It's been a while since we've seen one of these stories and it appears that some new and refined rationalizations have developed. New entries checked at the end of the list. Props to scourfish, cdreimer, zippo01, SuperKendall and several ACs for your contributions.
Apple/Foxconn worker and environmental exploitation rationalization worksheet
Check all that apply
[_] Making iPhones in a Chinese factory is better than being a Chinese peasant
[_] iPhones/Pads would cost too much if I had to pay my fellow citizens to make them
[_] iPhones/Pads would cost too much given environmental regulations I vehemently insist on for myself
[_] All the other manufacturers are doing it too
[_] Some/Many/Most Chinese workers appreciate 70 hour weeks and breathing my aluminum dust
[_] It's not Apple, it's Foxconn
[_] It's not Apple, it's the Chinese government
[_] They should quit if they don't like it
[_] It's just capitalism at work
[_] It's just communism at work
[_] Apple's disposable workers are paid better than non-Apple disposable workers
[_] Apple's auditors didn't find any serious issues
[_] Some day the Chinese will be too wealthy to exploit
[_] Your Android is Foxconn too
[_] You're an Apple hater using Apple as a scapegoat
[_] I also work 60/80/100/120 hour weeks at my IT job
[_] Apple designers are in the US
[_] The US did the same thing to the British
[_] The US had slaves once too
[_] The US has prison labor today
[_] It's up to the Chinese to stand up to their oppressive government
[_] There are lines of eager workers outside Foxconn factories
[_] If any company were to stop the exploitation, I really think it'll be Apple
[_] Your free Linux runs on Chinese hardware too
[_] Foxconn workers think they have it great, so it's ok!
[_] Foxconn worker suicide rate is lower than Chicago's murder rate
[_] Foxconn worker suicide rate is lower than China's suicide rate
[_] We can't pollute the whole world!
[_] Half of all US households have an Apple product
[_] If we don't exploit them they'll never develop
[_] The suicide's families get the insurance money
[_] You're posting from a macbook/iphone/ipad right now
[_] There are suicide nets on American bridges
[_] Interns in the US don't get paid
[_] They don't beat the workers, apparently.
[_] Why is this news? We expect this from China.
[_] It's their country; we have no right to judge.
[X] If it's voluntary it's ok; their body, their choice.
[X] Only 11 hours/day? Come over to the U.S. and do 12-hour days!
[X] Things are tough all over; I had a job in high school.
[X] Isn't this the case for all smart phones, of all brands?
[X] Android phone assemblers were abused worse
you need to realize some things just can't be done
Indeed; judging feasibility is an important ability. Analyzing why something is not feasible is a useful exercise. I believe the GP's proposal is infeasible because most code is created by people that haven't got the resources (time, tools, education, desire, experience, etc.) needed to create high quality code and are employed by people that don't care.
Stipulate for a moment that I am correct. What does this say of Rust? Isn't Rust simply an enforced expression of the discipline that working programmers and their employers are deliberately avoiding? Is Rust feasible for use by programmers that haven't got the resources to suffer its costs and are employed by people that won't let them? It's entirely possible that Rust is yet another entry in the list of things that "just can't be done," in the sense that it won't be taken up for the same reasons that few are applying the GPs methods.
I like Rust. I think it has moved that bar like nothing has in years. Decades perhaps. The "R word" is now unavoidable in discussions of language design because Rust embodies plausible solutions to serious and long standing problems. I've written code in Rust and found and used Rust software 'in the wild,' as have millions of others given Firefox. I do not, however, take it as a given that it (or any tool that enforces an equivalent discipline) will succeed in the long term because I hold the cynical view that people (programmers, employers, users, etc.) are not willing to pay the needed costs.
The puerile rage that has emerged for this language is truly sad. Rust is the honest effort of honorable people that attempts to address a legitimate problem in an open and liberal manner. There is no stink on Rust. Yet it has generated a legion of haters that take exception to its very existence. A further cynicism I hold is that this is primarily because Rust (or at least the concepts embodied in the language) exposes the inherent flaws of some loved tools, and the narrow minded practitioners that love those tools simply don't like it.
if it was $5 billion, the manufacturers of private jets would be unable to do any new aircraft.
Boeing accounts the development cost of the 787, a sub-sonic widebody of the sort they've been building for 47 years, as $29 billion as of 2011. The Irkut MC-21, a conventional narrow body sub-sonic 737 competitor being developed in Russia (one built so far) has a program cost of $4.6 billion to date.
For $33 million you might get as far as testing a credible wind tunnel model. $33 million to test fly a "Boom Supersonic" built aircraft next year (!) is pure fantasy. Marketing bunk. Full stop.
There is a lot of VC sloshing around right now and some of it will unavoidably slop over the side and disappear down the drain.
That is one disappointing summary. Marketing cut-and-paste mixed with a bunch of irrelevancies.
This is RISC-V. That crucial fact and what it means is completely omitted from the summary. RISC-V is an open ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) out of Berkeley. By open I mean you can go over here and get the stuff you need to make a real CPU without any license costs or other IP entanglements. Open and free from the silicon up. RISC-V is a new 32/64/128 bit ISA with a clean, comprehensive design that is free of legacy cruft, bad ideas and other flaws, and the core instruction set has recently been permanently frozen so it's no longer a moving target for developers.
SiFive is a fabless semiconductor company "founded by the creators" of RISC-V to produce real silicon. HiFive is a little demo board with a (rather fast) RISC-V SOC. Some people have gotten hung up on the FTDI thing; that's just a UART to provide USB; it doesn't mean this is some kind of proprietary trap. Because the ISA is fully open competitors are free to make their own RISC-V designs as well and embed/attach whatever UARTs they want. Competitors are also free to use Eagle, gEDA, damp napkins are whatever they wish to design boards for their RISC-V chips, so that Altium hang up in summary isn't particularly relevant either.
Google has been a sponsor of RISC-V work and has been hosting conferences for the platform. They are also actively developing Go on RISC-V and there have been some rumors about Google using RISC-V to displace proprietary CPUs in their operations.
but you couldn't send a message to someone's phone number that they receive as an SMS message
Yes you could. I've texted my wife's phone and others many times over the years using Skype on Linux. I've been using Skype on Windows for the last 18 months, but the last version of Skype I used on Linux (skype-4.3.0.37-suse121.i586 by the RPM name) sent text messages to phones just fine. You needed a account with a balance and you had to setup your Skype account with your phone's number (such that caller ID identifies the caller/sender,) but I know for a fact that it worked.
So yeah, this huge Break Through! technology isn't all that amazing to me.
Is this proof of iOS's security or does this correlate with the value of the holders of the iPhones?
It's both. Apple has apparently hardened devices that are popular with high value targets to the point where remote exploits are now costly to obtain. The market is factoring in both of these properties.
Here is another story about Colorado marijuana legalization:
Marijuana charges filed in Colorado courts fell 81 percent between 2012 and 2015, from 10,340 to 1,954. Those dramatic changes saved thousands of people from unjust punishment and channeled law enforcement resources toward activities with a bigger public safety payoff.
I'll take a few knuckleheads that hurt themselves over thousands upon thousands of persecuted people, a distended justice system that thrives on a huge supply of drug cases, a violent underclass of contraband dealers and a militarized police force to deal with it. Idiots hurt themselves with illegal drugs every day; until you're ready to operate a large scale gulag system your laws can't prevent that.
Television is broadcast in VHF and UHF; well above 30Mhz.. These SDR receivers won't pick up any broadcast television. If any AM radio stations care enough to sue over this (something they haven't bothered to do so far, despite WebSDR existing) it's easy to filter the broadcast AM bands, or anything else that has to be blocked.
In other very interesting SDR news; last month David Rowe did a linux.conf.au presentation that covered his work on fully open source (from the boards and firmware through the protocol stack) digital VHF radio. This will ultimately lead to cheap (sub $100) and powerful TDMA repeaters for VHF and UHF. Essentially this brings cellular radio technology to amateur radio bands.
There are undocumented gzip command line switches (-m, -M) that control embedding timestamps in gzip archives. They're not mentioned in the man page or --help output, but you can see them in the source here (line 344): http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gzip.git/tree/gzip.c
#ifdef UNDOCUMENTED
" -m, --no-time do not save or restore the original modification time",
" -M, --time save or restore the original modification time",
#endif
I learned about this because I had to ensure consistent hash values of build artifacts for regulatory reasons and I believe it is a misfeature. For me the Principle of Least Surprise would have gzip produce this exact same output given the same input, by default. As it is you get a slightly different output each time you compress the same set of bits, and that is entirely down to this timestamp. I think the fact that switches to achieve that behavior exist yet are undocumented belies some conflict about this.
The comments are a symptom. One easily ameliorated by the existing comment moderation system once the cause is addressed.
The real place "controversy" needs to be addressed is the stories. No amount of comment moderation will suffice to deal with the squabbles created by mdsolar's anti-nook crap, global warming click bait and gamer gate grievance mongering, among many other sad themes that have damaged Slashdot. That stuff needs to stop so the malcontents that live for it go away and let the place heal.
And no, just turning over story selection to the (existing) crowd will not work. They'll squander their employers time indulging their favorite cause and keep feeding in the same click bait. What is needed is a few people with good judgement and some patience to allow time for recovery.
As I write this it occurred to me to survey the last few days worth of stories. Except for the Clinton coin toss mistake — which promptly descended into a giant flame fest — it looks pretty good. Keep that up, add some more Linux/BSD/MCU/etc. related stories and something good could happen.
If I'm right and there really has been an editorial change, keep it to yourselves. Talking about it will just produce a giant sh*t storm.
Indeed. The political stuff has been very, very harmful.
Undo this mistake. Learn to identify SJW stuff, grievance mongering and other controversy click bait. Then ban it. After a few months of no global warming stories to squabble over the malcontents will get bored and wander off. Maybe then the place can recover.
Or don't. I've found my alternatives. And after a few more years of decline and the next sale some other owner will get a chance to fix it.
One of Google's core Go developers addressed this "master" problem at a golang conference some time ago. He said Go developers are expected to keep master clean. Maybe that works inside Google, where employees must adopt the policies of their employer. For the rest of the world this has been a terrible policy; whatever time one is supposed to have saved with simple abstractions and fast compilers is utterly pissed away herding dependencies and fixing breakage due to changing masters.
Builds must be easily reproducible, and that requires enumerated, versioned dependencies. The fact that this appears to be lost on The Powers That Be behind Go is astonishing. I seriously studied Go; read the book end to end and drank all the necessary kool-aid. Then I tried to use it for something. Two weeks after starting to work on toy projects to evaluate the language I walked away. The experience of trying to wade through the mess that accrues when trying to leverage libraries still makes me nauseous. I can't imagine trying to explain / apologize for Go dependency management to a peer. Complete non-starter.
I'd be a Go programmer today except for this. Every major programming platform in use today has a module system to manage dependencies except Go. Go gives you "go get" to haul gobs of source into your tree, after which you get to build and maintain the mess.
The Go folks cop-out and say this problem is one "for the community." Well, it has been six years and "the community" is still schlepping around, making messes with "go get" and inventing bad workarounds for the projects.
There are at least five major ways that "housing buying" is subsidized by government policy right now.
1. Home Mortgage Interest Deduction. This is a big one. A big fat sop to the "middle class" that knocks every home owner down a couple brackets of the income tax schedule. This one is so significant it drives "over" borrowing. The subsidy is paid in the form of interest on government debt accumulated by forgoing huge amounts of income tax revenue.
2. GSE backed loans. First time buyers and some subsequent purchases use GSE backed financing. That keeps down payments very low and interest rates low because the government backed GSEs are really carrying the risk. The subsidy gets paid in the form of bailouts when lenders fold.
3. Capital gains exemption; most sales of primary residences are exempt from capital gains taxes on money earned selling a home; that makes residential property very liquid. Without this people would move far less often due to the pain of capital gains taxes, and would therefore contribute less net demand. The subsidy is paid in the form of interest on government debt accumulated by forgoing this tax revenue.
4. Cheap money. The Fed, on behalf the the government, has been keeping our fake bubble economy propped up in part with near-zero interest rates since the debt bubble popped last decade. That's why anyone with a pulse can get a 30-year fixed at just over 4%. The subsidy is paid in the form of inflation.
5. Section 8 subsidizes $17 billion worth of purchases (not just rent) per year. Since all housing stock, rental or otherwise, is really part of the supply then one should also count Section 8 rental subsidy as well (another $20 billion per year.)
There are many, many lesser subsides as well (veterans programs, state subsidies, etc.), and I may have overlooked some other big ones.
Our real-estate bubble is public policy. You show me some part of the system where prices are spiraling up and I'll show you tax breaks and subsidies funding the buyers; health care and education are only the two other most obvious examples.
It's not a big mystery. Linus released a primitive kernel that worked, at the right time, with the right license, and then diligently kept rolling up contributions and releasing the result.
This is all true and important, but I think it's leaves out the really important part. Linus has good judgement in two critical areas; policy and people.
You and many others are correct about the timing, license and Linus's willingness to accept contributions without preconditions, and that part of it accounts for the early days. But it could have gone so wrong later and it didn't.
Had RMS been the shot caller Linux would be a curiosity today. People like him, while well intentioned, can't help but strangle babies in cradles in the name of their agenda. The kernel would be on GPL4 or 5 by now and about the only thing you might be able to use it for is a non-profit operation. The RMS mentality would have precluded set-tops, portables (binary blobs, DRM, etc.) the cloud and many other use cases. The best case would have been "for-profit" forks and then decline.
Also, Linus doesn't suffer fools. Over the years there have been contributors that, while possessing some talent, were destructive to the process. Linus has reliably kicked them to the curb and kept them from ruining Linux development. It's a simple, unfortunate truth; some people don't play well with others and if they get a foothold in something they ruin it.
These two aspects of Linus, good and firm judgement about policy and people, have ultimately been the most important because failure of either would have killed Linux long ago regardless of the early enthusiasm. That one person embodies the drive, talent and judgement to take Linux this far while protecting it from the bad ideas and fools that prevail is a small miracle.
Believe it or not, it use to be even more political, and even more radical.
Sorry no. The big political controversies did not appear on the front page as often, but more importantly the herd of really hate-filled left wing million+ UID types didn't exist here "back in the day."
The sea change probably started in 2000; Bush v Gore. You can see the history. In 2000, the "U.S. Supreme Court Issues Election Ruling" got just 438 comments despite the huge political significance and near-constitutional crisis that event represented. None of the Bush v. Gore stories got more than 1500, and the most popular was a story on statistics and ballot design.
As the site attracted more and more "SJW" types and political stories became more frequent Taco created politics.slashdot.org in 2004 — a full seven years after he created the site — in a deliberate attempt to segregate it. It's worth thinking about the subject he wrote: Slashdot Goes Political: Announcing politics.slashdot.org
And here we are today; political controversies are the most popular stories and people with 7 digit UIDs claim to be "originals".....
ESR's claim has nothing to do with the frequency or discovery of bugs. All he says is that given enough observers, bugs are quickly characterized. It is implied that any given bug has already been discovered. There is no benevolent cohort of experts continuously auditing code bases and his statement doesn't claim there is.
The link that supposedly refutes the argument that people are paying for things they wouldn't otherwise pay for doesn't actually refute anything. Rather, it characterizes the current situation as "socialism"; "Cable TV is socialism that works."
I do not want to contribute to ESPN. Nor the myrid "shopping" channels. Or the "Christian" networks. Or any of the other dreck that pollutes this world. Even if that means the things I do want aren't as well subsidized for the lack of fuhtbawl knuckle-heads.
Whatever.... I can't remember how long ago it was that I last paid a cable bill. My vote has been cast. Join me and cut these bloodsuckers off. You won't miss it.
Naturally the `record' must be limited to the subset of known cases. I've been studying the history of Soviet nuclear science and industry for a few years. Things went on in the Soviet Union that beggars the imagination, as they say.
When the waste storage tank blew up in Mayak in 1957, 90% of the high level waste fell in the immediate vicinity. That's 90% of 740 PBq (740E15 decays per second) within about half a kilometer radius, in which there were certainly some number of workers, this being the most urgent period of nuclear weapons development.
There were criticality accidents at Mayak that killed people as well; the Review of Criticality Accidents (2000) mentions seven incidents at Mayak and eight at other Soviet sites.
Then there is Chernobyl. Shortly after the explosion soldiers on the grounds of the plant policed up pieces of graphite and other debris, including fuel, from the reactor core with simple tools, bare hands and no respiratory protection [1]. They were breathing particles of heavy metal isotopes so "hot" that they floated through the air on their own thermal output like little balloons. They were treated as military casualties and their numbers are not publicly known.
The worst case of radiation exposure took place in the Soviet Union. We do not know the circumstances, how severe it was, how many it killed, when or where it happened, but that it did is a metaphysical certitude.
This should be rule number one for this type of application.
Perhaps it should be rule number one, but actually it's Rule 16.2 of MISRA-C:2004 (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association, Guidelines for the use of the C language in critical systems):
Functions shall not call themselves, either directly or indirectly.
The rule actually appeared first in MISRA-C:1998. Each rule is accompanied by a detailed rationale that I will not reproduce verbatim here as the standard is not open; one must pay for the privilege. The rationale for 16.2 is that recursion may cause stack overflows. I only cite the rule itself because it appears in public testimony and also on the (first) page linked by this story...... which you obviously did not read.
Because MISRA also disallows constructs such as function call indirection, self modifying code, etc. a compiler is entirely capable of detecting recursion and reporting the violation as an error. MISRA compliant compilers do exactly that.
Yes Virginia, the largest auto manufacturer on Earth ignores the very thing that was designed to prevent simple, common, easily predictable failures such as stack overflow despite the fact that the cost of compliance is much, much smaller than a rounding error for an outfit like Toyota.
Also, despite the fact that Industry dutifully identified this specific problem in a published standard at least 16 years ago, compliance is apparently not yet a requirement by government regulators. I suspect they're too busy investigating child seat manufacturers or Telsa batteries or whatever other politically high profile crisis that giant, engineer-free gaggle of NTSB lawyers fill their bankers hours with.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice to see people care.
We care. Thank you for the effort.
Also, Unicode!
It's been a while since we've seen one of these stories and it appears that some new and refined rationalizations have developed. New entries checked at the end of the list. Props to scourfish, cdreimer, zippo01, SuperKendall and several ACs for your contributions.
Apple/Foxconn worker and environmental exploitation rationalization worksheet
Check all that apply
[_] Making iPhones in a Chinese factory is better than being a Chinese peasant
[_] iPhones/Pads would cost too much if I had to pay my fellow citizens to make them
[_] iPhones/Pads would cost too much given environmental regulations I vehemently insist on for myself
[_] All the other manufacturers are doing it too
[_] Some/Many/Most Chinese workers appreciate 70 hour weeks and breathing my aluminum dust
[_] It's not Apple, it's Foxconn
[_] It's not Apple, it's the Chinese government
[_] They should quit if they don't like it
[_] It's just capitalism at work
[_] It's just communism at work
[_] Apple's disposable workers are paid better than non-Apple disposable workers
[_] Apple's auditors didn't find any serious issues
[_] Some day the Chinese will be too wealthy to exploit
[_] Your Android is Foxconn too
[_] You're an Apple hater using Apple as a scapegoat
[_] I also work 60/80/100/120 hour weeks at my IT job
[_] Apple designers are in the US
[_] The US did the same thing to the British
[_] The US had slaves once too
[_] The US has prison labor today
[_] It's up to the Chinese to stand up to their oppressive government
[_] There are lines of eager workers outside Foxconn factories
[_] If any company were to stop the exploitation, I really think it'll be Apple
[_] Your free Linux runs on Chinese hardware too
[_] Foxconn workers think they have it great, so it's ok!
[_] Foxconn worker suicide rate is lower than Chicago's murder rate
[_] Foxconn worker suicide rate is lower than China's suicide rate
[_] We can't pollute the whole world!
[_] Half of all US households have an Apple product
[_] If we don't exploit them they'll never develop
[_] The suicide's families get the insurance money
[_] You're posting from a macbook/iphone/ipad right now
[_] There are suicide nets on American bridges
[_] Interns in the US don't get paid
[_] They don't beat the workers, apparently.
[_] Why is this news? We expect this from China.
[_] It's their country; we have no right to judge.
[X] If it's voluntary it's ok; their body, their choice.
[X] Only 11 hours/day? Come over to the U.S. and do 12-hour days!
[X] Things are tough all over; I had a job in high school.
[X] Isn't this the case for all smart phones, of all brands?
[X] Android phone assemblers were abused worse
you need to realize some things just can't be done
Indeed; judging feasibility is an important ability. Analyzing why something is not feasible is a useful exercise. I believe the GP's proposal is infeasible because most code is created by people that haven't got the resources (time, tools, education, desire, experience, etc.) needed to create high quality code and are employed by people that don't care.
Stipulate for a moment that I am correct. What does this say of Rust? Isn't Rust simply an enforced expression of the discipline that working programmers and their employers are deliberately avoiding? Is Rust feasible for use by programmers that haven't got the resources to suffer its costs and are employed by people that won't let them? It's entirely possible that Rust is yet another entry in the list of things that "just can't be done," in the sense that it won't be taken up for the same reasons that few are applying the GPs methods.
I like Rust. I think it has moved that bar like nothing has in years. Decades perhaps. The "R word" is now unavoidable in discussions of language design because Rust embodies plausible solutions to serious and long standing problems. I've written code in Rust and found and used Rust software 'in the wild,' as have millions of others given Firefox. I do not, however, take it as a given that it (or any tool that enforces an equivalent discipline) will succeed in the long term because I hold the cynical view that people (programmers, employers, users, etc.) are not willing to pay the needed costs.
The puerile rage that has emerged for this language is truly sad. Rust is the honest effort of honorable people that attempts to address a legitimate problem in an open and liberal manner. There is no stink on Rust. Yet it has generated a legion of haters that take exception to its very existence. A further cynicism I hold is that this is primarily because Rust (or at least the concepts embodied in the language) exposes the inherent flaws of some loved tools, and the narrow minded practitioners that love those tools simply don't like it.
if it was $5 billion, the manufacturers of private jets would be unable to do any new aircraft.
Boeing accounts the development cost of the 787, a sub-sonic widebody of the sort they've been building for 47 years, as $29 billion as of 2011. The Irkut MC-21, a conventional narrow body sub-sonic 737 competitor being developed in Russia (one built so far) has a program cost of $4.6 billion to date.
For $33 million you might get as far as testing a credible wind tunnel model. $33 million to test fly a "Boom Supersonic" built aircraft next year (!) is pure fantasy. Marketing bunk. Full stop.
There is a lot of VC sloshing around right now and some of it will unavoidably slop over the side and disappear down the drain.
Where are the Nuclear power fans now?
Admiring this map, showing the huge advantage of predominantly nuclear powered nations such as France wrt CO2 emissions.
Stop nuclear power now before we have more accidents like these.
No. Stop indulging hysterical thinking.
That is one disappointing summary. Marketing cut-and-paste mixed with a bunch of irrelevancies.
This is RISC-V. That crucial fact and what it means is completely omitted from the summary. RISC-V is an open ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) out of Berkeley. By open I mean you can go over here and get the stuff you need to make a real CPU without any license costs or other IP entanglements. Open and free from the silicon up. RISC-V is a new 32/64/128 bit ISA with a clean, comprehensive design that is free of legacy cruft, bad ideas and other flaws, and the core instruction set has recently been permanently frozen so it's no longer a moving target for developers.
SiFive is a fabless semiconductor company "founded by the creators" of RISC-V to produce real silicon. HiFive is a little demo board with a (rather fast) RISC-V SOC. Some people have gotten hung up on the FTDI thing; that's just a UART to provide USB; it doesn't mean this is some kind of proprietary trap. Because the ISA is fully open competitors are free to make their own RISC-V designs as well and embed/attach whatever UARTs they want. Competitors are also free to use Eagle, gEDA, damp napkins are whatever they wish to design boards for their RISC-V chips, so that Altium hang up in summary isn't particularly relevant either.
Google has been a sponsor of RISC-V work and has been hosting conferences for the platform. They are also actively developing Go on RISC-V and there have been some rumors about Google using RISC-V to displace proprietary CPUs in their operations.
but you couldn't send a message to someone's phone number that they receive as an SMS message
Yes you could. I've texted my wife's phone and others many times over the years using Skype on Linux. I've been using Skype on Windows for the last 18 months, but the last version of Skype I used on Linux (skype-4.3.0.37-suse121.i586 by the RPM name) sent text messages to phones just fine. You needed a account with a balance and you had to setup your Skype account with your phone's number (such that caller ID identifies the caller/sender,) but I know for a fact that it worked.
So yeah, this huge Break Through! technology isn't all that amazing to me.
Is this proof of iOS's security or does this correlate with the value of the holders of the iPhones?
It's both. Apple has apparently hardened devices that are popular with high value targets to the point where remote exploits are now costly to obtain. The market is factoring in both of these properties.
Here is another story about Colorado marijuana legalization:
Marijuana charges filed in Colorado courts fell 81 percent between 2012 and 2015, from 10,340 to 1,954. Those dramatic changes saved thousands of people from unjust punishment and channeled law enforcement resources toward activities with a bigger public safety payoff.
I'll take a few knuckleheads that hurt themselves over thousands upon thousands of persecuted people, a distended justice system that thrives on a huge supply of drug cases, a violent underclass of contraband dealers and a militarized police force to deal with it. Idiots hurt themselves with illegal drugs every day; until you're ready to operate a large scale gulag system your laws can't prevent that.
1975 UK EEC Membership Referendum was a simple majority vote.
Television is broadcast in VHF and UHF; well above 30Mhz.. These SDR receivers won't pick up any broadcast television. If any AM radio stations care enough to sue over this (something they haven't bothered to do so far, despite WebSDR existing) it's easy to filter the broadcast AM bands, or anything else that has to be blocked.
In other very interesting SDR news; last month David Rowe did a linux.conf.au presentation that covered his work on fully open source (from the boards and firmware through the protocol stack) digital VHF radio. This will ultimately lead to cheap (sub $100) and powerful TDMA repeaters for VHF and UHF. Essentially this brings cellular radio technology to amateur radio bands.
There are undocumented gzip command line switches (-m, -M) that control embedding timestamps in gzip archives. They're not mentioned in the man page or --help output, but you can see them in the source here (line 344): http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gzip.git/tree/gzip.c
#ifdef UNDOCUMENTED
" -m, --no-time do not save or restore the original modification time",
" -M, --time save or restore the original modification time",
#endif
I learned about this because I had to ensure consistent hash values of build artifacts for regulatory reasons and I believe it is a misfeature. For me the Principle of Least Surprise would have gzip produce this exact same output given the same input, by default. As it is you get a slightly different output each time you compress the same set of bits, and that is entirely down to this timestamp. I think the fact that switches to achieve that behavior exist yet are undocumented belies some conflict about this.
"controversial" comments
The comments are a symptom. One easily ameliorated by the existing comment moderation system once the cause is addressed.
The real place "controversy" needs to be addressed is the stories. No amount of comment moderation will suffice to deal with the squabbles created by mdsolar's anti-nook crap, global warming click bait and gamer gate grievance mongering, among many other sad themes that have damaged Slashdot. That stuff needs to stop so the malcontents that live for it go away and let the place heal.
And no, just turning over story selection to the (existing) crowd will not work. They'll squander their employers time indulging their favorite cause and keep feeding in the same click bait. What is needed is a few people with good judgement and some patience to allow time for recovery.
As I write this it occurred to me to survey the last few days worth of stories. Except for the Clinton coin toss mistake — which promptly descended into a giant flame fest — it looks pretty good. Keep that up, add some more Linux/BSD/MCU/etc. related stories and something good could happen.
If I'm right and there really has been an editorial change, keep it to yourselves. Talking about it will just produce a giant sh*t storm.
Indeed. The political stuff has been very, very harmful.
Undo this mistake. Learn to identify SJW stuff, grievance mongering and other controversy click bait. Then ban it. After a few months of no global warming stories to squabble over the malcontents will get bored and wander off. Maybe then the place can recover.
Or don't. I've found my alternatives. And after a few more years of decline and the next sale some other owner will get a chance to fix it.
One of Google's core Go developers addressed this "master" problem at a golang conference some time ago. He said Go developers are expected to keep master clean. Maybe that works inside Google, where employees must adopt the policies of their employer. For the rest of the world this has been a terrible policy; whatever time one is supposed to have saved with simple abstractions and fast compilers is utterly pissed away herding dependencies and fixing breakage due to changing masters.
Builds must be easily reproducible, and that requires enumerated, versioned dependencies. The fact that this appears to be lost on The Powers That Be behind Go is astonishing. I seriously studied Go; read the book end to end and drank all the necessary kool-aid. Then I tried to use it for something. Two weeks after starting to work on toy projects to evaluate the language I walked away. The experience of trying to wade through the mess that accrues when trying to leverage libraries still makes me nauseous. I can't imagine trying to explain / apologize for Go dependency management to a peer. Complete non-starter.
I'd be a Go programmer today except for this. Every major programming platform in use today has a module system to manage dependencies except Go. Go gives you "go get" to haul gobs of source into your tree, after which you get to build and maintain the mess.
The Go folks cop-out and say this problem is one "for the community." Well, it has been six years and "the community" is still schlepping around, making messes with "go get" and inventing bad workarounds for the projects.
Got a plan for this? You should.
How in the hell is housing buying subsidized?
There are at least five major ways that "housing buying" is subsidized by government policy right now.
1. Home Mortgage Interest Deduction. This is a big one. A big fat sop to the "middle class" that knocks every home owner down a couple brackets of the income tax schedule. This one is so significant it drives "over" borrowing. The subsidy is paid in the form of interest on government debt accumulated by forgoing huge amounts of income tax revenue.
2. GSE backed loans. First time buyers and some subsequent purchases use GSE backed financing. That keeps down payments very low and interest rates low because the government backed GSEs are really carrying the risk. The subsidy gets paid in the form of bailouts when lenders fold.
3. Capital gains exemption; most sales of primary residences are exempt from capital gains taxes on money earned selling a home; that makes residential property very liquid. Without this people would move far less often due to the pain of capital gains taxes, and would therefore contribute less net demand. The subsidy is paid in the form of interest on government debt accumulated by forgoing this tax revenue.
4. Cheap money. The Fed, on behalf the the government, has been keeping our fake bubble economy propped up in part with near-zero interest rates since the debt bubble popped last decade. That's why anyone with a pulse can get a 30-year fixed at just over 4%. The subsidy is paid in the form of inflation.
5. Section 8 subsidizes $17 billion worth of purchases (not just rent) per year. Since all housing stock, rental or otherwise, is really part of the supply then one should also count Section 8 rental subsidy as well (another $20 billion per year.)
There are many, many lesser subsides as well (veterans programs, state subsidies, etc.), and I may have overlooked some other big ones.
Our real-estate bubble is public policy. You show me some part of the system where prices are spiraling up and I'll show you tax breaks and subsidies funding the buyers; health care and education are only the two other most obvious examples.
It's not a big mystery. Linus released a primitive kernel that worked, at the right time, with the right license, and then diligently kept rolling up contributions and releasing the result.
This is all true and important, but I think it's leaves out the really important part. Linus has good judgement in two critical areas; policy and people.
You and many others are correct about the timing, license and Linus's willingness to accept contributions without preconditions, and that part of it accounts for the early days. But it could have gone so wrong later and it didn't.
Had RMS been the shot caller Linux would be a curiosity today. People like him, while well intentioned, can't help but strangle babies in cradles in the name of their agenda. The kernel would be on GPL4 or 5 by now and about the only thing you might be able to use it for is a non-profit operation. The RMS mentality would have precluded set-tops, portables (binary blobs, DRM, etc.) the cloud and many other use cases. The best case would have been "for-profit" forks and then decline.
Also, Linus doesn't suffer fools. Over the years there have been contributors that, while possessing some talent, were destructive to the process. Linus has reliably kicked them to the curb and kept them from ruining Linux development. It's a simple, unfortunate truth; some people don't play well with others and if they get a foothold in something they ruin it.
These two aspects of Linus, good and firm judgement about policy and people, have ultimately been the most important because failure of either would have killed Linux long ago regardless of the early enthusiasm. That one person embodies the drive, talent and judgement to take Linux this far while protecting it from the bad ideas and fools that prevail is a small miracle.
Believe it or not, it use to be even more political, and even more radical.
Sorry no. The big political controversies did not appear on the front page as often, but more importantly the herd of really hate-filled left wing million+ UID types didn't exist here "back in the day."
The sea change probably started in 2000; Bush v Gore. You can see the history. In 2000, the "U.S. Supreme Court Issues Election Ruling" got just 438 comments despite the huge political significance and near-constitutional crisis that event represented. None of the Bush v. Gore stories got more than 1500, and the most popular was a story on statistics and ballot design.
Yet only a few years later in 2004 "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush," we find the most active story ever; 5000+ comments.
The herd had arrived!
As the site attracted more and more "SJW" types and political stories became more frequent Taco created politics.slashdot.org in 2004 — a full seven years after he created the site — in a deliberate attempt to segregate it. It's worth thinking about the subject he wrote: Slashdot Goes Political: Announcing politics.slashdot.org
And here we are today; political controversies are the most popular stories and people with 7 digit UIDs claim to be "originals".....
ESR's claim has nothing to do with the frequency or discovery of bugs. All he says is that given enough observers, bugs are quickly characterized. It is implied that any given bug has already been discovered. There is no benevolent cohort of experts continuously auditing code bases and his statement doesn't claim there is.
somebody else
Nope.
The link that supposedly refutes the argument that people are paying for things they wouldn't otherwise pay for doesn't actually refute anything. Rather, it characterizes the current situation as "socialism"; "Cable TV is socialism that works."
I do not want to contribute to ESPN. Nor the myrid "shopping" channels. Or the "Christian" networks. Or any of the other dreck that pollutes this world. Even if that means the things I do want aren't as well subsidized for the lack of fuhtbawl knuckle-heads.
Whatever.... I can't remember how long ago it was that I last paid a cable bill. My vote has been cast. Join me and cut these bloodsuckers off. You won't miss it.
As far as I am aware the highest radiation dose
Naturally the `record' must be limited to the subset of known cases. I've been studying the history of Soviet nuclear science and industry for a few years. Things went on in the Soviet Union that beggars the imagination, as they say.
When the waste storage tank blew up in Mayak in 1957, 90% of the high level waste fell in the immediate vicinity. That's 90% of 740 PBq (740E15 decays per second) within about half a kilometer radius, in which there were certainly some number of workers, this being the most urgent period of nuclear weapons development.
There were criticality accidents at Mayak that killed people as well; the Review of Criticality Accidents (2000) mentions seven incidents at Mayak and eight at other Soviet sites.
Then there is Chernobyl. Shortly after the explosion soldiers on the grounds of the plant policed up pieces of graphite and other debris, including fuel, from the reactor core with simple tools, bare hands and no respiratory protection [1]. They were breathing particles of heavy metal isotopes so "hot" that they floated through the air on their own thermal output like little balloons. They were treated as military casualties and their numbers are not publicly known.
The worst case of radiation exposure took place in the Soviet Union. We do not know the circumstances, how severe it was, how many it killed, when or where it happened, but that it did is a metaphysical certitude.
1. The Legacy of Chernobyl, 1992 Medvedev
or does everyone get 140 characters?
Everyone gets 140 NCF normalized UTF-8 Unicode code points. Characters, iow.
This should be rule number one for this type of application.
Perhaps it should be rule number one, but actually it's Rule 16.2 of MISRA-C:2004 (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association, Guidelines for the use of the C language in critical systems):
Functions shall not call themselves, either directly or indirectly.
The rule actually appeared first in MISRA-C:1998. Each rule is accompanied by a detailed rationale that I will not reproduce verbatim here as the standard is not open; one must pay for the privilege. The rationale for 16.2 is that recursion may cause stack overflows. I only cite the rule itself because it appears in public testimony and also on the (first) page linked by this story ...... which you obviously did not read.
Because MISRA also disallows constructs such as function call indirection, self modifying code, etc. a compiler is entirely capable of detecting recursion and reporting the violation as an error. MISRA compliant compilers do exactly that.
Yes Virginia, the largest auto manufacturer on Earth ignores the very thing that was designed to prevent simple, common, easily predictable failures such as stack overflow despite the fact that the cost of compliance is much, much smaller than a rounding error for an outfit like Toyota.
Also, despite the fact that Industry dutifully identified this specific problem in a published standard at least 16 years ago, compliance is apparently not yet a requirement by government regulators. I suspect they're too busy investigating child seat manufacturers or Telsa batteries or whatever other politically high profile crisis that giant, engineer-free gaggle of NTSB lawyers fill their bankers hours with.