Also, if you dig into their footnotes, you find that the median debt in collection is $1349, far less than the average (mean) that they so prominently feature.
Space travel is a big dead-end. Outside of sci-fi, nobody really wants to live in anyplace remotely as horrible as the friendliest of non-Earth planets. Think about the worst places on Earth: summit of Everest, South Pole, bottom of the ocean, middle of the Sahara. All of those places look like Eden compared to the nicest environment available within 10 light-years of here. Get real - we're stuck with our one Earth, and we should take care of it.
This result (which basically says that any planet with life has to look like ours) reminds me of an article I read long, long ago speculating on what ETs would look like. The author basically concluded that they'd have to look exactly like us, i.e. two arms, two legs, head on top with two eyes and a mouth and a nose, etc., and he had arguments for why each of these things was necessary. Of course, almost none of the thousands of other species on Earth look exactly like us, but that didn't faze him in the least in his application of logic...
Why does everyone always assume that life requires water, anyway? Couldn't there be a planet out there infested with silicon-based life forms who live at 300 degrees Celsius, or whatever?
So now anything we understand is not intelligence???
When I was in grad school back in the 80's, I knew a guy who was researching AI. He complained that as soon as some technique was understood, people would say it wasn't AI any more, so as a result the AI profession as a whole never got much credit for advancing.
The other way to hide the backdoor is to make it a hard to find bug. Plausible deniability is quite high.
Reading a huge codebase is an unlikely way to spot backdoors anyway. After a few thousand lines the reader's eyes would glaze over, and anything subtle would be missed. This isn't as easy as looking for two-digit year fields a la Y2K reviews.
Besides, the Heartbleed bug should have been a clue that open source alone doesn't make security issues "transparent". Somebody has to both read and understand the code to detect these things, and an OS like WIndows is so huge that nobody can understand the whole thing. Even a relatively small, specialized module like OpenSSL slid by for years without anybody noticing the problem.
Legendary alpinist Reinhold Messner once wrote a book about his encounters with suspected Yetis in the Himalaya. He concluded that they were bears, a variant of Ursus Arctos, the same species as polar bears.
Actually it's about non-standard-conforming "security" hacks causing unexpected results. If the result of an operation is undefined, the compiler can insert code to summon Cthulhu if it wants to.
The biggest problem with general jury duty is it is unbounded.
IMO, the biggest problem is that the two sides get to reject jurors. If they just picked 12 random people without any challenges allowed, then required (say) only 10 of 12 to agree on the verdict, the system would work more efficiently and with less gaming. Maybe exceptions could be made for hardship or disruptive jurors could be ejected (and fined), but the current system is mostly gamesmanship. Lawyers don't want intelligent jurors, they want jurors they can manipulate.
It's simple; you just need to change the motions of the heavenly bodies so that Earth orbits the sun exactly 13 times per year, the Earth rotates exactly 28 times per month, and the Moon orbits the Earth exactly once per month. If you can arrange that, I'll gladly switch to your new calendar.
Or at least a way to launch rich people and vapid celebrities to 50 miles above seal level. Unfortunately, we have no way to keep them from coming back (yet).
I'm reminded of the trite comment about "reinventing the wheel". There are a lot of different wheels out there (check the Discount Tire website, for example).
So what is this horrifying stuff-which be as much as four feet thick-and why did it begin appearing? The Minnesota research team is focusing on changes in the microbial content of pig shit as the cause. Minnesota Daily reports that the researchers hypothesize that a "new set of [bacteria] species" has developed in manure pits in the last few years. One possible catalyst: The practice of feeding pigs distillers grains, the spent mash left over from turning corn into ethanol. Distillers grains came roaring into feed rations in the mid-2000s as corn prices surged, pushed up by the federal government's escalating corn-ethanol mandates.
they more or less control the media, thus control what people see, read, and think
I always laugh when I see a statement like this, in an open forum read by hundreds of thousands of people. If the government is controlling what people see, why aren't you modded "-1 Unpatriotic"?
Or at least a mention in the Pulitzer announcement. The way the announcement phrased it, you'd think the journalists dug out this information on their own, rather than having it dumped in their laps.
To demonstrate opposition to this scheme, the moon will go dark tonight (Monday) for a few hours around midnight. Get out and show your solidarity by staring at the dark of the moon!
I maintain a system that, in theory, uses this component model to store and search documents. Third-party software is used to index, ocr, open archives and emails, extract different formats, display search results and the docs themselves, etc. In theory these are all solid products from established vendors that should function well. In practice, though, each component has its little flaws and end case problems, and always in different situations. As a result, the system is massively unreliable and requires constant attention to keep it from collapsing -the failure rates of the components are additive, and it adds up to a lot. The best news I've heard this year is that it's being discontinued.
Here in Colorado Springs, we've had two catastrophic fires in two years that destroyed 850 houses. People are rebuilding in place, and the media celebrates their resolve. At least it'll take a few years for the fuels to accumulate again, but you have to wonder sometimes...
Slashdot Mirror
My wrists! Oh, the humanity!
Also, if you dig into their footnotes, you find that the median debt in collection is $1349, far less than the average (mean) that they so prominently feature.
Space travel is a big dead-end. Outside of sci-fi, nobody really wants to live in anyplace remotely as horrible as the friendliest of non-Earth planets. Think about the worst places on Earth: summit of Everest, South Pole, bottom of the ocean, middle of the Sahara. All of those places look like Eden compared to the nicest environment available within 10 light-years of here. Get real - we're stuck with our one Earth, and we should take care of it.
Why does everyone always assume that life requires water, anyway? Couldn't there be a planet out there infested with silicon-based life forms who live at 300 degrees Celsius, or whatever?
So now anything we understand is not intelligence???
When I was in grad school back in the 80's, I knew a guy who was researching AI. He complained that as soon as some technique was understood, people would say it wasn't AI any more, so as a result the AI profession as a whole never got much credit for advancing.
The other way to hide the backdoor is to make it a hard to find bug. Plausible deniability is quite high.
Reading a huge codebase is an unlikely way to spot backdoors anyway. After a few thousand lines the reader's eyes would glaze over, and anything subtle would be missed. This isn't as easy as looking for two-digit year fields a la Y2K reviews.
Besides, the Heartbleed bug should have been a clue that open source alone doesn't make security issues "transparent". Somebody has to both read and understand the code to detect these things, and an OS like WIndows is so huge that nobody can understand the whole thing. Even a relatively small, specialized module like OpenSSL slid by for years without anybody noticing the problem.
Legendary alpinist Reinhold Messner once wrote a book about his encounters with suspected Yetis in the Himalaya. He concluded that they were bears, a variant of Ursus Arctos, the same species as polar bears.
Actually it's about non-standard-conforming "security" hacks causing unexpected results. If the result of an operation is undefined, the compiler can insert code to summon Cthulhu if it wants to.
So I know where this might be going.
The biggest problem with general jury duty is it is unbounded.
IMO, the biggest problem is that the two sides get to reject jurors. If they just picked 12 random people without any challenges allowed, then required (say) only 10 of 12 to agree on the verdict, the system would work more efficiently and with less gaming. Maybe exceptions could be made for hardship or disruptive jurors could be ejected (and fined), but the current system is mostly gamesmanship. Lawyers don't want intelligent jurors, they want jurors they can manipulate.
Disregarding that a year is one orbit around the sun, if you consider a year that is 1/13th of the current one, we would all fry.
This redistribution of orbital motions is trickier than I thought.
It's simple; you just need to change the motions of the heavenly bodies so that Earth orbits the sun exactly 13 times per year, the Earth rotates exactly 28 times per month, and the Moon orbits the Earth exactly once per month. If you can arrange that, I'll gladly switch to your new calendar.
I diagnose you egomaniac paranoid
Is that a showstopper? I mean, he's a fucking genius, cut him some slack. :)
I like the idea of having the interviewee read code. In a team environment, that's more important than how much code you can crank out.
we have a civilian launch system
Or at least a way to launch rich people and vapid celebrities to 50 miles above seal level. Unfortunately, we have no way to keep them from coming back (yet).
Besides, the empty skin looks like a used condom. Eeew.
I'm reminded of the trite comment about "reinventing the wheel". There are a lot of different wheels out there (check the Discount Tire website, for example).
There has never been a case of this causing a single problem anywhere.
Wrongo!
So what is this horrifying stuff-which be as much as four feet thick-and why did it begin appearing? The Minnesota research team is focusing on changes in the microbial content of pig shit as the cause. Minnesota Daily reports that the researchers hypothesize that a "new set of [bacteria] species" has developed in manure pits in the last few years. One possible catalyst: The practice of feeding pigs distillers grains, the spent mash left over from turning corn into ethanol. Distillers grains came roaring into feed rations in the mid-2000s as corn prices surged, pushed up by the federal government's escalating corn-ethanol mandates.
they more or less control the media, thus control what people see, read, and think
I always laugh when I see a statement like this, in an open forum read by hundreds of thousands of people. If the government is controlling what people see, why aren't you modded "-1 Unpatriotic"?
If this was the unix world, they'd be talking about no longer updating 8.1.0 and requiring customers update to 8.1.1.
If this were Ubuntu, they'd be upgrading from Persnickety Panda to Persnickety Panda Possum.
Snowden deserves a Nobel prize too.
Or at least a mention in the Pulitzer announcement. The way the announcement phrased it, you'd think the journalists dug out this information on their own, rather than having it dumped in their laps.
To demonstrate opposition to this scheme, the moon will go dark tonight (Monday) for a few hours around midnight. Get out and show your solidarity by staring at the dark of the moon!
I maintain a system that, in theory, uses this component model to store and search documents. Third-party software is used to index, ocr, open archives and emails, extract different formats, display search results and the docs themselves, etc. In theory these are all solid products from established vendors that should function well. In practice, though, each component has its little flaws and end case problems, and always in different situations. As a result, the system is massively unreliable and requires constant attention to keep it from collapsing -the failure rates of the components are additive, and it adds up to a lot. The best news I've heard this year is that it's being discontinued.
Here in Colorado Springs, we've had two catastrophic fires in two years that destroyed 850 houses. People are rebuilding in place, and the media celebrates their resolve. At least it'll take a few years for the fuels to accumulate again, but you have to wonder sometimes...
This brings a whole new meaning to the term "mobile hot spot".
Kind of like the Slashdot staff and the "Most Discussed" sidebar. Anybody notice that it hasn't changed in a week?