same reason why the Occupy Movement didn't generate lasting results in the same way many other movements did. Revolutions require people willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a result, often without the kinds of compromise that people normally engage in. A revolution to stop people from doing whatever it takes to achieve a goal is difficult to achieve when backed only by people unwilling to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.
George Washington famously assumed enormous military, and thus political power when he became the leader of the Continental Army, and his hands were not entirely clean when wielding it. But without him, there probably is no revolution that survives. When the war was over he surrendered that power by resigning his commission. The number of people both willing and able to exercise such vast power to achieve an end which results in surrendering that power entirely (even if only temporarily) is exceedingly small. Most people willing to do the latter have no capacity to do the former and vice versa.
To put it another way, what you need is a leader willing to say "I would rather see Americans die than surrender their freedom" that is also so popular he isn't immediately driven out of the country by pitchforks the next day, and can convince the average American (or for that matter any other citizen of any other country) to accept those values. Until such a person arrives, all revolutions to change the situation will fail, because none will genuinely have the support of the people.
Someone will probably come along and say that's a false choice, but that's missing the point. The point is that is the general perception: you either have the values that say "do everything you possibly can, pushing the envelope as far as you can" or you don't. If you don't, someone will always come along and say they would do more, and they would be correct, and because there's no way to prove it with certainty you'd always take the blame for the next person killed. That's just reality. You did everything possible, or you didn't. Leaders don't want to say they didn't, and citizens don't want excuses for why they didn't. That needs to change somehow, but most people I think don't really want that to change, deep down.
So, what I wonder is how the railguns fit into this. It seems that they'd be prone to very effectively making a couple of small holes in whatever they hit and delivering most of the energy into the sea or ground. Unless you actually hit the engines or some other critical piece, a ship, especially a warship can survive a surprisingly large number of holes before it is put out of action.
I believe the primary potential advantage of railguns is that they allow for a higher number of rounds to be carried and potentially fired at a higher rate, and have the defensive aspect of removing a critical vulnerability aboard ship. Its a significant advantage if, as you imply, the enemy will have a hard time sinking you because you don't have a magazine to detonate.
On the subject of ammunition, railguns are probably less efficient in general, but its probably a lot easier to store more fuel and less intrinsically explosive ordinance. Its not just that your ammunition is smaller because it doesn't need propellant, its likely the lower safety requirements would allow you to store your rounds at a higher space density over all. Naval vessels that are already nuclear don't need to even worry about higher fuel requirements, but even diesel ships are probably easier to design as carrying more fuel than more ammunition.
Thinking about efficiency, I wonder how much conventional ammunition is destroyed when it is not used for a significant length of time? I would imagine naval artillery shells have a "best used by" date of some kind, and their propellant and/or warheads don't have infinite shelf stable lifetimes. A railgun bullet could last a lot longer without degrading, and if your propellant is fundamentally diesel fuel (indirectly converted to electricity) then your diesel fuel remains constantly refreshed whether you fire your weapons or not. In terms of energy density cordite might be more efficient than railgun power, but the actual logistics of having a single fuel and using electricity might be in the long run cheaper than building and periodically recycling old ammunition.
Seems odd to me, though. I would think any improperly obtained evidence should be contestable.
It can be. But "improperly" requires context. Its not improper for the police to search servers. It is illegal for them to search servers in violation of fourth amendment protections. But the fourth amendment only applies when the search violates your rights. You have no right to prevent the police from searching property that is not yours.
No you CAN assert improper search whilst claiming a frame up. If a cop busts into your house without a warrant, pulls a bag of coke out of his pocket and says "This is yours", you can both claim the cop had no right to be in there AND that the drugs where not yours anyway. The same applies with the server. He can claim that access was gained improperly AND it wasn't his anyway.
No, he can't. In the first case, the defendant can claim the drugs were not his but *the house* was his and his privacy rights *to his home* were violated by the illegal search of his home.
But if the cops break into the house across the street and find drugs there and claim its yours, you cannot simultaneously claim the house and its contents are not yours *and* your right to privacy in that house was violated by an illegal search. You have no such right to have other people's houses not searched. *The owner* would have some legal recourse, but even then if the drugs were not used against him, he would not have a fourth amendment challenge because nothing is being used against him. He would have the right to sue for illegal trespass only.
What you're asserting is precisely why you should generally take advice of legal counsel rather than try to defend yourself based on incomplete knowledge of the law. The average person's actual understanding of the law tends to be woefully incomplete and inaccurate, because the law tends to be misrepresented in popular discussion. For example, the belief that the US Constitution grants the right to free speech, when it actually only asserts a right for speech to be free from government restrictions (and implicitly only unreasonable ones that do not prevent other Constitutional duties from being executed) is probably the most commonly misrepresented element of US law.
The biggest question not answered in the trial is how the servers were found. The defense didn't challenge on that point (no one knows why).
The answer to many questions about the defense strategy during the trial seem to be that either Ulbricht or his attorney or both thought they were engaged in an internet debate and not a criminal trial. His lawyer repeatedly failed to follow proper procedure during the trial that every trial lawyer knows, and used legal strategies that weirdly precluded them from offering certain lines of defense. For example, a critical defense assertion seems to have been that many of the pieces of evidence the prosecution used against Ulbricht were not owned by him or not his property. By making that assertion, he couldn't simultaneously assert that his rights were violated when they were acquired because he claimed they were not his in the first place. When his lawyer tried to do so, he was explicitly told he couldn't do that, as if he didn't even know.
Its almost as if the defense believed that since the prosecution bears the burden of proof, anything that had *any* alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely or illogical, automatically prevented proof beyond reasonable doubt. Which is ridiculous. I have a sneaking suspicion that most of this strategy was forced upon defense counsel by Ulbricht himself. It looks from the outside less like something an (even incompetent) attorney would do, and more like someone used to internet board sparring would think should work.
Not even that, Scott Adams doesn't know a scientist from a self-proclaimed and popular expert.
If Scott Adams thinks Science has failed him because of all the weird diet experts in the world, he probably thinks Medicine has failed him because of Doctor Oz, Psychology has failed him because of Dr. Phil, and the US Justice system has failed him because of Judge Judy.
I don't have a problem with the credibility of Science. On the other hand, I don't think Scott Adams career as a cartoonist grants a lot of credibility speaking about Science.
We used to wonder what in the hell was making these ultra-bright quasars; now we believe that they are "active" galactic cores which are in the process of forming a supermassive black hole in the centers. It's possible that two such black holes might form and orbit their mutual centers of gravity, but eventually they would merge. This merging is probably the source of the gamma ray bursts.
Most GRBs have a signal that's inconsistent with that scenario because of the size of the black holes: basically most GRBs have signals consistent with much smaller objects than galactic black holes.
The original theory, and one which still explains some GRBs, are the gamma ray emissions from two neutron stars merging. Binary stars are common, and in some cases both stars eventually become neutron stars. When their orbits decay, they can merge to form black holes and in the process convert a huge amount of mass into gamma ray energy. But the prevailing theory that best explains the majority of the rest of them are a special class of supernova that emits a huge amount of its energy in two narrow jets. When those jets happen to be pointed in our general direction, they appear to be a GRB.
Some GRBs emit so much energy that for a while astronomers couldn't reconcile their energy output with the limits on their size: even total conversion of all the matter in an object of that size into energy seemed to be insufficient to generate the kind of energy a GRB produces. When it was discovered that supernova can sometimes emit jets rather than explode outward equally in all directions, that provided a way for something of that size to appear to emit more energy than possible. Astronomers were calculating the energy reaching us from the GRBs, and assuming the object sent that much energy in all directions. Astronomers now think we only see a small fraction of all GRBs that detonate, and most jet their energy in directions we can't see.
Let me know when you can find a way to dispatch a tech to swap a hard drive in a tier 1 datacenter for a buck.
It doesn't cost a buck. It costs 5 bucks, but has a 20% chance of occurring in the 4 year lifetime of each HDD. Also, you would not "dispatch a tech". Instead you would send out a tech with a cart of, say, 50 HDDs. The the tech would walk down the aisles, pulling and inserting disks. That would be his full time job. If he could do 50 in an 8 hour shift, and is paid $30/hour, that is about $5/disk.
No, you would not. The problem with this is that the whole point of the paper was to analyze ways to improve the reliability of disk arrays. You can do what you're describing if there was no specific timeframe in which hard drives need to be replaced: you just replace them whenever you get around to it, rather than soon after they fail. But that only works in environments where actual disk reliability is not important. In environments where actual array reliability is important, delaying the swapping of drives widens the window of vulnerability for an array, even one with hot spares, because of the need to survive the rare cases of multiple drives failing in a short span. That isn't likely, but when you're dealing with five nines of uptime requirement, those unlikely events have to be accounted for.
I'm also trying to imagine implementing a system whereby a $30/hr tech just walks down aisles and pulls blinking drives and replaces them, and I'm thinking anyone who does that deserves the uptime they get.
One of the possible conclusions is we may actually be the first intelligent species to hit space flight in our galaxy.
So we're the older more advanced civilization we're looking for? That's so amazing and depressing at the same time.
Or we're just the oldest in the neighborhood. The really cool kids might simply be too far away for us to have met them yet.
On the subject of books, Stephen Baxter wrote a series of fiction novels designed to tackle the Fermi Paradox, each one of which containing similar characters but set in a different universe with a different answer to the paradox. In Manifold Time, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is basically "we were the first, and because we take over the universe quickly enough we also become the only." In Manifold Space, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is comparable to the subject being discussed: advanced civilizations pop up all the time but they get wiped out by massive cosmic disasters repeatedly throughout the history of the universe. Manifold Origin is a bit harder to summarize, but I guess the best way to put it is that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that evolution to advanced civilizations is contrary to our guesses so improbable, even we shouldn't be here but we didn't arrive by chance, we were "shepherded" into being here.
But once a civilization has achieved the Iron Age of technology, such a civilization is likely to achieve space faring status within a thousand years
It took humans 3200 years. Why do you assume that the average species is *way better* than humans?
In any case though, I thought it was pretty clearly talking about nipping things in the bud, sterilizing all life at any point in the massive timeline between the first self-replicator to a civilization capable of avoiding or defending against gamma ray bursts. The amount of time it actually takes is probably some random variable, and all things considered, how long it took us is probably around average. Earth life existed about 3.5 billion years or more before we came along.
Yeah, its a statistical thing. The point isn't that GRBs obliterate all technological civilzations. Its that by reducing the odds of a planet achieving a technological civilization capable of surviving GRBs to very low levels, the odds of us having ever encountered one drop for very likely to extremely unlikely. And that's all that's necessary to resolve Fermi's Paradox.
Now, what does it cost to swap it? Let's say the chance of failure is 20%, it takes ten minutes, and you pay the admin $30/hour (I just made up all these numbers). ($30/hour * 1/6 hour * 0.2 failures) = $1.
So unless I made a mistake in either my math or my assumptions, it looks like swapping is still a win, unless the number of additional disks is less than 5%.
Let me know when you can find a way to dispatch a tech to swap a hard drive in a tier 1 datacenter for a buck.
Apple arguably makes the best phones and when using Android phones you notice little things here and there that aren't quite a nice, but these are rather rare and mostly insignificant. It feels strange that Apple is making such a profit with a rather smallish that may be 12% of the market and no particularly eye-popping new products since the Steve Jobs era, just a series of well-engineered refinements. Then again, certain shoe and apparel companies do this and have done this for decades. Seems odd to see this in technology sector that historically has been very market-share, volume and dominance oriented. However historically, this was the method employed since the early days of Apple (premium pricing).
Well, first I think you're underestimating Apple's marketshare. If you measure Apple's marketshare relative to all smartphones everywhere on Earth, its marketshare could be that low. But Apple doesn't directly compete with most of those smartphones: it competes in the high-end smartphone market where it still has substantial marketshare. Supposedly, Apple shipped more phones in China last quarter than any other smartphone manufacturer, which means its marketshare is not insubstantial.
But I think more importantly, people - especially within the technology space - tend to look at Apple as a vanilla consumer tech company, when it is anything but. Asking why people are willing to pay so much for Apple when at best their products are marginally better is like asking why people pay so much for Air Jordans which are marginally better, or why people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for dresses that have no practical benefit over a $79 dress from Target. It comes down to brand loyalty and brand consciousness.
People keep saying Apple was going to fail in China because their phones were twice as expensive as the competition; that if they didn't make a budget priced phone Apple would be irrelevant in China. What those people are completely clueless about is that much of the sales of Apple iPhones in China were *because* its the expensive phone, not *in spite of* the fact its the most expensive phone. Its the Cadillac of phones, the Ferrari of phones. But as expensive as an iPhone is, its a lot easier to buy than a Cadillac, and far more useful day to day.
People have been misunderstanding Apple's strategy for years now, and show no signs of learning their lesson. The correct way to look at Apple is not to compare them to Samsung or Microsoft or Dell. Rather, its to compare them to Michael Kors or Calvin Klein or Nike. Imagine if Nike was the *only* company making shoes with celebrity athletes endorsing the product, and *everyone else* was marketing budget sneakers. They would probably never sell as much shoes as the budget sneaker companies, but think of the stranglehold Nike would have on the high-end shoe market, on mindshare, and most importantly on profits. Now look at Apple, saying "we're stylish and pricey" and everyone else, for the most part, saying "we are just as good but a lot cheaper." In the traditional tech space, Apple would be doomed. But in the high-end shoe market, they would be King. Apple isn't winning because they are playing the game better, Apple is winning because they are playing a completely different game and no one else is even bothering to suit up and play them.
Which is the amount they couldn't find a way to avoid. Their profits would be taxed at around 40% in the US, but they funnel them to Ireland (the famous "Double Irish") and pay 0% on them. What they do pay is made up of sales tax, employment taxes, and tax on things like property that they can't pretend does not exist in any taxable jurisdiction.
This is somewhat misleading. The US is special in that its the only country that actually taxes income that isn't even earned in the country. Most countries will tax someone on the income generated in the country, but not tax income generated outside the country. That includes both corporations and *people*. If you are a US citizen and you go outside the country and earn income, you're required to pay US income tax on that income, even though it was earned entirely outside the country. To repeat: that's something practically unique to the US.
The US does provide an exception: if that income was already taxed by another country, you're allowed to declare that because you already paid taxes on that money to someone else, you don't have to *also* pay taxes to the US. Again: that's not just for corporations like Apple, but also for individuals.
Apple is required to, and does pay US income taxes on net income it earns in the US: it cannot simply "funnel" the income to another country to dodge taxes, and everyone saying that simply is confused or mistaken. If that was possible every corporation would do it and no one would pay any taxes. What companies like Apple *can* do, however, is a) pay taxes on that income in another country, particularly one with a much lower tax rate and b) don't bring the money back to the US, where they would then have to pay US tax on it.
Is this "dodging taxes?" Yes. But not really *US* taxes. The countries with the biggest beef with Apple are really European countries for whom Apple doesn't pay taxes on income generated in those countries because that revenue is funneled into Ireland. But that money would *not* be "taxed at around 40% in the US" because if Apple didn't funnel that income to Ireland (where it has special sweetheart deals that Ireland gave to many companies, to the chagrin of many other EU countries), it would then be taxed in the individual countries it was earned, and the US would still not see a dime of it.
As to dodging taxes by not explicitly transferring that money earned overseas back to the US? It has yet to be explained why a company that earns money overseas has an obligation to transfer that money to the US explicitly for the sole purpose of paying US taxes on it, and for no other reason. That's simply illogical.
But as to the income Apple generates in the US by its business operations in the US: for the most part, it pays taxes on that income just like every other corporation.
The NSA has metadata (and most likely recordings) of most of the phone calls in the entire world. The FBI (and a bunch of other unnamed government agencies) can and do tap phones without court orders. Cell phones can be used to track individuals 24/7. And yet somehow between the FCC and all the phone companies no one can figure out who is making robocalls. Really?
What's actually going on is that phone companies love robocalls because they make money on them and the FCC doesn't give a damn and/or is too "pro-business" to do anything for consumers.
Just stop lying and pretending that this is a hard problem. It's bad enough that this crap goes on in the first place. Pretending that nothing can be done is adding insult to injury. STFU and admit that it happens on purpose and nothing will change because you like the status quo. Stop lying to us!
Who said its hard to figure out who is making robocalls? Its not difficult to figure that out. The problem is that it is not illegal to make robocalls. The concern is that some robocalls violate the law by calling people that are registered on do not call lists and do not have a valid legal reason for calling, and other robocalls are perfectly legal but the recipient doesn't want to answer them anyway. Services like nomorobo and others are intended for people who want to control the kinds of telemarketing and other robocalls they receive.
I use nomorobo myself, and given that its a free service I don't have to maintain myself, I think it works very well. It doesn't catch and block everything, but it blocks a surprising number of them and every one it blocks is a call I don't have to answer or alternatively listen to ring the phone over and over until voicemail picks it up. It doesn't block all robocalls, but its not supposed to. When my drugstore calls to tell me my prescriptions are ready for pickup, that's a robocall but not one I want blocked. If the service just blocks the worst offenders, that's still plenty valuable just as anti-spam filters don't have to block 100% of all email spam to still be worthwhile.
From TFS:
They further estimate that GRBs prevent complex life like that on Earth in 90% of the galaxies.
So, life possible on 10% of the galaxies means that those are none at all? What about our own one? This smells of clickbait.
The Fermi paradox basically states that if life on Earth is the typical result of similar conditions, the probability is far higher that there are older, more advanced civilizations, and eventually on timescales far smaller than the universe has existed we should eventually have bumped into one of them as they spread throughout the galaxy, even the universe.
The paper suggests two effects of gamma ray bursts that alter that calculation. First, a given location was more likely to be exposed to a gamma ray burst at earlier times in the universe, when the population of large hot stars was higher and overall density of the universe was higher. Therefore, its possible that even though the universe is 14 billion years old during a significant percentage of that time the universe was too dense and the frequency of gamma ray bursts too high to allow a sufficiently high technological civilization to arise. That's why there aren't any really old civilizations, or alternatively why there are so few that they tend to be very far away statistically. Second, even after the universe had expanded enough to make gamma ray bursts less likely to completely sterilize all planets everywhere its still the case that most parts of most galaxies are still too dense to avoid getting hit by them.
So its possible the reason why we have not yet seen a very old highly advanced civilization is that the actual probability of one being old enough, and close enough, for us to have bumped into (or rather for them to have bumped into us) is a lot lower than we might assume, even if the conditions to initiate life are pretty common. Nearly all of them have been wiped out before they could advance to the point of being able to colonize on an interstellar level and avoid being driven to extinction by gamma ray bursts.
when did we become a nation of wimps? we dealt with snowstorms for decades without shutting down at the mere hint of a blizzard. this country is going soft catering to whiners.
We dealt with cholera for even longer without all this public sanitation bling.
Why would LibreOffice or GIMP ever be dependent on systemd? They have nothing to do with the startup or shutdown of the system - they are plain vanilla applications (same most likely goes for JBoss and KDE, though they may provide some 'system-like' services). Seriously, folks. It's just this kind of hyperbole from systemd haters that makes me think it must be good...
The root of the worry comes from the fact that the history of systemd's development is not "lets address this one thing" but rather "wouldn't it be great if?" Systemd doesn't adapt to or reuse other things as often as a lot of people are comfortable with: they displace syslog with journald because its better for them, because they now have control over logging rather than have to work with anyone else to get the features they want. The issues with Gnome are due to systemd saying "wouldn't it be great if" they could extend boot startup services to session start up services, which then gets you to login and window managers and so on. And while they assert - correctly - that *technically* speaking these things aren't dependent on systemd, its clear they are trying to displace the other things because they think they can do them better.
And maybe they can. The most pernicious thing about systemd is that in many respects, what they displace they improve on (at least to an extent): that's what makes it possible at all for them to expand the system. But its still unnerving to many. The answer to the question "why would LibreOffice ever be dependent on systemd" is "if systemd developers decide that they can offer a service to LibreOffice that would be beneficial, there doesn't seem to be anything in their dna that says maybe we should stay in our lane." Maybe one day systemd will want to act as a gateway to special network file services, or whatever. I can't imagine what that could be, but then again I never imagined that an init replacement would be replacing system logging and hooking into session startup. That's the problem: they've already defied expectations on how much reach systemd is intended to have.
Honestly, the gist I get from the interview itself is "if we think we can do it better, why not go for it." That's an understandable point of view, but its also very provocative to many in the open source community.
Anyone believing the "terrorist" propaganda must somehow also believe that the DPRK has millions of bomb strapping terrorists stationed in the US ready to flock into Star and AMC to bomb people for watching a comedy.
Anyone who thinks that is nuts. But that's the problem. There's no way to predict how many nuts out there think this would actually happen, and decide they want to get in on the action. 13,000 theaters being attacked by North Koreans is a really bad sequel to Red Dawn, not a credible threat. But a couple dozen crazy people attacking theaters because they heard about the North Korean threat is still a lot of potential casualties. That is a legitimate risk worth thinking about.
Here's my Philosophical objection: if people can be exempt based on religious beliefs I can be exempt because I feel vaccines are bad.
Stupidity is not a philosophy, its a lifestyle choice.