A difference between badly documented code and well documented code? Sure. The badly documented (or not documented at all) is far more likely to be buggy, fragile and inefficient. People who create software professionally take pride in their work and a big part of that is letting other people know just how good they are. They do that by explaining what the code does and by implication telling the world how experienced and smart they are.
Poorly documented stuff is written by people who think it's all "fun" and have no real clue about professionalism. They probably haven't even spent any time thinking about the structure of the problem before diving in and bashing out a couple of thousand lines of code. These people tend to be trying to prove to themselves how good they are and mistakenly associate "good" with code size or how many overly complex and inexplicable constructs they can use - in the false assumption that others will be impressed by this.
We aren't. But I've never seen an Arts or Humanities coder produce this kind of shambolic mess (mostly because I've hardly ever seen any code from non-technical programmers) and I don't believe it's something any self-respective tech. graduate would be prepared to put their name to, either.
While the two CEOs who are promoting this view both have non-technical qualifications (so: no surprise there) the article is written more as a "preaching to the choir" piece than as serious career advice.
For example: the liberal arts train students to thrive in subjectivity and ambiguity, a necessary skill in the tech world where few things are black and white I don't see that as being particularly helpful when trying to compile code - it either does or it doesn't. There is no alternative to having an executable pop out of the slot when you "win". It also avoids any notion that technical problems require technical solutions - and the only way to arrive at the best (if not "the") solution is to have a deep understanding of the technical issues and the technical advantages and flaws with each alternative. No matter how good you are at history or philosophy, you won't be helping in this arena.
So while it is quite possible for technically unqualified individuals to work at technology companies, that does not mean they will be working with (or creating) the technology the firm is based on. But it could mean that one day, they'll be your boss.
It's something that's general knowledge for the majority of Slashdot readers
Nope. I've never even heard of it - and having read that announcement I'm still no clearer what it is, what it does or whether I should be interested in it.
However, it's not alone. There is a huge amount of FOSS that has an entire "front" web page that tells people in exquisite detail what changes have been made, who contributed, how others can get involved and what bugs are outstanding without ever mentioning what the hell the project does, or what benefits it brings the world. This just adds one more to the tally.
It may be the best thing since sliced bread, but until these projects extract their collective heads and start addressing the billions of people outside their closed, little development communities, no-one will ever know,
Would this be better than a RaspberryPI for small-scale arcade cabinets?
There are already dozens of boards available that are better than the RPi for this sort of use. Many at less than the $49 this thing is up for grabs at.
No. Learning to code is like learning the alphabet and some basic words.
Learning to be a programmer is being able to use a word-processor, having the rules of grammar, the 4 modes of discourse, a huge vocabulary and a storytelling ability fluently available to you.
"Coding" tells you the structure of a for loop. Being a programmer tells you when to use it and how to deal with the exceptions it could throw up. Sadly there are no job interviews I have ever encountered that are deep enough to split the one from the other.
Forget all the principled arguments: free software, "for the children", pretty coloured boxes, or hackability. The only reason people buy Pis is the price. The only thing that most of them do is them load XBMC and then brag to their friends how they got a $99 media player for fifty bucks.
We're all tarts: chasing after the cheapest price and free-est stuff. Nobody really cares whether the software is FOSS, the hardware is open source or if the PCB is made out of panda skin. If it low on the $$$$'s it's top of every geek's wishlist.
So what exactly requires so many years to make it al work
It takes as long as it does, because that is the amount of time (or money: same principle applies) than is allotted to the project. Finishing sooner makes no sense as you'd just be working yourself out of a job earlier. There is also no pressing need to have such a vehicle. It's not as if there was a killer asteroid heading this way that would spell doom - and worse: upset NASA's carefully crafted timetables.
In that situation, where there was a deadline to be met (and not a vacuous political one), then yes: I daresay the prototype would be on the pad in a matter of months. With 2 or 3 more following close behind.
Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress
unfortunately when you went off the deep end, you missed the pool completely.
This was never about government consipracy. It was simply that governments have no need of improved performance or improved efficiency - when they have (as near as dammit) infinite amounts of money available to "solve" the problem with.
The commercial aircraft makers, being subject to both competition and finite resources *had* to make things better to stave off their competitors who were in the same race for betterment and profit and to meet clients' expectations of improved performance: speed, reliability, payload capacity and lowered cost. Governments do not have those drivers, hence they have no need to improve the vehicles they use.
engines designed in the 70's&80's are still seen as state of the art
But that's government "progress" for you. Compare 60 years of spaceflight technology from 1955 to 2015 (OK, the years were cherry-picked) and it's still basically the same: LOX/Kerosene or LOX/LH2 and some engines are bigger and some are smaller.
Now look at aircraft development from (another cherry-picked 60 years): 1910 to 1970. That went from wooden biplanes to the 747. Sure, there were a few "helpful" eras in between - like 2 major wars and lots more lesser ones, which kicked development up by several notches. But those developments were still the result of commercial companies, just as NASA contracts out work, today.
Why would anyone want to waste time on a project for this board
You wouldn't waste time on a project for this board as the specs for it seem to be entirely generic. So your project would work just as well on many of the other SBCs out there. There don't seem to be any killer features on this product (possibly the camera) so whatever you were planning to create for a Cubie, or an Olimex or any of the others would work on this one, too. And if it didn't then just toss this variant and continue working on the more mature SBCs
Get a tripod that can lift the binoculars high enough that you can stand upright while using them whether you are looking at the horizon or near the zenith
It doesn't work.
Not only would I need a tripod with a reach of over 7 feet (nearly 6 feet to my eyes, then the tripod head, then the height from the binoculars mounting screw to the tripod), but you'd be standing directly under the tripod to view upwards - and too close to the tripod's legs at lower angles. Tripods are also unstable, since if they do extend high enough, it's on a single, wind-out, pole which has no lateral support.
Finally, you get neck-ache from having your head tilted at such an angle. Which is why proper astronomical telescopes have right-angled viewing positions, so you can observe from a much lower pivot-point and with your head directed downwards which is much more comfortable.
If you absolutely *must* use binoculars for astronomical viewing, either get a sun-lounger and lie back, or get a parallelgram mount (which will cost many times the price of even a decent pair of binoculars). However, sun loungers only point you in one direction, so are inconvenient for long-term viewing, unless you have a sun-tracking model. In which case you can probably afford a decent telescope.
I'd be pleased if some of these kids decide to take up astronomy as a hobby, but don't have any strong expectation that will happen
And most won't.
Most kids (adults, too) will be curious, rather than interested, However, once they take a look through a telescope they will be disappointed. The only objects that give any sense of awe, or wonder, are views of The Moon, Jupiter, Mars (when it's close: once every 2 years), and Saturn. Everything else is just a fuzzy, faint, grey blob.
Sure, you can point a telescope at M31 (Andromeda) and tell people that it's a galaxy and that it's 2 billion light-years away. But really: who care? and who can appreciate how far a light-year is, either? Try a telescope on M13 (The Hercules cluster: either the best or second-best cluster in the night sky) and it is just a collection of points of light - quite pretty for the average newbie to look at once, but that's about it - a bit like picking up an unusual shell on a beach.
I have lots of friends and neighbours who have asked for a look through my telescopes. But none have ever asked again. They see things through my 12-inch Dob or 4 inch refractor (on a GOTO) and make all the right, appreciative, noises but that's mainly for show. Afterwards the reaction is mainly that's nice - who wants a beer? And the whole experience is chalked up "I've seen the rings of Saturn" - but that's all it is: a tick on a "bucket" list.
So I would ignore all these recommendations for this telescope or those binoculars. - they merely reflect the biases and posessions of people who are already enthusiasts. I wouldn't go buying equipment in the hope of impressing, or converting children to astronomy. It won't. They are used to bright, colour images from space telescopes of things at the very edge of creation. They will settle for nothing less and are much more used to seeing things on screens than first-hand. Who can compete with that?
This advice about binoculars had been obsoleted by cheap, good, chinese telescopes. (Ans pretty much every commercial telescope is chinese-made, these days)
The advice came about after WW2 when there was a good supply of army surplus gear at very attractive prices. At the same time any amateur telescope was both expensive (being essentially hand made) and with poor quality optics and even worse mechanicals. The eyepieces sucked and the mountings available were completely rubbish.
In those days, an "expensive" pair of binoculars would cost about £30 (UK currency - I don't know what that translates to in other currencies at the time). However that was roughly 2 - 3 weeks pay (before deductions) for a shop worker or junior office employee. Obviously at the the time, astronomy was a rich mans' game - and it was almost all men.
With binoculars you are paying twice for the optics (one for each eye). Unless you go for top-end gear, you have fixed eyepieces that will only give a wide field of view - and them, you have to buy additional eyepeices in pairs. You also don't get any sort of mount - and a standard photographic tripod is unsuitable as you need to have the binoculars at eye height, or higher, in order to look upwards - a configuration that tripods are not designed for since you'd be standing too close. Without a mount, small arms will soon get tired of holding them at raised heights and you can't easily "star hop" to targets when you are a complete newbie. So using them is both frustrating and tiring.
By all means buy a pair of binoculars (I have 3), but you'll also need a parallelogram mount - another 200 USD or more. You will also have to set their focus for each user, which means they will be nudged off target. Also you will only be able to see big things like The Moon. Planets will be too small to please with binoculars' low magnification and most dim astronomical targets will still be too dim to appreciate - just on the verge of vision: more "detecting" them than "observing" them - a turn off to kids used to seeing Hubble-like images.
So binoculars are a bad idea to start with. One that is handed down due to ignorance and repetition without any consideration for why the advice was once helpful. They are no longer any match for a small, cheap, telescope on a proper mount.
I find it quite alarming that anyone would go anywhere near a company forum, excpet to sing the company song and add their vote to how GOOD everything was. One place I worked had one. It was shut down after 6 months as it was only HR who posted anything and the number of times that content was read was in the single figures.
Short of turning up at foo.com's premises with a government issued photo id, or swearing an affadavit, how exactly would foo.com know anything at all about anyone called John Doe? Let alone be able to differentiate one individual with that name from all the thousands of others.
Further, how could it know that John A. Doe was a different (or the same) individual as John B. Doe and that each actual, real, live person had only one identity filed with foo.com (and who would tell them when that person had died? - and what proof would be required to support that claim).
There are far too many pitfalls for anyone other than a government department to administer this level of control. There are also far too many different countries that would have to both agree standards and share this information in a secure manner.
Bugs come when people lose track of the big picture. When they lose concentration and focus - just like when jugglers drop the ball.
If you want to reduce the incidence of avoidable bugs, get rid of the distractions. Ones such as other people interrupting, phones ringing, asynchronous non job-related alerts going off (fire alarms excepted) and the administrivia associated with the programming environment. Maybe even unplug them from their "entertainment", too.
There will always be non-avoidable bugs: ones where the programmer is simply making a mistake, isn't up to the task in hand or has been given a bad brief or wrong information.
Exactly. You mine out the easy-to-find exploits until they are depleted
Which assumes there are a finite (and small) number of bugs - even zero-day exploits. I think we can safely say that's not the case.
As the "incentives" for finding new 0-day exploits grows, then more people will have a reason to start looking for them. If the government then buys up the "popular" ones, everyone who's running non-mainstream software will suddenly find they are being hacked. Whereas previously the 0-day exploiters would just have gone for the low-hanging fruit, now they'll be going higher up the (almost infinitely tall) tree.
If a new buyer comes into the market - a buyer with lots of money, then all that happens is that the price goes up. It's simple economics and we see this happening in every market: from commodities to TV programmes.
If the price becomes high enough, new exploiters will enter the market and start discovering exploits, in competition with the original suppliers. Then the NSA would have to start dealing with those guys, too. And so the circle would keep going round: more money, new exploit finders, asking higher prices.
If the NSA wants to improve security, they would set up their own zero-day exploiters to not only find, but to fix security holes and then issue those fixes for free (or use the exploits to force fixes on the exploited software. They might also ask for new laws that would require software vendors to pay them for fixing these problems. However, it's by no means certain that this would be their intention. They may simply be collecting hacks for their own nefarious purposes.
After all, we haven't seen a government agency buying up all the drugs, in order to stop them being supplied to the population - so why would they use that tactic here?
... if someone donates his time to develop a program
But that isn't how it works.
The whole FOSS thing is a trade. On the one hand, the coder "donates" his/her/its time doing things that are funAnd when you multiply the time spent by maybe some thousands of users, all trying to work out the same problems - compared to the time taken to write, compile and toss-over-the-wall some of this stuff, "free" software is probably some of the worst deals on the planet.
And as for that old crock: You get what you pay for or "Hey, it's free: what do you expect?", most of this stuff is far from "free", it has a large negative value, as it takes many hours or days of your time just to get up to zero: the point at which you can start to do something useful with it.
The simplest course of action would be for the major search engines, i.e. Google (there are some others, I'm told) to simply cut those spanish newspapers out of it's web-crawlers and search functions. If there are no links to the newspapers in question, there can be no tax to pay.
If that means that the online versions of these publications simply cease to exist? Well, that's not the search engines' problem. Would the E.U. then have to instigate a new internet law, to force these sites to be crawled and to force the search engines to do the opposite of forgetting about E.U. citizens and actively "remember" about them.
I have the impression that the newspapers that were pressing for this law don't realise that, despite what they may think, they really are not in a position of power, apropos the internet.
Of course, what this whole field of study needs is a rich uncle (or sugar daddy) to provide funding for specific, basic, pieces of research. You'd think that for all the money they've made from social media, some of the FB/Twitter/others founders or major beneficiaries could put their hands in their pocket.
Or maybe they are the *last* people who want to make this subject rigourous and scientific?
To replicate an experiment, you take the description of the conditions, tasks, environment, fixed independent and dependent variables, analytical method and results provided by the original experimenter in the (peer-reviewed) paper they published.
If you can show the same results, with the same statistical significance, then it's reasonable to assume that the experiment shows a valid scientific phenomenon.
If you can't then one of the two experiments got it wrong and more work is needed.
The basic problem with social experiments, that are based on the judgement, feelings, or anything else that the studied group merely says it would / would-not do, thinks, feels, or otherwise emotes is completely subjective. Asking people how sad, happy, angry something makes them feel and rating that feeling - or the difference from previous values - has no scientific merit, as none of the terms used have any hard, scientific, definition and none of the participants have had their feelings "calibrated".
It's little different from a scientist (a proper one) measuring electric voltage by sticking their tongue across two electrodes, or measuring distance by eyeballing it. The level of accuracy and standardisation the social "sciences" have at present puts them on a par with chemical research: phlogiston, fixed air (CO2) in the 17th century.
As for being able to determine which variables are being measured - or even what all the variables are in their experiments, the social scientists have yet to discover their subject's version of fire.
One of the techniques the government has for allowing the discussion of sensitive issues, without starting a witch hunt is called The Chatham House Rule
Meeting held under this rule do not allow the the disclosure of who said what. The "what" can be reported, but no-one is permitted to say who said it. That permits people to express views, or ask "what if" questions (and get considered, informed answers) without having to always play to the (media) audience and make guarded, ambiguous and watered-down statements.
Since the government recognises the value of these sorts of meetings (as well as the established protocol of "off the record" briefings, which cannot be quoted) it's ludicrous that they would think that removing anonymity would be a good idea. This can only be one of those "silly season" media reports, usually made up by journalists who are bored as politicians are away during the summer months.
The world has moved on since the BBB was the game in town.
Now there are much better boards (though maybe not all with the BBB's size) that, unlike the BBB support audio in & out, have more RAM, dual-core processor and more flexible power options.
Some of the new generation boards also make the BBB look quite expensive - both for what you get and in absolute terms.
Slashdot Mirror
Poorly documented stuff is written by people who think it's all "fun" and have no real clue about professionalism. They probably haven't even spent any time thinking about the structure of the problem before diving in and bashing out a couple of thousand lines of code. These people tend to be trying to prove to themselves how good they are and mistakenly associate "good" with code size or how many overly complex and inexplicable constructs they can use - in the false assumption that others will be impressed by this.
We aren't. But I've never seen an Arts or Humanities coder produce this kind of shambolic mess (mostly because I've hardly ever seen any code from non-technical programmers) and I don't believe it's something any self-respective tech. graduate would be prepared to put their name to, either.
For example: the liberal arts train students to thrive in subjectivity and ambiguity, a necessary skill in the tech world where few things are black and white I don't see that as being particularly helpful when trying to compile code - it either does or it doesn't. There is no alternative to having an executable pop out of the slot when you "win". It also avoids any notion that technical problems require technical solutions - and the only way to arrive at the best (if not "the") solution is to have a deep understanding of the technical issues and the technical advantages and flaws with each alternative. No matter how good you are at history or philosophy, you won't be helping in this arena.
So while it is quite possible for technically unqualified individuals to work at technology companies, that does not mean they will be working with (or creating) the technology the firm is based on. But it could mean that one day, they'll be your boss.
It's something that's general knowledge for the majority of Slashdot readers
Nope. I've never even heard of it - and having read that announcement I'm still no clearer what it is, what it does or whether I should be interested in it.
However, it's not alone. There is a huge amount of FOSS that has an entire "front" web page that tells people in exquisite detail what changes have been made, who contributed, how others can get involved and what bugs are outstanding without ever mentioning what the hell the project does, or what benefits it brings the world. This just adds one more to the tally.
It may be the best thing since sliced bread, but until these projects extract their collective heads and start addressing the billions of people outside their closed, little development communities, no-one will ever know,
Would this be better than a RaspberryPI for small-scale arcade cabinets?
There are already dozens of boards available that are better than the RPi for this sort of use. Many at less than the $49 this thing is up for grabs at.
Learning to be a programmer is being able to use a word-processor, having the rules of grammar, the 4 modes of discourse, a huge vocabulary and a storytelling ability fluently available to you.
"Coding" tells you the structure of a for loop. Being a programmer tells you when to use it and how to deal with the exceptions it could throw up. Sadly there are no job interviews I have ever encountered that are deep enough to split the one from the other.
why do we advocate its use?
Why do people rave about it? Because it's cheap.
Forget all the principled arguments: free software, "for the children", pretty coloured boxes, or hackability. The only reason people buy Pis is the price. The only thing that most of them do is them load XBMC and then brag to their friends how they got a $99 media player for fifty bucks.
We're all tarts: chasing after the cheapest price and free-est stuff. Nobody really cares whether the software is FOSS, the hardware is open source or if the PCB is made out of panda skin. If it low on the $$$$'s it's top of every geek's wishlist.
So what exactly requires so many years to make it al work
It takes as long as it does, because that is the amount of time (or money: same principle applies) than is allotted to the project. Finishing sooner makes no sense as you'd just be working yourself out of a job earlier. There is also no pressing need to have such a vehicle. It's not as if there was a killer asteroid heading this way that would spell doom - and worse: upset NASA's carefully crafted timetables.
In that situation, where there was a deadline to be met (and not a vacuous political one), then yes: I daresay the prototype would be on the pad in a matter of months. With 2 or 3 more following close behind.
Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress
unfortunately when you went off the deep end, you missed the pool completely.
This was never about government consipracy. It was simply that governments have no need of improved performance or improved efficiency - when they have (as near as dammit) infinite amounts of money available to "solve" the problem with.
The commercial aircraft makers, being subject to both competition and finite resources *had* to make things better to stave off their competitors who were in the same race for betterment and profit and to meet clients' expectations of improved performance: speed, reliability, payload capacity and lowered cost. Governments do not have those drivers, hence they have no need to improve the vehicles they use.
splash!
engines designed in the 70's&80's are still seen as state of the art
But that's government "progress" for you. Compare 60 years of spaceflight technology from 1955 to 2015 (OK, the years were cherry-picked) and it's still basically the same: LOX/Kerosene or LOX/LH2 and some engines are bigger and some are smaller.
Now look at aircraft development from (another cherry-picked 60 years): 1910 to 1970. That went from wooden biplanes to the 747. Sure, there were a few "helpful" eras in between - like 2 major wars and lots more lesser ones, which kicked development up by several notches. But those developments were still the result of commercial companies, just as NASA contracts out work, today.
Why would anyone want to waste time on a project for this board
You wouldn't waste time on a project for this board as the specs for it seem to be entirely generic. So your project would work just as well on many of the other SBCs out there. There don't seem to be any killer features on this product (possibly the camera) so whatever you were planning to create for a Cubie, or an Olimex or any of the others would work on this one, too. And if it didn't then just toss this variant and continue working on the more mature SBCs
Get a tripod that can lift the binoculars high enough that you can stand upright while using them whether you are looking at the horizon or near the zenith
It doesn't work.
Not only would I need a tripod with a reach of over 7 feet (nearly 6 feet to my eyes, then the tripod head, then the height from the binoculars mounting screw to the tripod), but you'd be standing directly under the tripod to view upwards - and too close to the tripod's legs at lower angles. Tripods are also unstable, since if they do extend high enough, it's on a single, wind-out, pole which has no lateral support.
Finally, you get neck-ache from having your head tilted at such an angle. Which is why proper astronomical telescopes have right-angled viewing positions, so you can observe from a much lower pivot-point and with your head directed downwards which is much more comfortable.
If you absolutely *must* use binoculars for astronomical viewing, either get a sun-lounger and lie back, or get a parallelgram mount (which will cost many times the price of even a decent pair of binoculars). However, sun loungers only point you in one direction, so are inconvenient for long-term viewing, unless you have a sun-tracking model. In which case you can probably afford a decent telescope.
I'd be pleased if some of these kids decide to take up astronomy as a hobby, but don't have any strong expectation that will happen
And most won't.
Most kids (adults, too) will be curious, rather than interested, However, once they take a look through a telescope they will be disappointed. The only objects that give any sense of awe, or wonder, are views of The Moon, Jupiter, Mars (when it's close: once every 2 years), and Saturn. Everything else is just a fuzzy, faint, grey blob.
Sure, you can point a telescope at M31 (Andromeda) and tell people that it's a galaxy and that it's 2 billion light-years away. But really: who care? and who can appreciate how far a light-year is, either? Try a telescope on M13 (The Hercules cluster: either the best or second-best cluster in the night sky) and it is just a collection of points of light - quite pretty for the average newbie to look at once, but that's about it - a bit like picking up an unusual shell on a beach.
I have lots of friends and neighbours who have asked for a look through my telescopes. But none have ever asked again. They see things through my 12-inch Dob or 4 inch refractor (on a GOTO) and make all the right, appreciative, noises but that's mainly for show. Afterwards the reaction is mainly that's nice - who wants a beer? And the whole experience is chalked up "I've seen the rings of Saturn" - but that's all it is: a tick on a "bucket" list.
So I would ignore all these recommendations for this telescope or those binoculars. - they merely reflect the biases and posessions of people who are already enthusiasts. I wouldn't go buying equipment in the hope of impressing, or converting children to astronomy. It won't. They are used to bright, colour images from space telescopes of things at the very edge of creation. They will settle for nothing less and are much more used to seeing things on screens than first-hand. Who can compete with that?
The advice came about after WW2 when there was a good supply of army surplus gear at very attractive prices. At the same time any amateur telescope was both expensive (being essentially hand made) and with poor quality optics and even worse mechanicals. The eyepieces sucked and the mountings available were completely rubbish.
In those days, an "expensive" pair of binoculars would cost about £30 (UK currency - I don't know what that translates to in other currencies at the time). However that was roughly 2 - 3 weeks pay (before deductions) for a shop worker or junior office employee. Obviously at the the time, astronomy was a rich mans' game - and it was almost all men.
With binoculars you are paying twice for the optics (one for each eye). Unless you go for top-end gear, you have fixed eyepieces that will only give a wide field of view - and them, you have to buy additional eyepeices in pairs. You also don't get any sort of mount - and a standard photographic tripod is unsuitable as you need to have the binoculars at eye height, or higher, in order to look upwards - a configuration that tripods are not designed for since you'd be standing too close. Without a mount, small arms will soon get tired of holding them at raised heights and you can't easily "star hop" to targets when you are a complete newbie. So using them is both frustrating and tiring.
By all means buy a pair of binoculars (I have 3), but you'll also need a parallelogram mount - another 200 USD or more. You will also have to set their focus for each user, which means they will be nudged off target. Also you will only be able to see big things like The Moon. Planets will be too small to please with binoculars' low magnification and most dim astronomical targets will still be too dim to appreciate - just on the verge of vision: more "detecting" them than "observing" them - a turn off to kids used to seeing Hubble-like images.
So binoculars are a bad idea to start with. One that is handed down due to ignorance and repetition without any consideration for why the advice was once helpful. They are no longer any match for a small, cheap, telescope on a proper mount.
In a company monitored socail media
I find it quite alarming that anyone would go anywhere near a company forum, excpet to sing the company song and add their vote to how GOOD everything was. One place I worked had one. It was shut down after 6 months as it was only HR who posted anything and the number of times that content was read was in the single figures.
Foo.com would know John Doe's real life info
Short of turning up at foo.com's premises with a government issued photo id, or swearing an affadavit, how exactly would foo.com know anything at all about anyone called John Doe? Let alone be able to differentiate one individual with that name from all the thousands of others.
Further, how could it know that John A. Doe was a different (or the same) individual as John B. Doe and that each actual, real, live person had only one identity filed with foo.com (and who would tell them when that person had died? - and what proof would be required to support that claim).
There are far too many pitfalls for anyone other than a government department to administer this level of control. There are also far too many different countries that would have to both agree standards and share this information in a secure manner.
Bugs come when people lose track of the big picture. When they lose concentration and focus - just like when jugglers drop the ball.
If you want to reduce the incidence of avoidable bugs, get rid of the distractions. Ones such as other people interrupting, phones ringing, asynchronous non job-related alerts going off (fire alarms excepted) and the administrivia associated with the programming environment. Maybe even unplug them from their "entertainment", too.
There will always be non-avoidable bugs: ones where the programmer is simply making a mistake, isn't up to the task in hand or has been given a bad brief or wrong information.
Exactly. You mine out the easy-to-find exploits until they are depleted
Which assumes there are a finite (and small) number of bugs - even zero-day exploits. I think we can safely say that's not the case.
As the "incentives" for finding new 0-day exploits grows, then more people will have a reason to start looking for them. If the government then buys up the "popular" ones, everyone who's running non-mainstream software will suddenly find they are being hacked. Whereas previously the 0-day exploiters would just have gone for the low-hanging fruit, now they'll be going higher up the (almost infinitely tall) tree.
If the price becomes high enough, new exploiters will enter the market and start discovering exploits, in competition with the original suppliers. Then the NSA would have to start dealing with those guys, too. And so the circle would keep going round: more money, new exploit finders, asking higher prices.
If the NSA wants to improve security, they would set up their own zero-day exploiters to not only find, but to fix security holes and then issue those fixes for free (or use the exploits to force fixes on the exploited software. They might also ask for new laws that would require software vendors to pay them for fixing these problems. However, it's by no means certain that this would be their intention. They may simply be collecting hacks for their own nefarious purposes.
After all, we haven't seen a government agency buying up all the drugs, in order to stop them being supplied to the population - so why would they use that tactic here?
But that isn't how it works.
The whole FOSS thing is a trade. On the one hand, the coder "donates" his/her/its time doing things that are funAnd when you multiply the time spent by maybe some thousands of users, all trying to work out the same problems - compared to the time taken to write, compile and toss-over-the-wall some of this stuff, "free" software is probably some of the worst deals on the planet.
And as for that old crock: You get what you pay for or "Hey, it's free: what do you expect?", most of this stuff is far from "free", it has a large negative value, as it takes many hours or days of your time just to get up to zero: the point at which you can start to do something useful with it.
The simplest course of action would be for the major search engines, i.e. Google (there are some others, I'm told) to simply cut those spanish newspapers out of it's web-crawlers and search functions. If there are no links to the newspapers in question, there can be no tax to pay.
If that means that the online versions of these publications simply cease to exist? Well, that's not the search engines' problem. Would the E.U. then have to instigate a new internet law, to force these sites to be crawled and to force the search engines to do the opposite of forgetting about E.U. citizens and actively "remember" about them.
I have the impression that the newspapers that were pressing for this law don't realise that, despite what they may think, they really are not in a position of power, apropos the internet.
"Pay authors"
The journal doesn't have to last long
Don't worry, it won't. I'd reckon on one edition.
Of course, what this whole field of study needs is a rich uncle (or sugar daddy) to provide funding for specific, basic, pieces of research. You'd think that for all the money they've made from social media, some of the FB/Twitter/others founders or major beneficiaries could put their hands in their pocket.
Or maybe they are the *last* people who want to make this subject rigourous and scientific?
To replicate an experiment, you take the description of the conditions, tasks, environment, fixed independent and dependent variables, analytical method and results provided by the original experimenter in the (peer-reviewed) paper they published.
If you can show the same results, with the same statistical significance, then it's reasonable to assume that the experiment shows a valid scientific phenomenon.
If you can't then one of the two experiments got it wrong and more work is needed.
The basic problem with social experiments, that are based on the judgement, feelings, or anything else that the studied group merely says it would / would-not do, thinks, feels, or otherwise emotes is completely subjective. Asking people how sad, happy, angry something makes them feel and rating that feeling - or the difference from previous values - has no scientific merit, as none of the terms used have any hard, scientific, definition and none of the participants have had their feelings "calibrated".
It's little different from a scientist (a proper one) measuring electric voltage by sticking their tongue across two electrodes, or measuring distance by eyeballing it. The level of accuracy and standardisation the social "sciences" have at present puts them on a par with chemical research: phlogiston, fixed air (CO2) in the 17th century.
As for being able to determine which variables are being measured - or even what all the variables are in their experiments, the social scientists have yet to discover their subject's version of fire.
Meeting held under this rule do not allow the the disclosure of who said what. The "what" can be reported, but no-one is permitted to say who said it. That permits people to express views, or ask "what if" questions (and get considered, informed answers) without having to always play to the (media) audience and make guarded, ambiguous and watered-down statements.
Since the government recognises the value of these sorts of meetings (as well as the established protocol of "off the record" briefings, which cannot be quoted) it's ludicrous that they would think that removing anonymity would be a good idea. This can only be one of those "silly season" media reports, usually made up by journalists who are bored as politicians are away during the summer months.
Yup. Smaller, better, cheaper. This is exactly what the RPi people should have been developing for the past 2 years.
Now there are much better boards (though maybe not all with the BBB's size) that, unlike the BBB support audio in & out, have more RAM, dual-core processor and more flexible power options.
Some of the new generation boards also make the BBB look quite expensive - both for what you get and in absolute terms.