Uhh... the solution is to have fewer kids. This has already happened in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Europe, and much of Latin America. It has also happened in America if you ignore immigration. The only places where population is still growing significantly are South Asia and Africa, and even there the rates are falling quickly as literacy and healthcare improve.
So the solution to having to many people is to make more people? Got it.
China doesn't have too many people. Their working age population is already falling, and the population as a whole will begin to fall within a few years. By going to a two-child policy, they are not "making more people", they are just leveling off. Two kids from two parents is just population replacement, not growth.
The point made in the summary is stupid, so it is not effective shilling anyway. It was written by someone who has no idea what is actually happening in the schools. I am involved in teaching elementary school kids programming. None of the schools that I know of are starting with Ruby, or Python, or Java, or any other language being criticizing. They all use Scratch, which is a much better introduction to programming than BASIC.
The high schools tend to use Java, because that is what the AP-CS test uses, but high school students can handle small print.
Not all scientists and other academics write in a complex, jargon filled style, but many do.
I have found that the amount of complexity and jargon is inversely correlated with the competence of the scientist. Great scientists, like Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein, were famous for their clear and simple explanations. Poor scientists use a lot of complexity and jargon to camouflage the fact that they aren't actually saying anything important.
Nonsense. I used to get several debt collection robo-calls every week, for someone I never heard of. Apparently, this deadbeat either used to have my phone number, or just listed my phone number on his credit app. Since it is a robo-call, there is no human at the other end to tell I am not the person they are looking for. I was only able to stop the calls by buying a $39 call blocker from Amazon.
The inherent value from some mineral from the ground is exactly zero too.
Gold mining is a filthy business. It causes extensive erosion, silted creeks and rivers, and mercury poisoning. Bitcoin mining is far better for the environment, and most of the electricity used comes from clean and cheap hydro-power.
Better hurricane models (the current prediction technology had the worst hurricane on record cause -zero- deaths in Mexico.)
That was caused by sensational journalism rather than bad models. Although Patricia was a record storm out at sea, models showed that it would lose energy as it passed over cooler waters close to the coast. The models correctly predicted that the winds would drop from 200mph to about 165 by the time it came ashore.
The next big use for large machines is HFT. A microsecond or two on a fast pipe can mean millions in stock gains.
The glory days of HFT are in the past. Speed is no longer an advantage when everyone is doing it. Besides, HFT needs fast pipes, but doesn't really need a lot of computation.
"One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them."
Zuckerberg has been conditioned to believe that there are poor people in Palo Alto, where the median income is $163,000. It is the 3rd richest city in America, behind only Bethesda, Maryland and Greenwich, Connecticut.
If he wants to help "low income students", he picked one of the worst possible places to start.
Software that people are paid to written more often includes the boring, not-fun parts like testing, documentation, and auditing.
I have worked on plenty of both open source and closed source projects over the last 30 years, and this is nonsense. If someone is being paid to do it, then a PHB is setting the priorities, and the programmer is working for pay rather than passion.
I have worked on projects that converted from closed to open source. It was a months long process to clean up all the vomit code, before the company wasn't too embarrassed to make it public. When Netscape went open source, the open source community looked at their code, and decided it was such a pile of crap that it would be easier to just throw it all away and start from scratch.
Also, plenty of people get paid to work on open source.
Therefore closed source software has a higher chance of being audited.
Have any of you ever decompiled machine code and from that tried to figure out how it worked?
Yes.
It's damned difficult
Full reverse engineering is difficult. But a hacker doesn't need to do that. He is just looking for potential stack overflows, buffer overruns, weak user authentication code, etc. If they exist, those are easy to find, using a disassembler and a VM.
In my opinion it's going to be tougher all around if the firmware/software is closed-source
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Open source is no guarantee of perfect security, but it has a better track record than closed source.
I think the better word choice is "guarantee" instead of "warranty" for the headline.
Also, "visible source" would be better than "open source". Unless they actually mean that anyone should be able to copy, modify, fork, and redistribute.
These crime gangs will just look for some other large profit activity.
If the alternative activity was profitable, someone would already be doing it. Most crime is opportunistic. If you eliminate the opportunity, you eliminate the crime. There is not a fixed amount of crime in the world, and there is no reason to believe that eliminating one type of crime causes increases in other crimes.
The days of a lifetime job at one company have been over for at least 3 decades really.
The days of a "lifetime job" NEVER happened. It is a myth. Average job tenure is higher today that it has ever been in the past. Sure, back in the 1960s, there were some people that worked at the same company for 40 years, but not as many as you may think, and there were a lot more that did day work and odd jobs.
Knowing the military the document giving clearance to tell of the sequence of events is probably classified and will remain so for 50 years./s
Most documents are automatically declassified after 30 years. These alleged events happened 53 years ago. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you are adding an additional unlikely conspiracy to keep it classified, to the already extraordinary claim that the events happened at all. And there is no evidence whatsoever that any of it true, except one guy's story.
So, it seems there was a permission process involved and it was only recently given.
No. HE SAYS he had to wait for permission. There is no evidence that this is true. If permission was granted, it would have been in writing, and he would have a document to prove it. So where is it?
There are two possibilities: 1. There was a very unlikely sequence of events, and then a vast conspiracy of silence involving dozens of people over 5 decades, to cover up something that no moral person would believe should be covered up, for no logical reason other than avoiding the embarrassment of officials that retired and mostly died long ago. 2. One guy made up a story. William of Okham says it is #2.
Considering the number of incidents in the Cold War where a nuclear war was averted by cool heads...
There may have been a number of incidents... but I doubt if this one really happened. This is all based on the testimony of ONE person, backed up by another anonymous witness that may, or may not, actually exist. Since there were dozens of people supposedly aware of the situation, I find it hard to believe that no one told this story before, or is able to corroborate this one guy's story.
This is likely just some half-senile old geezer trying to draw attention to himself by making up wild war stories.
The Americans haven't been in peace time mode since 1945 unless I missed history classes.
You missed some classes. The US was at war, continuously, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with American soldiers fighting to prop up dictators in Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras, etc.
Seriously, you want to spend 10% of the US military's entire budget on one line item?
No, no, you are missing the point. We need to increase the military budget by 10%. The whole point of scaremongering and manufactured crises, is to get more money, not just shift around what you already have.
And that's why I'm launching an initiative to get more men into elementary education.
I know you are joking, but this is actually a good idea. Elementary education could be greatly improved with more male teachers. Boys, and especially black boys, do better academically with male role models, and girls do no worse. Male teachers are only a quarter as likely to refer a student for possible ADHD medication. They are more likely to deal with a fidgeting student by making the kid run some laps around the playground.
Slashdot Mirror
Whats the solution? Wish I knew.
Uhh ... the solution is to have fewer kids. This has already happened in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Europe, and much of Latin America. It has also happened in America if you ignore immigration. The only places where population is still growing significantly are South Asia and Africa, and even there the rates are falling quickly as literacy and healthcare improve.
So the solution to having to many people is to make more people? Got it.
China doesn't have too many people. Their working age population is already falling, and the population as a whole will begin to fall within a few years. By going to a two-child policy, they are not "making more people", they are just leveling off. Two kids from two parents is just population replacement, not growth.
Please stop shilling for Facebook.
The point made in the summary is stupid, so it is not effective shilling anyway. It was written by someone who has no idea what is actually happening in the schools. I am involved in teaching elementary school kids programming. None of the schools that I know of are starting with Ruby, or Python, or Java, or any other language being criticizing. They all use Scratch, which is a much better introduction to programming than BASIC.
The high schools tend to use Java, because that is what the AP-CS test uses, but high school students can handle small print.
Not all scientists and other academics write in a complex, jargon filled style, but many do.
I have found that the amount of complexity and jargon is inversely correlated with the competence of the scientist. Great scientists, like Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein, were famous for their clear and simple explanations. Poor scientists use a lot of complexity and jargon to camouflage the fact that they aren't actually saying anything important.
I get those. I tell them it isn't me and that it was the last owner of the number. I am polite but firm.
If you can talk back to the caller, then it is NOT A ROBO-CALL, and has nothing to do with this issue.
Pay your bills, no one calls.
Nonsense. I used to get several debt collection robo-calls every week, for someone I never heard of. Apparently, this deadbeat either used to have my phone number, or just listed my phone number on his credit app. Since it is a robo-call, there is no human at the other end to tell I am not the person they are looking for. I was only able to stop the calls by buying a $39 call blocker from Amazon.
The inherent value from some mineral from the ground is exactly zero too.
Gold mining is a filthy business. It causes extensive erosion, silted creeks and rivers, and mercury poisoning. Bitcoin mining is far better for the environment, and most of the electricity used comes from clean and cheap hydro-power.
Better hurricane models (the current prediction technology had the worst hurricane on record cause -zero- deaths in Mexico.)
That was caused by sensational journalism rather than bad models. Although Patricia was a record storm out at sea, models showed that it would lose energy as it passed over cooler waters close to the coast. The models correctly predicted that the winds would drop from 200mph to about 165 by the time it came ashore.
The next big use for large machines is HFT. A microsecond or two on a fast pipe can mean millions in stock gains.
The glory days of HFT are in the past. Speed is no longer an advantage when everyone is doing it. Besides, HFT needs fast pipes, but doesn't really need a lot of computation.
Just wait till we have fully autonomous cars
We already have fully autonomous cars. You just can't buy one yet.
What guarantee do you have that your cars runs the code you were allowed to see?
All the consumer safety lawyers willing to make themselves rich by suing car companies.
After a serious accident, if the car company cannot reproduce the binary from the published code, they are going to be forking over a lot of money.
I don't have the time or resources to verify the software of my car
I don't have the time or resources to replace a bad head gasket in my car. But I am not going to buy a car with the hood welded shut.
"One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them."
Zuckerberg has been conditioned to believe that there are poor people in Palo Alto, where the median income is $163,000. It is the 3rd richest city in America, behind only Bethesda, Maryland and Greenwich, Connecticut.
If he wants to help "low income students", he picked one of the worst possible places to start.
College dropouts championing schools.
They are championing early education, not college.
Software that people are paid to written more often includes the boring, not-fun parts like testing, documentation, and auditing.
I have worked on plenty of both open source and closed source projects over the last 30 years, and this is nonsense. If someone is being paid to do it, then a PHB is setting the priorities, and the programmer is working for pay rather than passion.
I have worked on projects that converted from closed to open source. It was a months long process to clean up all the vomit code, before the company wasn't too embarrassed to make it public. When Netscape went open source, the open source community looked at their code, and decided it was such a pile of crap that it would be easier to just throw it all away and start from scratch.
Also, plenty of people get paid to work on open source.
Therefore closed source software has a higher chance of being audited.
Hogwash.
Have any of you ever decompiled machine code and from that tried to figure out how it worked?
Yes.
It's damned difficult
Full reverse engineering is difficult. But a hacker doesn't need to do that. He is just looking for potential stack overflows, buffer overruns, weak user authentication code, etc. If they exist, those are easy to find, using a disassembler and a VM.
In my opinion it's going to be tougher all around if the firmware/software is closed-source
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Open source is no guarantee of perfect security, but it has a better track record than closed source.
I think the better word choice is "guarantee" instead of "warranty" for the headline.
Also, "visible source" would be better than "open source". Unless they actually mean that anyone should be able to copy, modify, fork, and redistribute.
These crime gangs will just look for some other large profit activity.
If the alternative activity was profitable, someone would already be doing it. Most crime is opportunistic. If you eliminate the opportunity, you eliminate the crime. There is not a fixed amount of crime in the world, and there is no reason to believe that eliminating one type of crime causes increases in other crimes.
The days of a lifetime job at one company have been over for at least 3 decades really.
The days of a "lifetime job" NEVER happened. It is a myth. Average job tenure is higher today that it has ever been in the past. Sure, back in the 1960s, there were some people that worked at the same company for 40 years, but not as many as you may think, and there were a lot more that did day work and odd jobs.
It by "natural", you mean bombs and grenades, yeah, it can get kinda rough.
It is being built in Morocco, not Syria.
Knowing the military the document giving clearance to tell of the sequence of events is probably classified and will remain so for 50 years. /s
Most documents are automatically declassified after 30 years. These alleged events happened 53 years ago. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you are adding an additional unlikely conspiracy to keep it classified, to the already extraordinary claim that the events happened at all. And there is no evidence whatsoever that any of it true, except one guy's story.
So, it seems there was a permission process involved and it was only recently given.
No. HE SAYS he had to wait for permission. There is no evidence that this is true. If permission was granted, it would have been in writing, and he would have a document to prove it. So where is it?
There are two possibilities:
1. There was a very unlikely sequence of events, and then a vast conspiracy of silence involving dozens of people over 5 decades, to cover up something that no moral person would believe should be covered up, for no logical reason other than avoiding the embarrassment of officials that retired and mostly died long ago.
2. One guy made up a story.
William of Okham says it is #2.
Considering the number of incidents in the Cold War where a nuclear war was averted by cool heads ...
There may have been a number of incidents ... but I doubt if this one really happened. This is all based on the testimony of ONE person, backed up by another anonymous witness that may, or may not, actually exist. Since there were dozens of people supposedly aware of the situation, I find it hard to believe that no one told this story before, or is able to corroborate this one guy's story.
This is likely just some half-senile old geezer trying to draw attention to himself by making up wild war stories.
The Americans haven't been in peace time mode since 1945 unless I missed history classes.
You missed some classes. The US was at war, continuously, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with American soldiers fighting to prop up dictators in Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras, etc.
Seriously, you want to spend 10% of the US military's entire budget on one line item?
No, no, you are missing the point. We need to increase the military budget by 10%. The whole point of scaremongering and manufactured crises, is to get more money, not just shift around what you already have.
And that's why I'm launching an initiative to get more men into elementary education.
I know you are joking, but this is actually a good idea. Elementary education could be greatly improved with more male teachers. Boys, and especially black boys, do better academically with male role models, and girls do no worse. Male teachers are only a quarter as likely to refer a student for possible ADHD medication. They are more likely to deal with a fidgeting student by making the kid run some laps around the playground.