Oh yes. I'm sure, much like string theory, that one of the billions of possible HTML5s out there in the "HTML 5 landscape" might one day be proven to possibly be able to do anything you might want to be able to do. However the odds of that particular HTML 5 variant existing in our parallel universe are vanishingly small.
I think that private industry will kill a number of astronauts. But those astronauts will die taking chances to increase shareholder value, so it's all fine.
Right now, today we could build a sustainable colony on the moon but for two fundemental reasons, no one reason and two excuses.
Citation required. Depending on your definition of "sustainable", we haven't yet built a sustainable colony in low orbit; Skylab, Salyut, Mir and ISS all needed regular shipments of water, oxygen and food. We certainly haven't yet built a fully closed biological life support system on Earth - Biosphere 2 was an abject failure and demonstrated that the challenges to doing so, even in a relatively friendly Earthbound environment in Arizona with lots of failsafes, cheats and easy access to medical evacuation, are immense and not fully understood.
So no, we can't build a sustainable colony on the moon with today's technology. We could build a non-sustainable, highly fragile and dependent one, which might or might not ever be able to scale up. Could we someday close the loop? Maybe. Perhaps we should try building one on Earth first, so at least when it fails it doesn't kill people highly visibly and publically?
a bunch of mouth-breathers who probably got Cs and Ds in basic high school science courses
I'm sure you're right, because I certainly didn't learn in my high school biology that there was any correlation between a person's preferred breathing method and their intelligence. I mean, I thought I'd learned that that was an old, discredited Victorian-era prejudice along the lines of phrenology - but your advanced psychological insight obviously far outstrips my own.
They arrived to NATO datacenters, and hacked away 1GB of data from their servers. With an axe!
But of course. "Brute force reprogramming" of centralised data banks has been standard practice since 2001, and first began in 1992 at the H.A.L. planet in Urbana, Illinois.
it is not surprising that many would be willing to slow progress in the name of stability.
Indeed. What many in the web development sub-industry don't seem to grasp is that progress that breaks existing stuff isn't progress, it's just random unmotivated thrashing around, aka, destruction. Progress means going forward, and that means adding features - not breaking existing ones.
In the software industry, we've somehow internalised a false idea, which is that all new development necessarily means changing the way we used to do things. But that's not actually true. If we did things right in the first place, and used extensible protocols, we shouldn't need to break anything; just add new stuff.
The unexamined implication of the "old is bad, all progress requires destruction" meme is that everything you are currently doing, you are doing wrong - because today's "new hotness" will always be tomorrow's "old and broken".
But it should be possible, at least in theory, for us to do things right the first time - or at least to know when we're doing them better than worse - and then stop changing it once we've got it right.
Conversely, if whenever we invent a technology, we have no way of telling if we're doing it right rather than wrong -- then sheesh, we shouldn't even be in the technology business, because we obviously don't know what we're doing, and we're going to just hurt ourselves.
The Latin alphabet, for instance, is around 2000 years old, and we're still using it, give and take a few tweaks. Is it bad because it's old? No. So why should a technology get outdated just because it's five or ten years old?
tl;dr: Quit breaking stuff, just get it done right, then stick with it. It's not broken because it's old, it's proven and trustworthy.
Here's a definition. "Enterprise" means "it just works, it installs, upgrades and uninstalls cleanly, it patches its security holes without breaking other unrelated stuff at the same time, it does all of this in a silent, automated manner on 10,000 workstations at once, and it doesn't spend all its development budget on animating a flashing monkey in a million pixels and chasing the fickle consumer market instead of just doing its job."
Most "Enterprise" class software isn't (so very much isn't), but at least it's a goal to shoot for.
You'd be amazed at how many software companies can't seem to write installers that work in a standards-compliant manner, or at all. My personal theory is that installation and deployment is the Siberia of app development: when a programmer does something so unbelievably stupid that they're even an embarrassment to the teams who created atrocities like the Microsoft Office Ribbon, they get shunted into building the MSI package, so that when they stuff up the worst that can happen is that they merely cause the software to be uninstallable and unmaintainable on thousands of machines all over the world, instead of doing something really bad like making the fifth icon from the left be the wrong shade of mauve.
A bitter sysadmin? Yes, just a little. Why do you ask?
Which of the people working on [any feature] would have been able to write core security fixes for stable branches?
Um. This is a trick question right? All of them. Because if your programmers can't write secure code, why are they writing Internet facing code?
See, the mere existence of a question like this ought to put the heebie-jeebies into every programmer in existence. This is the 2010s now! All your code is Internet-facing, security-critical code, all the time! No exceptions! If you can't write secure code, you are getting your computer and all your clients' computers pwned by LulzSec script kiddies! Bad programmer! Stop doing that! I mean it! Step away from that keyboard right now, it is a deadly weapon and you just failed your ownership licence! You are a public health hazard! You are infectious and need to be quarantined!
But I don't blame the programmers really, I blame the language designers. It should not even be thinkable, in 2011, for any programmer working on an application to even consider writing "insecure" code. The language should just automatically take care of all known security vulnerabilities, because it's actually impossible for human brains to handle this. We invented garbage collection in the 1960s, right? And array bounds checking? Why are programmers still having to juggle this stuff manually?
Grr. Bad language designers. You are why the Internet can't have nice things!
What do you suggest Mozilla _not_ work on to do that?
Oh, ask me! Ask me! I have lots of ideas! For starters hw about: * all of WebGL, because I don't need another gaping security hole in my browser and WebGL was the first thing that crashed Firefox 4 on our work computers * the entire 'personas' architecture, because why does anyone need fifty 'Harry Potter' skins that make it harder to see where the buttons are? * all of HTML5 until some adult enters the room and actually writes a standard for it
In fact, how about not adding any 'features' at all until you fix all the security bugs. All of them. As a user, I really don't care about if CSS Acid Test 15 renders SpinningFlywheelWidget 1 or 2 pixels to the left. All the websites I go to already work just fine. I just want to not get my bank account hacked and all my money stolen because you left fifteen use-after-free errors inside the coolshinywidget.geewhiz library five years ago and never ran any tests on that section of code.
Can you give me security? Please? That's the only feature I want. Everything else is just window dressing.
Anything that touches the internet needs to be able to be updated rapidly
No, anything that touches the Internet needs to be able to be security patched rapidly, but feature upgraded only when doing so won't break essential sites.
Even better would be if programmers writing Internet-facing code never released security vulnerabilities in the first place, or at least had the ability to detect when they were writing code which was boneheadedly never-ever-do-this, this-shouldn't-even-compile wrong. But apparently that's utterly technically impossible.
This is a little like saying "it would be nice if architects designing 50-story buildings in downtown urban areas refrained from rolling the dice and randomly packing load-bearing columns with new, untested mixes of dynamite, plutonium and asbestos.. That's why every week you see construction crews pulling truckloads of experimental explosive compound out of buildings and replacing it with new, also untested mixes. We'd all love to live in a world where dynamite and plutonium weren't the preferred structural building materials - but you gotta have progress, right?
the Tevatron, which we funded on purpose because it could tell us a lot of things.
And did the Tevatron, in fact, tell us those other things it was funded to find out? Or do they continue to be things that it could have told us but didn't?
more motivation for me to not drop out of my BS Physics program knowing that we don't know it all.
Um, but doesn't "we discovered a particle predicted by existing theory" rather suggest that we do know it all and there's nothing useful left to be done in particle physics?
I hope that's not true, of course, but this seems the "yawn, next" kind of discovery rather than the "hmmmm, what the?" kind.
I can almost hear Don McLean in the background - very, very faintly...
And they were singin', I, I'm feeling lucky today I boot my Chrometop to the desktop but the Wave's gone away And Google boys turn off their Goggles and say This'll be the day I get laid
Long story short: bad nuclear reactor design, should never be done again.
Hi! You must be new here. Let me introduce you to the Slashdot resident "sodium cooled fast breeder reactors are way cool, we should build loads more of them and solve all the world's ecological problems!" contingent.
obviously it's not coherent, but that doesn't matter.
[citation required], and Hardt & Negri don't count. I tried to read Empire once, and ouch. I think the argument was something along the lines of "postmodern is like quantum, it's magic, and if everyone does something stupid and pointless and self-seeking in an uncoordinated manner as The Multitude then we'll get a wonderful beautiful world full of rainbows and puppies, because of the invisible hand of Revolution. As opposed to the Empire of neoliberal capitalism, where everyone does something stupid and pointless and self-seeking for dollars and the invisible hand of The Market supposedly turns it into rainbows and puppies, which is an obvious delusion."
We support the free flow of information. Anonymous is actively campaigning for this goal everywhere in all forms.
So Anonymous is in favour of the free release of all names, addresses, accounts, passwords and IPs of Anonymous members, then? Good to know. Where's the data dump?
some friendly, apologistic press from the only wing of the press that ever (and so reliably) applauds destruction, chaos, and delberately corrisive flailing about
Well yes, granted, but other than Rupert Murdoch, what other political tendencies in the press support Anonymous?
Income disparity was what made roman population lose interest, hope and eventually, participation in the roman republic
Well, that and the little detail that "the Roman population", the poor included, was itself a tiny minority at the top of a machine built on massacring, enslaving, and torturing the rest of the world for their own enrichment and amusement.
But I'm sure the foreign conquered provinces felt much more happy and free when they were invaded and enslaved and crucified by an equitable Roman Republic rather than by a Roman Empire ruled by a few rich guys.
Thank you for your correction. We will proactively expedite an interofficely administrationed solutioneering approach with broad-based win-win upside expectations, on a level playing field, with a proven track record, at the end of the day, in the large, scaled comprehensively viz-a-viz our cross-paradigm global "e" synergy best-practice value-driven innovation vision. Ism. Thing. We're a little vague on the details, but it will probably involve eating our own dogfood while we push the bleeding edge of the envelope to smash silos while we focus on key deliverables of our core competencies and not sweat the small stuff while we throw the fish who moved our cheese.
It's the least we could do for you, our valued customer!
I'm proud we built the world's most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility... instead of being proud of something as stupid as military might
You might want to recalibrate your pridometer. The NIF's primary mission is what's euphemistically referred to as "stockpile stewardship" - keeping ageing thermonuclear weapons in tip-top megadeath condition. Any studies of nuclear fusion which don't occur with of chunks of plutonium being the spark plug are kind of a long way down the list.
Fortunately nuclear weapons have nothing to do with military might so carry on Science!
And the correct scientific response on being drawn in to one of these "war" things (science doesn't really get "war", it's all sociology) is to take the course of least harm.
"Least harm", "biggest boom", "what the heck, let's just nuke the upper stratosphere and see what happens"... one of those courses, certainly.
ultimately there will be war between the space people and the earth people
Which will last approximately 2 months and end when the groundlubbers stop the launch of the next Progress/Verne capsule full of food, oxygen and water, and the skydogs realise that their station is filling up with lots of bottles of unrecycled pee.
To give them due credit, the Space Revolutionary Forces did launch a bold surprise bombardment of Star City with 1000 litres of frozen pee, which would have even succeeded in reaching the upper atmosphere if they had had any propellant left in their thruster tanks to achieve de-orbit. However, since the only launcher available was a rubber band salvaged from the exercise treadmill, the Glorious Revolutionary Homecan is now surrounded by the small ice cloud known as the Strategic Revolutionary Pee Reserve.
What happened to teaching that learning and discovery were valuable beyond reckoning?
Neoliberal economics happened to it, that's what. For the last 30 years we've had "economists" constantly preaching to us that everything worthwhile can be measured in dollars, and if you're not getting a dollar-for-dollar return on your investment, you're doing it wrong, you're stupid and inefficient and probably an immoral looter of the public purse who votes Democratic, and someone else deserves to take your stuff and contract it out to Third World factory-states who don't have labour laws.
Slashdot Mirror
HTML5 can do it, no?
Oh yes. I'm sure, much like string theory, that one of the billions of possible HTML5s out there in the "HTML 5 landscape" might one day be proven to possibly be able to do anything you might want to be able to do. However the odds of that particular HTML 5 variant existing in our parallel universe are vanishingly small.
I think that private industry will kill a number of astronauts. But those astronauts will die taking chances to increase shareholder value, so it's all fine.
Fixed!
Right now, today we could build a sustainable colony on the moon but for two fundemental reasons, no one reason and two excuses.
Citation required. Depending on your definition of "sustainable", we haven't yet built a sustainable colony in low orbit; Skylab, Salyut, Mir and ISS all needed regular shipments of water, oxygen and food. We certainly haven't yet built a fully closed biological life support system on Earth - Biosphere 2 was an abject failure and demonstrated that the challenges to doing so, even in a relatively friendly Earthbound environment in Arizona with lots of failsafes, cheats and easy access to medical evacuation, are immense and not fully understood.
So no, we can't build a sustainable colony on the moon with today's technology. We could build a non-sustainable, highly fragile and dependent one, which might or might not ever be able to scale up. Could we someday close the loop? Maybe. Perhaps we should try building one on Earth first, so at least when it fails it doesn't kill people highly visibly and publically?
a bunch of mouth-breathers who probably got Cs and Ds in basic high school science courses
I'm sure you're right, because I certainly didn't learn in my high school biology that there was any correlation between a person's preferred breathing method and their intelligence. I mean, I thought I'd learned that that was an old, discredited Victorian-era prejudice along the lines of phrenology - but your advanced psychological insight obviously far outstrips my own.
They arrived to NATO datacenters, and hacked away 1GB of data from their servers. With an axe!
But of course. "Brute force reprogramming" of centralised data banks has been standard practice since 2001, and first began in 1992 at the H.A.L. planet in Urbana, Illinois.
it is cool to hate the USA because USA does things the rest of the world doesn't like
Little things like invasion and bombing and assassination, yes. But what's a few global wars between friends?
it is not surprising that many would be willing to slow progress in the name of stability.
Indeed. What many in the web development sub-industry don't seem to grasp is that progress that breaks existing stuff isn't progress, it's just random unmotivated thrashing around, aka, destruction. Progress means going forward, and that means adding features - not breaking existing ones.
In the software industry, we've somehow internalised a false idea, which is that all new development necessarily means changing the way we used to do things. But that's not actually true. If we did things right in the first place, and used extensible protocols, we shouldn't need to break anything; just add new stuff.
The unexamined implication of the "old is bad, all progress requires destruction" meme is that everything you are currently doing, you are doing wrong - because today's "new hotness" will always be tomorrow's "old and broken".
But it should be possible, at least in theory, for us to do things right the first time - or at least to know when we're doing them better than worse - and then stop changing it once we've got it right.
Conversely, if whenever we invent a technology, we have no way of telling if we're doing it right rather than wrong -- then sheesh, we shouldn't even be in the technology business, because we obviously don't know what we're doing, and we're going to just hurt ourselves.
The Latin alphabet, for instance, is around 2000 years old, and we're still using it, give and take a few tweaks. Is it bad because it's old? No. So why should a technology get outdated just because it's five or ten years old?
tl;dr: Quit breaking stuff, just get it done right, then stick with it. It's not broken because it's old, it's proven and trustworthy.
"Enterprise". Hate that word!
Here's a definition. "Enterprise" means "it just works, it installs, upgrades and uninstalls cleanly, it patches its security holes without breaking other unrelated stuff at the same time, it does all of this in a silent, automated manner on 10,000 workstations at once, and it doesn't spend all its development budget on animating a flashing monkey in a million pixels and chasing the fickle consumer market instead of just doing its job."
Most "Enterprise" class software isn't (so very much isn't), but at least it's a goal to shoot for.
You'd be amazed at how many software companies can't seem to write installers that work in a standards-compliant manner, or at all. My personal theory is that installation and deployment is the Siberia of app development: when a programmer does something so unbelievably stupid that they're even an embarrassment to the teams who created atrocities like the Microsoft Office Ribbon, they get shunted into building the MSI package, so that when they stuff up the worst that can happen is that they merely cause the software to be uninstallable and unmaintainable on thousands of machines all over the world, instead of doing something really bad like making the fifth icon from the left be the wrong shade of mauve.
A bitter sysadmin? Yes, just a little. Why do you ask?
Which of the people working on [any feature] would have been able to write core security fixes for stable branches?
Um. This is a trick question right? All of them. Because if your programmers can't write secure code, why are they writing Internet facing code?
See, the mere existence of a question like this ought to put the heebie-jeebies into every programmer in existence. This is the 2010s now! All your code is Internet-facing, security-critical code, all the time! No exceptions! If you can't write secure code, you are getting your computer and all your clients' computers pwned by LulzSec script kiddies! Bad programmer! Stop doing that! I mean it! Step away from that keyboard right now, it is a deadly weapon and you just failed your ownership licence! You are a public health hazard! You are infectious and need to be quarantined!
But I don't blame the programmers really, I blame the language designers. It should not even be thinkable, in 2011, for any programmer working on an application to even consider writing "insecure" code. The language should just automatically take care of all known security vulnerabilities, because it's actually impossible for human brains to handle this. We invented garbage collection in the 1960s, right? And array bounds checking? Why are programmers still having to juggle this stuff manually?
Grr. Bad language designers. You are why the Internet can't have nice things!
What do you suggest Mozilla _not_ work on to do that?
Oh, ask me! Ask me! I have lots of ideas! For starters hw about:
* all of WebGL, because I don't need another gaping security hole in my browser and WebGL was the first thing that crashed Firefox 4 on our work computers
* the entire 'personas' architecture, because why does anyone need fifty 'Harry Potter' skins that make it harder to see where the buttons are?
* all of HTML5 until some adult enters the room and actually writes a standard for it
In fact, how about not adding any 'features' at all until you fix all the security bugs. All of them. As a user, I really don't care about if CSS Acid Test 15 renders SpinningFlywheelWidget 1 or 2 pixels to the left. All the websites I go to already work just fine. I just want to not get my bank account hacked and all my money stolen because you left fifteen use-after-free errors inside the coolshinywidget.geewhiz library five years ago and never ran any tests on that section of code.
Can you give me security? Please? That's the only feature I want. Everything else is just window dressing.
Anything that touches the internet needs to be able to be updated rapidly
No, anything that touches the Internet needs to be able to be security patched rapidly, but feature upgraded only when doing so won't break essential sites.
Even better would be if programmers writing Internet-facing code never released security vulnerabilities in the first place, or at least had the ability to detect when they were writing code which was boneheadedly never-ever-do-this, this-shouldn't-even-compile wrong. But apparently that's utterly technically impossible.
This is a little like saying "it would be nice if architects designing 50-story buildings in downtown urban areas refrained from rolling the dice and randomly packing load-bearing columns with new, untested mixes of dynamite, plutonium and asbestos.. That's why every week you see construction crews pulling truckloads of experimental explosive compound out of buildings and replacing it with new, also untested mixes. We'd all love to live in a world where dynamite and plutonium weren't the preferred structural building materials - but you gotta have progress, right?
the Tevatron, which we funded on purpose because it could tell us a lot of things.
And did the Tevatron, in fact, tell us those other things it was funded to find out? Or do they continue to be things that it could have told us but didn't?
more motivation for me to not drop out of my BS Physics program knowing that we don't know it all.
Um, but doesn't "we discovered a particle predicted by existing theory" rather suggest that we do know it all and there's nothing useful left to be done in particle physics?
I hope that's not true, of course, but this seems the "yawn, next" kind of discovery rather than the "hmmmm, what the?" kind.
Many of those measurements are fantastically precise, and are sometimes even better than those done by experiments.
That is an interesting definition of the word "measurement". Don't you perhaps mean "prediction"?
It ain't measured until it's actually measured, in my book. But perhaps I'm old-fashioned.
I can almost hear Don McLean in the background - very, very faintly...
And they were singin',
I, I'm feeling lucky today
I boot my Chrometop to the desktop but the Wave's gone away
And Google boys turn off their Goggles and say
This'll be the day I get laid
Long story short: bad nuclear reactor design, should never be done again.
Hi! You must be new here. Let me introduce you to the Slashdot resident "sodium cooled fast breeder reactors are way cool, we should build loads more of them and solve all the world's ecological problems!" contingent.
obviously it's not coherent, but that doesn't matter.
[citation required], and Hardt & Negri don't count. I tried to read Empire once, and ouch. I think the argument was something along the lines of "postmodern is like quantum, it's magic, and if everyone does something stupid and pointless and self-seeking in an uncoordinated manner as The Multitude then we'll get a wonderful beautiful world full of rainbows and puppies, because of the invisible hand of Revolution. As opposed to the Empire of neoliberal capitalism, where everyone does something stupid and pointless and self-seeking for dollars and the invisible hand of The Market supposedly turns it into rainbows and puppies, which is an obvious delusion."
We support the free flow of information. Anonymous is actively campaigning for this goal everywhere in all forms.
So Anonymous is in favour of the free release of all names, addresses, accounts, passwords and IPs of Anonymous members, then? Good to know. Where's the data dump?
some friendly, apologistic press from the only wing of the press that ever (and so reliably) applauds destruction, chaos, and delberately corrisive flailing about
Well yes, granted, but other than Rupert Murdoch, what other political tendencies in the press support Anonymous?
Income disparity was what made roman population lose interest, hope and eventually, participation in the roman republic
Well, that and the little detail that "the Roman population", the poor included, was itself a tiny minority at the top of a machine built on massacring, enslaving, and torturing the rest of the world for their own enrichment and amusement.
But I'm sure the foreign conquered provinces felt much more happy and free when they were invaded and enslaved and crucified by an equitable Roman Republic rather than by a Roman Empire ruled by a few rich guys.
Thank you for your correction. We will proactively expedite an interofficely administrationed solutioneering approach with broad-based win-win upside expectations, on a level playing field, with a proven track record, at the end of the day, in the large, scaled comprehensively viz-a-viz our cross-paradigm global "e" synergy best-practice value-driven innovation vision. Ism. Thing. We're a little vague on the details, but it will probably involve eating our own dogfood while we push the bleeding edge of the envelope to smash silos while we focus on key deliverables of our core competencies and not sweat the small stuff while we throw the fish who moved our cheese.
It's the least we could do for you, our valued customer!
I'm proud we built the world's most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility... instead of being proud of something as stupid as military might
You might want to recalibrate your pridometer. The NIF's primary mission is what's euphemistically referred to as "stockpile stewardship" - keeping ageing thermonuclear weapons in tip-top megadeath condition. Any studies of nuclear fusion which don't occur with of chunks of plutonium being the spark plug are kind of a long way down the list.
Fortunately nuclear weapons have nothing to do with military might so carry on Science!
And the correct scientific response on being drawn in to one of these "war" things (science doesn't really get "war", it's all sociology) is to take the course of least harm.
"Least harm", "biggest boom", "what the heck, let's just nuke the upper stratosphere and see what happens"... one of those courses, certainly.
ultimately there will be war between the space people and the earth people
Which will last approximately 2 months and end when the groundlubbers stop the launch of the next Progress/Verne capsule full of food, oxygen and water, and the skydogs realise that their station is filling up with lots of bottles of unrecycled pee.
To give them due credit, the Space Revolutionary Forces did launch a bold surprise bombardment of Star City with 1000 litres of frozen pee, which would have even succeeded in reaching the upper atmosphere if they had had any propellant left in their thruster tanks to achieve de-orbit. However, since the only launcher available was a rubber band salvaged from the exercise treadmill, the Glorious Revolutionary Homecan is now surrounded by the small ice cloud known as the Strategic Revolutionary Pee Reserve.
What happened to teaching that learning and discovery were valuable beyond reckoning?
Neoliberal economics happened to it, that's what. For the last 30 years we've had "economists" constantly preaching to us that everything worthwhile can be measured in dollars, and if you're not getting a dollar-for-dollar return on your investment, you're doing it wrong, you're stupid and inefficient and probably an immoral looter of the public purse who votes Democratic, and someone else deserves to take your stuff and contract it out to Third World factory-states who don't have labour laws.