They will have to understand math and integers, but not our textual representations of them.
So they'll have to figure out what the encoding is. Given that they need to build a spacecraft to even be able to get to the message in the first place, decoding shouldn't be totally beyond their powers. It might take them quite a while to do it, but why worry about that?
Finally, there have to be some "national treasures" that aren't really all that treasurable: can't the Smithosonian find a few pieces worth putting up for auction?
That'd be very unlikely to raise enough money to make much of a dent in the national debt; you're talking a few millions against a few trillions, which is just pissing in the wind. (What's more, the Smithsonian's wonderful collection does a lot to encourage tourists to visit, and that's a generally good thing.)
The only way to seriously pay down the debt is to both cut expenditure and raise taxes. Cutting expenditure (and realistically that means both cutting entitlements and the military, given that these are the main items in the federal budget) is going to be unpopular with a lot of people, and who likes raising taxes? Heck, the Tea Party appears founded on the principle that taxes must not ever go up (especially for the very rich it seems; funny that). I'm not opposed in general to governments borrowing — borrowing to improve the economy, and hence tax revenue growth, in the future makes a lot of sense — but it can't fund everything, and recurring costs (including wars, it seems) should be met directly from taxation of one form or another. Note that you probably don't have to adjust entitlements very much to have a substantial impact on their cost.
"ISO will replace TCP/IP in 5 years" was a real thing. After 10 years the phrase became a joke. Now it isn't even that.
Assuming you mean OSI, it was in use on UK academic networks in the early '90s. I remember when it was scrapped in favour of IP, and the world became a better place. There are many good things about IP, but the key ones are that it can be implemented on many devices, that it can be routed over many different physical layers, and that it doesn't require all the nodes to know how to route to every other node they might ever want to contact (BGP and DNS are wonderful things, for all their flaws).
Correlation doesn't suggest causation, it "proves" it. Correlation implies causation. Just not the type.
If there is no causal relationship between two things, there is no correlation between them either. There may APPEAR to be a correlation, but there isn't actually one.
That's false too. It's quite possible for two things to be correlated, but both be caused by some third thing of which you are not aware. The presence of a true correlation means that there is some causal relationship, but not necessarily a direct one. The problem is that there are false correlations too. Get a large random dataset and look for some correlations in it. You'll probably find some. Does that mean that there is a causal relationship? Not at all; it's just random data.
The correct response to "Oh look, there's a correlation" is to ask first whether there's a direct causal relationship, then if there is an indirect one, but always to bear in mind that the correlation might be due to dumb luck. Never underestimate the power of dumb luck to throw up meaningless correlations.
Having a good SHA algorithm is a good thing. Yes, hash collisions may not seem to be something that can happen often, but if there is a chance that one can make a document saying "hell no" be changed to "yes, definitely", that can bankrupt a company.
Hash collisions happen all the time.
You're enormously reducing the number of bits of information present, so you will get collisions (unless you've tuned the hash algorithm to exactly the sets of data being hashed, which is a total drag in practice). What you don't want though is the ability to say "I have the hash of something, let's easily find something else useful to me with the same hash"; preventing that is a key feature of cryptographic hashes. (Other kinds of hashes exist, where collisions are more likely between related data but the cost of calculation is much lower; there's a lot of code where that trade-off makes a huge amount of sense.)
If my company is in the EU, but not the UK, I can't get a ".uk" domain name?
Amazon S.a.r.L manages to have amazon.co.uk., amazon.de., amazon.fr., etc. But not amazon.lu. Even though they are actually based in Luxembourg.
Amazon have multiple UK business addresses (and probably also in the other countries you list too), but they just don't officially use them for handling the sales-to-consumers side of their trading. If you need to return something though, you won't be sending it to the Luxembourg operation...
Theoretically, all country codes, including 'co.uk', should be policed and only given out to residents. Hell, I remember in the mid-90's when I felt ethically conflicted because I was registering a.net domain and I wasn't running a network. ICANN hasn't properly administered the TLDs since day one.
ICANN doesn't police the CC TLDs and never has other than to state who is the registrar, where they virtually always follow direction from the country concerned (ICANN getting deeply involved with that side of things would guarantee that the UN jumps in). The policing of CC TLD has always been up to the registrar and their policies; some are very strict about it, others are much more lax.
But sure, why not? The USA has a '.us' domain (whose owner info, by the way, cannot be anonymized), so I don't see why the UK shouldn't have one.
The issue is that the UK has always used another level below.uk in names (a hold-over from the old pre-IP days) and that's now proposed to change, together with stricter rules on who can have them and higher charges (though the current lax regime will remain for.co.uk; I RTFA after all). I've no idea whether there will be anonymization of contact details, but I'd hope not as the service is aimed at companies. Anyone deciding that they need a vanity address for their personal website in the corporate space can deal with the consequences.
Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically.
Strictly, it's a bit too soon to say for sure (due to the existence of multi-century cycles in politics and economics driven by wealth accumulation by elites). Come back in another few centuries and we'll have a much better idea whether that assertion is correct.
It is extremely expensive to create new forms of anti-depressants, and treatments for erectile dysfunction... meanwhile tropical diseases don't have a business case.
Don't worry! With global warming likely to raise temperatures in the US substantially by mid-century, it won't be long before those neglected tropical diseases have an excellent business case! See? There's always a silver lining...
Continuous integration assumes a waterfall development methodology
What? It just assumes that you keep some branches in your VCS buildable, but that's quite compatible with whatever development methodology you prefer. Whatever is going wrong in your organization to make you think that CI requires waterfall, I don't want any part of it...
Being XML is one of the reasons that SVG hasn't really taken off.
Grumbling about the serialization format? Really? Of all the reasons to pick, that's the one which is least insightful. The real reason its had problems taking off is that Microsoft doesn't support it properly, probably because they mistakenly think of it as a "web technology" instead of a "vector image format" (that happens to be somewhat human readable). But it's not exactly like vector formats are unheard of on Windows; it's just that the particular group that does core services for UI elements doesn't seem to believe in tackling scalability that way (and there's now boatloads of crap that works around this basic problem).
I have a very hard time believing that some random person can pick up a beer making kit and produce anything like the quality that others have spent generations refining.
It's not that hard. The smaller the batch, the easier it is to brew a decent beer. The hard part is scaling up while keeping the consistency. (This means that the brewers of Bud and Miller are indeed skilled brewers, even if they are also evil sods. Either that or they're blending their batches...)
Actually, Javascript needs to be the new Java. Which seems to actually be happening.
Shit. Swapping something that's extremely well defined (even anal-retentively so) for something with as... err... whimsical set of variations as Javascript is such a huge step forward. Not.
Sure, Javascript sucks seriously in its own way and can't touch Java in performance, but it does the job, blows Java out of the water in responsivess, and has multiple implementations not under the control of any one company.
On the other hand, the main reason that JS is responsive is that it's got a fully warmed up engine going by the time your browser actually loads any script code. There's a large class of things that you can't do in JS (well, not the JS that's in browsers) and the multiple implementations vary in subtle ways that bite you on the ass.
It isn't just manipulating graphics or DOM trees that people want to do in browsers.
That's correct, but unhelpful. The issue is that it has to be understood from within the context of German unification, which had been a political project in what is now Germany through a lot of the second half of the 19th century. This ran out of steam somewhat toward the end of that century, but it was all recent enough — especially during Hitler's childhood — that it wasn't a ridiculous thing. An Austrian could claim to be german, and everyone would agree with that even knowing the facts of the person's birth.
It's different now. The Austrians are far more certain that they are not Germans (except in an ethnic sense).
You do realize that for most of the US, the nearest public transportation is several days walk?
Is that "most" as in "most of the area" or "most of the population"? The former is highly believable, but who really cares about the lack of buses in Backwoods, Montana?
Right. HTML5 local storage is a fairly recent addition. You might also have been able to use a cookie with the "secure" flag set, which means the cookie is sent only over HTTPS connections, but AFAIK can be accessed in JavaScript code locally. I'm not certain whether such cookies are accessible through JavaScript that arrived over unencrypted HTTP, though, so that might not work.
You're supposed to be able to mark a cookie as being unavailable to Javascript (well, as being only for use with HTTP connections; secure transport of the cookie is an orthogonal attribute) but that's both something I wouldn't rely on working and also easy to disrupt from JS; there's nothing to stop any cookie from being overwritten with something else. Cookies aren't designed for deep security.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia has a value of $10billion and is losing money. Apple could buy them with cash.
Do you really think that would make it past anti-trust regulators?
Funny or Insightful?
Informative!
They will have to understand math and integers, but not our textual representations of them.
So they'll have to figure out what the encoding is. Given that they need to build a spacecraft to even be able to get to the message in the first place, decoding shouldn't be totally beyond their powers. It might take them quite a while to do it, but why worry about that?
So, Autumn causes elections?
No, elections cause Autumn!!!!!
You probably don't want people to be able to delete content nodes on your server just by issuing a DELETE request
It's not a problem in reality; just because someone asks to delete something doesn't mean you have to say "yes".
Finally, there have to be some "national treasures" that aren't really all that treasurable: can't the Smithosonian find a few pieces worth putting up for auction?
That'd be very unlikely to raise enough money to make much of a dent in the national debt; you're talking a few millions against a few trillions, which is just pissing in the wind. (What's more, the Smithsonian's wonderful collection does a lot to encourage tourists to visit, and that's a generally good thing.)
The only way to seriously pay down the debt is to both cut expenditure and raise taxes. Cutting expenditure (and realistically that means both cutting entitlements and the military, given that these are the main items in the federal budget) is going to be unpopular with a lot of people, and who likes raising taxes? Heck, the Tea Party appears founded on the principle that taxes must not ever go up (especially for the very rich it seems; funny that). I'm not opposed in general to governments borrowing — borrowing to improve the economy, and hence tax revenue growth, in the future makes a lot of sense — but it can't fund everything, and recurring costs (including wars, it seems) should be met directly from taxation of one form or another. Note that you probably don't have to adjust entitlements very much to have a substantial impact on their cost.
Until they add no returns to their standard EULA
Right where the courts can rule it contrary to local law?
"ISO will replace TCP/IP in 5 years" was a real thing. After 10 years the phrase became a joke. Now it isn't even that.
Assuming you mean OSI, it was in use on UK academic networks in the early '90s. I remember when it was scrapped in favour of IP, and the world became a better place. There are many good things about IP, but the key ones are that it can be implemented on many devices, that it can be routed over many different physical layers, and that it doesn't require all the nodes to know how to route to every other node they might ever want to contact (BGP and DNS are wonderful things, for all their flaws).
Correlation doesn't suggest causation, it "proves" it. Correlation implies causation. Just not the type.
If there is no causal relationship between two things, there is no correlation between them either. There may APPEAR to be a correlation, but there isn't actually one.
That's false too. It's quite possible for two things to be correlated, but both be caused by some third thing of which you are not aware. The presence of a true correlation means that there is some causal relationship, but not necessarily a direct one. The problem is that there are false correlations too. Get a large random dataset and look for some correlations in it. You'll probably find some. Does that mean that there is a causal relationship? Not at all; it's just random data.
The correct response to "Oh look, there's a correlation" is to ask first whether there's a direct causal relationship, then if there is an indirect one, but always to bear in mind that the correlation might be due to dumb luck. Never underestimate the power of dumb luck to throw up meaningless correlations.
Having a good SHA algorithm is a good thing. Yes, hash collisions may not seem to be something that can happen often, but if there is a chance that one can make a document saying "hell no" be changed to "yes, definitely", that can bankrupt a company.
Hash collisions happen all the time.
You're enormously reducing the number of bits of information present, so you will get collisions (unless you've tuned the hash algorithm to exactly the sets of data being hashed, which is a total drag in practice). What you don't want though is the ability to say "I have the hash of something, let's easily find something else useful to me with the same hash"; preventing that is a key feature of cryptographic hashes. (Other kinds of hashes exist, where collisions are more likely between related data but the cost of calculation is much lower; there's a lot of code where that trade-off makes a huge amount of sense.)
Amazon S.a.r.L manages to have amazon.co.uk., amazon.de., amazon.fr., etc. But not amazon.lu. Even though they are actually based in Luxembourg.
Amazon have multiple UK business addresses (and probably also in the other countries you list too), but they just don't officially use them for handling the sales-to-consumers side of their trading. If you need to return something though, you won't be sending it to the Luxembourg operation...
Theoretically, all country codes, including 'co.uk', should be policed and only given out to residents. Hell, I remember in the mid-90's when I felt ethically conflicted because I was registering a .net domain and I wasn't running a network. ICANN hasn't properly administered the TLDs since day one.
ICANN doesn't police the CC TLDs and never has other than to state who is the registrar, where they virtually always follow direction from the country concerned (ICANN getting deeply involved with that side of things would guarantee that the UN jumps in). The policing of CC TLD has always been up to the registrar and their policies; some are very strict about it, others are much more lax.
But sure, why not? The USA has a '.us' domain (whose owner info, by the way, cannot be anonymized), so I don't see why the UK shouldn't have one.
The issue is that the UK has always used another level below .uk in names (a hold-over from the old pre-IP days) and that's now proposed to change, together with stricter rules on who can have them and higher charges (though the current lax regime will remain for .co.uk; I RTFA after all). I've no idea whether there will be anonymization of contact details, but I'd hope not as the service is aimed at companies. Anyone deciding that they need a vanity address for their personal website in the corporate space can deal with the consequences.
Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically.
Strictly, it's a bit too soon to say for sure (due to the existence of multi-century cycles in politics and economics driven by wealth accumulation by elites). Come back in another few centuries and we'll have a much better idea whether that assertion is correct.
It is extremely expensive to create new forms of anti-depressants, and treatments for erectile dysfunction... meanwhile tropical diseases don't have a business case.
Don't worry! With global warming likely to raise temperatures in the US substantially by mid-century, it won't be long before those neglected tropical diseases have an excellent business case! See? There's always a silver lining...
the documentation [of PHP] is exceptional
I see you're setting the bar for "exceptional" fairly low; PHP's documentation is merely mid-tier.
Continuous integration assumes a waterfall development methodology
What? It just assumes that you keep some branches in your VCS buildable, but that's quite compatible with whatever development methodology you prefer. Whatever is going wrong in your organization to make you think that CI requires waterfall, I don't want any part of it...
Smart people who aren't jerks tend to require an actual good salary ,however.
If they add sufficient value, why is a good salary a problem?
Being XML is one of the reasons that SVG hasn't really taken off.
Grumbling about the serialization format? Really? Of all the reasons to pick, that's the one which is least insightful. The real reason its had problems taking off is that Microsoft doesn't support it properly, probably because they mistakenly think of it as a "web technology" instead of a "vector image format" (that happens to be somewhat human readable). But it's not exactly like vector formats are unheard of on Windows; it's just that the particular group that does core services for UI elements doesn't seem to believe in tackling scalability that way (and there's now boatloads of crap that works around this basic problem).
Continental drift.
I have a very hard time believing that some random person can pick up a beer making kit and produce anything like the quality that others have spent generations refining.
It's not that hard. The smaller the batch, the easier it is to brew a decent beer. The hard part is scaling up while keeping the consistency. (This means that the brewers of Bud and Miller are indeed skilled brewers, even if they are also evil sods. Either that or they're blending their batches...)
Actually, Javascript needs to be the new Java. Which seems to actually be happening.
Shit. Swapping something that's extremely well defined (even anal-retentively so) for something with as... err... whimsical set of variations as Javascript is such a huge step forward. Not.
Sure, Javascript sucks seriously in its own way and can't touch Java in performance, but it does the job, blows Java out of the water in responsivess, and has multiple implementations not under the control of any one company.
On the other hand, the main reason that JS is responsive is that it's got a fully warmed up engine going by the time your browser actually loads any script code. There's a large class of things that you can't do in JS (well, not the JS that's in browsers) and the multiple implementations vary in subtle ways that bite you on the ass.
It isn't just manipulating graphics or DOM trees that people want to do in browsers.
Hitler was Austrian, dumbass.
That's correct, but unhelpful. The issue is that it has to be understood from within the context of German unification, which had been a political project in what is now Germany through a lot of the second half of the 19th century. This ran out of steam somewhat toward the end of that century, but it was all recent enough — especially during Hitler's childhood — that it wasn't a ridiculous thing. An Austrian could claim to be german, and everyone would agree with that even knowing the facts of the person's birth.
It's different now. The Austrians are far more certain that they are not Germans (except in an ethnic sense).
help Poisson Googles Data
That sounds fishy to me.
You do realize that for most of the US, the nearest public transportation is several days walk?
Is that "most" as in "most of the area" or "most of the population"? The former is highly believable, but who really cares about the lack of buses in Backwoods, Montana?
Right. HTML5 local storage is a fairly recent addition. You might also have been able to use a cookie with the "secure" flag set, which means the cookie is sent only over HTTPS connections, but AFAIK can be accessed in JavaScript code locally. I'm not certain whether such cookies are accessible through JavaScript that arrived over unencrypted HTTP, though, so that might not work.
You're supposed to be able to mark a cookie as being unavailable to Javascript (well, as being only for use with HTTP connections; secure transport of the cookie is an orthogonal attribute) but that's both something I wouldn't rely on working and also easy to disrupt from JS; there's nothing to stop any cookie from being overwritten with something else. Cookies aren't designed for deep security.