To be pedantic: 96% of marine _species_ went extinct.
We've seen 99% of all of some species disappear, and the species come back. Homo Sapiens was brought down to a 10,000 person bottleneck once, but bounced back. We've had 90%+ of some fish populations disappear with almost no complete species disappearing. But the great extinctions losing 96 % of species is another level entirely.
>> Require access to reflash the firmware securely by independent means. > The firmware image on the device does not have to let you reflash it. It can happily report "success!" while doing nothing
Agreed: if the firmware is malware then it cannot be trusted, period. By "require access" I mean something like JTAG bus that enables you to replace the firmware reliably, given that you assume malicious firmware to start with. This requires someone demanding such hardware features, which is why I doubted it would happen. Given China's recent actions, I'm now inclined to think it will happen - Intel, Cisco, etc. are not going to give up the Chinese market if the Chinese demand such features.
Won't work. See the modification of Cisco hardware intercepted between manufacture and delivery.
Open-source the whole stack. Require access to reflash the firmware securely by independent means.
Previously I would have thought this a pipedream, but with China looking to deny access to its markets to insecure equipment, I'm hopeful that this will happen.
Some accents / dialects have been growing: e.g. Cockney English rhyming. As a result of it becoming 'popular', actual Cockneys have doubled down and made it harder. Accents / dialects are "membership" indicators, showing you belong to a community; they take time to learn. There is value in (1) having a common language but also for a community (2) being distinct. I suspect that _bilingualism_ is not going to fade away, though having one common language (English by default) will stay.
This makes using them in the aggregate as "Intellectual Property" legally meaningless if one is trying to state something concrete.
The one thing copyright, patents, trademarks have in common is that legally, None of them are a form of property.
Property means the thing is permanently yours, you get to keep it or at worst get compensated for its removal. If the state takes your land to build a road, you get compensated.
Copyright, Patents and Trademarks are monopolies granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times". Intellectual Proterty is a political cause or movement to get these temporary monopolies granted as Property. It needs to be recognised as such, and denied.
You do more than rescue. When you know the storm is coming you prepare ahead of time. With 3-5 days notice, Councils, police cancel overtime. All vehicles are out of the garage/repair shop. Priority on getting sandbags in place, clearing all drains and drain covers.
Then the general public are warned. Less events are on, or they are cancelled. Less people travel, everyones been to the shops two days before.
And away from storms, farmers know 5 days in advance what they're doing; warm humid weather means preparing for blight, etc. Less fertlilizers, less pesticides are wasted.
People still grumble about the bad weather, but harvests and lives aren't lost.
Emacs works fine as pid1, as long as you don't expect X.
(In practice I've done this with a startup sh script as init=/bin/do_emacs.sh that set up stuff and ended as "exec emacs" but still. An old underpowered laptop as file editor, with tramp mode for remote editing, no problem.
These simulations are forecasts. They check every forecast against observations, and have very good metrics on how good their forecasts are, and how much skill changes. See for example how the European ECMWF does its forecasts: http://www.ecmwf.int/en/foreca...
Every change to the operational model(s) can be and is checked out first against " will it improve the forecast". Similarly improvements in computing power: we simply run yesterdays forecast at higher resolution for example; we can then say "this new model is n% better, but takes 10x as long to calculate", and use that to decide whether its worth buying a faster computer.
On the climate timescale we have a challenge verifying the simulations, but on the weather timescale its straightforward, and done.
PID1 has special significance in Unix that means if it needs to be restarted, the whole system needs a reboot. Its essential functionality can (has) been written in 10-20 lines, allowing it to be carefully audited and ensure no CVEs, with other functionality subordinated.
systemd has too much functionality in pid1. it is also, in my and many peoples opinion, too highly integrated: Effectively everything has to be done "the systemd way". We have a range of init 'setups' at the moment suitable for embedded systems through servers to desktops. systemd does a "one size fits all" that locks in a design. Replacing it in the future (even eg./usr on a separate mount, for example) requires rewriting much of the core code. We lose the one-component-does-one-thing design, allowing individual components to be replaced and new designs tested (eg. different mailservers, different bind implementations,etc).
This is Engineering. This dilemma has been faced before by other Engineers, and its time for software engineers to step up to the mark and earn the title.
Basically, professionalize. Join an industry body like IEEE, create and get standards like C.Eng, lobby for critical software to be signed off by Licensed Engineers. Wrestle control from the PHBs.
There have been several studies of tidally-locked planets around M-dwarfs which refute this. Simulations of the Atmospheres of Synchronously Rotating Terrestrial Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Conditions for Atmospheric Collapse and the Implications for Habitability, M. M. Joshi, R. M. Haberle, and R. T. Reynolds , Icarus (1997) A Reappraisal of The Habitability of Planets around M Dwarf Stars, Tarter et al. (2007), Astrobiology,
Basically atmosphere and ocean circulation transfer the heat, and you get a relatively habitable earthlike environment.
The NSA has two conflicting tasks: (1) Secure national communications. (2) Break other countries communications.
This made sense in the 1950s when secure encryption was something only the military, spies, etc used. It breaks down badly in the internet, international era.
"They declined to help" hides the fact that _that was their job_. They are the national, even world experts on the problem, and they stood back and allowed a broken internet security model. Elsewhere, they've made swiss cheese of encryption standards so they could continue to do (2), at the cost of (1).
The NSA is Broken As Designed and needs to be scrapped.
Yes, the trouble is that independent invention is no defence. And yes, it is the "natural" way of doing the task, used my many if not most in the field.
Hence the conundrum for the patent office: by rights he should be granted the patent, but in effect they will have given Hyatt an incredibly valuable monopoly by virtue of their delay in processing the patent. But they can't think of any valid reason _not_ to give him the patent.
Monopolies are bad. Government makes a monopoly. Results are bad. Are you surprised? I am surprised at your apparent attitude, given the track record of government-managed systems. You think that would be better?
Not necessarily. For example the method used in Former Yugoslavia: the bread business was nationalised to ensure cheap bread for the populace. Two government bread companies were set up (IIRC). They were made to compete with each other, but with within strict rules, so that profit-taking for the benefit of staff salaries was out, but they could find efficiencies and compete. Also, it was legal for private companies to set up and sell other types of bread, but obviously couldn't control the market.
Similarly, Ireland had a nationalized shipping company to ensure shipping happened in Ireland ; during WWII no-one else would ship to Ireland because of the danger, and after the war they needed stable prices. Other companies could compete, but this meant there was a ceiling on prices and there was always someone capable of shipping.
Secondly having spent half my life in the public and half in the private sector, the private-sector is just as bad, it just doesn't have public investigations into waste.
No, You've plenty: we run our climate models on other planets, too. There are operational models running for Mars (to predict dust storms); Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Neptune and Uranus have been tested too.
We also have paleoclimates, matching CO2 and temperature patterns against fossil and isotopic records both on Earth and recently on Mars.
We have lots of individual tests: climate model accuracy on a regional scale, when the models are not tuned to this; getting predictions such as Arctic ampliification right, etc. Getting the magnitude and duration of global cooling in the wake of volcanos such as Pinatubo, etc.
As another poster said, we've plenty of tests that we can do and have done, if you show any imagination.
Getting the result to be deterministic is only the start of the problem. How do you know it is _correct_, or more properly, know the error bounds involved? How much does it matter to your problem?
e.g. If I am doing a 48-hour weather forecast, I can compare my results with observations next week; I can treat numerical error as a part of "model" error along with input observational uncertainty, etc.
I might validate part of my solutions by checking that, for example, the total water content of my planet doesn't change. For a 48-hour forecast, I might tolerate methods that slightly lose water over 48 hours in return for a fast solution. For a climate forecast/projection, this would be unacceptable.
Getting the same answer every time is no comfort if I have no way of knowing if its the right answer.
By keeping science funding at arms length, funded by agencies like NIH and NSF, with politicians setting overarching policy only. This works most of the time, and elsewhere around the world. The case being quoted is the exception, not the norm, and should be called out (as it is being) as interference.
Arguing that government shouldn't be involved in science is ignoring that most science is publicly funded, and nearly all privately-funded science depends on publicly-funded fundamental science that has no immediate applied value (and hence won't be corporately funded) but is still needed.
"Spying" is misleading when what we're really talking about it mass surveillance.
Its one thing to say "Countries have always spied on each other", when it used to mean having one or two "diplomats" at the embassy and debriefing businessmen when they came back from trips to X. Its a very different affair when intelligence gathering means everyone in the country is effectively targetted (70m phone calls a month is hardly discretely targetting a country).
Mass surveillance is to spying as martial law is to policing. Instead of spying for some slight advantage, slightly corrupting negotiations between friendly countries, we now have NSA ops dictating the landscape: the communications tools used worldwide are by default cracked; the US is setting out to use this advantage to screw its partners, and they're _not_ happy about it. "Business as usual" cannot continue on these terms, and some readjustment is being demanded.
The EU mandates _a_ standard in the industry. Its up to the industry to pick what the standard is. Guess what, this is the industry talking to Apple about standardization.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, European here. Tap water is heavily legally regulated. It has higher quality standards than bottled water.
Why drink bottled water?
To be pedantic: 96% of marine _species_ went extinct.
We've seen 99% of all of some species disappear, and the species come back. Homo Sapiens was brought down to a 10,000 person bottleneck once, but bounced back. We've had 90%+ of some fish populations disappear with almost no complete species disappearing. But the great extinctions losing 96 % of species is another level entirely.
Typically the power button automatically locks the phone, making it trivial to lock the phone in a hurry.
>> Require access to reflash the firmware securely by independent means.
> The firmware image on the device does not have to let you reflash it. It can happily report "success!" while doing nothing
Agreed: if the firmware is malware then it cannot be trusted, period. By "require access" I mean something like JTAG bus that enables you to replace the firmware reliably, given that you assume malicious firmware to start with.
This requires someone demanding such hardware features, which is why I doubted it would happen. Given China's recent actions, I'm now inclined to think it will happen - Intel, Cisco, etc. are not going to give up the Chinese market if the Chinese demand such features.
Won't work. See the modification of Cisco hardware intercepted between manufacture and delivery.
Open-source the whole stack. Require access to reflash the firmware securely by independent means.
Previously I would have thought this a pipedream, but with China looking to deny access to its markets to insecure equipment, I'm hopeful that this will happen.
Thats the Semantic versioning convention:
http://semver.org/
Some accents / dialects have been growing: e.g. Cockney English rhyming. As a result of it becoming 'popular', actual Cockneys have doubled down and made it harder.
Accents / dialects are "membership" indicators, showing you belong to a community; they take time to learn. There is value in (1) having a common language but also for a community (2) being distinct. I suspect that _bilingualism_ is not going to fade away, though having one common language (English by default) will stay.
This makes using them in the aggregate as "Intellectual Property" legally meaningless if one is trying to state something concrete.
The one thing copyright, patents, trademarks have in common is that legally, None of them are a form of property.
Property means the thing is permanently yours, you get to keep it or at worst get compensated for its removal. If the state takes your land to build a road, you get compensated.
Copyright, Patents and Trademarks are monopolies granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times". Intellectual Proterty is a political cause or movement to get these temporary monopolies granted as Property. It needs to be recognised as such, and denied.
You do more than rescue. When you know the storm is coming you prepare ahead of time. With 3-5 days notice, Councils, police cancel overtime. All vehicles are out of the garage/repair shop. Priority on getting sandbags in place, clearing all drains and drain covers.
Then the general public are warned. Less events are on, or they are cancelled. Less people travel, everyones been to the shops two days before.
And away from storms, farmers know 5 days in advance what they're doing; warm humid weather means preparing for blight, etc. Less fertlilizers, less pesticides are wasted.
People still grumble about the bad weather, but harvests and lives aren't lost.
Emacs works fine as pid1, as long as you don't expect X.
(In practice I've done this with a startup sh script as init=/bin/do_emacs.sh that set up stuff and ended as
"exec emacs" but still. An old underpowered laptop as file editor, with tramp mode for remote editing, no problem.
These simulations are forecasts. They check every forecast against observations, and have very good metrics on how good their forecasts are, and how much skill changes.
See for example how the European ECMWF does its forecasts:
http://www.ecmwf.int/en/foreca...
Every change to the operational model(s) can be and is checked out first against " will it improve the forecast". Similarly improvements in computing power: we simply run yesterdays forecast at higher resolution for example; we can then say "this new model is n% better, but takes 10x as long to calculate", and use that to decide whether its worth buying a faster computer.
On the climate timescale we have a challenge verifying the simulations, but on the weather timescale its straightforward, and done.
PID1 has special significance in Unix that means if it needs to be restarted, the whole system needs a reboot. Its essential functionality can (has) been written in 10-20 lines, allowing it to be carefully audited and ensure no CVEs, with other functionality subordinated.
systemd has too much functionality in pid1. it is also, in my and many peoples opinion, too highly integrated: Effectively everything has to be done "the systemd way". We have a range of init 'setups' at the moment suitable for embedded systems through servers to desktops. systemd does a "one size fits all" that locks in a design. Replacing it in the future (even eg. /usr on a separate mount, for example) requires rewriting much of the core code. We lose the one-component-does-one-thing design, allowing individual components to be replaced and new designs tested (eg. different mailservers, different bind implementations,etc).
ALL CAPS has been optional since 1990, at least.
Fortran has had modularisation, structured code since 1990, Classes and object-orientated since 2003. Please update your prejudices.
This is Engineering. This dilemma has been faced before by other Engineers, and its time for software engineers to step up to the mark and earn the title.
Basically, professionalize. Join an industry body like IEEE, create and get standards like C.Eng, lobby for critical software to be signed off by Licensed Engineers. Wrestle control from the PHBs.
No.
There have been several studies of tidally-locked planets around M-dwarfs which refute this.
Simulations of the Atmospheres of Synchronously Rotating Terrestrial Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Conditions for Atmospheric Collapse and the Implications for Habitability, M. M. Joshi, R. M. Haberle, and R. T. Reynolds , Icarus (1997)
A Reappraisal of The Habitability of Planets around M Dwarf Stars, Tarter et al. (2007), Astrobiology,
Basically atmosphere and ocean circulation transfer the heat, and you get a relatively habitable earthlike environment.
It is not the NSA's job to cause mudslides, or make peoples hair fall out.
It is NSAs JOB to crack (other peoples) security systems. You are not being paranoid, they are out to get you.
Of course, other agencies do this too ...
Here's a challenge: Find any two versions of Word that will open, between them, all MS doc documents.
I have a friend who has a sideline business reading old Word files. Seriously, we need to get rid of that shit.
The NSA has two conflicting tasks:
(1) Secure national communications.
(2) Break other countries communications.
This made sense in the 1950s when secure encryption was something only the military, spies, etc used. It breaks down badly in the internet, international era.
"They declined to help" hides the fact that _that was their job_. They are the national, even world experts on the problem, and they stood back
and allowed a broken internet security model. Elsewhere, they've made swiss cheese of encryption standards so they could continue to do (2),
at the cost of (1).
The NSA is Broken As Designed and needs to be scrapped.
Yes, the trouble is that independent invention is no defence. And yes, it is the "natural" way of doing the task, used my many if not most in the field.
Hence the conundrum for the patent office: by rights he should be granted the patent, but in effect they will have given Hyatt an incredibly valuable monopoly by virtue of their delay in processing the patent. But they can't think of any valid reason _not_ to give him the patent.
Monopolies are bad. Government makes a monopoly. Results are bad. Are you surprised? I am surprised at your apparent attitude, given the track record of government-managed systems. You think that would be better?
Not necessarily. For example the method used in Former Yugoslavia: the bread business was nationalised to ensure cheap bread for the populace. Two government bread companies were set up (IIRC). They were made to compete with each other, but with within strict rules, so that profit-taking for the benefit of staff salaries was out, but they could find efficiencies and compete. Also, it was legal for private companies to set up and sell other types of bread, but obviously couldn't control the market.
Similarly, Ireland had a nationalized shipping company to ensure shipping happened in Ireland ; during WWII no-one else would ship to Ireland because of the danger, and after the war they needed stable prices. Other companies could compete, but this meant there was a ceiling on prices and there was always someone capable of shipping.
Secondly having spent half my life in the public and half in the private sector, the private-sector is just as bad, it just doesn't have public investigations into waste.
No, You've plenty: we run our climate models on other planets, too. There are operational models running for Mars (to predict dust storms);
Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Neptune and Uranus have been tested too.
We also have paleoclimates, matching CO2 and temperature patterns against fossil and isotopic records both on Earth and recently on Mars.
We have lots of individual tests: climate model accuracy on a regional scale, when the models are not tuned to this; getting predictions
such as Arctic ampliification right, etc. Getting the magnitude and duration of global cooling in the wake of volcanos such as Pinatubo, etc.
As another poster said, we've plenty of tests that we can do and have done, if you show any imagination.
Getting the result to be deterministic is only the start of the problem. How do you know it is _correct_, or more properly, know the error bounds involved? How much does it matter to your problem?
e.g. If I am doing a 48-hour weather forecast, I can compare my results with observations next week; I can treat numerical error as a part of "model" error along with input observational uncertainty, etc.
I might validate part of my solutions by checking that, for example, the total water content of my planet doesn't change. For a 48-hour forecast, I might tolerate methods that slightly lose water over 48 hours in return for a fast solution. For a climate forecast/projection, this would be unacceptable.
Getting the same answer every time is no comfort if I have no way of knowing if its the right answer.
How do we keep politics out of this?
How do we keep politics out of this?
By keeping science funding at arms length, funded by agencies like NIH and NSF, with politicians setting overarching policy only.
This works most of the time, and elsewhere around the world. The case being quoted is the exception, not the norm, and should be called out
(as it is being) as interference.
Arguing that government shouldn't be involved in science is ignoring that most science is publicly funded, and nearly all privately-funded
science depends on publicly-funded fundamental science that has no immediate applied value (and hence won't be corporately funded)
but is still needed.
"Spying" is misleading when what we're really talking about it mass surveillance.
Its one thing to say "Countries have always spied on each other", when it used to mean having one or two "diplomats" at the embassy and debriefing businessmen when they came back from trips to X. Its a very different affair when intelligence gathering means everyone in the country is effectively targetted (70m phone calls a month is hardly discretely targetting a country).
Mass surveillance is to spying as martial law is to policing. Instead of spying for some slight advantage, slightly corrupting negotiations between friendly countries, we now have NSA ops dictating the landscape: the communications tools used worldwide are by default cracked; the US is setting out to use this advantage to screw its partners, and they're _not_ happy about it. "Business as usual" cannot continue on these terms, and some readjustment is being demanded.
Actually, no.
The EU mandates _a_ standard in the industry. Its up to the industry to pick what the standard is.
Guess what, this is the industry talking to Apple about standardization.