was from the text used in a graduate-level data communication course I took many, many years ago. It said, more or less, that "Communication requires three things: a shared model, a shared set of symbols, and a common system for associating symbols with objects from that model."

Now here's the thing that I think is wise about that idea. People respond as if something like a famous photograph has an objective meaning and that everyone *should* somehow all have the same reaction to it. But intelligent, educated people should know better than that. Personally, I see a considerable element of self-deprecating humor in this particular choice of photo. However nobody should be particularly surprised that not everyone is laughing.

After many years of watching people drag out the pitchforks and torches when they're offended, or man the ramparts when they're offended by that offense, here's what I think the sensible way to handle this kind of thing is. When you feel offended by something someone says, say so, but without accusing the sayer of bad faith or collusion with the Forces of Oppression. When you have given offense you apologize and express yourself a different way.

You have a choice: you can either accept that people coming from different experiences will view things differently than you and work around that; or you can try to convince everyone in the world to think and feel the same way you do about everything.

There's really nothing to see here. Except that long distance with per-minute charges are still a thing. And AOL is still a thing, I guess? I definitely would not have called that. And old people are easily tricked into buying both those things. I don't think addressing the ease with which old people are tricked is on the agenda. Whether it's aluminum siding or their uncle in Uganda, tricking old people is just way too easy. And phone companies will just let you run up tens of thousands of dollars in arbitrary charges in one month, and let you keep doing it for several months when you don't pay the first one, that's definitely been a thing for a while. I'm actually a bit surprised AT&T waived it. In the stories I've heard in the past, the telcos usually put up a pretty good fight about that sort of thing.

It creates a "Virtual quantum burrito"? As long as there's a burrito in the microwave, thrust is always guaranteed to be generated!

Uh. more or less everybody?

(Everybody running a Debian based distro anyway, I don't know if RedHat has perl as a required package).

Yes, you're right, anti-systemd people are not all insane, but some of the most vocal of them are.

(And it's not just good old "I want to marry 12 year old girls" MikeeUSA, there are also the "systemd will eat your ouput" loons, the "systemd is an NSA plot" obsessives, the "systemd is an end run around the GPL" tin-foil hatters...)

Since when was Russell Coker an official spokesman for Debian?

Would you?

https://threatpost.com/lizard-squads-ddos-for-hire-service-built-on-hacked-home-routers/110341

Isn't amazing how dumb slashdot has got these days -- I make a joke about lazy evaluation (ok, maybe not a funny joke, but a joke none the less), and some moron mods it "offtopic".

Offtopic? Don't they even have a clue about what Haskell is?

Overrated I could understand, troll or flamebait if you think I'm dissing Hudak, but offtopic?

When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)

The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.

Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.

The trust system in TLS is really lousy.

For how many kilowatts though?

The price of solar panels is getting down to about $1/watt (peak) right now, and you get about 1-2 kWh per kW (peak) per day production depending on your latitude and climate.

I'm a member of several professional associations, including IEEE and the ACM. These societies have codes of ethics, which mandate things like respecting data privacy, accepting and cooperating with professional review, honoring contracts, respecting the rights of system stakeholders, providing honest estimates of project costs, disclosing conflicts of interest etc.

It's mostly stuff that almost goes without saying, so I have say I don't think much about these codes. But I sure would be pissed if one of these organizations was involved in helping the government violate its own code of ethics.

APA has a code of ethics for its members. Getting information out of an unwilling subject technically violates several principles the APA expects its own membership to abide by. For example the code of ethics requires APA members to safeguard the rights of anyone they're involved with professionally, and in particular those in situations where the subject's autonomy is limited. This would clearly forbid an APA member to be involved in the development of *any* coercive method, even if that method falls short of the legal definition of "torture".

Now arguably APAs code of ethics is too restrictive; arguably psychologists should be able to develop coercive methods so long as those methods are in the interest of society and do not rise to a reasonable standard of "torture". But until the APA rewrites its code of ethics it should refrain from any action which arguably might violate that code. To do otherwise, particularly secretly is morally repugnant for a dues-supported membership organization. It may even be malfeasance, since a non-profit is supposedly bound by the purpose for which it is chartered in its spending decisions.

Well the tests keep showing the damn thing works! Maybe it's just magic. Works based on fairies flying out of an engineer's butt, or something. Hopefully it doesn't break the universe :-/

American Psychological Association (2012) style citations please.

References:
American Psychological Association. (2012). APA style guide to electronic references.

It turns out it was only actually torture about 39% of the time.

Real doctors take an oath to do no harm with the knowledge they've been granted. I guess that's why the CIA went with psychologists.