And throwing unqualified people at the problem just makes it worse, because they create new problems

But my Indian contract firm assured me they only hire the most experienced candidates. How else am I supposed to get people with 30 years or Ruby experience when the language has only been around 21 years? HR would be furious if I couldn't put in a number they could filter on.

In order to ensure uniqueness (so the same person can't vote multiple times), there has to be a unique id (such as a token, username&password, or even voter id number, ssn, etc.) that is linked to a single human being.

Nonsense. This is easily handled. Most of the 'keep black people from voting' systems used in southern US states already handle this case.

You only permit access to the voting terminal based on an existing ID. You only let the voting terminal process one voting form per session. You don't send the votes immediately and directly, such as batching them or relaying them through a batch system like email. At that point you only need to count the pool of votes. Verify that the number of submissions matches the number of voters expected. With the 'voting booth restrictions' you know that only the correct people voted once but you don't know which vote was for which specific person.

Only have one astronaut? Assign random people on the ground to use the ground copy of the test systems. You should probably be doing this anyway to increase the pool. And to test the system.

Mixing in the pool creates plausible anonymity. Restricting access based on existing ID and verifying account provides plausible uniqueness.

At that point it's up to preventing ID fraud. Short of whole body biometrics that's an unsolvable problem. ID cards can be stolen and faked. Tokens can be stolen. Passwords are just one crowbar to the knees away, Anything that uses a camera can be fooled by a photo or model or man-in-the-middle attacked on any unprotected data path.

Universities - with the capital U and the capital price - are trade schools for professors. The end product, or terminal degree, is the PhD. This is a researcher: someone qualified to apply for grant money from the government for the school or someone able to work for someone doing the same. This is not necessarily someone with practical skills in their field. This is not someone who can talk reasonably about political matters, economics, biology or history at large. At the best, it's someone who can stand up in a room and deliver a speech on a random topic in their field with some preparation. Or grade papers.

Universities and the 4-year college education is touted as 'rounding' and 'filling.' As if forcing art and business majors to take calculus and mechanical engineers to take art history magically grants wider understanding of the world. If you want people to spell better and count faster there are courses for that. If you want people to know their history and biology good luck (it's a political mess in the USA.) Focus on skill and knowledge retention instead of standardized testing is what the best certification courses offer. The test is just an excuse to learn. Far too many University courses are just an excuse to find people to drink with after class.

What's the difference from an audio book series listened to on the drive to work? You have to connect the subjects back to the core curriculum so the students are motivated to remember and use them. That takes a lot of effort at the classroom level. I've never seen it done at the 'not for majors' courses just because of the sheer diversity of the students packed into each room.

As University schooling focuses on producing research papers, writing grant proposals and doing research it is good at producing people skilled at that. And taking tests. Lots and lots of tests. But any other benefit you get is a side product of the easily replicated social environment, not the core curriculum.

And the costs for that social environment have become outrageous.

To quote the handyman's motto: "Every tool is a hammer, except chisels, which are screwdrivers."

You will use in order:

1. 1. What you know
2. 2. What you have
3. 3. What you are told
4. 4. What you ought to use

Which is why coding, scripting and hacking look nothing like what traditionally has been called engineering.

Instead of searching for that unbalanced brace or accidental Greek question mark, in Python you are forced to write English-style white-space delimited psuedocode that executes. This uncomfortable closeness to documentation is probably why Python is so popular with academics. These people tend to know a lot. Generally they are told to to whatever they want. Although they are given no funding to have things to work on. It's no surprise they did a lot of what they ought to do in a many cases. So Python ended up with a community of useful F/OSS batteries-included features.

There's something to be said for both knowing a noun-focused-compiled language like Java or C and a verb-focused language like Python or Haskell. Sometimes you need a hammer and nouns. Sometimes you need a specific-magic screwdriver and verbs. But don't forget you can close paint can lids just as easily with the butt of a chisel as with a proper flat head single sided hammer.

I was watching a number of different family-friendly streamers like the Hermitcraft players.

Then one of them did a stream on a little odd game called "Ark: Survival Evolved" that was running a free edition for Windows users who willing download the Epic store app.

Unfortunately this game as a native Linux version on Steam. Normally I use this barrier to entry to preserve my free time and sanity. And it supports single player offline mode.

Now I'm filling my "spare" time playing the Jurassic Park equivalent of pokemon for lewed adults with anger issues.

Five years old and with enough of a decent (non-PVP) community means you can vegetate to plenty of youtube content about it if you really want.

I really do need to get back to my projects. There are RPMs to build and code to document. But man, that one dino I just found looks so cool in 4k ultrawide on my Linux desktop...

The activists have an agenda, to force these fictional people we call businesses to do something they normally would not, But it's at least one that is not a step above criminal intent to defraud their customers. In my opinion that's an agenda that a rational customer should support.

The definition of 'worked' is different before Net Neutrality, during and after.

That is the point of the telecom lobby buying the chairman of the FCC: change the meaning of words to suit the marketing department's needs.

Yes, 5mbps is 'high speed Internet' in America. Just like it was in 1997. Last century.

IPv6, BGP security, last mile in urban areas and gigabit downlinks are all costs that you can sweep under the rug if you can define 'worked' to mean 'what ever I am willing to give you for your dollars.'

Unless we forget that at in the Twentieth Century, the Bell Telephone company required you to buy an expensive telephone from them to use the network they built through the common access areas on roads, sometimes with taxpayer money. If you let them graze their sheep on your land, you need to make sure they aren't charging you for it on top of the wool. Or they have really pulled that wool over your eyes.

Google built major facility nearby where I was renting for a while and ran 1Gbps fibre to the neighborhoods. It took almost no time, in government speed, for the regional phone company ISP to pay for laws restricting who can use it. They are actually so anti-competitive that if they sold bottled water, American telephone companies would seek to have your house plumbing outlawed because that water doesn't run through their pipes.

Excepting some games like beat saber, video gaming is a passive sport. To keep top performance these teams will require teaching their gamers to learn the value of taking frequent breaks and physical training. Yes, competitive video gamers have to hit the gym, too. It's really hard to hit those Actions-Per-Minute numbers if you keep sliding into a diabetic coma.

eSports has the potential to publicize healthy ways to handling gaming as a hobby or interest. And that applies to desk work in general. American, in particular, has an obesity problem. One study showed a 67% obesity rate (2012 Washington University School of Medicine). Some of this is due to poor food choices. Some of this is due to the sedentary lifestyle of office work.

But I suspect this potential lesson about healthy gaming will be lost in money from sugary drink and soft chair endorsements.

I thought wireless connections were established via a handshake...

With 5G all network connections will be established with a credit card number and a credit check.

We cannot forget the slashdot staple of using a closed Google project as a sign that a market is dying.

The best part of this style of 'journalism' is that no matter what industry you are researching you can probably find something Google tried, found out wasn't as profitable as selling ADs and eyeballs, then shut down.

So there's my math - how about yours?

A lot better since I'm not trolling.

Never assume you launch all your infrastructure from Earth for space projects. Every serious analysis avoids this mistake. If the English settlers had to ship over all the concrete and steel to build New York City, their tiny wooden boats would have never left the dock.

A Dyson swarm isn't a new camera for the Hubble space telescope, it requires in-situ resource manipulation. After you launch the starter factories and seed mining colony, they have to operate with only minimal launches from Earth. These factories would be dedicated to the cause: any other use for these factories is purely a side benefit.

Mercury masses around 3.2x10^26 kg per Google. That's enough material for 6.2 trillion 'silicon' Dyson swarms using typical composition of a rocky inner planet.

The delta-V to get from Ceres to Mercury is horrible. You're better off building the swarm there or out near the optimal range between Jupiter and Saturn. With a tiny escape velocity of 4.2 km/s (compared to 11.1 km/s for Earth) and no need to change orbits expensively the rocket requirements for building at Mercury are minimal, especially as you get near the end of chewing up the planet. Mass launchers (aka Navy Rail guns) with current technology can do this.

But the most important part is that you don't have to dig up anybody's back yard to build the swarm. Political resistance to mining 15 trillion tons of material, let alone the cost of launching the rockets for it, would stop the project first.

The Sun will eat Mercury eventually as it swells into a Red Giant. Transforming the planet into a billion billion solar sails with brains means it can live on. It's not hard to sail further out on light as the Sun swells. We've already proved it works. Plus you can build interesting things with the left overs.

Building a Mercury chewing factory is left as an exercise for the reader.

Just make/ruin your own OS already! And leave actual Linux and actual professionals alone!

Pottering works for IBM's newly acquired RedHat division. As RedHat's XFS choice shows, they will prefer their own brand in-house code even if it lacks features users want.

If you are doing professional Linux in the USA that means you are probably running Ubuntu or some variant of RedHat. Both of these use Pottering's toy init system, unreliable binary logfile service and the rest of his kitchen sink.

My point is that Pottering is making is own OS already. It's just that he's reusing the name RedHat for it.

1. Corporate preferred (aka required) for www.mycompany.com site and apps.
2. Your real browser.
3. Something in a text mode and script-able for when the GUI sh*ts the bed. (Or just cURL and wget then edit the downloaded file).
....
999. The crappy ancient copy of Internet Explorer and Java 1.x required for some "special things".

By special things I specifically mean Dell iDRAC, HP iLO, SGI BMC and any other PoS out-of-band management card slapped into every commercial server ever. These are the perfect example of how IoT really works. Fire and forget. Sell the thing and abandon support 5 minutes before the money is in the bank.

IBM is excepted just because you never really buy things from IBM. You just rent them for a while.

If you're really not lucky that day you'll have to pop up a console on something that offers ActiveX control or to download of some never-patched ancient Java application. Oh, and you have to turn off ALL security settings and trust this software from Example.com with a certificate that expired early in the Stone Age.

Hope you kept that Windows XP VM around with IE 6.

At first glace I thought this was a joke. This 'overwriting of existing files' is how Zip, tar, Arch, 7zip and really any archive works.

The problem is real but is at a higher level. It is a classic lack of validating user input. Usually filtering out relative path names is enough (the path foo/bar/../../../../../../../etc/rhosts is not a valid location.). Combined with bad operational practices your application is overwriting /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow while processing my_little_brony_avatar.zip.

User facing applications, probably running as root, that don't limit their archive unpack to some safe sub-path can overwrite anything. Even if your application is installed to some place (e.g. /opt/vendorname,) locked down to a user and even running with (IMHO bad) SELinux types it can unpack a file and overwrite a library, plugin, configuration file or even the binary for the app itself.

The article may be a wake up call for the clueless. How many developers never thought about how unpacking an archive actually works?

For the rest it is a sensational piece based on the idea that open doors do in fact let people walk through them. That is how doors work. It is up to you to close the door and lock it.

I expect a follow up report about how unpacking a zip file downloaded from your email client can overwrite critical files on your desktop. Maybe call it "Mail Slip." Reserve a domain and a $5/mo AWS host. Use an icon with feral dogs instead of cats this time.

1. 1. Humans can engineer random mutations to create a viable population. I'd bet a lot of those variations are just going to be immune factors (we can also engineer mono-culture like bananas, apples and lab mice if needed.) The world of genetic engineering post CRISPR is never going to be the same again.
2. 2. Humans, unlike every other species, has both the capacity and intention to craft a custom environment to ensure continence if not flourishing of a revived species (insert rants about the Zoo here.) Darwin built an ecology out of imported species on Ascension Island over a hundred years before Jurassic Park was filmed.
3. 3. There is limited time, space and ability to 'save' everything. We can save and store what we can. The common (incorrect) statement is that there are three widely used crops that feed the world but around 50,000 edible species of plants. Even if you could ensure a solid founder population with only 10 diverse seeds that's a half-million storage containers you have to manage. This is not even touching on how to preserve the gametes, blastulas or embryos of the animal kingdom.

As for the question of should one only has to consider the fossil record. If you do not learn how to bring the extinct back then the best you can hope is that someone somewhere stepped in the wrong sand pit and it currently leaving a really nice impression as they petrify.

I expect that once field ready PCR is available some kind of public Merkel tree of DNA codes should be assembled. (Insert DNAcoin cryptocurrency joke here.) Just the deltas need to be kept like in this "Git repository of code" the same way we do with human DNA records. It's a literal tree of life. Then the race is on to scan in everything you can before it dies.

After that it is just a matter of making tools that can turn the DNA back into living stuff. Now you have an instant backup of the planet's ecosystem, from bacteria and virii and molds to your neighbor Steve and his dog. Throw it in a can attached to a light sail. Stop worrying about the death of the Sun.

Start worrying about competing with other species that had the same idea and are about to show up on your doorstep.

A biohacker can't inject a rock bigger than my house into his junk and claim to be 'thinking with the other head' while doing his taxes on his dick-puter. Via the wikfi.

Honestly, I expect facebook to come out with Jewelry that lets you rate the reputation of your meal with this. Then you'll finally be living in one of the Black Mirror episodes. The Nosedive episode, not the San Junipero episode (where the civilization ends by everyone become uploads living life in a retirement village that looks like American TV from the 60s, 70s and 80s until the first major power outage.)

Can one fit a bluetooth adapter and some of that motion power tech? If your can get dental implants with this thing you'd have a Beowulf cluster of teeth powered by blab. With Bluteeth(tm), you could move your datacenter into the sales people's mouths and never pay a power bill again. Rent might be a big pricey if they demand a commission on their oral real estate. But then you could actually get something done in a meeting like serve web pages through your molars as you chew on the free donuts.