checktheorder

>What is this article about, anyway?

It's about 12000 words long.

>This reminds me of Superman and General Zod in the "Man of Steel" film.

In that Zack Snyder was fundamentally incapable of focusing on one thing at a time, and decided to metaphorically barf up every half-baked idea simultaneously, making for an ungodly confusing incompetent mess of a film?

Heck, it's still a problem with direct connections. Take the average Windows PC. Take the average Android phone. Take a USB cable. Plug them in together. Now copy a few thousand MP3s from the PC to the phone using nothing but stock Explorer and watch the transfer rate drop to about 1/1000th of what the wired connection should be capable of, because Microsoft made sure to assign their most inept, incapable, dumbest employees when they designed MTP.

>Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Douglas Adams' "Wonko the Sane," who built an asylum turned inside out to house the whole world. Many comedians would qualify as this as well.

I'm also thinking of the Terry Pratchett concept of being "knurd". On the Discworld, the opposite of being drunk isn't being sober - sober is the middle ground on the drunk/sober/knurd scale. To be knurd is to be so completely aware of everything that one can't really function in normal society.

>You're missing the point: There's basically a point sometime in the 2020s when an electric vehicle becomes cheaper than a gas car. We just don't know that date yet.

I think a case could be made for us already being at that point, if the total lifetime cost of car ownership is factored in. ICE vehicles are obscenely mechanically complex. That complexity inevitably leads to lots of repair bills over an ICE vehicle's lifetime.

Contrast that with the average electric car, which doesn't even have a multispeed transmission, just a single-speed step-down. About the most complex mechanical systems in an electric are differentials and shocks. I'm sure someone will pitch in here with a horror story about a high repair bill on an electric, but I'd suggest that's because economies of scale on electrics' parts haven't ramped up yet, and there isn't a large corps of electric-experienced mechanics.

>“It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”

English translation: "We are hell-bent on making sure not to steal bdsmlr's thunder and maintain tumblr's death-spiral."

>And now Psychedlic Warlord of the Cult of Dead Cow is running for President

Me, two minutes ago: "Oh, I bet he's some oddball fringe candidate who'll never get any press attention."

Me, after a quick google search: "Oh my god."

>they retired by machine-gunning the BRIT Award audience (with blanks)

I thought you were joking. Holy cow. (And holy chao.) https://youtu.be/h_I0b05zpJ4?t=160

>I own a rare collector car with a three-digit VIN. This has caused endless hassles at the DMV as well as the insurance office.

I have a similar problem with my own identity. I was born in Canada's smallest province, PEI, and now live in its largest, Ontario. Some Ontario government software seems to have problems recognizing the relatively low numbers on PEI birth certificates.

One of my favourite episodes of Deep Space Nine, "Little Green Men", involved Quark, Nog, and Rom accidentally traveling back in time to 1947 Earth, crash-landing in Roswell, and being captured by the US military. There's a wonderful conversation between the three about nuclear weapons and ultra-cynic Quark of all people being surprised and horrified by the concept.

ROM: I'm working as fast as I can, brother, but there must be some kind of interference disrupting our translators.

QUARK: What kind of interference?

ROM: I'm not sure. Could be solar flares, or maybe ionic interference. Or I suppose it could be beta radiation, but that's only produced by nuclear fission.

QUARK: Don't be an idiot. Nuclear fission doesn't happen within planetary atmospheres.

NOG: It does here. In the twentieth century humans used crude nuclear reactors as weapons. They called them atom bombs. They used to blow them up all the time.

QUARK: They irradiated their own planet?!

ROM: If Nog says so, they did. He knows all about Earth history.

QUARK: You'd better fix those translators fast. The sooner we start talking to these savages, the better off we'll be.

A hundred thousand years from now, when the Terran Empire's Dyson Swarms are ubiquitous throughout the Orion Arm, the relativistic generation-ships of the Andromeda Colonization Fleet have set out on their multi-million-year journey across the intergalactic deeps, and the World Computers housing the Great Intelligences serve the daily needs of quadrillions of citizens, there will still be job ads for COBOL programmers.

>It's not. I'm just not going to accept authoritative arguments on security, sorry.

Wrong, you already do. You either don't realize it, or you're being disingenuous about it.

Did you write 100% of the code of the web browser you used to post your comments?

Did you write the OS that browser runs on?

Did you write the compiler used to build the OS, and did you provably avoid the sorts of issues brought up in "Reflections on Trusting Trust"?

Did you fabricate the chips your OS runs on?

Did you design the die mask for those chips?

Did you build the chip fab facility?

Did you design the locks on the front doors of the chip fab facility?

Did you stay awake 24/7 inside the chip fab facility to make sure no-one broke in to conduct an evil maid attack on the process?

Unless your answer to all of the above is an honest "yes", at some point in the chain of tech, you accepted an outside authority. So kindly knock it off with the "you're automatically wrong because that's appeal to authority!" nonsense.

This is incoherent FUD.

I'm glad you picked up on that, because yes, I DO trust Signal more than Telegram. I trust Signal and distrust Telegram for many solid technical reasons. If you want to misinterpret that as "appeal to authority", then go nuts. But frankly, your own argument reeks of government-friendly "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" nonsense.

So long as Telegram's developers refuse to implement mandatory-and-default end-to-end-encryption with a properly audited protocol and implementation in all clients, I will not use it. And I will discourage friends and family from using it.

Oh, please. If Mossad really wants my messages, they're not going to give up at the "Oh no, he uses Signal!" step. They're going to go full knee-wrench if they have to. And considering they have a habit of forging my country's passports, don't pretend that me living in another country is a barrier to that. The same goes for my country's government. Our laws are chock-full of "throw him in jail until he gives up the password" allowances to law enforcement. And that's not even getting into the fact that Signal's owners, OWS, are located within the jurisdiction of the "we'll star-chamber NSL you on a moment's notice" US government.

But Signal is perfect to stay private against non-nation-state actors. If I want to make sure that my ISP, mobile carrier, etc. can't snoop on my messages, Signal is my phone messenger of choice. Until and unless Facebook is demonstrated to not be on the level regarding Whatsapp's implementation of the Signal protocol, then I'll keep Whatsapp on the list as well.

Telegram is not on that list. If my threat model consisted solely of "that guy with the manbun and macbook working on his novel in the coffeeshop", then maybe Telegram would be acceptable. Let me know when Telegram has default and mandatory end-to-end encryption, using a properly-implemented and proven-secure protocol like Signal's, on all clients both mobile and desktop. Until then I'll consider it to be about as secure as SMS - "hilariously not".

>Signal will also lose all your messaging history and kick you out of all your group conversations if your phone breaks or you lose it. It also has no usable automated backup solution or sync.

Depending on one's threat model, this could be considered a feature.

I would bet that it's easier to design an orbital or moon-based structure (depending on whether production benefits from or suffers from microgravity) that's heavily shielded with lead, than it would be to create a deep-space-class hard vacuum in a volume of space on Earth suitable for large-scale industrial processes. It's a simple matter of not making the structure airtight.

Given the volume and mass payload capabilities of the upcoming Starship/Superheavy, cheaply lifting bulk quantities of lead into space may actually be a reasonable proposal in the next five years rather than ultra-expensive pie-in-the-sky fantasy as it was during the age of disposable rockets.

>Why is it important that the FBI can access that person’s phone?

To establish legal precedent.

It may not be the microgravity that's the major help, but the hard vacuum. Deep space is the biggest, best clean room there could ever be.

I was thinking it might be a domestic Canadian flight. The high average price and high variability fit the standard pattern for our domestic flights as well.

Now there's a subject line that I'm very happy to see didn't link to a Simone Giertz video.

>A) Linus won't stablize kernel ABI

Yes, but this is for very good reasons. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

>Or are you saying you aren’t going to use anything new by them? That is probably the case and I misunderstood.

Basically, yes. I don't even make the effort to log in to use any of their services, except for the Google account on my phone for the purposes of Play Store access. I'm just tired of being Charlie Brown trying to kick Google-Lucy's exciting-new-product-football.

I've basically given up on Google and their corporate ADHD. I use Android because it's the only phone OS that allows for easy permanent sideloading while also having a healthy native app ecosystem, and I'll use search and maps, but that's literally (not figuratively, but literally) it. It seems that the only products of theirs with any staying power were launched prior to 2010.

>Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States.

One of my favourite scientists of all-time is Harrison Brown. He was most known for his role in launching George Tilton and Clair Patterson's dating-the-Earth project. But he had a most amazing ability to convince the cold-war era US government to fund civilian science that had no real military value whatsoever. He was a kind of science-funding Robin Hood, an ethical con artist.

I thought Google was developing Fuschia because some of their ambitious junior project managers need to appear to be working on Something Big And New to get a promotion, leaving their project to turn into Something Half-Assed And Cancelled In Two Years. Isn't that the standard trajectory for Google projects launched within this decade?

You could have cut that sentence down to the first three words and I still would have wholeheartedly agreed with you. There is no justification for that design choice, in any circumstance.

It's much the same for us Canadian accounting grads. Law classes are standard in any reputable accounting undergrad program, and mandatory for CPA accreditation (as it was in the CGA, CA, and CMA before the CPA merger). It's not so much about training accountants to be lawyers, but more about making sure that accountants understand when to seek legal advice, the consequences of failing to do so, and how to converse with a lawyer effectively.

The three prairie provinces have almost 20% of the seats in the HoC, and rural ridings in those provinces have disproportionately more MPs than in urban ridings. Western farming communities are not an insignificant voting bloc on the federal stage. It's not in the DNA of any Canadian federal party, all of which tend towards "big tent" habits, to simply write off any area of the country. Even the Conservatives consistently made serious efforts to court Quebec voters over the past decade despite their leaders' backgrounds in the Quebec-hostile Reform Party.

In 2014, the federal governing party in Canada was the Conservative Party, renowned for both their extreme hostility to science-based environmental policy, and their friendliness to large businesses in the prairie provinces. No-one with any familiarity with Canadian federal politics expected the Conservatives to lift a finger to ban neonics. This is the same party that made is a fireable offense for federally-employed scientists to speak to the media without prior approval.

What's become unexpectedly shameful is the new government under the Liberal Party elected in late 2015. That party keeps claiming to be in favour of science-based policy, but they've dragged their feet on the neonic issue just as much as the Conservatives. The general consensus is that the Liberals are worried about rural votes in the prairie provinces in the general election to be held later this year, so they're trying to avoid any action that could be perceived as "anti farmer".