Yeah the early days of Slashot were great. I lurked on slashdot since the late 90's, it was many years before I made an account. But for the best part of a decade I read slashdot every day. In the early days it was THE site for Linux/open source news. I still look at it occasionally, and logged in to post this for the first time in a few years. I have nothing else to add beyond what has been said, but want to post anyway. RIP Roblimo.
If Congress wanted Constellation, then they would have funded it. That was one of Obama's options. The status quo was ridiculous. The options were fund it, or kill it.
And if someone flips the meaning of TRUE and FALSE, then you have much bigger problems on your hands. The whole basis of comparison operations in C is based around zero versus non-zero. The value '1' has no significance whatsoever.
Argh, in C, comparisons against true (TRUE) or false (FALSE) are even worse style. Indeed, in C, defining TRUE == 1 is erroneous, because in C anything that is zero is false, anything that is non-zero is true. So in C, code such as
if (a == TRUE)
is a bug. Any non-zero value represents true, but this comparison only tests for a == 1.
Comparisons against FALSE are OK, but flawed logic. It is anyway a boolean, so why not just test directly?
if (a)
In C, you should *never* do a comparison against TRUE. If you really want to do a comparison against a boolean value (which is never necessary, but perhaps, in some cases, might be a useful form of documenting your intent), compare against FALSE. eg,
if (a == FALSE)
if (a != FALSE)// the proper way of comparing a == TRUE
That kind of code indicates some rather flawed logic. Why would you ever want to compare something against a boolean? Better to write simply If !Field.IsCleverlyHiddenByAPhisher...
I was going to reply, but logging on half-way through writing the reply caused the edit box to clear and I lost it. But nevermind, the comment from haruchai sums up what I was going to say anyway. Trying to store biomass doesn't work, it decomposes and releases the CO2 anyway. Trying to 'plug' it is basically impossible, it amounts to basically artificially reproducing the same effect that happens in the production of coal or oil. The natural rate of fossil fuel production, across the entire planet, is something like 1 barrel of oil per day. (yes that fits - the rate of oil usage currently about 20 million barrels per day; it formed over the course of 300 million years).
Ignoring all other points but just focusing on one: The 'corrections' in this data set are, at most, 0.06 degrees C. That is only a couple of pixels on the XKCD comic. Do you know what a pixel is? Hint: it is really small. If you looked at the original comic, and the 'corrected' comic, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless you looked very very closely.
So the solution that ends up getting implemented is that the autonomous car will take whatever course of action that will minimize costs, which will typically be crash into whichever car contains the occupants with the least total wealth.
They're never going to fix this. It isn't just a matter of publishing source code, it affects the hardware too. It needs hardware protection on the flash, for example, so that you can control, at a hardware level (eg by a button on the device) whether the flash is writable.
But by now, all of the manufacturers are so infiltrated by other agencies, the NSA, foreign governments, and business interests (having the user in control of their own security directly contradicts the aims of DRM, not to mention marketing companies); this all conspires against ever having any security over your own firmware.
Build it yourself is probably the best bet. And the nice thing is that this is becoming more practical. The biggest problem is that there is no way to verify the hardware at the chip level, but with careful design it is possible to get reasonably good security without 100% trust in all of the individual components.
But for the overwhelming majority of people, who are not motivated or able to build their own, their tech is doomed to be compromised. I don't think there is anything that can be done about that. It is a political issue, rather than technical. And in all "democracies" that I can think of, the political will is against it.
DoD, DHS, CIA, NSA, etc will all require that you keep your research secret. They do fund cryptographers, but they are all in-house and not part of the academic community.
There is no doubt that *eventually* natural carbon sequestration will remove the excess carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere. The problem though is that the natural rate of fossil fuel formation is roughly 10 barrel of oil per day. The amount of oil we are burning is about 10 million barrels of oil per day. So yes, in a few million years it will all change back into oil, and the amount of CO2 will be back to where it is today. I'm glad that is a comfort to you, I'm sure your children will take comfort in it too.
And yes, the ocean pH has decreased by about 0.1 since pre-industrial times. That is becoming *more acidic*.
That's a load of nonsense - the problem is that 10-15 years is too short a time-scale to make a reliable judgment. Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade. But it isn't a steady increase. If you look at the 15-year period up to 2006, the warming trend was almost twice as high as normal (namely 0.3 C per decade) but nobody cared much (except climate scientists and environmentalists). The 15-year period from 1998 to now has been slower than the trend, and that's got hugely more attention. The reason is that interest groups strongly push the latter, and want to ignore anything that doesn't fit their agenda.
See here for details
No, the rate at which it's removed doesn't increase with increasing CO2, at least not enough to make a difference. Some additional carbon is stored in the oceans, possibly some increased biomass (but probably outweighed by deforestation?), but its pretty small in comparison to the amount of carbon stored in fossil fuels. And the amount is limited - the oceans are already turning slightly acidic.
The OS included priority inheritance mutexes, but IIRC the developers decided not to use them for reasons of 'efficiency'. Presumably it takes an extra cycle or two to lock a priority-inheriting mutex...
All of those were proved wrong by evidence, and once the evidence was there and presented to people, people believed it. That isn't the case with global warming. There is plenty of evidence, and it all points in one direction. There isn't any "smoking gun" that can be used to disprove global warming, and there almost certainly never will be.
Also, it isn't true that "99% of scientist used to say that "the Earth was flat"". Even the ancient Greeks knew that the earth was round.
The comparison to the geocentric / heliocentric models of the solar system isn't fair either. Science as a discipline really only developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, so at the time that the Church taught everyone that the Earth was the center of the universe there wasn't really such a thing as a "scientist". No one had any real reason to disbelieve the geocentric model because there wasn't any convincing evidence to refute it. Not until Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter, and Kepler's equations for orbits, and later Netwon derived Kepler's equations from the inverse-square law of gravitation, that finally the heliocentric model was on a firm footing. it Indeed, the events that led to the heliocentric model in many ways represents the birth of what we regard nowdays as "science". There is nothing "scientific" about climate change denial, it is pure politics and greed.
That isn't very accurate. At some point 97% of geologists had never heard of plate techtonics. Once the theory was proposed there was, of course, some opposition because it was so different to what was previously believed. But once geologists properly evaluated the evidence, almost every geologist took it on board.
Similarly, once the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs became widely known, it didn't take all that long for scientists to take a good objective look at the evidence and rewrite the textbooks.
There is no comparison to climate change because the "for" and "against" theories have been known for 30+ years by now. So far no one has managed to find any convincing evidence against global warming, and at this point the basic theory is so well established it is inconceivable that anyone ever will. You might argue about the magnitude of the problem, and whether some other effect might mask the warming (which is true anyway, eg I don't think anyone really knows why the deep ocean has been warming faster than expected, and somewhat masking surface warming). But there isn't going to be a "smoking gun" that disproves the basic notions, not any more than there will ever be a "smoking gun" that disproves Newton's theory of gravity. That doesn't mean that the theories won't get refined (eg, general relativity can be seen as a refinement of Newtonian gravity).
Merchants can charge additional for using a CC in Australia, since a few years ago. I think it cannot be more than the fees associated with the CC purchase. Its quite common now to pay a "credit card fee" with purchases, both online and in stores.
I don't think so - even after an extinction-level event on the Earth, it would still be an easier place for a habitation than the Moon. For a start, the Earth would still have an atmosphere, and even if it was toxic or otherwise not breathable it still makes the task of maintaining a habitat much easer (ie only need to seal it, rather than build a pressure container). Similar story for water (maybe need to go to great lengths to decontaminate water from a post-apocolyptic Earth, but that is still fairly simple compared with extracting water from the Moon), soil, plant life etc.
>virtually all laptops are macs though, which is curious.
Not really. The laptops really are great hardware regardless of which OS you run on it. Unless of course you are one of those people with an irrational hatred of all things Apple.
I was referring to the dichotomy of using windows on the desktop but a mac laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah the early days of Slashot were great. I lurked on slashdot since the late 90's, it was many years before I made an account. But for the best part of a decade I read slashdot every day. In the early days it was THE site for Linux/open source news. I still look at it occasionally, and logged in to post this for the first time in a few years. I have nothing else to add beyond what has been said, but want to post anyway. RIP Roblimo.
If Congress wanted Constellation, then they would have funded it. That was one of Obama's options. The status quo was ridiculous. The options were fund it, or kill it.
There have also been suggestions that they planted child porn in order to get the $500 bounty.
And if someone flips the meaning of TRUE and FALSE, then you have much bigger problems on your hands. The whole basis of comparison operations in C is based around zero versus non-zero. The value '1' has no significance whatsoever.
Argh, in C, comparisons against true (TRUE) or false (FALSE) are even worse style. Indeed, in C, defining TRUE == 1 is erroneous, because in C anything that is zero is false, anything that is non-zero is true. So in C, code such as
if (a == TRUE)
is a bug. Any non-zero value represents true, but this comparison only tests for a == 1.
Comparisons against FALSE are OK, but flawed logic. It is anyway a boolean, so why not just test directly?
if (a)
In C, you should *never* do a comparison against TRUE. If you really want to do a comparison against a boolean value (which is never necessary, but perhaps, in some cases, might be a useful form of documenting your intent), compare against FALSE. eg,
if (a == FALSE)
if (a != FALSE) // the proper way of comparing a == TRUE
That kind of code indicates some rather flawed logic. Why would you ever want to compare something against a boolean? Better to write simply If !Field.IsCleverlyHiddenByAPhisher ...
Sorry, the rate of natural oil production is actually about 10 barrels per day.
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
I was going to reply, but logging on half-way through writing the reply caused the edit box to clear and I lost it. But nevermind, the comment from haruchai sums up what I was going to say anyway. Trying to store biomass doesn't work, it decomposes and releases the CO2 anyway. Trying to 'plug' it is basically impossible, it amounts to basically artificially reproducing the same effect that happens in the production of coal or oil. The natural rate of fossil fuel production, across the entire planet, is something like 1 barrel of oil per day. (yes that fits - the rate of oil usage currently about 20 million barrels per day; it formed over the course of 300 million years).
Ignoring all other points but just focusing on one: The 'corrections' in this data set are, at most, 0.06 degrees C. That is only a couple of pixels on the XKCD comic. Do you know what a pixel is? Hint: it is really small. If you looked at the original comic, and the 'corrected' comic, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless you looked very very closely.
So the solution that ends up getting implemented is that the autonomous car will take whatever course of action that will minimize costs, which will typically be crash into whichever car contains the occupants with the least total wealth.
They're never going to fix this. It isn't just a matter of publishing source code, it affects the hardware too. It needs hardware protection on the flash, for example, so that you can control, at a hardware level (eg by a button on the device) whether the flash is writable.
But by now, all of the manufacturers are so infiltrated by other agencies, the NSA, foreign governments, and business interests (having the user in control of their own security directly contradicts the aims of DRM, not to mention marketing companies); this all conspires against ever having any security over your own firmware.
Build it yourself is probably the best bet. And the nice thing is that this is becoming more practical. The biggest problem is that there is no way to verify the hardware at the chip level, but with careful design it is possible to get reasonably good security without 100% trust in all of the individual components.
But for the overwhelming majority of people, who are not motivated or able to build their own, their tech is doomed to be compromised. I don't think there is anything that can be done about that. It is a political issue, rather than technical. And in all "democracies" that I can think of, the political will is against it.
The reason why Gtk was written is because at the time that GIMP was starting out, there wasn't a good alternative. Nowdays there are.
DoD, DHS, CIA, NSA, etc will all require that you keep your research secret. They do fund cryptographers, but they are all in-house and not part of the academic community.
Drone attacks?
There is no doubt that *eventually* natural carbon sequestration will remove the excess carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere. The problem though is that the natural rate of fossil fuel formation is roughly 10 barrel of oil per day. The amount of oil we are burning is about 10 million barrels of oil per day. So yes, in a few million years it will all change back into oil, and the amount of CO2 will be back to where it is today. I'm glad that is a comfort to you, I'm sure your children will take comfort in it too.
And yes, the ocean pH has decreased by about 0.1 since pre-industrial times. That is becoming *more acidic*.
That's a load of nonsense - the problem is that 10-15 years is too short a time-scale to make a reliable judgment. Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade. But it isn't a steady increase. If you look at the 15-year period up to 2006, the warming trend was almost twice as high as normal (namely 0.3 C per decade) but nobody cared much (except climate scientists and environmentalists). The 15-year period from 1998 to now has been slower than the trend, and that's got hugely more attention. The reason is that interest groups strongly push the latter, and want to ignore anything that doesn't fit their agenda. See here for details
No, the rate at which it's removed doesn't increase with increasing CO2, at least not enough to make a difference. Some additional carbon is stored in the oceans, possibly some increased biomass (but probably outweighed by deforestation?), but its pretty small in comparison to the amount of carbon stored in fossil fuels. And the amount is limited - the oceans are already turning slightly acidic.
The OS included priority inheritance mutexes, but IIRC the developers decided not to use them for reasons of 'efficiency'. Presumably it takes an extra cycle or two to lock a priority-inheriting mutex...
All of those were proved wrong by evidence, and once the evidence was there and presented to people, people believed it. That isn't the case with global warming. There is plenty of evidence, and it all points in one direction. There isn't any "smoking gun" that can be used to disprove global warming, and there almost certainly never will be.
Also, it isn't true that "99% of scientist used to say that "the Earth was flat"". Even the ancient Greeks knew that the earth was round.
The comparison to the geocentric / heliocentric models of the solar system isn't fair either. Science as a discipline really only developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, so at the time that the Church taught everyone that the Earth was the center of the universe there wasn't really such a thing as a "scientist". No one had any real reason to disbelieve the geocentric model because there wasn't any convincing evidence to refute it. Not until Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter, and Kepler's equations for orbits, and later Netwon derived Kepler's equations from the inverse-square law of gravitation, that finally the heliocentric model was on a firm footing. it Indeed, the events that led to the heliocentric model in many ways represents the birth of what we regard nowdays as "science". There is nothing "scientific" about climate change denial, it is pure politics and greed.
The ancient greeks knew that the earth was round. They even had a pretty good estimate of its radius, and the distance to the sun.
That isn't very accurate. At some point 97% of geologists had never heard of plate techtonics. Once the theory was proposed there was, of course, some opposition because it was so different to what was previously believed. But once geologists properly evaluated the evidence, almost every geologist took it on board.
Similarly, once the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs became widely known, it didn't take all that long for scientists to take a good objective look at the evidence and rewrite the textbooks.
There is no comparison to climate change because the "for" and "against" theories have been known for 30+ years by now. So far no one has managed to find any convincing evidence against global warming, and at this point the basic theory is so well established it is inconceivable that anyone ever will. You might argue about the magnitude of the problem, and whether some other effect might mask the warming (which is true anyway, eg I don't think anyone really knows why the deep ocean has been warming faster than expected, and somewhat masking surface warming). But there isn't going to be a "smoking gun" that disproves the basic notions, not any more than there will ever be a "smoking gun" that disproves Newton's theory of gravity. That doesn't mean that the theories won't get refined (eg, general relativity can be seen as a refinement of Newtonian gravity).
Merchants can charge additional for using a CC in Australia, since a few years ago. I think it cannot be more than the fees associated with the CC purchase. Its quite common now to pay a "credit card fee" with purchases, both online and in stores.
I don't think so - even after an extinction-level event on the Earth, it would still be an easier place for a habitation than the Moon. For a start, the Earth would still have an atmosphere, and even if it was toxic or otherwise not breathable it still makes the task of maintaining a habitat much easer (ie only need to seal it, rather than build a pressure container). Similar story for water (maybe need to go to great lengths to decontaminate water from a post-apocolyptic Earth, but that is still fairly simple compared with extracting water from the Moon), soil, plant life etc.
>virtually all laptops are macs though, which is curious.
Not really. The laptops really are great hardware regardless of which OS you run on it. Unless of course you are one of those people with an irrational hatred of all things Apple.
I was referring to the dichotomy of using windows on the desktop but a mac laptop.