Not that Javascript doesn't have faults, but what exactly is it about Javascript that means it can't be used offline? The only real hurdles to writing 'offline' apps in Javascript are the lack of traditional local file access and other anti-cross-site-scripting features in browsers which have nothing to do with Javascript itself and everything to do with security concerns that would affect any 'web language'.
I give you, for example, GitHub's new "Atom" editor which, as far as I can tell, is mostly Javascript, running in its own gimped version of Chromium with the local file access API enabled. I assume Adobe Brackets is the same. Any 'offline' Javascript code that you've written in Node.JS are obviously a figment of your imagination, too.
Meanwhile, languages that "compile" to Javascript as if it were bytecode seem to work quite well, like the aforementioned 'Dart', Coffeescript, Haxe and Google Web Toolkit (which compiles Java to JavaScript). From what I've seen, although they ain't gonna be used for climate modelling or big data anytime soon, their performance is quite adequate for the sort of thing that web apps need to do.
perhaps interstellar travel is impossible or maybe civilizations are always self-destructive. But with every new discovery of a potentially habitable planet, the Fermi Paradox becomes increasingly mysterious.
No, it doesn't. It just suggests that interstellar travel and communication are very, very difficult. They don't have to be impossible, just hard enough to put a spoke in the Ponzi-scheme galactic colonization plan that the Fermi prediction relies on, and why SETI hasn't found any needles in the haystack yet.
We know that space travel is hard. We got from powered flight to landing on the Moon in a single human lifetime, then hit the wall. We have hugely successful, experimentally proven theories of physics that say that FTL travel is impossible, and well-reasoned scientific speculation showing that the possible loopholes (Alcubiere warps, wormholes etc.) require access to exotic matter, consume ridiculous amounts of energy, and (fortunately, for causality's sake) have deal-breaking complications... and even if they work may only provide near/at/slightly over lightspeed travel. We know enough about energy and matter to start doing the sums for slower-than-light interstellar travel and work out how difficult it is* (even SF writers fall back on Unobtanium power rather than 'old fangled' fusion drives for their generation ships, now).
As for communication/detecting signals, our only data point is us: A century or so after inventing radio, we're already switching to highly compressed, encrypted digital signals indistinguishable from noise without the 'key', transmitted at the lowest power and tightest beam possible.
So, despite all the plausible resolutions of the 'Fermi paradox' which, while not proven, are built on reasoned extrapolation of what we do know, why do people focus on the least plausible resolution: 'there are no aliens' which, while impossible to conclusively disprove without actually finding an alien, relies on us existing on the tail end of a probability curve?
That is anthropocentric thinking bordering on religion.
* Plus, if you can build generation ships that can survive in interstellar space, and manage their populations, it would be far, far easier to build space habitats and park them somewhere with solar energy and big chunks of raw materials floating around. Kinda reduces your incentive for Ponzi colonization which, as Greg Egan put it, "is what bacteria with spaceships would do".
"Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights"
Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear.
Red herring. Where did the GP say that the nearside lane was clear? I've often been overtaking a string of slow-moving traffic, only to have some wanker in a big German saloon (the sort with the aggressive-looking LED running lights designed to intimidate peons without flashing and honking) drop out of hyperdrive 6" behind my tailpipe. If the nearside lane did have room to swing a cat, they would use it to pass you.
Less freedom than what? An XBox, Playstation or Wii with locked-down hardware, that probably aren't ever going to support alternative software or game stores without jailbreaking? And good luck building a homebrew XBox or Playstation using your choice of components.
Steam seems to be the least worst of the game platforms.
The real test of a SteamBox is whether you can quit Steam, access the underlying OS and install other software. AFAIK that is eminently possible under SteamOS - whether Steam Boxes will be locked down is unknown (it would be a mistake).
It would be nice if that underlying OS was Linux, but it sounds as if Valve has dropped the ball. It's OK taking forever to create the next version of Half Life - but if you're relying on third party hardware manufacturers you need to stick to schedule.
When I buy my next car, however, I do know it will probably cost between $50K-$100K, and involve several weekends worth of Excel and making Pugh charts, because I don't drop that cash on a whim.
Strange. Although my annual income has less digits in it than yours, I've put by enough savings to easily drop ~$70k on a car without needing finance, yet I would only worry about running costs if it ran on single malt and was lubricated with white truffle oil, because it is completely bloody obvious that the running costs are trivial when you could get a pretty nice car for half the price, and insignificant c.f. the value a new car uses when it rolls of the forecourt (...actually the BMW i3 range extender sounds more suited to my needs, although I'd probably need to rent a long-range car from time to time).
I'll save you at least one Excel weekend, though: buying the $50k car rather than the $100k car will save you $50k. $50k will get you 10k gallons of gas. 10k gallons of petrol will take you 400,000 miles - or 100 miles every day for 10 years (by which time I'm pretty sure you'll have fried a Tesla battery or two). The only way you're going to save money with the Tesla is if you like it better than the $100k car (and don't end up needing a second car for long journeys). No Pugh charts (whatever the hell they are) required.
The question I'd be asking is not "how much am I going to save on fuel" but "how much is a 3 year old Tesla going to be worth". I'd put my money on depreciation making fuel cost savings look like chump change... and the more fuel costs you save, the higher the mileage and the worse the depreciation...
I don't understand why we keep following elon around like lost puppies when he really doesn't do anything for the average person.
Well, he's making a lot of advances in electric car technology and is dropping strong hints that he plans to share those with the rest of the industry on a fairly generous basis. Selling premium-priced cars to the rich is a good way to bankroll that - in 5-10 years time the rest of us may well be benefitting from this work. I can respect that.
What he hasn't done yet is created a compelling alternative to the gas-powered car. The Tesla has a very clear niche where it might be practical if cash were no object: private garages and long, regular commutes of 50-100 miles: long enough to make you want to travel in a luxurious car, short enough to fall comfortably within the Tesla's range, home-based so you can recharge overnight.
I'd be OK with that if the Tesla website didn't try and push things like economy (no, you're not going to save money unless you conveniently ignore the extra cost of the car - but if you have that sort of money why would you care?) and how easy it was to make a road trip (...just start driving, then have lunch at a supercharger! On the newly-localised British site this advice is followed by a map that shows no superchargers in the UK)
I think they're on the verge of getting there: make that mileage '250 miles minimum)' rather than 'up to 265 miles (unless you get stuck in slow traffic and need lights, heat or air con)' and have supercharger stations every 50 miles or so (otherwise your useful range gets reduced because you have to recharge early or detour to charge) and you might have a viable care replacement.
There's also a scaling issue with chargers: I was looking at (non-Tesla) chargers in the UK and, superficially, its not too bad. Look closer, however, and most of those stations only have 1 or 2 bays - often one slow and one fast (with different connectors). Arrive there and find the bay in use (with the owners off having lunch somewhere), or out-of-order, and you'd be stuffed. You'd have to be so cautious about how soon to recharge that it would decimate the useful range of an EV.
Without those subsidies, those people might have to study in high school and go to college in order to make a living...terrifying!
Seriously? If all those hypothetical wasters go to school and get decent, well-paid jobs (assuming someone pays to feed and shelter them while they do), who is going to flip the burgers and clean the toilets?
Of course, that won't be a problem, because going to college never guaranteed anybody a well-paid job, and the main effect of an increased supply of college graduates in an unregulated economy would be to reduce vacancies and push down the wages of all college graduates.
I.E. -> Those "1%-ers" ARE "the problem" in that not only does capital underutilization occur due to hoarding money essentially, but NEVER using it... but those 1% hoarders ALONE could never, EVER, spend as much as the masses would.
I suspect that a lot of that money is fairy gold that would disappear if it were ever spent. What do you think would happen, say, to the MS share price if Bill Gates just dumped all his shares on the market?
I'm not sure the problem with wages is so much the billionaire's club (there may be other problems with that) as the large number of management/admin employees on mid 6-figure salaries, often receiving several times more money than even well-qualified employees 'below' them, let alone the janitor. Re-distributing some of those wages might make a difference.
I'd vary the GPs suggestion and have a maximum legal salary of (say) $100k, or maybe lower, with any benefits beyond that in the form of shares (with a strict minimum holding period) or other long-term profit-sharing schemes. These should satisfy strict criteria to ensure that they were genuinely dependent on medium/long term performance and carried significant risk (not the typical dollar-on-elastic share option scam).
I don't mind some people becoming rich. I do mind some people getting high-6-digit salaries for turning up to work and implementing short-term-ist slash & burn schemes.
Keep in mind that a family would qualify for SNAP and rent support also.
Translation: the employer can only get away with paying only $7.50 because the government makes up the difference between that and a realistic wage. Benefits without minimum living wage == state subsidy of industry. Still, don't worry, if you look around enough you'll be able to find someone faking disability to parade in front of the media, and prevent people asking awkward questions about how much taxpayers money goes to allowing working people to survive on unliveable wages.
I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage.
You don't need to be a socialist: lack of a minimum living wage means that the taxpayer is forking out vast quantities of money to subsidise businesses by allowing them to employ people without paying them a living wage. Even the capitalist paradise of the USA understands that you can have too many people starving in the streets and spends billions of dollars on welfare. In the UK, the government makes a huge song and dance about the long-term unemployed while avoiding the elephant in the room: a huge chunk of the welfare budget is being spent to allow working people to sleep indoors and eat food so that their employers can pay them peanuts.
Also, you can't sell things to people with no money, which is a problem... we've tried lending them money that they can't possibly repay, and that went a bit pear-shaped, so we're trying it again to see if it turns out differently this time.
Seriously. The current Kindle does one job - reading long texts for leisure - really, really well, and is pretty much crap at anything else.
The e-ink display is very restful to read for long periods, even in bright sunlight and gives incredible battery life, but at the expense of a glacial refresh rate and the need for pixels to be regularly cycled to black. Its no good whatsoever for the sort of fluid touch interface that you'll see in a 'proper' tablet or smartphone.
The Kindle is my go-to device for 'sitting down with a good book' (or even 'sitting on a plane reading low-mental-load crappy SF shorts') but for any other use - even reading reference books where you need to rapidly scroll/skim, use indices/TOCs or follow links, a tablet, smartphone or laptop runs rings around it.
As soon as someone cracks a full-colour, high refresh-rate, low power 'eInk' technology to replace backlit LCD in tablets and phones, the e-reader will be dead overnight.
Also, I know Amazon is teh evilz (but no more so than Apple, Google or Microsoft), and the Kindle is their cash register, but they also run a bloody good service. As they say, the Devil has all the best tunes (and books).
Why not use Node.js that has already got the wheel (JIT) rather than drilling holes in PHP to fit an axle?
Because PHP also has a perfectly good chassis, body, roof, steering wheel, gear shift, seats, windows, instruments, cup holders, audio, fluffy dice etc. that you know how to use and don't want to throw away.
People don't use PHP for the language (which is fugly), they use it because it has a huge collection of useful libraries, supported and well documented on the php.net site - and it is almost certainly available on your web hosting service.
Not knocking Node.js, but it is still "getting there" as far as mature library support goes: yes, there are plenty of modules, but you're still more likely to find 4 diverse, half-written modules for a particular function than one complete, well-documented, future-proof choice.
It can also be overly complex: Node's USP is asynchronous, event-driven programming, which is cool, but harder and overkill for many applications. Then there's the small matter of having to effectively roll your own web server for even the simplest dynamic web page (OK, you'll probably use a third party module - pick one and hope it stands the test of time, then learn how to configure it) and you'll still probably need a black belt in Apache to set up a reverse proxy to your app.
Mind you, the great thing about Node vs. PHP is that nobody ever has anything bad to say about Javascript as a programming language </sarcasm>
It's not like the guy sitting in the seat is the actual "driver" of an autonomous car.
No, but maybe if you're going to have a bit of heavy machinery rolling along the road, someone needs to be "in charge" and responsible.
My guess is that an "autonomous" car will need an emergency kill switch (required on virtually any bit of machinery) and maybe the ability to be manually 'driven' at 5mph with a full symphony of flashing lights and warning beeps, so that if the computer gets stuck it can be manoeuvred out of the way.
It also seems sensible that it should be accompanied by a 'responsible person' with some minimal training in emergency procedure who can call the emergency services when needed (or *stop* the vehicle calling the emergency services unnecessarily). Nothing like the sort of training required a driving license, but AI has a long way to go before it can deal with anything the world can throw at it.
So, age requirements could be relaxed - but not removed. I'm sure a 14-year-old could cope. Some of the stricter drink-drive limits could also be relaxed - but that doesn't mean its a good idea to be paralytically drunk in one of these.
Yes, there are driverless trains, but (a) they are on rails, which limits the sort of scrapes they can get in to, and (b) there are humans on-call, at a much higher human-to-vehicle ratio than you could ever expect with domestic cars.
That's the wrong way to do it according to Common Core [ijreview.com]. No, instead you need to do this:
Instead of citing a silly youtube video that's part of the FUD campaign against the common core (motivated by political dogmas that have nothing to do with math or education), why don't you try referencing the actual common core state standards say is that 2nd graders should be taught to:
Fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.
Note "strategies" (plural). Good "common core" activities take a class of problem and look at multiple ways of solving it. As others have pointed out, your 'common core' subtraction method is one perfectly valid strategy for doing a subtraction in your head. Its not a replacement for the traditional way (which, as you can see, is perfectly compatible with the common core definition. If any teachers really are teaching "your" method, rote, as "the way" to do do subtraction, and marking the traditional method wrong, then they really don't have a clue about common core. More likely someone with an axe to grind has cherry-picked the example from an activity in which students are specifically told to try different methods, or explore strategies for mental arithmetic, and presented it out of context.
Also, please bear in mind that the current 'status quo' in US schools is not:
32
-12
------
20
....but more like:
What is 32 - 12? (a) 44, (b) 30, (c) 20, (d) -44
Shade the correct bubble.
...and its logically impossible to get any more insane than that (plus, the kids still can't do it).
This isn't even as insane as it gets. My son was given the problem: 1.62 / 0.27. Instead of actually dividing, he was told to draw 162 "tenths segments" Then he had to redraw them, but in groupings of 27. The number of groupings was his answer. Does this work? Yes, but it doesn't teach kids to work with numbers.
Grade 6 The Number System Compute fluently with multi-digit numbers and find common factors and multiples. 3
Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation.
Either your son urgently needs to change school or, more likely, you've again picked out part of an activity designed to help kids understand a topic from different perspectives and weed out common misconceptions. In this case, lots of kids would answer '0.06' or '0.6' because they think division always makes things smaller. This sort of activity helps them understand why that is not true.
A good activity might have kids repeating a method like this with 1.62/27, 162/27 and 162/0.27, maybe using manipulatives or some software, and reflecting on the result sandwiched between more traditional problems using the standard algorithms.
and yet kids are being taught that THIS is how you solve math problems and doing it any other way is WRONG (even if it works and gives you the right answer).
[Citation Needed]. There's certainly nothing of the sort here. If anything, the thrust of the common core is that there isn't just one right way of doing something (read the Common Core Math Practices).
If any teacher is actually doing as you describe then they are emphatically not teaching the common core, and someone, somewhere along the line has either pulled a massive TL:DNR (not impossible) or is deliberately spreading (or unwittingly retweet
GPS specifically refers to the system created by the US military for tracking your position using a bunch of satellites they put up there.
So, its a System that gives you your Position on the Globe, but not a GPS(TM). Thanks for the clarification...
Unless its just a super-accurate way of finding out which way is North in which case it is probably a compass (not trademarked, at least in that context, AFAIK). Carefully analysing the name "quantum compass" suggests that maybe, just maybe, that's the case - although it could still form part of a System that gives your Position on the Globe.
Maybe the key distinction is that a GPS (TM-or-otherwise) will work out your position from scratch, whereas the sort of hyper-accurate dead reckoning/inertial navigation system that TFA appears to describe would need to know where you started from...
Maybe the inhabitants of those other planets aren't ravening imperialist douchebags.
Or, as one of the posthuman characters in Greg Egan's Disapora says of the Fermi paradox: "That's what bacteria with spaceships would do".
The simplest way to explain away the Fermi paradox is that interstellar travel is really, really difficult, bordering on impossible. Even if you can plant a flag on your local equivalent of Proxima Centuri, scaling it up so that you can shift useful numbers of excess population and/or bring back the booty may be another matter.
As far as we know, FTL travel is impossible - all the theories require copious quantities of unobtanium and there's the small matter of violating causality. We could be wrong, but we're a little bit more advanced than "travelling over 30mph will cause suffocation" here.
Generation ships? Well, we still don't know how to build one of those in practice, but it sounds more attainable. However, if you can build a self-sustaining generation ship, that can survive for centuries in interstellar space without access to external energy or raw materials, and your race has the social maturity to maintain a stable population for generations (without reverting to savagery, worshiping the engines as a god and blowing the ship up in a holy civil war...) then your race has probably outgrown the 'lets conquer the galaxy for the hell of it' stage.
In any case, with that level of technology, it would be a hell of a lot easier to just build a Dyson Swarm and live in space habitats where there was plenty of external energy and raw material.
Maybe do the same for a couple of nearby stars, just for security, but any nearby star will do, no need to hunt for goldilocks-zone planets when asteroids are so much more useful. But more than that... well, psychotic expansionists who believe in continual exponential growth make bloody awful generation ship crews.
Or if you think your DNA is so good you need to share it with the rest of the universe... just send freeze dried viruses. Maybe the last squirrel flu epidemic was the colonists from the planet Zog?
No production code without unit tests. Every possible type or class of input must be tested. All assumptions must be tested. All outputs must be verified for each possible combination of inputs. All failure modes must be exercised. No excuses, just do it.
Unit testing would only have caught this if someone had thought to test for an invalid payload length in the incoming request. Maybe OpenSSL would be a good candidate for full-blown formal methods that could mathematically prove that it matched the specification - however, then its important to remember that the proof only says that the code matched the specification not that the specification matched the real world, so all it really does is shift the complexity and scope for errors to the specification.
Thing is, for networking, those tests need to be right there in the code. Any data coming in off the web needs to be treated like a TSA officer treats a hippie in a 'Legalise Dope' T-shirt. Simple code review shows that OpenSSL wasn't doing that.
I glanced at some of the OpenSSL C code, in particular the new code that introduced this bug.
I don't disagree about the 'coding style' issue, but that kinda misses the point. The points are:
Theres a memcpy() - where is the bounds checking? Hello? Its not 1976. We all know memcpy is dangerous. Where there's a memcpy there should be a bounds check... even in a fart app. If the project has secure in the title there should be paranoid anal-retentive checking of both the source and destination buffers.
The code uses data that has come from teh interwebs, - again, where's the obsessive-compulsive validity checking on everything that comes in?
However, that's still not the point. Programmers make mistakes - and this bug was at least a bit more subtle than the usual one where the bad hat sends an over-length string.
The problem is with the oft-made claim that Open Source security software is extra-safe because the code is public has been seen by many eyeballs. That claim is dead. Possibly crypto experts have been all over the actual encryption/decryption algorithms in OpenSSL like flies on shit - however, clearly none of them looked at the boring heartbeat stuff. That shouldn't be the death of open source, though - Windows is proprietary and look at the sheer terror caused by the prospect of running Windows XP for one day after the security patches stop...
That's a little harsh. Lawrence Krauss was also tricked into appearing in the documentary, are you going to claim he's stupid as well?
Its quite easily to believe that you could invite a scientist to be interviewed for a legitimate-sounding science documentary and then assemble a few soundbites that supported your cause by cherry-picking statements and using them out of context.
Its slightly harder to believe that someone could record the complete narration of such a film without getting some idea of what it was about - or at least getting suspicious. Nor does it pass the plausibility test that the makers would go to the time, expense or legal risk* of large-scale manipulation when there are plenty of real life Troy McLures out there would will read out whatever the hell they were handed if they needed money or lizards.
Of course, you'd really need to watch the film to make a judgement, and I don't propose to pollute my eyeballs with a single photon of it.
(* Yeah, its technically easy to change 'I do not believe that' into 'I do believe that' - but if you get caught you'll be slaughtered in the subsequent lawsuit. Better to take complete statements out of context and make it a question of interpretation).
Yeah but they have ass breath and rotting, discolored teeth.
Only because our leaders keep taking advice from the Americans about how to run a health service (and for some reason, dentistry has taken a far worse hit than other services: even if you can find a national health service dentist you still have to pay non-trivial sums for treatment if you're not a child or OAP - c.f. Doctors where the worst case is max ~£10/month for prescriptions. I guess not enough babies die from toothache to motivate the opposition).
Anyway, once they all rot and fall out you can get dentures and enjoy unnaturally white, uniform, plastic-looking teeth just like an American.
Plus, we're much more reluctant to humiliate teenagers by forcing them to wear mediaeval torture devices to straighten their teeth just when they're most sensitive about their appearance.
An amp of current produces about a half a litre per hour of hydrogen gas. A 9V batter with 0.5-1 Ahr is not going to produce less than a litre of hydrogen gas, which wouldn't be a problem even in a small closet.
A litre? OK, you get to stick the burning splint into the collection bottle to test that it's hydrogen. I'm quite attached to my eyebrows. A few ccs in a test tube is enough for a satisfying 'pop'.
Half a litre of pure O2 is more than enough to do something inadvisable with, too. Pass the wire wool and the blowtorch please...
However, I wasn't suggesting that the hydrogen and oxygen were more of a deadly peril than the chlorine - just that its silly to single out one chemical because its been used in warfare and ignore the other potential risks. G.P. forgot to tell people not to drink the electrolyte, swallow the battery or get strands of copper wire stuck in their fingers.
Chlorine gas is toxic. It was used in shells to poison troops in WW1.
Whereas both hydrogen and oxygen are perfectly safe and have never been known to case any sort of problem whatsoever... well, ok, there was the Hindenburg, and Apollo 1, and...
So if you do the described experiment while locked in a badly-ventilated room, leave it running for long enough to increase Ever Ready's share price by 1%, ignore the eye-watering stink that even a whiff of chlorine will produce and then light a cigarette, you could be in real trouble. If only from all the crap in the cigarette smoke...
However, all this pales into insignificance alongside the experiment's reckless use of the liquid death that is Dihydrogen Monoxide!
Seriously, guys, when everything is described as dangerous, nothing gets treated as dangerous. If you're not sure what it is, don't wait for someone on the internet to tell you not to snort it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that Javascript doesn't have faults, but what exactly is it about Javascript that means it can't be used offline? The only real hurdles to writing 'offline' apps in Javascript are the lack of traditional local file access and other anti-cross-site-scripting features in browsers which have nothing to do with Javascript itself and everything to do with security concerns that would affect any 'web language'.
I give you, for example, GitHub's new "Atom" editor which, as far as I can tell, is mostly Javascript, running in its own gimped version of Chromium with the local file access API enabled. I assume Adobe Brackets is the same. Any 'offline' Javascript code that you've written in Node.JS are obviously a figment of your imagination, too.
Meanwhile, languages that "compile" to Javascript as if it were bytecode seem to work quite well, like the aforementioned 'Dart', Coffeescript, Haxe and Google Web Toolkit (which compiles Java to JavaScript). From what I've seen, although they ain't gonna be used for climate modelling or big data anytime soon, their performance is quite adequate for the sort of thing that web apps need to do.
perhaps interstellar travel is impossible or maybe civilizations are always self-destructive. But with every new discovery of a potentially habitable planet, the Fermi Paradox becomes increasingly mysterious.
No, it doesn't. It just suggests that interstellar travel and communication are very, very difficult. They don't have to be impossible, just hard enough to put a spoke in the Ponzi-scheme galactic colonization plan that the Fermi prediction relies on, and why SETI hasn't found any needles in the haystack yet.
We know that space travel is hard. We got from powered flight to landing on the Moon in a single human lifetime, then hit the wall. We have hugely successful, experimentally proven theories of physics that say that FTL travel is impossible, and well-reasoned scientific speculation showing that the possible loopholes (Alcubiere warps, wormholes etc.) require access to exotic matter, consume ridiculous amounts of energy, and (fortunately, for causality's sake) have deal-breaking complications... and even if they work may only provide near/at/slightly over lightspeed travel. We know enough about energy and matter to start doing the sums for slower-than-light interstellar travel and work out how difficult it is* (even SF writers fall back on Unobtanium power rather than 'old fangled' fusion drives for their generation ships, now).
As for communication/detecting signals, our only data point is us: A century or so after inventing radio, we're already switching to highly compressed, encrypted digital signals indistinguishable from noise without the 'key', transmitted at the lowest power and tightest beam possible.
So, despite all the plausible resolutions of the 'Fermi paradox' which, while not proven, are built on reasoned extrapolation of what we do know, why do people focus on the least plausible resolution: 'there are no aliens' which, while impossible to conclusively disprove without actually finding an alien, relies on us existing on the tail end of a probability curve?
That is anthropocentric thinking bordering on religion.
* Plus, if you can build generation ships that can survive in interstellar space, and manage their populations, it would be far, far easier to build space habitats and park them somewhere with solar energy and big chunks of raw materials floating around. Kinda reduces your incentive for Ponzi colonization which, as Greg Egan put it, "is what bacteria with spaceships would do".
"Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights"
Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear.
Red herring. Where did the GP say that the nearside lane was clear? I've often been overtaking a string of slow-moving traffic, only to have some wanker in a big German saloon (the sort with the aggressive-looking LED running lights designed to intimidate peons without flashing and honking) drop out of hyperdrive 6" behind my tailpipe. If the nearside lane did have room to swing a cat, they would use it to pass you.
Less freedom than what? An XBox, Playstation or Wii with locked-down hardware, that probably aren't ever going to support alternative software or game stores without jailbreaking? And good luck building a homebrew XBox or Playstation using your choice of components.
Steam seems to be the least worst of the game platforms.
The real test of a SteamBox is whether you can quit Steam, access the underlying OS and install other software. AFAIK that is eminently possible under SteamOS - whether Steam Boxes will be locked down is unknown (it would be a mistake).
It would be nice if that underlying OS was Linux, but it sounds as if Valve has dropped the ball. It's OK taking forever to create the next version of Half Life - but if you're relying on third party hardware manufacturers you need to stick to schedule.
When I buy my next car, however, I do know it will probably cost between $50K-$100K, and involve several weekends worth of Excel and making Pugh charts, because I don't drop that cash on a whim.
Strange. Although my annual income has less digits in it than yours, I've put by enough savings to easily drop ~$70k on a car without needing finance, yet I would only worry about running costs if it ran on single malt and was lubricated with white truffle oil, because it is completely bloody obvious that the running costs are trivial when you could get a pretty nice car for half the price, and insignificant c.f. the value a new car uses when it rolls of the forecourt (...actually the BMW i3 range extender sounds more suited to my needs, although I'd probably need to rent a long-range car from time to time).
I'll save you at least one Excel weekend, though: buying the $50k car rather than the $100k car will save you $50k. $50k will get you 10k gallons of gas. 10k gallons of petrol will take you 400,000 miles - or 100 miles every day for 10 years (by which time I'm pretty sure you'll have fried a Tesla battery or two). The only way you're going to save money with the Tesla is if you like it better than the $100k car (and don't end up needing a second car for long journeys). No Pugh charts (whatever the hell they are) required.
The question I'd be asking is not "how much am I going to save on fuel" but "how much is a 3 year old Tesla going to be worth". I'd put my money on depreciation making fuel cost savings look like chump change... and the more fuel costs you save, the higher the mileage and the worse the depreciation...
I don't understand why we keep following elon around like lost puppies when he really doesn't do anything for the average person.
Well, he's making a lot of advances in electric car technology and is dropping strong hints that he plans to share those with the rest of the industry on a fairly generous basis. Selling premium-priced cars to the rich is a good way to bankroll that - in 5-10 years time the rest of us may well be benefitting from this work. I can respect that.
What he hasn't done yet is created a compelling alternative to the gas-powered car. The Tesla has a very clear niche where it might be practical if cash were no object: private garages and long, regular commutes of 50-100 miles: long enough to make you want to travel in a luxurious car, short enough to fall comfortably within the Tesla's range, home-based so you can recharge overnight.
I'd be OK with that if the Tesla website didn't try and push things like economy (no, you're not going to save money unless you conveniently ignore the extra cost of the car - but if you have that sort of money why would you care?) and how easy it was to make a road trip (...just start driving, then have lunch at a supercharger! On the newly-localised British site this advice is followed by a map that shows no superchargers in the UK)
I think they're on the verge of getting there: make that mileage '250 miles minimum)' rather than 'up to 265 miles (unless you get stuck in slow traffic and need lights, heat or air con)' and have supercharger stations every 50 miles or so (otherwise your useful range gets reduced because you have to recharge early or detour to charge) and you might have a viable care replacement.
There's also a scaling issue with chargers: I was looking at (non-Tesla) chargers in the UK and, superficially, its not too bad. Look closer, however, and most of those stations only have 1 or 2 bays - often one slow and one fast (with different connectors). Arrive there and find the bay in use (with the owners off having lunch somewhere), or out-of-order, and you'd be stuffed. You'd have to be so cautious about how soon to recharge that it would decimate the useful range of an EV.
Without those subsidies, those people might have to study in high school and go to college in order to make a living...terrifying!
Seriously? If all those hypothetical wasters go to school and get decent, well-paid jobs (assuming someone pays to feed and shelter them while they do), who is going to flip the burgers and clean the toilets?
Of course, that won't be a problem, because going to college never guaranteed anybody a well-paid job, and the main effect of an increased supply of college graduates in an unregulated economy would be to reduce vacancies and push down the wages of all college graduates.
I.E. -> Those "1%-ers" ARE "the problem" in that not only does capital underutilization occur due to hoarding money essentially, but NEVER using it ... but those 1% hoarders ALONE could never, EVER, spend as much as the masses would .
I suspect that a lot of that money is fairy gold that would disappear if it were ever spent. What do you think would happen, say, to the MS share price if Bill Gates just dumped all his shares on the market?
I'm not sure the problem with wages is so much the billionaire's club (there may be other problems with that) as the large number of management/admin employees on mid 6-figure salaries, often receiving several times more money than even well-qualified employees 'below' them, let alone the janitor. Re-distributing some of those wages might make a difference.
I'd vary the GPs suggestion and have a maximum legal salary of (say) $100k, or maybe lower, with any benefits beyond that in the form of shares (with a strict minimum holding period) or other long-term profit-sharing schemes. These should satisfy strict criteria to ensure that they were genuinely dependent on medium/long term performance and carried significant risk (not the typical dollar-on-elastic share option scam).
I don't mind some people becoming rich. I do mind some people getting high-6-digit salaries for turning up to work and implementing short-term-ist slash & burn schemes.
Keep in mind that a family would qualify for SNAP and rent support also.
Translation: the employer can only get away with paying only $7.50 because the government makes up the difference between that and a realistic wage. Benefits without minimum living wage == state subsidy of industry. Still, don't worry, if you look around enough you'll be able to find someone faking disability to parade in front of the media, and prevent people asking awkward questions about how much taxpayers money goes to allowing working people to survive on unliveable wages.
I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage.
You don't need to be a socialist: lack of a minimum living wage means that the taxpayer is forking out vast quantities of money to subsidise businesses by allowing them to employ people without paying them a living wage. Even the capitalist paradise of the USA understands that you can have too many people starving in the streets and spends billions of dollars on welfare. In the UK, the government makes a huge song and dance about the long-term unemployed while avoiding the elephant in the room: a huge chunk of the welfare budget is being spent to allow working people to sleep indoors and eat food so that their employers can pay them peanuts.
Also, you can't sell things to people with no money, which is a problem... we've tried lending them money that they can't possibly repay, and that went a bit pear-shaped, so we're trying it again to see if it turns out differently this time.
Lorenz contraction, says the tachyon.
Why the long face? asks the barman.
A tachyon walks into a bar.
Seriously. The current Kindle does one job - reading long texts for leisure - really, really well, and is pretty much crap at anything else.
The e-ink display is very restful to read for long periods, even in bright sunlight and gives incredible battery life, but at the expense of a glacial refresh rate and the need for pixels to be regularly cycled to black. Its no good whatsoever for the sort of fluid touch interface that you'll see in a 'proper' tablet or smartphone.
The Kindle is my go-to device for 'sitting down with a good book' (or even 'sitting on a plane reading low-mental-load crappy SF shorts') but for any other use - even reading reference books where you need to rapidly scroll/skim, use indices/TOCs or follow links, a tablet, smartphone or laptop runs rings around it.
As soon as someone cracks a full-colour, high refresh-rate, low power 'eInk' technology to replace backlit LCD in tablets and phones, the e-reader will be dead overnight.
Also, I know Amazon is teh evilz (but no more so than Apple, Google or Microsoft), and the Kindle is their cash register, but they also run a bloody good service. As they say, the Devil has all the best tunes (and books).
Why not use Node.js that has already got the wheel (JIT) rather than drilling holes in PHP to fit an axle?
Because PHP also has a perfectly good chassis, body, roof, steering wheel, gear shift, seats, windows, instruments, cup holders, audio, fluffy dice etc. that you know how to use and don't want to throw away.
People don't use PHP for the language (which is fugly), they use it because it has a huge collection of useful libraries, supported and well documented on the php.net site - and it is almost certainly available on your web hosting service.
Not knocking Node.js, but it is still "getting there" as far as mature library support goes: yes, there are plenty of modules, but you're still more likely to find 4 diverse, half-written modules for a particular function than one complete, well-documented, future-proof choice.
It can also be overly complex: Node's USP is asynchronous, event-driven programming, which is cool, but harder and overkill for many applications. Then there's the small matter of having to effectively roll your own web server for even the simplest dynamic web page (OK, you'll probably use a third party module - pick one and hope it stands the test of time, then learn how to configure it) and you'll still probably need a black belt in Apache to set up a reverse proxy to your app.
Mind you, the great thing about Node vs. PHP is that nobody ever has anything bad to say about Javascript as a programming language </sarcasm>
It's not like the guy sitting in the seat is the actual "driver" of an autonomous car.
No, but maybe if you're going to have a bit of heavy machinery rolling along the road, someone needs to be "in charge" and responsible.
My guess is that an "autonomous" car will need an emergency kill switch (required on virtually any bit of machinery) and maybe the ability to be manually 'driven' at 5mph with a full symphony of flashing lights and warning beeps, so that if the computer gets stuck it can be manoeuvred out of the way.
It also seems sensible that it should be accompanied by a 'responsible person' with some minimal training in emergency procedure who can call the emergency services when needed (or *stop* the vehicle calling the emergency services unnecessarily). Nothing like the sort of training required a driving license, but AI has a long way to go before it can deal with anything the world can throw at it.
So, age requirements could be relaxed - but not removed. I'm sure a 14-year-old could cope. Some of the stricter drink-drive limits could also be relaxed - but that doesn't mean its a good idea to be paralytically drunk in one of these.
Yes, there are driverless trains, but (a) they are on rails, which limits the sort of scrapes they can get in to, and (b) there are humans on-call, at a much higher human-to-vehicle ratio than you could ever expect with domestic cars.
That's the wrong way to do it according to Common Core [ijreview.com]. No, instead you need to do this:
Instead of citing a silly youtube video that's part of the FUD campaign against the common core (motivated by political dogmas that have nothing to do with math or education), why don't you try referencing the actual common core state standards say is that 2nd graders should be taught to:
Fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.
Note "strategies" (plural). Good "common core" activities take a class of problem and look at multiple ways of solving it. As others have pointed out, your 'common core' subtraction method is one perfectly valid strategy for doing a subtraction in your head. Its not a replacement for the traditional way (which, as you can see, is perfectly compatible with the common core definition. If any teachers really are teaching "your" method, rote, as "the way" to do do subtraction, and marking the traditional method wrong, then they really don't have a clue about common core. More likely someone with an axe to grind has cherry-picked the example from an activity in which students are specifically told to try different methods, or explore strategies for mental arithmetic, and presented it out of context.
Also, please bear in mind that the current 'status quo' in US schools is not:
32
-12
------
20
....but more like:
What is 32 - 12?
(a) 44,
(b) 30,
(c) 20,
(d) -44
Shade the correct bubble.
...and its logically impossible to get any more insane than that (plus, the kids still can't do it).
This isn't even as insane as it gets. My son was given the problem: 1.62 / 0.27. Instead of actually dividing, he was told to draw 162 "tenths segments" Then he had to redraw them, but in groupings of 27. The number of groupings was his answer. Does this work? Yes, but it doesn't teach kids to work with numbers.
From the common core state standards:
Grade 6 The Number System Compute fluently with multi-digit numbers and find common factors and multiples. 3
Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation.
Either your son urgently needs to change school or, more likely, you've again picked out part of an activity designed to help kids understand a topic from different perspectives and weed out common misconceptions. In this case, lots of kids would answer '0.06' or '0.6' because they think division always makes things smaller. This sort of activity helps them understand why that is not true.
A good activity might have kids repeating a method like this with 1.62/27, 162/27 and 162/0.27, maybe using manipulatives or some software, and reflecting on the result sandwiched between more traditional problems using the standard algorithms.
and yet kids are being taught that THIS is how you solve math problems and doing it any other way is WRONG (even if it works and gives you the right answer).
[Citation Needed]. There's certainly nothing of the sort here. If anything, the thrust of the common core is that there isn't just one right way of doing something (read the Common Core Math Practices).
If any teacher is actually doing as you describe then they are emphatically not teaching the common core, and someone, somewhere along the line has either pulled a massive TL:DNR (not impossible) or is deliberately spreading (or unwittingly retweet
Not only is it useful, but it's secure too—the technology is apparently interference-proof.
Well, radio interference maybe.
Here's betting that a sufficiently powerful magnet or a honking great lump of iron in the wrong place would screw it up nicely.
GPS specifically refers to the system created by the US military for tracking your position using a bunch of satellites they put up there.
So, its a System that gives you your Position on the Globe, but not a GPS(TM). Thanks for the clarification...
Unless its just a super-accurate way of finding out which way is North in which case it is probably a compass (not trademarked, at least in that context, AFAIK). Carefully analysing the name "quantum compass" suggests that maybe, just maybe, that's the case - although it could still form part of a System that gives your Position on the Globe.
Maybe the key distinction is that a GPS (TM-or-otherwise) will work out your position from scratch, whereas the sort of hyper-accurate dead reckoning/inertial navigation system that TFA appears to describe would need to know where you started from...
Close your eyes and picture the person across from you constantly looking at their watch. It screams boredom.
c/f taking out their smartphone every 5 minutes to check incoming texts?
Maybe the inhabitants of those other planets aren't ravening imperialist douchebags.
Or, as one of the posthuman characters in Greg Egan's Disapora says of the Fermi paradox: "That's what bacteria with spaceships would do".
The simplest way to explain away the Fermi paradox is that interstellar travel is really, really difficult, bordering on impossible. Even if you can plant a flag on your local equivalent of Proxima Centuri, scaling it up so that you can shift useful numbers of excess population and/or bring back the booty may be another matter.
As far as we know, FTL travel is impossible - all the theories require copious quantities of unobtanium and there's the small matter of violating causality. We could be wrong, but we're a little bit more advanced than "travelling over 30mph will cause suffocation" here.
Generation ships? Well, we still don't know how to build one of those in practice, but it sounds more attainable. However, if you can build a self-sustaining generation ship, that can survive for centuries in interstellar space without access to external energy or raw materials, and your race has the social maturity to maintain a stable population for generations (without reverting to savagery, worshiping the engines as a god and blowing the ship up in a holy civil war...) then your race has probably outgrown the 'lets conquer the galaxy for the hell of it' stage.
In any case, with that level of technology, it would be a hell of a lot easier to just build a Dyson Swarm and live in space habitats where there was plenty of external energy and raw material.
Maybe do the same for a couple of nearby stars, just for security, but any nearby star will do, no need to hunt for goldilocks-zone planets when asteroids are so much more useful. But more than that... well, psychotic expansionists who believe in continual exponential growth make bloody awful generation ship crews.
Or if you think your DNA is so good you need to share it with the rest of the universe... just send freeze dried viruses. Maybe the last squirrel flu epidemic was the colonists from the planet Zog?
No production code without unit tests. Every possible type or class of input must be tested. All assumptions must be tested. All outputs must be verified for each possible combination of inputs. All failure modes must be exercised. No excuses, just do it.
Unit testing would only have caught this if someone had thought to test for an invalid payload length in the incoming request. Maybe OpenSSL would be a good candidate for full-blown formal methods that could mathematically prove that it matched the specification - however, then its important to remember that the proof only says that the code matched the specification not that the specification matched the real world, so all it really does is shift the complexity and scope for errors to the specification.
Thing is, for networking, those tests need to be right there in the code. Any data coming in off the web needs to be treated like a TSA officer treats a hippie in a 'Legalise Dope' T-shirt. Simple code review shows that OpenSSL wasn't doing that.
I glanced at some of the OpenSSL C code, in particular the new code that introduced this bug.
I don't disagree about the 'coding style' issue, but that kinda misses the point. The points are:
Theres a memcpy() - where is the bounds checking? Hello? Its not 1976. We all know memcpy is dangerous. Where there's a memcpy there should be a bounds check... even in a fart app. If the project has secure in the title there should be paranoid anal-retentive checking of both the source and destination buffers.
The code uses data that has come from teh interwebs, - again, where's the obsessive-compulsive validity checking on everything that comes in?
However, that's still not the point. Programmers make mistakes - and this bug was at least a bit more subtle than the usual one where the bad hat sends an over-length string.
The problem is with the oft-made claim that Open Source security software is extra-safe because the code is public has been seen by many eyeballs. That claim is dead. Possibly crypto experts have been all over the actual encryption/decryption algorithms in OpenSSL like flies on shit - however, clearly none of them looked at the boring heartbeat stuff. That shouldn't be the death of open source, though - Windows is proprietary and look at the sheer terror caused by the prospect of running Windows XP for one day after the security patches stop...
That's a little harsh. Lawrence Krauss was also tricked into appearing in the documentary, are you going to claim he's stupid as well?
Its quite easily to believe that you could invite a scientist to be interviewed for a legitimate-sounding science documentary and then assemble a few soundbites that supported your cause by cherry-picking statements and using them out of context.
Its slightly harder to believe that someone could record the complete narration of such a film without getting some idea of what it was about - or at least getting suspicious. Nor does it pass the plausibility test that the makers would go to the time, expense or legal risk* of large-scale manipulation when there are plenty of real life Troy McLures out there would will read out whatever the hell they were handed if they needed money or lizards.
Of course, you'd really need to watch the film to make a judgement, and I don't propose to pollute my eyeballs with a single photon of it.
(* Yeah, its technically easy to change 'I do not believe that' into 'I do believe that' - but if you get caught you'll be slaughtered in the subsequent lawsuit. Better to take complete statements out of context and make it a question of interpretation).
Yeah but they have ass breath and rotting, discolored teeth.
Only because our leaders keep taking advice from the Americans about how to run a health service (and for some reason, dentistry has taken a far worse hit than other services: even if you can find a national health service dentist you still have to pay non-trivial sums for treatment if you're not a child or OAP - c.f. Doctors where the worst case is max ~£10/month for prescriptions. I guess not enough babies die from toothache to motivate the opposition).
Anyway, once they all rot and fall out you can get dentures and enjoy unnaturally white, uniform, plastic-looking teeth just like an American.
Plus, we're much more reluctant to humiliate teenagers by forcing them to wear mediaeval torture devices to straighten their teeth just when they're most sensitive about their appearance.
An amp of current produces about a half a litre per hour of hydrogen gas. A 9V batter with 0.5-1 Ahr is not going to produce less than a litre of hydrogen gas, which wouldn't be a problem even in a small closet.
A litre? OK, you get to stick the burning splint into the collection bottle to test that it's hydrogen. I'm quite attached to my eyebrows. A few ccs in a test tube is enough for a satisfying 'pop'.
Half a litre of pure O2 is more than enough to do something inadvisable with, too. Pass the wire wool and the blowtorch please...
However, I wasn't suggesting that the hydrogen and oxygen were more of a deadly peril than the chlorine - just that its silly to single out one chemical because its been used in warfare and ignore the other potential risks. G.P. forgot to tell people not to drink the electrolyte, swallow the battery or get strands of copper wire stuck in their fingers.
Chlorine gas is toxic. It was used in shells to poison troops in WW1.
Whereas both hydrogen and oxygen are perfectly safe and have never been known to case any sort of problem whatsoever... well, ok, there was the Hindenburg, and Apollo 1, and...
So if you do the described experiment while locked in a badly-ventilated room, leave it running for long enough to increase Ever Ready's share price by 1%, ignore the eye-watering stink that even a whiff of chlorine will produce and then light a cigarette, you could be in real trouble. If only from all the crap in the cigarette smoke...
However, all this pales into insignificance alongside the experiment's reckless use of the liquid death that is Dihydrogen Monoxide!
Seriously, guys, when everything is described as dangerous, nothing gets treated as dangerous. If you're not sure what it is, don't wait for someone on the internet to tell you not to snort it.