lotsoflumens

I used to worry about this. Now I realise that my worry came from a scarcity mindset.

There is no reason at all to believe that electricity production will always be difficult or expensive. These problems will be solved.

>>> That is, you could recover the unencrypted data if you recorded a copy of the pilot by mixing.

Yes, thanks for the response!

Since backscatter systems depend on on an RF source, I wonder if work has been done on encrypting the source signal (pseudorandom bit pattern for example), then modulating the random stream at the device and decoding the backscattered signal at the receiver - essentially a streaming XOR cypher.

I think it's just very subtle sarcasm that these are dangerous thoughts in a world where thought-crime is real.

I just love it that everyone is saying things like:

"And yes, it is my opinion that climate change is absolutely happening" .

The level of fear in stating simple opinions has gone to 11.

You should review the concept of "fractional reserve banking".

Still relevant but apparently unknown to the trendy conference speakers and FP ranters:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/aPToP/

You're missing the entire fields of robotics and automatic control, which are not new fields and have never made claims of human level intelligence. These are the fields that have been making steady progress for over 50 years.

The result has been increasingly effective weapons technology that is now being outfitted with even more effective software.

It doesn't take a "rocket scientist" to see the endgame.

Well then, I guess with that line of reasoning we should just turn off the computers and go live in the woods. There's obviously too much risk in doing anything.

In most large companies today, the shareholders outside of the top 3 management levels are irrelevant and usually just a tedious burden.

Thanks, but that means I'm doing the testing. I wish I could do that - maybe someday.

It's important for package developers to be aware of other software that depends on their interfaces or functionality.

Some cases will slip through sometimes, but over a couple of releases these should be gone.

>> Where do new bugs and vulnerabilities come from? When the main developers add features or make changes to existing features that go beyond fixing bugs.

Do you have stats for that?

Semantic versioning was supposed to be the fix for that, but as Rich Hickey has pointed out, that is also broken.

Everyone is their own server admin these days. We all want "a stable, solid version that has all the latest security fixes" but it's difficult accept that that might be impossible.

I've seen that bug!

And, I'm not too surprised, KDE has a broken development and maintenance process. I'm sure they think they're doing a great job - but that's because they don't even see or receive most bug reports.

I agree, this is a problem, but it's not being solved by this practice.

The example you gave is specifically about a client application of git that wasn't updated to work with the current version of git - probably because of some twisted logic that they didn't have to worry about it until some future date.

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to ignore the real world and pretend that software will always be stable.

This practice is seriously bad.

It means that one group of developers is busy improving and fixing packages, and another different group is cherry-picking commits in order to maintain the illusion of stability (as mentioned above).

That second group has to duplicate all the testing work done by the first group, and additionally ensure that there are no new problems introduced.

It's very vulnerable to human error and adds a lot of unnecessary work.

Thanks so much for pointing to this.

Thanks for the info!

I've added the git-core PPA now which installs 2.14.1 .

I just don't understand this screwing with version numbers and not being on the latest code.

Does anybody understand Ubuntu releases?

The update this morning for Ubuntu 17.04 installs git 2.11.0

.. NOT the patched 2.11.3 NOR the latest 2.14.1

Why isn't Ubuntu fully up to date?

I assume they are .. however, they take no risks with their shaming.

Of course it's mandatory ... unless you don't care about silly little things like bonuses and promotions.

TL;DR

Some guy not only speaks his mind, but has the balls to actually write his thoughts down.

The completely predictable response from "forward thinking progressives" follows.

Yes. This so correct.

Linting efficacy is one of the many myths about software quality and team efficiency that abound in this industry.

Citing an arXiv paper should take precedence over citing anything else.

If you really believe in science then ONLY non-paywall papers should be cited.

It's called Finite Domain Constraint Programming and it's been studied for about 50 years.

It's disappointing that the authors use the term "brute force" to describe modern SAT solving, in an article intended for people who may not be familiar with the algorithms used.

That term implies that the speed of the computer that was used to find the solution is the determining factor.

It is not. Modern SAT solvers use very elegant search algorithms that have enabled the solution of SAT-encoded problems that could never have been solved if only "brute force" was used.

If you see an architecture that has a box or a ring with the word "controller" in it - the design is wrong.

A good read despite the ridiculous headline.

Colorado is an amazing place.

The article quotes a journalist:

>> “This town is so easily scammed,” says John Hazlehurst, himself a former councilmember and now a columnist with the Colorado Springs Business Journal. “Why? Because we’re hicks. It’s really that simple.”

No, I don't think that's fair. The people are nice, that's all.

I believe that HashGraph might be a better idea ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashgraph

They still want users to either view the ads or pay the "publisher". This will never work.

They must start paying users. Only then, will their ads be viewed.