Second less than 60 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl. Luckily the estimated deaths never occurred because the linear no threshold used to estimate radiation deaths is bullshit. More people died today from fossil fuels than have ever died from nuclear energy.
Claiming that there were only 60 deaths from Chernobyl is a bit disingenuous. There were only 60 immediate deaths from Chernobyl. There were several thousand people who lived no more than a decade after their exposure at Chernobyl, but were otherwise young healthy men. I use the term men here, not because I ma being misogynistic, but specifically because the vast majority of those people whos lives were ended were military personnel who were tasked with the clean up and entombment of the reactor immediately following the accident. These men were exposed to lifetime doses in a matter of minutes, and many of them served multiple tours through the hot zone. Many of them knew what they were involved in and faked their dosimeter readings to go multiple extra times. They did this because they knew they were already badly exposed, and the extra dose would hasten their death, but would save some other individual the dose that could kill them. There were thousands of heros at Chernobyl that most of the world will never know about.
On the other side of that, the number of deaths from people who were exposed by virtue of living in Pripyat (The nearest real city), were remarkably small. There are people who still live in the exclusion zone, in all but the most heavily contaminated areas, and their life expectancy is not significantly shorter than it would have been otherwise.
We have seen similar results from 3-mile island and Fukushima. In both of those instances, there was very little reason to expose workers directly to the huge doses close to the core, and as such, there have been almost no deaths resulting from these accidents. Chernobyl was only the tragedy that it became because the core was detonated, and disbursed outside containment. Fukushima #3 blew material from the core directly into the atmosphere, and in spite of that, there have been and will continue to be almost no deaths because no one has to go into the hot zones to clean up the way they did at Chernobyl.
There is a lot of bullshit out there about nuclear power, on both sides, but the reality remains that nuclear meltdown is not really the tragedy that everyone thinks it is. Explosion is the real danger, and even then, only if the core is disbursed in such a way that people have to go in to the hot zones and clean it up.
The fact that Congress has to approve any design changes is mind-boggling. In any reasonably-regulated industry, Congress creates an agency and directs it to do the job of rulemaking and enforcement, then lets it do its job. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to get involved beyond that... it's not like the politicians can evaluate the design changes in any meaningful way. The only reason for that requirement is to place arbitrary bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way of construction.
Never mind that congress is not an engineering body and is no way, shape or form qualified to be making engineering decisions.
A "meritocracy" where he turns up as part of the "chosen ones", of course.
I don't care if I get a vote or not, as long as the stupidest 2/3 of the population don't. In the end, not matter what kind of government there is, I am confident that I will be able to work the system to my advantage, it's just far less work if I don't have to keep compensating for the things that idiotic elected officials keep doing.
We keep trudging along with democracy as though it were not fundamentally flawed. The basic problem we have today is that the laws themselves are fundamentally corrupt because those that make the laws are corrupt. This is the problem that needs to be solved, but democracy can't solve it because democracy is made up of people who have an average IQ less than 101. These people play unwitting victim to psychological attacks by very smart, but very greedy and corrupt people, and those are the people that get elected. The smart but moral kind wont use those tactics against the stupid electorate because the attacks are themselves immoral, and as such, the only kind of people who can get elected are the absolute last kind of people you want to put in charge of anything.
The only way that I can think of to remedy this situation is to prevent anyone who is susceptible to these kinds of attacks from having any say in who gets to run things. If that means I have to give up my right to vote then so be it.
Yes he was, but even the stupid, gullible, and greedy shouldn't be preyed on by crooks.
I fully agree that the crooks (in this case western union) should have to pay the penalty, but giving the money back? I think that's just stupid and sends the wrong message that is acceptable to be stupid and greedy and in the end you wont lose anything. They should take the money and instead use it to fund black ops that hunt down and kill these scammers in whatever country they reside because its painfully obvious that the local governments are completely ineffective.
Stupidity needs to be fatal again, or nothing will keep the human race from getting dumber...
SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.
I'm not saying bullshit, but I think links are appropriate given the accusation you just made.
It isn't like there are no options if a person doesn't like systemd. In fact, for the most discriminating Linux cognoscenti, they can roll their own, with not a thing to disturb their delicate sensibilities :
I saw an init system written by a young person without any formal CS education, using Boost as a style guide and dbus as the only requirement. Wow was that thing messed up.
Wait, they used start-stop-daemon in a unit file, WTF?
I have seen a lot of this. Developers who have an existing package under upstart, and saw the switch to systemd, wanted to be ready, so they "wrapped" their upstart script in a systemd unit file, and pretended it was all good. The practical result is that the package works fine under normal conditions, but any failure turns into a complete undiagnosable mess because the developer didn't take the time to understand what systemd is or how it works.
systemd does have one fundamental flaw, and it is the only truly real one it ever had: The documentation sucks ass. The one thing it really needs is a how-to instruction on porting from an upstart service to a systemd service, written by someone who actually knows how to do it properly instead of the droves of rank amateurs out there who "got something working" and are just documenting their own screwed up attempt. RedHat has a few examples, but they are geared to RedHat, and most were written in the last year or so, which did absolutely no good for the people who needed this 2+ years ago.
when pieces of the system become too entwined, that's bad architecture.
That depends on how coupled the underlying principles are. If your word processor and your audio sub-system are tightly coupled, then that is bad architecture because audio and word processing have nothing to do with each other.
However, when init and hot swapping are tightly coupled, that makes sense, and is good architecture because both interactions have code that has to do the exact same thing, and both need to handle the same conditions and requirements.
The UNIX philosophy has its own set of limitations, and directly led to many of the interoperability problems that Linux suffered in the late 90's and early aughts. Just like programming languages, one size does not fit all when it comes to system architectures, and using the right design for the job is critical.
Those who argue against anything that does not fit the "do one thing only" program model remind me of the purist Object Oriented programmers. They single mindedly believe their way is always the best, even when it isn't, and anyone not doing things their way is an idiot.
Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.
As someone who had to wring bootup performance out of server spinup instances, I can tell you that nothing about SysVInit or upstart "just worked". Getting them to spinup fast was an ugly mess. For many cases, this only had to be done once, but it was still a headache that nobody wanted or needed. Since the switch to systemd, startup times have been as fast or faster than before, and it requires zero maintenance on our part.
It should also be noted that hot swapping was a royal pain under the old architecture, and the code involved held many bugs related to the fact that the daemons that handled the hot swapping could not run as PID 1. This is the single biggest reason that systemd runs as PID 1, and hot swapping works a damn sight more reliably now, especially on more obscure hardware.
Early boot issues have always been a problem, and always will be. until you have enough OS in place to properly handle persistent media, there is no way to log anything, other than to keep the information in memory and hope there will be an opportunity to dump the data later. systemd has had little impact on this either way, and for the vast majority of users, early boot problems simply dont exist, or are a symptom of faulty/flaky hardware. If you are developing drivers for hardware that needs to spin up during early boot, then I will fully agree that you don't want systemd, but you should probably also have some specialty hardware (like a serial monitor) that gives you someplace to dump early boot diagnostics anyways.
For what it is worth, my experience with RAID devices has been that the controllers are mostly shit unless you are willing to drop 10k to get top of the line. Everything else tends to be under-tested junk that works with windows and nothing else. My last raid card from Dell fried all four hard drives attached to it when it failed.
I disagree. I think it has a lot of good theory behind it.
Agile is no better and no worse that any other way of doing business. In then end, good devs produce good work as long as management isn't totally inept. Bad devs produce bad work no matter how good the management is. The simple reality is that 50% of the software developers out there really should not be developing software because they just plain aren't good at it. Trying to somehow magically get good work out of them by "empowering" them is just putting lipstick on the pig.
You should really have your son on the ESR channel as Firefox updates and breaks things very regularly, like every 6 weeks.
As they continue moving away from Gecko, breakages are even more likely.
Personally I use SeaMonkey, which currently has automatic updates turned off, to hard to keep up with Mozilla's changes to Firefox
We moved to chromium for everything. Mozillla already screwed the pooch. When I installed firefox originally, I simply went to their website and downloaded the option for our various OS's. The idea that this would be anything other than the safest most stable version available (i.e. current but not Beta) is baffling to me. I would expect a version that automatically follows an upgrade path to the latest version would constitute a Beta only option. When I want a stable release, it means just that, I expect it will work, and will not change to anything significantly different without my consent.
You use noscript and think that it's important, I use noscript and think that it's important, but I don't think that's true for most people. Even in this thread, the parent doesn't use noscript - you can tell because he talks about AdBlock Plus as though it were doing the same thing.
Very true, but I am not talking about an adult user with discretion in tact, I am talking about machines that are used by children. They do dumb things, but cutting them off from the internet doesnt solve the problem, sooner or later they need to learn about the wonder that is search engines. Even the smartest adult can accidentally mistype a URL and get stuck with something nasty. That is why I use noscript myself. It is simply safer.
At some point, automatically updating the browser has to include updating to the new version. I think you're being a little too hard on Mozilla in this case.
At no point is it acceptable to upgrade major revisions without absolute user (or admin) consent. Major revisions tend to break things (including workflows). If they didn't they wouldn't be major releases. Inluding a major version upgrade without absolute consent is unacceptable in a corporate network, and if we had any sense at all, the same would be true in a home network as well. It is perfectly acceptable to automate large parts of a major release upgrade, and even put it into a security update, but at the end of the day, an authorized user has to pull the trigger. Nothing else is safe, and by definition anything unsafe is unacceptable.
Are you kidding? Do you know how many attack vectors Firefox 57 closed compared to your loss of noscript for a week? Apparently, you don't.
Noscript closes all attack vectors except those that I deliberately allow.
In all the years I had been using noscript, and the 3 years my kids have been using it, our machines had never been compromised. In 1 week without Noscript, my seven year old son managed to get his computer obliterated. This may be anecdotal, but even still it is compelling.
I can't say that I care for chrome, and Google has a track record of some pretty evil shit for a "don't be evil" company, but its still has a better track record in my eyes than Mozilla. Even if that weren't the case, there is still Chromium, which I now use everywhere.
Yes, the "mysterious plugin" fiasco was ridiculously stupid. Stupid on every level, people should have been fired, what the hell were they thinking stupid.
But it didn't compromise anyone's security.
When firefox updated to version 57, there was about a week after the release that noscript did not work. By itself that would not have been a fatal problem, but their stupid employees thought it would be a good idea to push the automatic update silently in spite of the fact that it broke all of the plugins.
In that week, my 7 year old sons computer was not protected against some apparently bad crap, and his computer was messed up so bad I had to wipe it and re-install the OS. He did not have permissions to install or update software without my credentials, but I had standard security updates allowed for firefox. The very fact that Mozilla would automatically update a major release that caused security critical third party software to fail is a move straight out of the Microsoft playbook.
I found out later that Mozilla even knew that noscript was not ready yet, and decided that they would just force the upgrade anyways. They did not even have the good grace to put a prompt to the user indicating that the upgrade would break plugins and ask if it should continue or not.
Mozilla is dead to me. Their complete lack of security concern is very disconcerting for the maker of software that presents the single largest attack surface on any desktop computer. Their complete incompetence and obvious lack of concern for computer security is unacceptable, and no one should use their software.
If anyone condemning the SWATters stops to take a breath, the public might have time to consider the danger lurking in their communities, waiting for a call to go shoot some people.
This isn't an either/or situation. There is plenty of blame to go around. The 1 in 50 cop that fired the lethal shot when 95+% of his fellow officers had the sense to exercise some judgement. The serial Swatter who is just as guilty of murder for "pulling the trigger" on the loaded weapon that is the police force in this country.
This is exactly why I support the complete disarmament of police in this country. Once people know that the police are disarmed, they will not feel the overwhelming need to carry firepower into every petty criminal act. This is not even a new concept, there are plenty of police forces around the world that have disarmed front line police, and we can see pretty clearly that those forces have much lower incidences of officer related shootings (Going both ways). Those police are safer and so are the communities they police. Any officer who cannot understand how policing is done without deadly force does not have the right mindset to protect anyone from anything.
The continuing occurrence of crimes that are currently subject to the death penalty proves that the death penalty has virtually no impact whatsoever.
Are you sure? What if the prevalence of capital crimes would be much higher without the death penalty?
I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying, you have come to a very absolute conclusion, and it is only fitting that you should provide some evidence to support your claim.
Then why is Sexual assault predominantly men assaulting women? If the drive were equal, I would expect there to be a roughly equal amount of harassment going in both directions. The data simply does not support that assertion
Given the highly disproportional incidence of sex related anti-social behaviors exhibited by men vs women, claiming that Women and Men are equal in all respects relating to sex drive is flying in the face of reason, and will require some extra-ordinary evidence to explain the massive discrepancy.
I am a people watcher by inclination and habit, and I have seen a great deal of evidence to suggest that men generally think about sex a great deal more, are far more driven to have sex, and need far less stimulus to become aroused.
As the old adage goes: Women need a reason to have sex, Men need a place. There is a great deal of wisdom in that saying.
The whole point of the Three Laws was to illustrate the holes in the concept of the Three Laws.
EVERY Azimov Robot story was designed to show the unintended consequences of the Three Laws....
More importantly, any intelligence advanced enough to even comprehend the three laws in any way meaningful enough to carry them out would by definition have to be advanced enough to ignore them.
Put another way: The three laws cannot be expressed in any programming language. Those languages simply are not capable of that level of abstraction. As such, the AI would already have to be capable of interpreting a human language, and consequently, the interpretation of the laws would not be intrinsic to the program, but an artifact of the learning process.
Anything that can be learned can be unlearned. Intelligence has to be capable of choosing what information to act on, or the first bit of contradictory information will cause it to meltdown into uselessness
A quick thought experiment will show how silly the whole thing is:
Two of the three laws require an AI to understand what a human is. That question is still a bit fuzzy for most humans (The original US constitution defines Black people as 3/5 of a human, and there are still lots of people who would be more than willing to adhere to that definition. Or if you want something a little less controversial, try the fundamental question, at what point before/after copulation does a human come into being?). If people can't make these distinctions with any certainty, what chance does an AI have?
Not that they care. They have a shadow profile on you already.
I have at least 4 fake Facebook profiles. Every time I need to log in to one of those idiotic sites that uses facebook to authenticate, I create another fake facebook account and use it to sign up. (It helps that I have a domain that I can send any email I want to). I just intercept the first email to verify the account and then blackhole the address. I do not have a "real" facebook account, as I dont use the service, but i would be willing to bet that facebook considers each and every one of my accounts to be "active" since they are all used to regularly authenticate various things.
My wife has at least two accounts that I know of, and probably at least one more that I don't
Given all of that, and the fact that facebook is wiping out 100 million fake accounts a month and has never wiped any of mine, I have to wonder how many real accounts they actually have? 1 Billion, 500 miillion, 100 million? I would be willing to bet that they even know how many real accounts there are, but go to great lengths to hide the reality from their advertisers as this would collapse their revenue pretty quick. Even having to admit that they only had 500 million real users instead of 2 billion would take a very large chunk off their advertising revenue and put their stock into free fall.
Yes, some 800 years ago Christians tried taking back land from the Muslims. Ie, war for land. Today Muslims murder people because of difference of opinion, not iver land. Totes the same today.
What about the KKK They have strong ties to Christianity and they are firmly right here in modern history.
Or, how about the Rohingya in Myanmar, happening right now?
We may think we are immune to that sort of thing here in the US, but a large minority of Americans voted for Donald trump for no other reason than he promised to get rid of all the Muslims. Please not that the Evangelicals *support* Donald Trump, even today in spite of the fact that nearly everything he has done in his personal life is directly antithetical to their professed beliefs.
Religion as a concept *is* the true root of evil. It is, at its essence, one group of people claiming they are better than everyone else because God said so.
What we need is folks to stop giving a crap about pointless shit (Guns, Abortion, Gay Marriage, you know, wedge issues) and pay attention to the economy. But good luck with that.
While I do agree with most of your post, I strongly disagree that the second amendment is "pointless shit".
I don't own any guns (unless you count paintball, and even then, none that work), but I will never vote for any politician that interferes with the right to own a gun. I don't even much care for gun regulation. I consider it our right (and responsibility unless you have a good reason otherwise, like an autistic child) to own a gun and be prepared to use it in defense of our Constitution (notice I didn't say government). Our founding fathers foresaw a day when this country would get so thoroughly borked that even with democratic norms, it might become necessary to defend our rights against tyranny using the method of last resort. Without the right to bear arms (and by arms, I include military grade weapons), we cannot hope to enforce any of our other rights. The right to bear arms is not about hunting, or sport, or even personal freedoms, it is about our ability to enforce our authority over our government. The only thing that stops a tyrant from declaring themselves dictator for life is the fact that an armed mob will bring that tyrant to justice and restore our rights.
The one gun regulation I can fully support would be a requirement to have 3 people cosign when a person buys a gun. This will help to ensure that any gun nut has to have at least three people who think they are responsible enough to have a gun. That one regulation would have prevented nearly every mass shooting in this country, and would not have interfered with anyone elses right to bear arms. No need for permits, or any other kind of government interference.
They continue functioning just fine, but with a reduced power output.
A typical solar installation will cost about $25 per kwH per month. at $0.10 per kwH, that is the equivalent of about 20 years repayment time assuming two things: 1st, the cost of electricity does not go up over that 20 years, and 2nd, there is no subsidy on the cost of the panels.
The panels themselves will still produce 70% of their rated power after 30 years, so at some point around the 30 years mark it becomes financially beneficial to replace old solar cells, but make no mistake, over the actual life of a home, it will be cheaper to put new panels on the roof every 30 years, than it will be to pay for electricity for those 30 years, and that is assuming no government subsidies for solar power at all.
At the rate that panels are reducing in cost, and the cost of energy is rising, the subsidies for solar will be completely unnecessary in less than 10 years, maybe even as short as 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Second less than 60 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl. Luckily the estimated deaths never occurred because the linear no threshold used to estimate radiation deaths is bullshit. More people died today from fossil fuels than have ever died from nuclear energy.
Claiming that there were only 60 deaths from Chernobyl is a bit disingenuous. There were only 60 immediate deaths from Chernobyl. There were several thousand people who lived no more than a decade after their exposure at Chernobyl, but were otherwise young healthy men. I use the term men here, not because I ma being misogynistic, but specifically because the vast majority of those people whos lives were ended were military personnel who were tasked with the clean up and entombment of the reactor immediately following the accident. These men were exposed to lifetime doses in a matter of minutes, and many of them served multiple tours through the hot zone. Many of them knew what they were involved in and faked their dosimeter readings to go multiple extra times. They did this because they knew they were already badly exposed, and the extra dose would hasten their death, but would save some other individual the dose that could kill them. There were thousands of heros at Chernobyl that most of the world will never know about.
On the other side of that, the number of deaths from people who were exposed by virtue of living in Pripyat (The nearest real city), were remarkably small. There are people who still live in the exclusion zone, in all but the most heavily contaminated areas, and their life expectancy is not significantly shorter than it would have been otherwise.
We have seen similar results from 3-mile island and Fukushima. In both of those instances, there was very little reason to expose workers directly to the huge doses close to the core, and as such, there have been almost no deaths resulting from these accidents. Chernobyl was only the tragedy that it became because the core was detonated, and disbursed outside containment. Fukushima #3 blew material from the core directly into the atmosphere, and in spite of that, there have been and will continue to be almost no deaths because no one has to go into the hot zones to clean up the way they did at Chernobyl.
There is a lot of bullshit out there about nuclear power, on both sides, but the reality remains that nuclear meltdown is not really the tragedy that everyone thinks it is. Explosion is the real danger, and even then, only if the core is disbursed in such a way that people have to go in to the hot zones and clean it up.
The fact that Congress has to approve any design changes is mind-boggling. In any reasonably-regulated industry, Congress creates an agency and directs it to do the job of rulemaking and enforcement, then lets it do its job. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to get involved beyond that... it's not like the politicians can evaluate the design changes in any meaningful way. The only reason for that requirement is to place arbitrary bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way of construction.
Never mind that congress is not an engineering body and is no way, shape or form qualified to be making engineering decisions.
A "meritocracy" where he turns up as part of the "chosen ones", of course.
I don't care if I get a vote or not, as long as the stupidest 2/3 of the population don't. In the end, not matter what kind of government there is, I am confident that I will be able to work the system to my advantage, it's just far less work if I don't have to keep compensating for the things that idiotic elected officials keep doing.
We keep trudging along with democracy as though it were not fundamentally flawed. The basic problem we have today is that the laws themselves are fundamentally corrupt because those that make the laws are corrupt. This is the problem that needs to be solved, but democracy can't solve it because democracy is made up of people who have an average IQ less than 101. These people play unwitting victim to psychological attacks by very smart, but very greedy and corrupt people, and those are the people that get elected. The smart but moral kind wont use those tactics against the stupid electorate because the attacks are themselves immoral, and as such, the only kind of people who can get elected are the absolute last kind of people you want to put in charge of anything.
The only way that I can think of to remedy this situation is to prevent anyone who is susceptible to these kinds of attacks from having any say in who gets to run things. If that means I have to give up my right to vote then so be it.
How is duping a then 67-year-old “natural selection”?
His kids wont get that inheritance...
Yes he was, but even the stupid, gullible, and greedy shouldn't be preyed on by crooks.
I fully agree that the crooks (in this case western union) should have to pay the penalty, but giving the money back? I think that's just stupid and sends the wrong message that is acceptable to be stupid and greedy and in the end you wont lose anything. They should take the money and instead use it to fund black ops that hunt down and kill these scammers in whatever country they reside because its painfully obvious that the local governments are completely ineffective.
Stupidity needs to be fatal again, or nothing will keep the human race from getting dumber...
Even creimer makes more sense...
woosh
SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.
I'm not saying bullshit, but I think links are appropriate given the accusation you just made.
It isn't like there are no options if a person doesn't like systemd. In fact, for the most discriminating Linux cognoscenti, they can roll their own, with not a thing to disturb their delicate sensibilities :
I saw an init system written by a young person without any formal CS education, using Boost as a style guide and dbus as the only requirement. Wow was that thing messed up.
Wait, they used start-stop-daemon in a unit file, WTF?
I have seen a lot of this. Developers who have an existing package under upstart, and saw the switch to systemd, wanted to be ready, so they "wrapped" their upstart script in a systemd unit file, and pretended it was all good. The practical result is that the package works fine under normal conditions, but any failure turns into a complete undiagnosable mess because the developer didn't take the time to understand what systemd is or how it works.
systemd does have one fundamental flaw, and it is the only truly real one it ever had: The documentation sucks ass. The one thing it really needs is a how-to instruction on porting from an upstart service to a systemd service, written by someone who actually knows how to do it properly instead of the droves of rank amateurs out there who "got something working" and are just documenting their own screwed up attempt. RedHat has a few examples, but they are geared to RedHat, and most were written in the last year or so, which did absolutely no good for the people who needed this 2+ years ago.
when pieces of the system become too entwined, that's bad architecture.
That depends on how coupled the underlying principles are. If your word processor and your audio sub-system are tightly coupled, then that is bad architecture because audio and word processing have nothing to do with each other.
However, when init and hot swapping are tightly coupled, that makes sense, and is good architecture because both interactions have code that has to do the exact same thing, and both need to handle the same conditions and requirements.
The UNIX philosophy has its own set of limitations, and directly led to many of the interoperability problems that Linux suffered in the late 90's and early aughts. Just like programming languages, one size does not fit all when it comes to system architectures, and using the right design for the job is critical.
Those who argue against anything that does not fit the "do one thing only" program model remind me of the purist Object Oriented programmers. They single mindedly believe their way is always the best, even when it isn't, and anyone not doing things their way is an idiot.
Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.
As someone who had to wring bootup performance out of server spinup instances, I can tell you that nothing about SysVInit or upstart "just worked". Getting them to spinup fast was an ugly mess. For many cases, this only had to be done once, but it was still a headache that nobody wanted or needed. Since the switch to systemd, startup times have been as fast or faster than before, and it requires zero maintenance on our part.
It should also be noted that hot swapping was a royal pain under the old architecture, and the code involved held many bugs related to the fact that the daemons that handled the hot swapping could not run as PID 1. This is the single biggest reason that systemd runs as PID 1, and hot swapping works a damn sight more reliably now, especially on more obscure hardware.
Early boot issues have always been a problem, and always will be. until you have enough OS in place to properly handle persistent media, there is no way to log anything, other than to keep the information in memory and hope there will be an opportunity to dump the data later. systemd has had little impact on this either way, and for the vast majority of users, early boot problems simply dont exist, or are a symptom of faulty/flaky hardware. If you are developing drivers for hardware that needs to spin up during early boot, then I will fully agree that you don't want systemd, but you should probably also have some specialty hardware (like a serial monitor) that gives you someplace to dump early boot diagnostics anyways.
For what it is worth, my experience with RAID devices has been that the controllers are mostly shit unless you are willing to drop 10k to get top of the line. Everything else tends to be under-tested junk that works with windows and nothing else. My last raid card from Dell fried all four hard drives attached to it when it failed.
50%? Optimist.
I wasn't counting the unemployed / permanently unemployed ones where the percentage is obviously much much higher.
I disagree. I think it has a lot of good theory behind it.
Agile is no better and no worse that any other way of doing business. In then end, good devs produce good work as long as management isn't totally inept. Bad devs produce bad work no matter how good the management is. The simple reality is that 50% of the software developers out there really should not be developing software because they just plain aren't good at it. Trying to somehow magically get good work out of them by "empowering" them is just putting lipstick on the pig.
You should really have your son on the ESR channel as Firefox updates and breaks things very regularly, like every 6 weeks. As they continue moving away from Gecko, breakages are even more likely. Personally I use SeaMonkey, which currently has automatic updates turned off, to hard to keep up with Mozilla's changes to Firefox
We moved to chromium for everything. Mozillla already screwed the pooch. When I installed firefox originally, I simply went to their website and downloaded the option for our various OS's. The idea that this would be anything other than the safest most stable version available (i.e. current but not Beta) is baffling to me. I would expect a version that automatically follows an upgrade path to the latest version would constitute a Beta only option. When I want a stable release, it means just that, I expect it will work, and will not change to anything significantly different without my consent.
You use noscript and think that it's important, I use noscript and think that it's important, but I don't think that's true for most people. Even in this thread, the parent doesn't use noscript - you can tell because he talks about AdBlock Plus as though it were doing the same thing.
Very true, but I am not talking about an adult user with discretion in tact, I am talking about machines that are used by children. They do dumb things, but cutting them off from the internet doesnt solve the problem, sooner or later they need to learn about the wonder that is search engines. Even the smartest adult can accidentally mistype a URL and get stuck with something nasty. That is why I use noscript myself. It is simply safer.
At some point, automatically updating the browser has to include updating to the new version. I think you're being a little too hard on Mozilla in this case.
At no point is it acceptable to upgrade major revisions without absolute user (or admin) consent. Major revisions tend to break things (including workflows). If they didn't they wouldn't be major releases. Inluding a major version upgrade without absolute consent is unacceptable in a corporate network, and if we had any sense at all, the same would be true in a home network as well. It is perfectly acceptable to automate large parts of a major release upgrade, and even put it into a security update, but at the end of the day, an authorized user has to pull the trigger. Nothing else is safe, and by definition anything unsafe is unacceptable.
Are you kidding? Do you know how many attack vectors Firefox 57 closed compared to your loss of noscript for a week? Apparently, you don't.
Noscript closes all attack vectors except those that I deliberately allow.
In all the years I had been using noscript, and the 3 years my kids have been using it, our machines had never been compromised. In 1 week without Noscript, my seven year old son managed to get his computer obliterated. This may be anecdotal, but even still it is compelling.
I can't say that I care for chrome, and Google has a track record of some pretty evil shit for a "don't be evil" company, but its still has a better track record in my eyes than Mozilla. Even if that weren't the case, there is still Chromium, which I now use everywhere.
Yes, the "mysterious plugin" fiasco was ridiculously stupid. Stupid on every level, people should have been fired, what the hell were they thinking stupid. But it didn't compromise anyone's security.
When firefox updated to version 57, there was about a week after the release that noscript did not work. By itself that would not have been a fatal problem, but their stupid employees thought it would be a good idea to push the automatic update silently in spite of the fact that it broke all of the plugins.
In that week, my 7 year old sons computer was not protected against some apparently bad crap, and his computer was messed up so bad I had to wipe it and re-install the OS. He did not have permissions to install or update software without my credentials, but I had standard security updates allowed for firefox. The very fact that Mozilla would automatically update a major release that caused security critical third party software to fail is a move straight out of the Microsoft playbook.
I found out later that Mozilla even knew that noscript was not ready yet, and decided that they would just force the upgrade anyways. They did not even have the good grace to put a prompt to the user indicating that the upgrade would break plugins and ask if it should continue or not.
Mozilla is dead to me. Their complete lack of security concern is very disconcerting for the maker of software that presents the single largest attack surface on any desktop computer. Their complete incompetence and obvious lack of concern for computer security is unacceptable, and no one should use their software.
If anyone condemning the SWATters stops to take a breath, the public might have time to consider the danger lurking in their communities, waiting for a call to go shoot some people.
This isn't an either/or situation. There is plenty of blame to go around. The 1 in 50 cop that fired the lethal shot when 95+% of his fellow officers had the sense to exercise some judgement. The serial Swatter who is just as guilty of murder for "pulling the trigger" on the loaded weapon that is the police force in this country.
This is exactly why I support the complete disarmament of police in this country. Once people know that the police are disarmed, they will not feel the overwhelming need to carry firepower into every petty criminal act. This is not even a new concept, there are plenty of police forces around the world that have disarmed front line police, and we can see pretty clearly that those forces have much lower incidences of officer related shootings (Going both ways). Those police are safer and so are the communities they police. Any officer who cannot understand how policing is done without deadly force does not have the right mindset to protect anyone from anything.
The continuing occurrence of crimes that are currently subject to the death penalty proves that the death penalty has virtually no impact whatsoever.
Are you sure? What if the prevalence of capital crimes would be much higher without the death penalty?
I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying, you have come to a very absolute conclusion, and it is only fitting that you should provide some evidence to support your claim.
Women like sex as much or more than men.
Then why is Sexual assault predominantly men assaulting women? If the drive were equal, I would expect there to be a roughly equal amount of harassment going in both directions. The data simply does not support that assertion
Given the highly disproportional incidence of sex related anti-social behaviors exhibited by men vs women, claiming that Women and Men are equal in all respects relating to sex drive is flying in the face of reason, and will require some extra-ordinary evidence to explain the massive discrepancy.
I am a people watcher by inclination and habit, and I have seen a great deal of evidence to suggest that men generally think about sex a great deal more, are far more driven to have sex, and need far less stimulus to become aroused.
As the old adage goes: Women need a reason to have sex, Men need a place. There is a great deal of wisdom in that saying.
The whole point of the Three Laws was to illustrate the holes in the concept of the Three Laws. EVERY Azimov Robot story was designed to show the unintended consequences of the Three Laws....
More importantly, any intelligence advanced enough to even comprehend the three laws in any way meaningful enough to carry them out would by definition have to be advanced enough to ignore them.
Put another way: The three laws cannot be expressed in any programming language. Those languages simply are not capable of that level of abstraction. As such, the AI would already have to be capable of interpreting a human language, and consequently, the interpretation of the laws would not be intrinsic to the program, but an artifact of the learning process.
Anything that can be learned can be unlearned. Intelligence has to be capable of choosing what information to act on, or the first bit of contradictory information will cause it to meltdown into uselessness
A quick thought experiment will show how silly the whole thing is:
Two of the three laws require an AI to understand what a human is. That question is still a bit fuzzy for most humans (The original US constitution defines Black people as 3/5 of a human, and there are still lots of people who would be more than willing to adhere to that definition. Or if you want something a little less controversial, try the fundamental question, at what point before/after copulation does a human come into being?). If people can't make these distinctions with any certainty, what chance does an AI have?
Not that they care. They have a shadow profile on you already.
I have at least 4 fake Facebook profiles. Every time I need to log in to one of those idiotic sites that uses facebook to authenticate, I create another fake facebook account and use it to sign up. (It helps that I have a domain that I can send any email I want to). I just intercept the first email to verify the account and then blackhole the address. I do not have a "real" facebook account, as I dont use the service, but i would be willing to bet that facebook considers each and every one of my accounts to be "active" since they are all used to regularly authenticate various things.
My wife has at least two accounts that I know of, and probably at least one more that I don't
Given all of that, and the fact that facebook is wiping out 100 million fake accounts a month and has never wiped any of mine, I have to wonder how many real accounts they actually have? 1 Billion, 500 miillion, 100 million? I would be willing to bet that they even know how many real accounts there are, but go to great lengths to hide the reality from their advertisers as this would collapse their revenue pretty quick. Even having to admit that they only had 500 million real users instead of 2 billion would take a very large chunk off their advertising revenue and put their stock into free fall.
Yes, some 800 years ago Christians tried taking back land from the Muslims. Ie, war for land. Today Muslims murder people because of difference of opinion, not iver land. Totes the same today.
What about the KKK They have strong ties to Christianity and they are firmly right here in modern history.
Or, how about the Rohingya in Myanmar, happening right now?
We may think we are immune to that sort of thing here in the US, but a large minority of Americans voted for Donald trump for no other reason than he promised to get rid of all the Muslims. Please not that the Evangelicals *support* Donald Trump, even today in spite of the fact that nearly everything he has done in his personal life is directly antithetical to their professed beliefs.
Religion as a concept *is* the true root of evil. It is, at its essence, one group of people claiming they are better than everyone else because God said so.
What we need is folks to stop giving a crap about pointless shit (Guns, Abortion, Gay Marriage, you know, wedge issues) and pay attention to the economy. But good luck with that.
While I do agree with most of your post, I strongly disagree that the second amendment is "pointless shit".
I don't own any guns (unless you count paintball, and even then, none that work), but I will never vote for any politician that interferes with the right to own a gun. I don't even much care for gun regulation. I consider it our right (and responsibility unless you have a good reason otherwise, like an autistic child) to own a gun and be prepared to use it in defense of our Constitution (notice I didn't say government). Our founding fathers foresaw a day when this country would get so thoroughly borked that even with democratic norms, it might become necessary to defend our rights against tyranny using the method of last resort. Without the right to bear arms (and by arms, I include military grade weapons), we cannot hope to enforce any of our other rights. The right to bear arms is not about hunting, or sport, or even personal freedoms, it is about our ability to enforce our authority over our government. The only thing that stops a tyrant from declaring themselves dictator for life is the fact that an armed mob will bring that tyrant to justice and restore our rights.
The one gun regulation I can fully support would be a requirement to have 3 people cosign when a person buys a gun. This will help to ensure that any gun nut has to have at least three people who think they are responsible enough to have a gun. That one regulation would have prevented nearly every mass shooting in this country, and would not have interfered with anyone elses right to bear arms. No need for permits, or any other kind of government interference.
Solar PV Cells degrade over time expected life 20 years
No, Solar panels have a derating over 25 years.
They continue functioning just fine, but with a reduced power output.
A typical solar installation will cost about $25 per kwH per month. at $0.10 per kwH, that is the equivalent of about 20 years repayment time assuming two things: 1st, the cost of electricity does not go up over that 20 years, and 2nd, there is no subsidy on the cost of the panels.
The panels themselves will still produce 70% of their rated power after 30 years, so at some point around the 30 years mark it becomes financially beneficial to replace old solar cells, but make no mistake, over the actual life of a home, it will be cheaper to put new panels on the roof every 30 years, than it will be to pay for electricity for those 30 years, and that is assuming no government subsidies for solar power at all.
At the rate that panels are reducing in cost, and the cost of energy is rising, the subsidies for solar will be completely unnecessary in less than 10 years, maybe even as short as 5 years.