It is how it works, forwards or backwards. If events A and B are exclusive, then the probability of A or B is p(A) + p(B). So, assuming that each 100 year span is the same as the next, the proability of us being wiped out approaches 1 at 45500 years - that is, if you buy this number.
The bigger problem is that the 1 in 455 number is based on the probability of events that we don't know anything about. It's pure pseudo-science fantastic-sounding soundbyte horse shit.
We don't know ANYTHING about supervolcanoes. Only what some geologists have imagined. "What if yellowstone is one giant volcano!" which leads to "what if it erupted?"
Of course, what if it isn't, or even if it is... What if "eruption" just meant the lava dome collapsing and doing nothing but aesthetic local damage.
We likewise don't know shit about meteor strikes. We have no idea how many meteors there are, of those, how many could strike earth, and of those, how many are big enough/fast enough to cause a major catastrophe.
Every other week I hear about a giant tidal wave, earthquake, volcano, or other threat to "survival of the human race". We don't know shit about any of these events because they've never happened. Any "statistics" coming out of any of it is just some number spit out by an inherently flawed mathematical model.
It's just as easy (and mathematically valid) for me to say there's a 1 in 455 chance that Satan's 1000 year reign of evil will begin in the next 100 years, or that we'll be enslaved by an alien race of tent caterpillars. Or that we'll all grow gills and move under the sea.
Think of this list as being of the top ten "science related soundbites for the local news".
I hate the way science is reported. What's more likely, they discovered an ancient race of hobbits - or dug up a midget? What do they report? The most fantastic sounding interpretation of the "evidence".
Whatever happened to the most simple explanation being the most likely to be correct?
Besides, we've known planets are there for a long long time, taking a fuzzy picture of one isn't really a "discovery", any more than the first aerial photos taken in the US were "discovery" of North America.
But, Microsoft has the luxury of being able to pay people to look for flaws.
PHP and every other OSS project just sort of sits around waiting for someone to come along and volunteer to do so.
If HPHP hadn't come along, noone would be looking, and the vulnerabilities would go unpatched.
Do you ever sit there going over thousands to millions of lines of code that someone else wrote, looking for obscure flaws? It's the kind of boring thankless job that noone would do unless they were paid to. HPHP found them as a side effect to doing something else.
The very fact that there's a need for a seperate "Hardened PHP" project or "SE Linux" project should say something about the stability and security of those projects' bases. If linux was so secure and unhackable, why did the NSA spend so much money rewriting it? If PHP is so enterprise-ready, why would people try to create a "hardened" version of it?
You don't worry about a single brick. Consider a wall of these things like a RAID array made up of a few hundred drives. The failure of one cell/drive/brick is irrelevant, and as the TFA says, you ignore it until its scheduled to be replaced.
Besides, you don't have to assume they're in a wall. There are plenty of configurations that could allow you to easily access whatever bricks you need.
It doesnt seem as though the bricks need to stay in the same position either, so you can pull from the bottom, plop them on top, rinse and repeat until you get to the one you're after. High-tech Jenga.
The whole point of this is uber-redundancy. It's not a flawed design at all. You'd need to destroy a good 1/4 to 1/3 of the bricks to hurt things.
This isn't a chain, where a weak link kills the entire structure. Think of a pyramid. What happens when a brick or two at the center of the Great Pyramid at Giza crumble? Not a damned thing, it still stands for another few millenia.
The probability of getting one head and one tail is 1 in 2, however.
And the probability that we'd be wiped out hits 1 in 45,000 years with this mentally retarded model. It doesnt mean it will happen, it just means that this 1 in 455 statistic is pure pseudo-science bullshit.
Noone alive knows how a super volcano works. We've never seen one erupt. We don't know where they are. The entire field of study is a bunch of guesses and labwork.
Same goes for meteors. We have no idea really how many are out there, how many are Earth threatening, where they are.
So, the probability of event A is unknown, and the probability of B is unknown, and yet, the probability of A or B occuring AND destroying all human life within 100 years is 1 in 455?
Hell, do the math. P((1/0) + (1/0) * 100) = 455
The margin of error for this "probability" has to be close to infinity.
I wish slashdot wouldn't post this kind of shit. This type of pseudo-science horseshit is killing the intellectual community. Leave this style of reporting to the NYT or other tabloids.
The problem is asshats trying to boil everything down into a single probability, which they then proceed to misterm a "statistic".
It came straight from someones ass, or more likely, the submitter or genious editors here at slshdot flubbed it.
If the odds of our species being wiped out within any givin 100 year span is 1 in 455, that would mean, statistically, we shouldnt survive more than 45,500 years.... Or at least our probability of doing so hits 0. And yet we've been here much longer.
Good, I'm tired of worthless stock options or meaningless "promotions" in lieu of real raises measured in cold hard cash.
These are scams invented by corporate HR departments to get away with paying you less without you realizing it.
Ever go into a yearly review, hear how awesome you are.. So awesome in fact, they're promoting you to "vice-manager-general"!
Your job duties are the same, but you get a nifty new title. Oh and sorry, you dont qualify for a raise. Sure you've been there two years, but now you have a new "title" so you have to wait a year to be reviewed in your new position.
Wait.. wait.. Dont quit. Here, take a bajillion shares of stock instead! They're worth 0 now, but in a year they could be worth 10 points (of course, if that happens we'll print up seven bajillion more to make sure that WE keep our cash).
They used to be able to pay employees with worthless stock and not even have to call it an expense. How is that compensation if it's not even an expense to the company?
This is a good thing, corporate america needs more rules.
It keeps companies from treating stock like their own private money printing press. Whats that? You want a raise? Well, how about a billion shares instead! Two billion!
The.com bubble was inflated with "stock options", and everyone found out that their 100,000 shares of ComputerCo weren't worth shit after they'd given away 100 ga-jillion shares.
I'm not sure how a company calculates the value of the expense, though, since the shares are generally given away when they have nil, or practically nil value. Usually as soon as the stock is worth anything at all they just print up another jillion shares.
I'm no accountant though.
I'm just in favor of making it harder for corporations to think up "creative" ways to "compensate" employees without actually paying them. The "promotion in title only" as an alternative to a real raise is something else I wish something could be done about.
Does that mean I'd be in trouble for letting my kids play a game that some old lady decided was too "violent"?
Ratings aside, I play the games and make the decision on whether my kids should be playing it.
There are M rated games that my 10 year old likes that I have no problem with him playing (Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat series), and some that I do (GTA). It's more about language and content than violence to me, and so far as I care, it's my decision.
R rated or NC-17, there is no (legal) penalty at all. The MPAA rating system is not law, it's voluntary. It's merely the theater owner's policy not to let 18 year old kids or younger in. Of course, if they dont play by the MPAA rules they don't get to show/rent their movies.
Same goes with those "explicit lyric" stickers on CDs. There's no law requiring them, it's completely voluntary. Of course, if you want to distribute through Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and the rest, you need to comply.
Hardcore porn is another subject, because that's more about pedophilia - supplying indecent or explicit material to minors.
Such as it is with video games and the voluntary ESRB rating system.
But the point is, it's perfectly fine for the MPAA/RIAA to police themselves, but we need the government to step in and regulate the sale of video games.
Yeah, right.
The Governator et al are just trying to cripple the industry that's sucking so much cash and offscreen talent from Hollywood. Their motives are so fucking transparent it makes me sick.
Absolutely ridiculous the way video games are the scapegoat for this generation.
Remember Judas Priest , Ozzy, et al being sued back in the 80s because their satanic lyrics caused all of the problems with young kids today?
Remember when it was Dungeons and Dragons?
The people are idiots though, if the movie and recording industries can police themselves (MPAA ratings / "explicit lyrics" stickers), whats the problem with the (incredibly coherent) ESRB rating system?
And once again, games are created for and marketed to adults, primarily 18-40 year old males. Just go google for any statistics (Nielson, etc) on who plays/buys games if you dont believe me.
The "think about the children" argument is a red herring. This is all about appeasing Hollywood by helping eliminate the competition. Pure pork. And politicians think it's win-win because it'll get them a lot of "cranky old bitch" votes.
So if someone tampers with YOUR mail, destroys or steals your unemployment checks, will you still be up on your soapbox talking about the "right to be anonymous while tampering with federal mail?"
It has nothing to do with terrorism, but just plain security. Protecting the mail is a BFD to the USPS. Even minor incidents get people thrown into a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
I don't see the privacy issue. The government already has my photo several times over, and they already know when I use their mail service.
If you all don't like it, use Fed Ex, UPS, Fax, e-mail, AIM, telephone, carrier pigeon....
AthlonXP Sempron 2200+ , AMD AthlonXP Barton 3000+ and AMD Athlon64 3200+ with 1mb cache are all the same thing
Realistically, they are. Your gaming experience wouldnt change noticably from one of those CPUs to the next.
You really don't need a lot of horsepower to run modern games.
I dont know if the dingii who always have the latest $500 video card have ever even tried playing on "cheap" equipment, but you'd be surprised how much you can squeeze out of an S4.
I have an older (first-mobile-gen) Radeon Mobility in my laptop, and I'm sure most of these "I play video games alot and am therefore all things to do with 3d rendering" would be blown away at how much you can actually do with something like that.
Hell, I have a GF4MX in my machine at work, and have played stuff like Halo and Far Cry on it. Both perfectly playable, and just as fun, just not at 1600x1200 with 16x FSAA and all that kind of crap.
More people saw the various film adaptations of Anne Frank, or know of her via TV/movies than have read the book.
My point was that a movie or even a game could have the same effect.
Do a little googling to find out what happened to the Great White shark population after the movie Jaws came out, and then tell me movies don't affect people.
Solar works a whole lot better when theres no atmosphere in the way.
Nuclear: the same way the sun does, radiation instead of convection. Plus the moon is essentially an enormous heatsink. And it's also less relevant when there's nothing to 'burn'.
Microsoft wont sweat, SourceSafe doesn't really compete with anything. It's just part of the Visual Studio package, which will sell for their IDEs and other features (.NET). I guess you can buy it seperately, I don't know who would though. It has nothing to do with Microsoft.
By that token, why are fiction books so serious? Did War and Peace really change anyones life? Did someone get a great epiphany reading To Kill a Mockingbird or A Farewell to Arms?
You can tell a great story in any form, books, TV, movies, or in a video game. The truly great ones don't need an award.
Most of the best movies I've seen never won an Oscars, most of the best books I've read never won a pulitzer, most of my favorite TV shows don't win Emmys, and most video games I really like won't get 9 stars at EGM or win any votes. It's irrelevant.
Being popular doesnt mean being great, and take awards shows for what they are - popularity contest. At some point some group, large or small, votes on the winners using whatever arbitrary method they use. There are no metrics, nothing you can measure to say "this game is bigger/faster/better than that one".
People like zonk need to be told what to like or dislike and/or constantly reassured that they like/dislike the same things as everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
It is how it works, forwards or backwards. If events A and B are exclusive, then the probability of A or B is p(A) + p(B). So, assuming that each 100 year span is the same as the next, the proability of us being wiped out approaches 1 at 45500 years - that is, if you buy this number.
The bigger problem is that the 1 in 455 number is based on the probability of events that we don't know anything about. It's pure pseudo-science fantastic-sounding soundbyte horse shit.
We don't know ANYTHING about supervolcanoes. Only what some geologists have imagined. "What if yellowstone is one giant volcano!" which leads to "what if it erupted?"
Of course, what if it isn't, or even if it is... What if "eruption" just meant the lava dome collapsing and doing nothing but aesthetic local damage.
We likewise don't know shit about meteor strikes. We have no idea how many meteors there are, of those, how many could strike earth, and of those, how many are big enough/fast enough to cause a major catastrophe.
Every other week I hear about a giant tidal wave, earthquake, volcano, or other threat to "survival of the human race". We don't know shit about any of these events because they've never happened. Any "statistics" coming out of any of it is just some number spit out by an inherently flawed mathematical model.
It's just as easy (and mathematically valid) for me to say there's a 1 in 455 chance that Satan's 1000 year reign of evil will begin in the next 100 years, or that we'll be enslaved by an alien race of tent caterpillars. Or that we'll all grow gills and move under the sea.
Too esoteric for a mass audience.
Think of this list as being of the top ten "science related soundbites for the local news".
I hate the way science is reported. What's more likely, they discovered an ancient race of hobbits - or dug up a midget? What do they report? The most fantastic sounding interpretation of the "evidence".
Whatever happened to the most simple explanation being the most likely to be correct?
Besides, we've known planets are there for a long long time, taking a fuzzy picture of one isn't really a "discovery", any more than the first aerial photos taken in the US were "discovery" of North America.
Got bandwidth troubles? Well we're here to help by linking your site to the front page of /. three times a week.
Sheesh. Noone reads the summary and knows the strip is here, they just go clickity-click.
On a related note, where's suprnova.org? All I get from them is a blank page.
But, Microsoft has the luxury of being able to pay people to look for flaws.
PHP and every other OSS project just sort of sits around waiting for someone to come along and volunteer to do so.
If HPHP hadn't come along, noone would be looking, and the vulnerabilities would go unpatched.
Do you ever sit there going over thousands to millions of lines of code that someone else wrote, looking for obscure flaws? It's the kind of boring thankless job that noone would do unless they were paid to. HPHP found them as a side effect to doing something else.
The very fact that there's a need for a seperate "Hardened PHP" project or "SE Linux" project should say something about the stability and security of those projects' bases. If linux was so secure and unhackable, why did the NSA spend so much money rewriting it? If PHP is so enterprise-ready, why would people try to create a "hardened" version of it?
When was the last time there was a severe bug in PHP?
Uh, right now.
This is the first time anyone's looked in PHP for flaws.
You don't worry about a single brick. Consider a wall of these things like a RAID array made up of a few hundred drives. The failure of one cell/drive/brick is irrelevant, and as the TFA says, you ignore it until its scheduled to be replaced.
Besides, you don't have to assume they're in a wall. There are plenty of configurations that could allow you to easily access whatever bricks you need.
It doesnt seem as though the bricks need to stay in the same position either, so you can pull from the bottom, plop them on top, rinse and repeat until you get to the one you're after. High-tech Jenga.
The whole point of this is uber-redundancy. It's not a flawed design at all. You'd need to destroy a good 1/4 to 1/3 of the bricks to hurt things.
This isn't a chain, where a weak link kills the entire structure. Think of a pyramid. What happens when a brick or two at the center of the Great Pyramid at Giza crumble? Not a damned thing, it still stands for another few millenia.
The probability of getting one head and one tail is 1 in 2, however.
And the probability that we'd be wiped out hits 1 in 45,000 years with this mentally retarded model. It doesnt mean it will happen, it just means that this 1 in 455 statistic is pure pseudo-science bullshit.
Noone alive knows how a super volcano works. We've never seen one erupt. We don't know where they are. The entire field of study is a bunch of guesses and labwork.
Same goes for meteors. We have no idea really how many are out there, how many are Earth threatening, where they are.
So, the probability of event A is unknown, and the probability of B is unknown, and yet, the probability of A or B occuring AND destroying all human life within 100 years is 1 in 455?
Hell, do the math. P((1/0) + (1/0) * 100) = 455
The margin of error for this "probability" has to be close to infinity.
I wish slashdot wouldn't post this kind of shit. This type of pseudo-science horseshit is killing the intellectual community. Leave this style of reporting to the NYT or other tabloids.
The problem is asshats trying to boil everything down into a single probability, which they then proceed to misterm a "statistic".
It came straight from someones ass, or more likely, the submitter or genious editors here at slshdot flubbed it.
If the odds of our species being wiped out within any givin 100 year span is 1 in 455, that would mean, statistically, we shouldnt survive more than 45,500 years.... Or at least our probability of doing so hits 0. And yet we've been here much longer.
Good, I'm tired of worthless stock options or meaningless "promotions" in lieu of real raises measured in cold hard cash.
These are scams invented by corporate HR departments to get away with paying you less without you realizing it.
Ever go into a yearly review, hear how awesome you are.. So awesome in fact, they're promoting you to "vice-manager-general"!
Your job duties are the same, but you get a nifty new title. Oh and sorry, you dont qualify for a raise. Sure you've been there two years, but now you have a new "title" so you have to wait a year to be reviewed in your new position.
Wait.. wait.. Dont quit. Here, take a bajillion shares of stock instead! They're worth 0 now, but in a year they could be worth 10 points (of course, if that happens we'll print up seven bajillion more to make sure that WE keep our cash).
They used to be able to pay employees with worthless stock and not even have to call it an expense. How is that compensation if it's not even an expense to the company?
This is a good thing, corporate america needs more rules.
It keeps companies from treating stock like their own private money printing press. Whats that? You want a raise? Well, how about a billion shares instead! Two billion!
.com bubble was inflated with "stock options", and everyone found out that their 100,000 shares of ComputerCo weren't worth shit after they'd given away 100 ga-jillion shares.
The
I'm not sure how a company calculates the value of the expense, though, since the shares are generally given away when they have nil, or practically nil value. Usually as soon as the stock is worth anything at all they just print up another jillion shares.
I'm no accountant though.
I'm just in favor of making it harder for corporations to think up "creative" ways to "compensate" employees without actually paying them. The "promotion in title only" as an alternative to a real raise is something else I wish something could be done about.
Thats more of the bullshit.
I'm talking about Neilson stats - those are whose playing the game, or watching the channel, not sales statistics.
Adults play videogames more than kids do. That's why there are more adult games than kiddy ones.
MS wont sell this, or their new antivirus. Both will ship with Windows.
A spyware/adware/virus scanner is prevention.
How can this be a bad thing?
Does that mean I'd be in trouble for letting my kids play a game that some old lady decided was too "violent"?
Ratings aside, I play the games and make the decision on whether my kids should be playing it.
There are M rated games that my 10 year old likes that I have no problem with him playing (Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat series), and some that I do (GTA). It's more about language and content than violence to me, and so far as I care, it's my decision.
R rated or NC-17, there is no (legal) penalty at all. The MPAA rating system is not law, it's voluntary. It's merely the theater owner's policy not to let 18 year old kids or younger in. Of course, if they dont play by the MPAA rules they don't get to show/rent their movies.
Same goes with those "explicit lyric" stickers on CDs. There's no law requiring them, it's completely voluntary. Of course, if you want to distribute through Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and the rest, you need to comply.
Hardcore porn is another subject, because that's more about pedophilia - supplying indecent or explicit material to minors.
Such as it is with video games and the voluntary ESRB rating system.
But the point is, it's perfectly fine for the MPAA/RIAA to police themselves, but we need the government to step in and regulate the sale of video games.
Yeah, right.
The Governator et al are just trying to cripple the industry that's sucking so much cash and offscreen talent from Hollywood. Their motives are so fucking transparent it makes me sick.
Absolutely ridiculous the way video games are the scapegoat for this generation.
Remember Judas Priest , Ozzy, et al being sued back in the 80s because their satanic lyrics caused all of the problems with young kids today?
Remember when it was Dungeons and Dragons?
The people are idiots though, if the movie and recording industries can police themselves (MPAA ratings / "explicit lyrics" stickers), whats the problem with the (incredibly coherent) ESRB rating system?
And once again, games are created for and marketed to adults, primarily 18-40 year old males. Just go google for any statistics (Nielson, etc) on who plays/buys games if you dont believe me.
The "think about the children" argument is a red herring. This is all about appeasing Hollywood by helping eliminate the competition. Pure pork. And politicians think it's win-win because it'll get them a lot of "cranky old bitch" votes.
Bitch wants to have her cake and eat it too.
Guess what, this is what happens to your lifes work when you sell out.
Anyone who expects Sci Fi to ever produce anything worth watching is a moron.
So if someone tampers with YOUR mail, destroys or steals your unemployment checks, will you still be up on your soapbox talking about the "right to be anonymous while tampering with federal mail?"
It has nothing to do with terrorism, but just plain security. Protecting the mail is a BFD to the USPS. Even minor incidents get people thrown into a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
I don't see the privacy issue. The government already has my photo several times over, and they already know when I use their mail service.
If you all don't like it, use Fed Ex, UPS, Fax, e-mail, AIM, telephone, carrier pigeon....
AthlonXP Sempron 2200+ , AMD AthlonXP Barton 3000+ and AMD Athlon64 3200+ with 1mb cache are all the same thing
Realistically, they are. Your gaming experience wouldnt change noticably from one of those CPUs to the next.
You really don't need a lot of horsepower to run modern games.
I dont know if the dingii who always have the latest $500 video card have ever even tried playing on "cheap" equipment, but you'd be surprised how much you can squeeze out of an S4.
I have an older (first-mobile-gen) Radeon Mobility in my laptop, and I'm sure most of these "I play video games alot and am therefore all things to do with 3d rendering" would be blown away at how much you can actually do with something like that.
Hell, I have a GF4MX in my machine at work, and have played stuff like Halo and Far Cry on it. Both perfectly playable, and just as fun, just not at 1600x1200 with 16x FSAA and all that kind of crap.
More people saw the various film adaptations of Anne Frank, or know of her via TV/movies than have read the book.
My point was that a movie or even a game could have the same effect.
Do a little googling to find out what happened to the Great White shark population after the movie Jaws came out, and then tell me movies don't affect people.
When will someone create a GPLed replacement for this OpenCVS thing?
I checked it out but I couldnt commit to it.
HAHA get it, theres a client but no server.. hee hee..
Funny how you're a troll but everyone making the exact same statement about subversion is +5: insightful!
I prefer VSS too. It works and I dont have to futz around on a command line.
Solar works a whole lot better when theres no atmosphere in the way.
Nuclear: the same way the sun does, radiation instead of convection. Plus the moon is essentially an enormous heatsink. And it's also less relevant when there's nothing to 'burn'.
Microsoft wont sweat, SourceSafe doesn't really compete with anything. It's just part of the Visual Studio package, which will sell for their IDEs and other features (.NET). I guess you can buy it seperately, I don't know who would though. It has nothing to do with Microsoft.
By that token, why are fiction books so serious? Did War and Peace really change anyones life? Did someone get a great epiphany reading To Kill a Mockingbird or A Farewell to Arms?
You can tell a great story in any form, books, TV, movies, or in a video game. The truly great ones don't need an award.
Most of the best movies I've seen never won an Oscars, most of the best books I've read never won a pulitzer, most of my favorite TV shows don't win Emmys, and most video games I really like won't get 9 stars at EGM or win any votes. It's irrelevant.
Being popular doesnt mean being great, and take awards shows for what they are - popularity contest. At some point some group, large or small, votes on the winners using whatever arbitrary method they use. There are no metrics, nothing you can measure to say "this game is bigger/faster/better than that one".
People like zonk need to be told what to like or dislike and/or constantly reassured that they like/dislike the same things as everyone else.