I bet other civilizations failed to travel outside their star system because they devoted all their energy to trying to solve the Fermi Paradox.

Yes it is a form of "soft" censorship. So be it. We have to sacrifice some ideals to avoid living in a corporate waste-land. Tradeoffs tradeoffs.

You are free to tune out and make all that money worthless and put the people you want on the ballot.

What "works" for you or me doesn't necessarily scale to the rest of voters.

That's what they get for using double underscores in function names.

We already are surpassing radio to become something that is undetectable in space. spread spectrum and low power communications is already common place in the Ham Radio community. with 2.5 Watts I can talk to 30 people around the globe using PSK31 or Wspr. My signal will not be detectable past the moon even on the best radio equipment made. High power broadcasting is a thing of the past and will rapidly disappear. Some of these new technologies will make communicating with our own space probes easier, but hellishly harder to detect as power levels can be reduced.

A very advanced species will not be broadcasting at 200,000,000,000 watts with AM modulation or CW... what can be detected at light year or more distances. they will be using things that are far more efficient and will not be detectable. Honestly the whole SETI project is not looking for ET's TV stations or regular communications, it's looking for an intentional ultra high power beacon that was sent for the only purpose of saying "WE ARE HERE" which even reduces the chances of it being successful even more.

For SETI to detect a signal from Alpha Centauri. IT would have to be 10,000X stronger than any transmission ever sent from earth and on a constant time year after year after year so that it can be detected.

Paul Graham partially credits Lisp for making him rich via his store-site start-up, despite having viable competitors. The company that bought him out eventually converted it to a more conventional language stack for day-to-day maintenance.

First, us humans prefer killing each other to science. This is a proven fact.
Second, humanity did not go from Horses to Nukes, a very very small percent of the population did it, those geniuses have everyone else standing on their coat-tails.

The next leap will be by a very small group that is significantly more enlightened than the rest of the 99.95% of the population. If those people are benevolent, then everyone enjoys the fruits. If they are not....... Well, things can go very differently.

Currently with how education is going, the general population is becoming more uneducated every year. WE do not glorify learning, but instead glorify morons that can carry a ball, or can sing a tune. And we Vilify in society those that do love learning and are very smart.

Honestly Humanity is a joke, almost a cancer. And if an advanced civilization stumbled across us, they would probably wipe us out to make the rest of the universe safer. We as a species love to hate others, we love murder, war, and control. WE thrive on hating those that are different or think or worship different.

The next probe will be Zombie 2.

The best "lone wolf" developers probably use something like Lisp and a high amount of math-like abstraction to crank out vast amounts of features in a short time.

However, a good team programmer knows how OTHER typical programmers think and read code, and writes code that is easy for them to navigate, digest, and change. Team programming is more like authoring a good technical manual, not clever gee-whiz tricks.

Indeed. My theory is that many of those mysterious gamma-ray bursts are civilizations earning a Galactic Darwin award.

"Hey look, we can create mini anti-black-holes in our la ~ ^ & [NO CARRIER]

Perhaps the research could help over time those distinctions exist and pair like-minded people together.

I thought most modern games already had systems to at least try and match players with similar skill levels.

Why not let abuse take place online in virtual environments?

Because it sucks and leads to much more offline abusive behavior by otherwise good people after they have been repeatedly harassed.

Instead, this psychology of banning and throttling likely leads to more offline abusive real-life suffering.

The opposite is true. Because the natural abuser is inclined to fight through any system thrown at them, throttling and other attempts drain their energy more than simply letting them post would, leading to more relaxed (or at least less) behavior offline.

Not to mention, we all know that trolls online are probably losers who would never in a billion years have the nerve to say or do anything offensive offline...

Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.

I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).

This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.

Now if only Bell Media/CTV here in Canada would do the same. They are the ONLY family of websites I know of that won't work with the Linux versions of Flash, complaining that you need an update because they check for the WINDOWS version numbers.

Your assumption is only one person did an analysis.

Do you have any idea how many people have combed over glibc and either reported or exploited issues found?

Hell, read the article - THE PROBLEM WAS PATCHED before he found it. What we're talking about is some old distros are still distributing that code unpatched, and that's the real problem.

We can all jump to conclusions but, personally, I doubt the NSA have anywhere near the capabilities they (and you) suggest. These people are in the art of deception. They don't need to crack something, they just need to make you think they have.

In the grand scheme of things, any secure system is out of their reach anyway, whether it uses this code or not. The systems they're interested in are likely running under much more strict scrutiny and a single attempt to exploit such things would raise alarms and even accusations of initiating cyber-wars.

To be honest, I'll put my trust in a planet full of people checking open code casually than a select group of "experts" hunting out these flaws.

People are being paid, worldwide, to find and fix these flaws in major commercial companies and just as security researchers, in universities or for their own personal reputation.

Next, we'll be in the "acres of supercomputers" and "boxes in every ISP" bollocks. You know what? If I were the NSA, that's EXACTLY what I'd want you to think.

They're either incompetent (fucking up Elliptic Curves in public forums and being spotted instantly), or they're not (in which case you can't believe anything they say and likely won't know what the REAL trick is).

Maybe, but for better or worse, the situation today is that Ubisoft is effectively empowered to "confiscate" keys acquired through illegitimate channels in violation of whatever terms of sale or licensing agreements those keys came with.

Now, you might argue that the law should be updated to address the rights of customers buying digital products in a more even-handed way. If you did, I'd be the first to agree. But even then, it's hard to see why those rights would or should protect someone with the digital equivalent of stolen property. If you wanted to legitimise reselling keys across borders as a matter of policy then you'd probably also need an explicit change so that DRM schemes attempting to prevent cross-border trade were prohibited and anyone operating them on a commercial basis was required to honour otherwise valid keys for any sort of activation or customer support purposes.