618 karma · joined April 6, 2012
I think this says it all. Even if you don't retaliate, if the way you deal with a whistleblower who brings illegal activity to your attention is to explain to them why it's okay rather than do something about it, then you shouldn't really be surprised if whistleblowers lose trust in the organization's ability to police itself.
Mundanely speaking, launching from high-altitude planes or balloons, and using space planes, could save a lot of fuel, as well as allowing for a wider selection of launch sites and, as a consequence, wider launch windows and the ability to change where one launches from at short notice, all of which could help reduce launch costs.
MD5's weakness is that it's (relatively) easy to produce two strings which have the same hash. However, given an MD5 hash, it's not easy to produce a string which also has that hash.
In principle, one could intentionally construct two passwords which have the same hash. It's hard to see how that could be exploited maliciously - any attacker knows both passwords to begin with. Even then, making colliding strings that would make acceptable passwords hasn't been done yet, AFAIK: the shortest colliding strings found so far are 64 bytes long and contain several unprintable characters.
OTOH, computers are fast enough now that brute-forcing MD5 is practical for short strings with a limited set of characters, which is what passwords tend to be. One should use algorithms like PBKDF2, scrypt, and bcrypt which can increase their complexity as the computation capacity of potential attackers increases. This isn't because of a particular weakness in MD5, though, and one should equally avoid storing passwords as SHA-512 hashes, say.
The thing you definitely shouldn't use MD5 for is digitally signing a file you didn't make, because it's possible that whoever did make it also made another file with the same MD5 hash, for which your signature would also be valid.
When Arch switched from /usr/bin/python being python 2 to being python 3, buckets of python scripts failed. When downloading third-party python programs, the only way I know to know which version of python to use is to try one and when try the other when it complains about syntax errors.
With a perl-style "use" declaration, the runtime can immediately tell you when you're using the wrong version, or even, in principle, switch to the correct runtime if it's installed.
Hashbangs should refer to a version: e.g. "#!/usr/bin/env python2". Github shows approx. 3M results for "/usr/bin/env python", but less than 200k combined for version-specific hashbangs.
OTOH, I disable the left-click to set the cursor because I find it distracting and very rarely want it - only when I want an arbitrary pivot for transforms, or to align vertices from different meshes. It irritates me deeply that there's no way to hide the cursor without also hiding e.g. the selection outline and the grid.
It also found that mice who eat a nutritionally balanced diet did not gain more weight whether or not they had aspartame.
We already know that people who are eating HFDs and hoping that diet soda will magically cause them to lose weight are wrong.
But, it is possibly useful to know that aspartame may have a confounding effect when combined with a high-fat diet.
From what I can find, Dodge v. Ford isn't considered "garbage", but it is often misrepresented.
Directors have a primary responsibility to work for the benefit of the shareholders, but they also have virtually total discretion in how to achieve that. In the absence of clear evidence of the intention to shirk the responsibility - such as, in Dodge v. Ford, telling the shareholders you're putting public interests ahead of their profits - the onus is on the shareholders to prove that the directors aren't fulfilling their fiduciary duty.
There is a different dynamic here. In this comparison, Breitbart is the bakery. The ad exchange is the one with the messages that they want Breitbart to display on their cake, and they (used to) pay Breitbart to do so. It isn't illegal for a same-sex couple to refuse to buy a cake from a random bakery.
Even so, your comment implies that people who think the ad exchange should be allowed to refuse to sell Breitbart's advertising space have to explain why they think bakeries shouldn't be allowed to refuse to make same-sex marriage cakes, but there's no reason why people have to either agree or disagree with both.
Vector clocks are still out, though.
Edit: Actually, you can't do Lamport timestamps because you can't query the current value of a timestamp.
Re-edit: That's wrong. I shouldn't believe any old blog I find. (I'm leaving it in the comment because it was quoted in a reply.)
What the article shows is not hypocrisy, but ironic juxtaposition.
One paper (DOI 10.3386/w20171), relating to search ads, concluded that they saw a strong correlation between people who click on ads and people who already regularly purchase from the advertising vendor. i.e. When a vendor pays for clicks on search ads, most of the time they're paying for people who would have bought from them anyway. In that study, for campaigns where naive analysis implies there was a 4000% ROI, an analysis which takes the correlation into account indicated a negative ROI.
I know from experience that another confounding factor is that marketing departments and agencies often have perverse incentives. Campaigns are often judged by the net revenue from customers who interacted with that campaign, which incentivizes campaigning towards the people already most likely to buy whatever is being advertised.
Additionally, even if Internet ads do influence their viewers, the most likely influence it has on people who see it despite having installed an ad blocker is to make them dislike the host website and the advertiser.
The FSF don't want to make their software better on non-free operating systems which, given their goals, doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to me.
Ads are not a public service. Ads are for consumers. Advertisers pay for them to be placed in the hopes that consumers will give them money as a result.
Advertisers are wasting money if they're trying to show adverts to people who are sufficiently disinterested in seeing them that they've installed an ad blocker.
Any website which knowingly wastes an advertiser's money on aggressive attempts to display adverts to those who have clearly indicated they don't want to see them is essentially engaging in fraud.
All the factors you listed are equivalent to or surrogates of that fundamental requirement. Or, in the case of leadership skill, are excess to requirements unless the role involves leadership.
All races and sexes being equal on average does not mean that all candidates are equal on average. If they were, we wouldn't have interviews.
Almost always, one candidate will be better. Necessary, that candidate will be a member of one race or sex. If any of the other candidates is a member of another race or sex, and that race or sex is one which the hirer is incentivized to hire people for, a less-suitable candidate will be hired if the hirer follows his incentives.
Some bots might say useful things on Twitter. Asking Twitter to decide what's acceptable for a bot to say is asking for trouble.
Perhaps she's just one of those crazy people who think that just because one can stop playing multiplayer games doesn't mean it is perfectly okay to be a massive jerk to other players.
In some states in the US, you can't legally fire people for lawful off-duty activity, including political activity. There are some states where political activity specifically is protected. But, there are plenty of places where you can be fired for any reason.
In many cases where off-duty activity is protected, there are exceptions for when that activity conflicts, or (sometimes) is seen to conflict, with your employer's interests.
Even in cases where your political activities are protected and no conflict can reasonably be inferred, you may be in a "at will" jurisdiction that allows your employer to fire you for no reason, which then puts the onus on you to prove to a court that the real reason was because of your protected activities.
Not if my passphrase is S3cur3!. The primary use case for HE is securing data that's encrypted with keys that a human chose.
Aside: Documentation obtained this way is available at http://wiki.vg/Protocol.
Some slides about the process: https://www.grahamedgecombe.com/talks/minecraft.pdf
With a 64-bit mantissa, ULP(x) is ≤ 1 for x in [-2e64, 2e64]. If you have the time you can count up to 2^64 by repeatedly incrementing a float80(0.0) by 1.
Addition, subtraction and multiplication on float80s are perfectly stable provided the results stays within [-2e64, 2e64].
Either way leads to surprises if your intuition tells you the other thing should happen.
Strictly, in C the behaviour is undefined when a signed integer overflows. Although it wouldn't help in the author's case, since he's using unsigned integers, it is valid for a compiler to internally promote the operands of signed arithmetic.
Characterising the mere existence of an external HTTP gateway to systemd (and other components) as a "staggeringly WTF" mistake made by the systemd team is at best unreasonable. That's like saying sysvinit sucks because Webmin exists.
When is this a problem?
> systemctl start foo.service && systemctl status foo.service
If you need to do that, the problem is with foo.service, not systemd. If foo.service fails to start, the right way, then "systemd start foo" will fail. This is true of any init system: if a service starts but then bails out after success has been reported to the user, it's too late to change that.
> static /dev tree
What's insanity-causing about a dynamic /dev tree "on a server"?
Anti-competitive actions are anti-competitive even if you're paying somebody to help you, even if you make a FOSS operating system, and even if Apple engage in their own anti-competitive activities.
People who don't agree with you about it being a worse place to live than Earth in almost every regard might want to live there. I don't think Mars is a "worse" place to live than Earth in general, though it's certainly more challenging to live there. On Earth, humans have lived everywhere it's possible to live, not just where it was easy.
Antarctica was uninhabited until comparatively recently not because it isn't a nice place to live, but because without modern technology it's basically impossible to live there. The Sahara has been inhabited for thousands of years.
The Andes and Tibet are places which are so hard for humans to live in that the populations there have genetic adaptations to help them survive the low-oxygen environment. I mention that not to suggest that Martians might evolve the ability to breathe Martian are, but that humans haven't allowed mere inhospitability to stop them living in a place: history tells us that if it's possible to live somewhere, people will live there.
The OST prohibits a signatory to the treaty from claiming any celestial body. In practical terms, a base on Mars would, unless it was exclusively built with components launched from the same country, be a patchwork of jurisdictions. This is in fact the situation with the ISS, which is (probably) the only place in the Universe where the territories of USA, Canada, Japan, Russia and Europe are only seconds apart.
Of course there is always the possibility of a New Boston Tea Party. International convention is that a seceding state isn't bound by the treaties of the original state, so if a Martian government were recognized by Earth's governments they could try to claim Mars.
The more practical concern is what it would mean for SpaceX to "claim Mars". I could claim Mars right now, but it wouldn't benefit me at all unless my claim was respected by other states. If the US, or anyone else, could steamroll in and take control of a SpaceX-founded colony that was purporting to be independent, then the claim would be worthless.