I hope that no one believes that Bitcoin has no value. It has whatever value is assigned to it by the people willing to use it.
The problem with Bitcoin is not that is has no value, the problem with it is that it has significantly less utility than legal currencies, can have significant shifts in value, and that things like this "innovation" can affect the value in a way that isn't representative of any economic indicator.
However, much could be said about fiat currencies especially if they are poorly managed. It is usually just that a fiat currency is managed, and closely watched and protected. That has both positive and negative effects.
So in the end, the problem with Bitcoin may well be that it is completely off the rails. I don't think I'd hesitate to use it to make small purchases, if I had to, but I don't think I'd want my retirement in Bitcoin.
That said, I'd like to see it continue. A currency that cannot be governed by some country's monetary policy may well reveal interesting things about a free market currency. I'm just not sure I want to be part of the experiment.
"Actually, the biggest threat to space exploration is actually the unwillingness of people to do it."
Actually the biggest threat to space exploration is Congress.
Two sides of the same coin. Congress doesn't want to do it because either the representatives don't want to, or their voters don't. The usual reason is, as you mentioned, either some military program, or alternately, some social welfare program. Or maybe a bridge to Nowhere for their constituents.
But no, I don't think Americans are interested in killing people, we are interested in not being attacked. We just have the idea that we will get that by attacking other people *harder*, and Congress is happy to go with that reasoning in order to keep the defense contractor contributions coming in.
Again, we have this odd fixation on if you want one thing, you couldn't have possibly done the other.
I've spent quite a bit of time exploring this planet. I have quite literally traveled to the other side of the world from where I live and many other places in between. What I don't understand is why this planet has to be "enough" for me.
You're making a poor assumption about who you're talking to, because it's all black and white to you. Either I agree with you, or I'm an Aspie who has never left his parent's basement; as if, even if that were true, it somehow refutes what I have been saying. I like Earth just fine, but there are other places than this. I may never go to them, but I think we should try to. For the same reason, I might travel to more terrestrial locations.
More to the point, you learn more about where you live when you can turn around and put it in perspective. When you go to the Mars or you go to the Moon, even, you can learn things about Earth itself that you can't learn any other way.
There's no so-called "techno-religion" going on here. And I get it, you're a feet on the ground sort of guy. Fair enough. You don't have to go anywhere. But of all the places that I see my money going to, this is probably one of the few where I feel like we're doing more than putting hand to mouth and taking our turn at the grindstone.
OP's implication with that question is that you couldn't get it for that price from anywhere. The implication is that this is not a real thing you could get.
However, if Amazon is listing that item for that price, then someone has set a price and is going to be shipping it. The rest is nitpicking. I wouldn't call something that takes two months to ship to be "unreal". I'd call it "backordered".
The people giving them the orders can still say, "no", and they might be more inclined to if the realize that they're actually the last human between some villager and the end of a gun.
Even drone pilots realize what they're doing, and from what I can tell, what they're doing has the same visuals as calling in support in Call of Duty. Unless someone tries to lie and tell you that you're actually playing a video game, you know you're killing people. You don't get the smell or the visceral impact of shooting or stabbing someone, but you know you're doing it. There is definitely an impact.
Actually, the biggest threat to space exploration is actually the unwillingness of people to do it.
Even with current technology, we'd have a shot at a Mars landing now, if we focused our resources on it. However, I'm not asking for that. We can take our time on that, but you don't have to shut down one thing to make the other thing happen.
As for afterlife, I have other plans for the afterlife than floating in space. This isn't about that.
There are some people out there, apparently you included, who think that throwing all the money at a problem will fix it, and it can never be fixed without all the money. This is not at all true. We can add NASA's entire budget to feeding the hungry, and we'll get the same result. You know why? Because the reason that the billions we're already throwing at aid programs isn't working is politics and corruption. Politics and corruption will eat up *any* amount you send at it.
Aid packages that have been sent to war zones and areas impoverished by government failures are either regularly left to rot on the docks or are taken by the local powers that be and used to maintain their control over the populations.
As for health care, everyone is going to die eventually, as you seem to understand with your afterlife comment. It is as much as a black hole as anything else. You're never going to attain immortality for your population, but if somehow you managed to, you'd better have somewhere to put them.
As for space, yeah, there are vast empty stretches and very inhospitable conditions. Despite that, it is believed that the entire galaxy could be explored in less than 5 million years by robotic exploration. That's because space is big, really big, but there are places to go between here and infinity.
There's more to life than sitting around trying to feed yourself. There are places where we can still adventure and space is a big one. More than anything, as a species and a culture we need the challenge of space exploration almost as much as we need to remain fed. Looking up keeps us from navel gazing and helps us avoid fighting over petty things.
The problem with that reasoning is assuming ACs are a bloc of people who think the same and are willing to mod you down for dissing ACs in general. There is no such bloc of people because most ACs have different reasons for being an AC.
ACs aren't going anywhere. The mod system was set up with them in mind. If they're really trolls, they do get modded down. If they merely irritate you with their speech, that's not trolling, that's free speech. The signal to noise ratio is less favorable, but there is some information you will never see while people have to be identified. And frequently, you want to see people's anger about things. You want to know that people like that exist or you get blindsided when Donald Trump wins the election and you never even saw it coming. (That was an example, I don't think it is really going to happen).
Now, I don't agree that the only terrorists out there are Muslim ones, but I can see why he'd think so based on how it is reported these days. In any event, he has a right to make his comment, and he clearly seems to believe it, so he's not being a troll, even if he says something you don't like. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
We're stuck on this rock for the foreseeable future, champ. Learn to love it.
We will be stuck on this rock forever, if you get your way.
There are certain things about space and space travel that you only can find out by doing it.
Learning about comets gives us the ability to see what sort of material makes up a solar system and how it interacts. We're not just doing this to go sightseeing.
There is some idea that we will somehow be able to magically be able to find all of those advances we need later if we just stay on Earth and focus no effort or money on space exploration. That makes zero sense.
We can still focus on space exploration while feeding the hungry. As I've pointed out more than once, we already *can* feed the world's population. What keeps us from doing it is actually mostly politics, which fouls up the logistics of actually doing it. We're not actually threatened with extinction and mass starvation simply because we won't add 19 billion dollars or so to our 4-6 trillion dollar budgets.
I said, "make an effort", I didn't say "entirely succeeded".
But no, I don't think I'd call the effort on Torrent Time to be the same as decent commercial jobs. There are degrees of failure and it is important to distinguish between them.
More to the point, it is GIGO. If we program the robots to follow our Doomsday order, they *will* execute it. A human, even a hard ass, might reconsider at the brink of nuclear war. The robots and computers would not hesitate for a millisecond in executing the bombastic, genocidal orders they were programmed with.
The problem with humans is not that we're savages, but that we'll talk like savages and when someone else reacts to that or our own people act on it, we realized that savagery isn't really what we wanted after all. That sometimes has saved us from certain doom. With machines, they will simply prevent reconsideration by taking it out of our hands entirely.
Well, psychopaths have their own motivations. Those motivations may include following a deranged order.
Or they may simply be motivated to kill their officers in their sleep.
No, most of the order followers aren't psychopaths, they're just detached emotionally from what they are doing. The have created a justification for it, and since no one is calling them on their BS, and worse, everyone else is reinforcing that justification, they feel like they are not responsible. They're quite sane, however.
Yes, a modern force uses suppressive fire, which frequently is aimed more in the direction of the enemy, rather than an aimed shot at them. In that case, however, they're not aiming to miss, they're keeping the enemy's heads down while their compatriots are maneuvering into a better firing position. If someone pops their head up during suppressive fire, you can be pretty sure that they'll get aimed at.
The stat that you are seeming to give was a discredited one by a buy named S.L.A. Marshall who did studies that seemed to show that only 30% of troops actually fired their weapons on the battlefield in WWII. This was completely bogus. It appears that the guy didn't even actually talk to much of anyone, he just made that shit up.
It turns out that soldiers are fighting for their lives and they are doing whatever it takes to not get killed, including returning or even initiating fire on an enemy position. They may miss because the enemy isn't a stationary paper target that can't shoot back, but they are not *trying* to miss.
Remember that these softwares are made by amateurs who spent their time downloading warez instead of getting proper professional programming education.
Actually, I doubt that they lack CS education. What they lack is QA. "Good" developers with educations let this sort of shit through all the time. The businesses who make software actually make an effort to test their software for security and functionality.
The problem with these guys is that coding is sexy, QA is not.
Generally, I don't agree with arguments of the form "If we ban X, only the bad guys will have X". (For example, if X is "guns", then total general unavailability of them, would eventually drive manufacturers out of business - and sooner or later all guns (and ammunition) would rust into non-existence and the bad guys wouldn't have them.)
As the other reply said, guns are easy to manufacture. That genie is out of the bottle.
There is a place in northern Pakistan, in the tribal areas, where they quite literally make *modern* weapons by hand, with *primitive tools*. And I don't mean just AK-47s, I mean *anti-aircraft guns*. And they work just fine. Yes, they would be expensive to hand make, but the community that uses them isn't exactly looking to own 50 of them.
Let's not confuse the ability to stop making guns cheaply in industrial quantities with the ability to end their existence. Organized crime can very easily obtain armorers just like they do chemists and any other specialist. In that case, the only ones with the weapons would be the criminals and probably the cops.
As a manager, I only resent one type of loss of "control" over my team members: the loss of control that doesn't do anything but make our lives more difficult to prop up a situation that has nothing to do with the work we are trying to get done.
There is a reason people like Henry Ford actually did research on the proper length of a work day and provided good pay, it improved productivity.
Left to their own devices, managers want productivity, and a good manager knows that slavery had shitty efficiency. Particularly in my field, I spend forever trying to find the right person to hire, I certainly don't want them to bail on me because I made them work 12 hour shifts for 8 weeks straight. I also don't want them tired or dispirited.
Managers can absolutely do long term thinking. The problem is that it is not always rewarded. If you want to do anything, find a way to reward long term thinking, and not short term profit.
For my part, I think tariffs are a terrible idea. They may help maintain an artificially higher standard of living... for awhile... but you stagnate because you lose competition and both your population and industry eventually stagnates in terms of productivity and capability. I think a tariff is a short term, knee-jerk reaction to a problem. It is same sort of shitty short term political solution to match the shitty short term business decisions made by executives who are being pressured by shareholders for "Profit Now". Except in this case it is, "save our jobs now," even if those jobs really should go.
We should not be wanting to go back to the days of the 1950s where we made cars and t-shirts here. Working on assembly lines or in mills *sucked*. It was a steady job, which certainly was a nice thing for people who remembered the Great Depression, but as a long term strategy, China is welcome to have them.
Our real problem isn't that China makes our t-shirts. Our problem is that we aren't making enough advanced widgets of our own here and that those people in the unemployment lines cannot be put to work in fields that need more people, as opposed to pining for jobs that we shouldn't even aspire to anymore.
If we're just going to run an economy to keep our populations fed, we should automate everything and get people on a basic income or make a real effort at re-training what we can't automate. We shouldn't be hamstringing our economy with things like tariffs to maintain a 1950s model of America.
More to the point, we shouldn't be hogging jobs that help other countries become more successful. Do you want to end war? Then you make the other side so afraid of losing its trade with you that it wouldn't even consider it. Tariffs make bad neighbors. And bad neighbors are liable to get in fights. We need to do some sharing.
The speed of light is less about a speed of one thing, and probably more about a property of space-time that just happens to affect how fast photons move through space.
So, ultimately, anything attempting to propagate through space will be affected in some way by that property. If space-time is made up of something that pushes back as you go faster, once you get to a certain speed, you won't go any faster.
So if gravity tries to act more quickly than the speed of light, then space-time may be pushing back on gravity as well. This makes more sense if you assume there is an actual massless particle called a gravaton which transfers the gravitational force that is affected in much the same way as the photon by this same property of space-time and hence, has exactly the same speed through vacuum.
I'm with you on what you said. We should be skeptical of existing theories, but ultimately if we're changing theories all the time, we're not making progress. We should be trying to increase the things are are "almost certain" about.
On the other hand, I admit it would be nice to find out that we could do something like, exceed the speed of light in a vacuum through some new loophole. Because right now, we're starting to bump up against certain limits that are putting the greater balance of the universe outside of the reach of humanity forever. I may be greedy, considering the size of our galaxy and local group, but it seems sad that if we do survive long enough (somehow), that we might actually see most of the galaxies outside our supercluster fade to black.
That's not a good reason to hope for uncertainty, and I'm extremely unlikely to live long enough for it to even be begin to be an issue, but I suppose people want a universe that has some mystery left, or something out of left field that makes something silly like magic possible.
Re:trump independent can lead to no one getting 27
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Yes, but I think the polls at this point of the game are a crock of shit.
Sanders is more genuine and all of that, but I think Clinton has the better long game. She has the machine to win a national election easily and she will have no trouble uniting the Democratic base against Trump. So, Trump will not beat Clinton.
Mind you, I don't think he will beat Sanders either, but I think it will be closer because Sanders' campaign hasn't been in a real bowl game before, as it were. And if it is closer, then the Republicans will mess things up with any reasonable candidate.
The only sure losers in this election are the establishment Republicans unless they cut the shit and find someone who isn't a robot or a moron to elect. I'm thinking their only real chance at taking on someone like Clinton or Sanders in a national election by picking up Independents is Kaisch, and he's not going to have the allegiance of the crazies that Trump has, so he's going to have severe trouble even getting a nomination.
Rubio might get the nomination, but he seriously needs to up his game. And if he keeps up the Mr. Roboto act, he's going to be "designated loser".
Bush... I was unenthusiastic about Bush the Third to begin with, and despite his deeper war chest, he's a dead letter unless something surprising happens. Which is almost good, since I am nearly certain that Bush would even lose the national election against a wet paper bag that had the Democratic party logo on it. He'd get 45% of the vote and never have a chance at a single vote more unless Hillary Clinton dropped her disguise and revealed that she's actually a robot Adolf Hitler. (I'd have said The Devil, but I doubt that most Democrats actually believe there is a devil any more).
I sort of agree with that sentiment. I like to play games, and I'm pretty good at them, enough to have a reputation as someone who wins often. This makes me feel good, because I was able to win a lot of games on merit, and so I'm a "winner".
There are times, however, that I see someone beating me, and I'm thinking, "that guy can't beat me!" Now, I don't actually cheat, because I do have the attitude that playing with others is more important for the social interaction aspect, as well as maintaining an actual challenge for myself, but I definitely do have the feeling like I have to do "something" to win. It is sometimes hard to make myself call out an illegal move I made accidentally that no one else noticed and take it back, especially in a game where I have a reputation to maintain. So yeah, I see how this could be accurate.
So, I can totally see someone who is a winner at "business" or at "life" having even higher perceived stakes and an even stronger reaction. They're a "winner", so they *cannot* lose to someone who has proven to be a "loser" in the past. And I think it can start small like a cheat that was actually more of a slip-up than a planned move. They managed to get a stock tip that is technically illegal, but small enough that no one will know about. Then they test the waters and find out that there's no enforcement, so they assume it's "okay" and that they're just smarter than the losers and so they deserve to make the money or the victory at something. Soon, they're breaking the law right and left, and making money hand over fist. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get away with it.
I think that it is definitely the feeling that you have to maintain a reputation to maintain your self-respect. You can get hooked on success, and that's a problem because you can't always be successful.
Does the guy who designs bridges have to make considerations to ensure it can't be attacked by terrorists?
In some cases, yes.
However, just as in bridge building, in software, there are certain processes or standards you follow, and you do your due diligence. You're not going to get every bug or hole. What you have fixed ahead of time keeps away the easy compromises, and then you have to be vigilant to make sure more focused attacks don't work on you.
It's risk management. If your bridge is a well known modern Wonder of the World, you're probably looking out for active terrorist attacks on it. If it's a minor bridge, you're probably not. And the reality is, you've accepted the risk to the minor bridge, they aren't actually secure from explosions. On the other hand, you might kill a couple of people that way, which isn't usually what terrorists are going for. So blowing up a minor bridge isn't what they want to do.
So if you wrote something that you app scanned and wrote against something like OWASP, then you're probably okay as long as you're not writing mission critical software. You just have to remain responsive to intelligence reports that tell you that you have a vulnerability as they come in. If you've written mission critical software, however, then you need to test, re-test, and certify the hell out of it.
Re:trump independent can lead to no one getting 27
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I don't think he has enough to stop the Democratic candidate unless Sanders wins and the Republican is particularly strong.
If Clinton takes the nomination, Trump is just going to ensure that the Republicans have zero chance, as opposed to a slight chance this year.
Re:trump independent can lead to no one getting 27
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I think he will trigger a convention fight if he maintains his 33% over all primaries, but the party brass will be considering their options to deal with him. There will be epic backroom deals on this one, but I don't see Trump walking out of the convention as the nominee unless he improves his primary showings to over 50%.
And at that point, I will start worrying about the future of this country in a way that I have previously not been worried before.
Slashdot Mirror
In all likelihood, you are responding to a joke. If you are experiencing some odd airflow over your head, that is the likely cause.
I hope that no one believes that Bitcoin has no value. It has whatever value is assigned to it by the people willing to use it.
The problem with Bitcoin is not that is has no value, the problem with it is that it has significantly less utility than legal currencies, can have significant shifts in value, and that things like this "innovation" can affect the value in a way that isn't representative of any economic indicator.
However, much could be said about fiat currencies especially if they are poorly managed. It is usually just that a fiat currency is managed, and closely watched and protected. That has both positive and negative effects.
So in the end, the problem with Bitcoin may well be that it is completely off the rails. I don't think I'd hesitate to use it to make small purchases, if I had to, but I don't think I'd want my retirement in Bitcoin.
That said, I'd like to see it continue. A currency that cannot be governed by some country's monetary policy may well reveal interesting things about a free market currency. I'm just not sure I want to be part of the experiment.
"Actually, the biggest threat to space exploration is actually the unwillingness of people to do it."
Actually the biggest threat to space exploration is Congress.
Two sides of the same coin. Congress doesn't want to do it because either the representatives don't want to, or their voters don't. The usual reason is, as you mentioned, either some military program, or alternately, some social welfare program. Or maybe a bridge to Nowhere for their constituents.
But no, I don't think Americans are interested in killing people, we are interested in not being attacked. We just have the idea that we will get that by attacking other people *harder*, and Congress is happy to go with that reasoning in order to keep the defense contractor contributions coming in.
Again, we have this odd fixation on if you want one thing, you couldn't have possibly done the other.
I've spent quite a bit of time exploring this planet. I have quite literally traveled to the other side of the world from where I live and many other places in between. What I don't understand is why this planet has to be "enough" for me.
You're making a poor assumption about who you're talking to, because it's all black and white to you. Either I agree with you, or I'm an Aspie who has never left his parent's basement; as if, even if that were true, it somehow refutes what I have been saying. I like Earth just fine, but there are other places than this. I may never go to them, but I think we should try to. For the same reason, I might travel to more terrestrial locations.
More to the point, you learn more about where you live when you can turn around and put it in perspective. When you go to the Mars or you go to the Moon, even, you can learn things about Earth itself that you can't learn any other way.
There's no so-called "techno-religion" going on here. And I get it, you're a feet on the ground sort of guy. Fair enough. You don't have to go anywhere. But of all the places that I see my money going to, this is probably one of the few where I feel like we're doing more than putting hand to mouth and taking our turn at the grindstone.
I actually thought the response was funnier.
OP's implication with that question is that you couldn't get it for that price from anywhere. The implication is that this is not a real thing you could get.
However, if Amazon is listing that item for that price, then someone has set a price and is going to be shipping it. The rest is nitpicking. I wouldn't call something that takes two months to ship to be "unreal". I'd call it "backordered".
The people giving them the orders can still say, "no", and they might be more inclined to if the realize that they're actually the last human between some villager and the end of a gun.
Even drone pilots realize what they're doing, and from what I can tell, what they're doing has the same visuals as calling in support in Call of Duty. Unless someone tries to lie and tell you that you're actually playing a video game, you know you're killing people. You don't get the smell or the visceral impact of shooting or stabbing someone, but you know you're doing it. There is definitely an impact.
Robots are autonomous, not invincible.
Actually, the biggest threat to space exploration is actually the unwillingness of people to do it.
Even with current technology, we'd have a shot at a Mars landing now, if we focused our resources on it. However, I'm not asking for that. We can take our time on that, but you don't have to shut down one thing to make the other thing happen.
As for afterlife, I have other plans for the afterlife than floating in space. This isn't about that.
There are some people out there, apparently you included, who think that throwing all the money at a problem will fix it, and it can never be fixed without all the money. This is not at all true. We can add NASA's entire budget to feeding the hungry, and we'll get the same result. You know why? Because the reason that the billions we're already throwing at aid programs isn't working is politics and corruption. Politics and corruption will eat up *any* amount you send at it.
Aid packages that have been sent to war zones and areas impoverished by government failures are either regularly left to rot on the docks or are taken by the local powers that be and used to maintain their control over the populations.
As for health care, everyone is going to die eventually, as you seem to understand with your afterlife comment. It is as much as a black hole as anything else. You're never going to attain immortality for your population, but if somehow you managed to, you'd better have somewhere to put them.
As for space, yeah, there are vast empty stretches and very inhospitable conditions. Despite that, it is believed that the entire galaxy could be explored in less than 5 million years by robotic exploration. That's because space is big, really big, but there are places to go between here and infinity.
There's more to life than sitting around trying to feed yourself. There are places where we can still adventure and space is a big one. More than anything, as a species and a culture we need the challenge of space exploration almost as much as we need to remain fed. Looking up keeps us from navel gazing and helps us avoid fighting over petty things.
The problem with that reasoning is assuming ACs are a bloc of people who think the same and are willing to mod you down for dissing ACs in general. There is no such bloc of people because most ACs have different reasons for being an AC.
ACs aren't going anywhere. The mod system was set up with them in mind. If they're really trolls, they do get modded down. If they merely irritate you with their speech, that's not trolling, that's free speech. The signal to noise ratio is less favorable, but there is some information you will never see while people have to be identified. And frequently, you want to see people's anger about things. You want to know that people like that exist or you get blindsided when Donald Trump wins the election and you never even saw it coming. (That was an example, I don't think it is really going to happen).
Now, I don't agree that the only terrorists out there are Muslim ones, but I can see why he'd think so based on how it is reported these days. In any event, he has a right to make his comment, and he clearly seems to believe it, so he's not being a troll, even if he says something you don't like. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
We're stuck on this rock for the foreseeable future, champ. Learn to love it.
We will be stuck on this rock forever, if you get your way.
There are certain things about space and space travel that you only can find out by doing it.
Learning about comets gives us the ability to see what sort of material makes up a solar system and how it interacts. We're not just doing this to go sightseeing.
There is some idea that we will somehow be able to magically be able to find all of those advances we need later if we just stay on Earth and focus no effort or money on space exploration. That makes zero sense.
We can still focus on space exploration while feeding the hungry. As I've pointed out more than once, we already *can* feed the world's population. What keeps us from doing it is actually mostly politics, which fouls up the logistics of actually doing it. We're not actually threatened with extinction and mass starvation simply because we won't add 19 billion dollars or so to our 4-6 trillion dollar budgets.
I said, "make an effort", I didn't say "entirely succeeded".
But no, I don't think I'd call the effort on Torrent Time to be the same as decent commercial jobs. There are degrees of failure and it is important to distinguish between them.
More to the point, it is GIGO. If we program the robots to follow our Doomsday order, they *will* execute it. A human, even a hard ass, might reconsider at the brink of nuclear war. The robots and computers would not hesitate for a millisecond in executing the bombastic, genocidal orders they were programmed with.
The problem with humans is not that we're savages, but that we'll talk like savages and when someone else reacts to that or our own people act on it, we realized that savagery isn't really what we wanted after all. That sometimes has saved us from certain doom. With machines, they will simply prevent reconsideration by taking it out of our hands entirely.
Well, psychopaths have their own motivations. Those motivations may include following a deranged order.
Or they may simply be motivated to kill their officers in their sleep.
No, most of the order followers aren't psychopaths, they're just detached emotionally from what they are doing. The have created a justification for it, and since no one is calling them on their BS, and worse, everyone else is reinforcing that justification, they feel like they are not responsible. They're quite sane, however.
Not really true.
Yes, a modern force uses suppressive fire, which frequently is aimed more in the direction of the enemy, rather than an aimed shot at them. In that case, however, they're not aiming to miss, they're keeping the enemy's heads down while their compatriots are maneuvering into a better firing position. If someone pops their head up during suppressive fire, you can be pretty sure that they'll get aimed at.
The stat that you are seeming to give was a discredited one by a buy named S.L.A. Marshall who did studies that seemed to show that only 30% of troops actually fired their weapons on the battlefield in WWII. This was completely bogus. It appears that the guy didn't even actually talk to much of anyone, he just made that shit up.
It turns out that soldiers are fighting for their lives and they are doing whatever it takes to not get killed, including returning or even initiating fire on an enemy position. They may miss because the enemy isn't a stationary paper target that can't shoot back, but they are not *trying* to miss.
Even The Pirate Bay itself is quite hacked code.
Remember that these softwares are made by amateurs who spent their time downloading warez instead of getting proper professional programming education.
Actually, I doubt that they lack CS education. What they lack is QA. "Good" developers with educations let this sort of shit through all the time. The businesses who make software actually make an effort to test their software for security and functionality.
The problem with these guys is that coding is sexy, QA is not.
Generally, I don't agree with arguments of the form "If we ban X, only the bad guys will have X". (For example, if X is "guns", then total general unavailability of them, would eventually drive manufacturers out of business - and sooner or later all guns (and ammunition) would rust into non-existence and the bad guys wouldn't have them.)
As the other reply said, guns are easy to manufacture. That genie is out of the bottle.
There is a place in northern Pakistan, in the tribal areas, where they quite literally make *modern* weapons by hand, with *primitive tools*. And I don't mean just AK-47s, I mean *anti-aircraft guns*. And they work just fine. Yes, they would be expensive to hand make, but the community that uses them isn't exactly looking to own 50 of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Let's not confuse the ability to stop making guns cheaply in industrial quantities with the ability to end their existence. Organized crime can very easily obtain armorers just like they do chemists and any other specialist. In that case, the only ones with the weapons would be the criminals and probably the cops.
As a manager, I only resent one type of loss of "control" over my team members: the loss of control that doesn't do anything but make our lives more difficult to prop up a situation that has nothing to do with the work we are trying to get done.
There is a reason people like Henry Ford actually did research on the proper length of a work day and provided good pay, it improved productivity.
Left to their own devices, managers want productivity, and a good manager knows that slavery had shitty efficiency. Particularly in my field, I spend forever trying to find the right person to hire, I certainly don't want them to bail on me because I made them work 12 hour shifts for 8 weeks straight. I also don't want them tired or dispirited.
Managers can absolutely do long term thinking. The problem is that it is not always rewarded. If you want to do anything, find a way to reward long term thinking, and not short term profit.
For my part, I think tariffs are a terrible idea. They may help maintain an artificially higher standard of living... for awhile... but you stagnate because you lose competition and both your population and industry eventually stagnates in terms of productivity and capability. I think a tariff is a short term, knee-jerk reaction to a problem. It is same sort of shitty short term political solution to match the shitty short term business decisions made by executives who are being pressured by shareholders for "Profit Now". Except in this case it is, "save our jobs now," even if those jobs really should go.
We should not be wanting to go back to the days of the 1950s where we made cars and t-shirts here. Working on assembly lines or in mills *sucked*. It was a steady job, which certainly was a nice thing for people who remembered the Great Depression, but as a long term strategy, China is welcome to have them.
Our real problem isn't that China makes our t-shirts. Our problem is that we aren't making enough advanced widgets of our own here and that those people in the unemployment lines cannot be put to work in fields that need more people, as opposed to pining for jobs that we shouldn't even aspire to anymore.
If we're just going to run an economy to keep our populations fed, we should automate everything and get people on a basic income or make a real effort at re-training what we can't automate. We shouldn't be hamstringing our economy with things like tariffs to maintain a 1950s model of America.
More to the point, we shouldn't be hogging jobs that help other countries become more successful. Do you want to end war? Then you make the other side so afraid of losing its trade with you that it wouldn't even consider it. Tariffs make bad neighbors. And bad neighbors are liable to get in fights. We need to do some sharing.
The speed of light is less about a speed of one thing, and probably more about a property of space-time that just happens to affect how fast photons move through space.
So, ultimately, anything attempting to propagate through space will be affected in some way by that property. If space-time is made up of something that pushes back as you go faster, once you get to a certain speed, you won't go any faster.
So if gravity tries to act more quickly than the speed of light, then space-time may be pushing back on gravity as well. This makes more sense if you assume there is an actual massless particle called a gravaton which transfers the gravitational force that is affected in much the same way as the photon by this same property of space-time and hence, has exactly the same speed through vacuum.
I'm with you on what you said. We should be skeptical of existing theories, but ultimately if we're changing theories all the time, we're not making progress. We should be trying to increase the things are are "almost certain" about.
On the other hand, I admit it would be nice to find out that we could do something like, exceed the speed of light in a vacuum through some new loophole. Because right now, we're starting to bump up against certain limits that are putting the greater balance of the universe outside of the reach of humanity forever. I may be greedy, considering the size of our galaxy and local group, but it seems sad that if we do survive long enough (somehow), that we might actually see most of the galaxies outside our supercluster fade to black.
That's not a good reason to hope for uncertainty, and I'm extremely unlikely to live long enough for it to even be begin to be an issue, but I suppose people want a universe that has some mystery left, or something out of left field that makes something silly like magic possible.
Yes, but I think the polls at this point of the game are a crock of shit.
Sanders is more genuine and all of that, but I think Clinton has the better long game. She has the machine to win a national election easily and she will have no trouble uniting the Democratic base against Trump. So, Trump will not beat Clinton.
Mind you, I don't think he will beat Sanders either, but I think it will be closer because Sanders' campaign hasn't been in a real bowl game before, as it were. And if it is closer, then the Republicans will mess things up with any reasonable candidate.
The only sure losers in this election are the establishment Republicans unless they cut the shit and find someone who isn't a robot or a moron to elect. I'm thinking their only real chance at taking on someone like Clinton or Sanders in a national election by picking up Independents is Kaisch, and he's not going to have the allegiance of the crazies that Trump has, so he's going to have severe trouble even getting a nomination.
Rubio might get the nomination, but he seriously needs to up his game. And if he keeps up the Mr. Roboto act, he's going to be "designated loser".
Bush... I was unenthusiastic about Bush the Third to begin with, and despite his deeper war chest, he's a dead letter unless something surprising happens. Which is almost good, since I am nearly certain that Bush would even lose the national election against a wet paper bag that had the Democratic party logo on it. He'd get 45% of the vote and never have a chance at a single vote more unless Hillary Clinton dropped her disguise and revealed that she's actually a robot Adolf Hitler. (I'd have said The Devil, but I doubt that most Democrats actually believe there is a devil any more).
I sort of agree with that sentiment. I like to play games, and I'm pretty good at them, enough to have a reputation as someone who wins often. This makes me feel good, because I was able to win a lot of games on merit, and so I'm a "winner".
There are times, however, that I see someone beating me, and I'm thinking, "that guy can't beat me!" Now, I don't actually cheat, because I do have the attitude that playing with others is more important for the social interaction aspect, as well as maintaining an actual challenge for myself, but I definitely do have the feeling like I have to do "something" to win. It is sometimes hard to make myself call out an illegal move I made accidentally that no one else noticed and take it back, especially in a game where I have a reputation to maintain. So yeah, I see how this could be accurate.
So, I can totally see someone who is a winner at "business" or at "life" having even higher perceived stakes and an even stronger reaction. They're a "winner", so they *cannot* lose to someone who has proven to be a "loser" in the past. And I think it can start small like a cheat that was actually more of a slip-up than a planned move. They managed to get a stock tip that is technically illegal, but small enough that no one will know about. Then they test the waters and find out that there's no enforcement, so they assume it's "okay" and that they're just smarter than the losers and so they deserve to make the money or the victory at something. Soon, they're breaking the law right and left, and making money hand over fist. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get away with it.
I think that it is definitely the feeling that you have to maintain a reputation to maintain your self-respect. You can get hooked on success, and that's a problem because you can't always be successful.
Does the guy who designs bridges have to make considerations to ensure it can't be attacked by terrorists?
In some cases, yes.
However, just as in bridge building, in software, there are certain processes or standards you follow, and you do your due diligence. You're not going to get every bug or hole. What you have fixed ahead of time keeps away the easy compromises, and then you have to be vigilant to make sure more focused attacks don't work on you.
It's risk management. If your bridge is a well known modern Wonder of the World, you're probably looking out for active terrorist attacks on it. If it's a minor bridge, you're probably not. And the reality is, you've accepted the risk to the minor bridge, they aren't actually secure from explosions. On the other hand, you might kill a couple of people that way, which isn't usually what terrorists are going for. So blowing up a minor bridge isn't what they want to do.
So if you wrote something that you app scanned and wrote against something like OWASP, then you're probably okay as long as you're not writing mission critical software. You just have to remain responsive to intelligence reports that tell you that you have a vulnerability as they come in. If you've written mission critical software, however, then you need to test, re-test, and certify the hell out of it.
I don't think he has enough to stop the Democratic candidate unless Sanders wins and the Republican is particularly strong.
If Clinton takes the nomination, Trump is just going to ensure that the Republicans have zero chance, as opposed to a slight chance this year.
I think he will trigger a convention fight if he maintains his 33% over all primaries, but the party brass will be considering their options to deal with him. There will be epic backroom deals on this one, but I don't see Trump walking out of the convention as the nominee unless he improves his primary showings to over 50%.
And at that point, I will start worrying about the future of this country in a way that I have previously not been worried before.