OTOH, using "roll your own crypto" is nortorious for individualized holes and weaknesses. It does tend to mean that the "one size fits all" means of breaking the code won't work, however. Or at least may well not work.

That said, if you have good enough communication to share custom crypto programs, you may be better off using a one-time pad....as that can't even theoretically be broken. But it does require a good source of random numbers (e.g. amplified triode vacum tube with no input so you're just amplifying noise). Such things are reasonably easy to build, but for some reason they aren't normal computer accessories. (Video cams watching a flickering flame are another good source.)

But custom crypto is hard to do correctly. AND it requires good communications to standardize the programs. So if you have the communication, a one time pad is better.

It's worse than that. The entire basis of the "infinite monkeys theorum" is that given enough random chances even highly improbable things occur. So he was not only wrong, he didn't even understand what he was describing. So why should he be believed where he can't be checked?

The assertion that the infinite monkeys theorum has been disproved seems incorrect. Searches for the named scientist in conjuction with monkey also fail.

IOW, I suspect the entire article is garbage. I will admit that this is based on the fact the the only easily checkable statement appears to be factually incorrect, but if it's wrong where you can check, what should you believe about the places where you can't check?

Sorry, but I don't even accept that as guaranteed. Too many things that people thought were "hard problems" turned out to be relatively easy. I'd bet the hard part of being an electricial is object recognition.

There's also absolutely no guarantee that anybody will be hiring those skills. Why should the rich bastards be the only ones who demand guarantees?

Were I advising someone in school, I'd look at the current economics of STEM professions, and the BS surrounding them, and advise the students to study foreign languages. Or *something* besides STEM. Otherwise in 20 years you'll have a huge debt and no way to ever pay it off.

You are talking about the second or third generation of driverless vehicles. The first generation will just be cheaper. (The ones on the road now are a part of the zeroth generation, i.e., before any major adoption.)

Sorry, I can give general explanations about how ice shelves work, but I don't know the specifics of Larson B. But clearly different sea levels would mean that the ice shelves would form in different places. As to what name they would have ...

As an aside a lot of the argument among paleontologists, and others of the ilk, is about names rather than about facts. E.g. there often isn't enough solid information available to say whether two fossils are of different species...so people guess. Some people like to split spieces on small basis, others like to clump, and there often isn't a good reason to decide between the two. Similarly, what difference in locations would justify giving an ice shelf at two different times, and slightly different location, a different name? The ice wouldn't be the same, because the ice on an ice shelf is continually, if usually slowly, moving out to sea. But people like to draw boundaries.

Saying that it formed during the current interglacial is misleading. This is an ice shelf, and ice shelves are the result of glaciers moving into the ocean and not breaking off. So it probably formed because the glaciers started moving a bit more rapidly, and it also probably had ice at the oceanwards side that broke off and melted, and which may well have been older.

FWIW, glaciers are always moving, but as the start to melt their motion speeds up. For a glacier to grow it needs to be accumulating new ice faster than it looses it through moving into an area where the ice is removed faster than its formed. This was said in a sort of general way, because some glaciers live high in the mountains, and when they descend they drop chunks of ice down hill. In the case of an ice shelf, the glaciers are pushing out onto the ocean and floating, so the weight of the terminus is suspended. This "ice shelf" creates back pressure that tends to hold the glacier in place, but the glacier is also pressing the ice shelf to move further out to sea, where it becomes unstable.

It looks interesting, but they need to work on their documentation. I wasn't able to find anything about reading and writing random access files. It had many things that appear easy to do in Rust which are difficult in various different languages, but I couldn't find a way in which it was notably better overall in any area.

FWIW I was mainly comparing it against D and Python, with a few considerations of Ruby. I should have compared it against Ada, but it's been too long since I actually used it. I can't reasonably compare it against C++ as I haven't used it significantly since the STL was adopted. (At that point I was stuck using access basic, and relatively to that nearly *anything* looks good.) The only fortran I could compare it against is FORTRAN IV, and they are nearly disjoint in the tasks that they would be good at.

Mind you, this comparison is based purely on reading over the documentation, and shouldn't be taken too seriously. So often the contents of the package doesn't match what it says on the packaging. Given what it says on the packaging my favorite language would be Vala, but actually I never use it.

I wish you weren't telling the truth. The drug companies seem totally without either morals or ethics. But vaccination is necessary in a population that lives as densely as humans do and which has rapid transportation. So I'm in favor of this law. I'm just not in favor of many others, and in particular I don't like the way that the wealthy and powerful are let off the hook...and here I'm explicitly including drug companies.

Step 1 should be that all publicly funded research is publicly available (with a very few carefully and explicitly stated caveats).
Step 2 is that while patents can be obtained based on publicly funded research, all citizens of the country have free licenses to those patents.
Step 3 is some other reforms of patent law.
Step 4 is some way for the laws to actually be enforced.

Please note that the order of these steps is not particularly important, as they are virtually independent, and that most of them would have good effects beyond the pharmaceutical industry. But one of the, I believe existing, laws that needs to be enforced is that the results of all trials in qualification for FDA approval need to be made public.

While sediments *are* gathered up by glaciers as they move, the sediments are gathered at the bottom of the glaciers...unless you are proposing some mechanism for moving the sediments from the bottom to the top.

The problem is, when you have a complicated feedback relation it's not quite clear what "*primarily*" means. Often there are threshold effects, and it is, indeed, the last straw that breaks the camel's back, because that's what pushes things past the threshold into a region where amplification happens rather than decay.

Calling either Mao or Stalin a scientist is so strange as to qualify for wierd. Hitler had some doctors working for him who would meet the qualification, but I haven't been able to think of any other scientists that engaged in multiple murders, though I sure some must have existed. I suspect that this is largely because scientists are rarely in positions of power, and don't like to expose themselves to violent circumstances. But not entirely. The kind of mind that will devote itself to science must of needs be relatively passive and oriented towards careful observation. Such people will only take personally violent action under extreme provocation.

The problem is that nobody has shown that those "whack-jobs" weren't following orthodoxly accepted interpretations of the Koran. That some "scholars claim those quotes are taken out of context" is clearly true, but that doesn't mean it's not a reasonable and common interpretation.

The Koran actually *is* more viscious than even the Old Testament. Partially this is due to the fact that Mohammed spent much of his life leading an armed struggle against armed opponents, and needed to rally and advise his followers (i.e., armies).

OTOH, it would be quite interesting to know what the New Testament would be like if we had accurate records rather than third hand accounts written down a century or more later. *Was* JC leading a revolutionary action group against the Romans? (Well, against the governor installed by the Romans.) John the Baptist was, almost without question. You can't believe the words written in the Bible, even if they are phrased as quotes. They weren't quotes. They were written down by someone who never met Jesus, and never met anyone who had seen him within the last 30 years. And the intervening period seems to be filled only with verbal reporting. Calling them "second hand information" is praising them fullsomely.