The reason I would avoid Uber stock is their business model falls foul of the law in most of the countries where they operate, only a matter of time until they are shut down. A comparison to Kazza's business model would be more apt than snapchat but I agree the eyeball market is saturated these days.

Take your word for it, I was working from memory. The medal must be a great conversation starter for him....

You can justifiably blame the state for lack of opportunity, but there's nobody to blame for a lack of morals other than yourself. And before you ask - I have walked many miles in a poor man's shoes.

The massive slashdot paradox in this thread? - In other stories the NSA are seen as omnipotent hackers who know more about me than my closest friends, but in this thread they suddenly don't know their arse from their elbow?

So rather than isolating and repairing the hole they should bulldoze everything and build another one and just hope it doesn't have the same hole? - sound like a government plan to me.

I suspect the 'journalist' is actually a disgruntled 8yo who recently stopped blaming Santa's elves for the poor quality..

Yeah, I had a luggable trinitron that worked for 30+yrs, the only reason my daughter threw it out was because all the (Aussie) TV stations changed to the new frequency. Sony had a reputation for quality and innovation in the 70's & 80's but they pissed that away, I think the rot set in after their huge success with the walkman. They don't need to sell off the rest of the company's arms to fix that.

It's Scotland Police, nothing to do with Scotland yard or Ireland. Scotland is the land where cops punch out suicide bombers while their still on fire! They don't need no stinking coding error to cover their tracks, they just have to glare at the server and it will forget everything it knows.

Yep, if the coder followed procedures, not his fault, if there were no procedures also not his fault. Inadequate testing regime, again, not his fault. Anyone in the business of coding for more than an hour knows serious coding errors like this happen all the time in development. If these expected errors manage to navigate the layers of testers and admins between check-in and production then someone else screwed-up, either that or there's a hole in the test/delivery procedures.

Don't have layers of testers and admins between check-in and production? Again, not the coders fault - since no coder worth their paycheck is so foolish as to boast his code does not require independent testing. It's the same deal with jobs such a welding pipelines, the welder is expected to have the requisite skills and training to produce quality work to a deadline, they are definitely not asked to guarantee every weld is fit for purpose, the inspector with the x-ray machine does that. No matter how good you QA regime is, at the end of the day software will still have bugs, and pipelines will occasionally explode. The best one can hope for is to not repeat the same mistake twice, and even that seems unattainable since it requires an absence of incompetence and malice.

I think the bottom line there is that many devs and testers don't realise that when they disagree about "what it should do" they are doing their job. Both groups exists to throw work at each other until both are in agreement. Often there's also some testing effort from the customer and the in-house testers are the meat in the sandwich when they ask questions. Three layers of testers is not uncommon, the third being a completely independent group between tester and customer tester.

I've seen the testers job and read more test plans than I care to remember, a tester that has the tenacity of a dog with a bone over minor points annoys the shit out of me but gets my utmost respect, bonus points because someone has to do it and I certainly don't want the job.

Wankers who swallow the latest conspiracy theory are the root problem, I wish the UN would do something about them, perhaps spraying them with valium from high altitude would work.

For instance, "How do I plot a course from earth to Uranus?"

The really tragic thing about this particular example is that Alpha could just return (and indeed to any question involving Uranus):

"To plot a course to my anus, you're going to need to start by buying me a drink"

Thanks folks, I'll be here all night.

Enthusiastically read "Emperor's New Mind" when it hit the bookstores. I was expecting something brilliant from Penrose but was very disappointed with the metaphysical contents. Many brilliant people engage in wild speculation, I think to some degree it comes with the gift of genius. For instance the vast bulk of Newton's papers were theological rants, full of wacky claims such as "Jesus was sent to Earth to operate the levers of gravity". He also wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666. Of course Newton also wrote what is arguably the most important and influential document in modern science, that's why we don't call Newton a 'crackpot', even though he clearly behaved like one at times.

Yep, being wrong is easy, anyone can do it. Penrose still has a track record that makes him one of the top mathematicians alive today, and he does have a point in that neural nets do appear to be insufficient to reproduce consciousness. Just a shame that such a talent has been sidetracked into looking for an answer in metaphysical mumbo-jumbo for the last couple of decades.

Yes, but there's often a hell of a racket shortly after predator spots prey. And then there's sex, when one frog is croaking for a mate a fox can easily home in on it, when tens of thousands are doing it all at the same time even the fox's huge ears cannot pinpoint an individual frog unless it's almost standing on it. Disorientating predators with omni-directional noise is a common tactic for a variety of small critters. In certain years large green cicadas here in Oz fill the trees for a few weeks in summer, the high pitched noise can be that loud that it hurts your ears. There are millions of them each about the size of a man's thumb, making a huge racket, but spotting one in a tree takes a surprising amount of searching and luck.

Nature's noisy orgies are short and seasonal, for the rest of the year(s) between events the same location will be almost silent.

In 1980 I moved from inner suburban Melbourne to a sawmill town which is now a ghost town in the middle of a huge national park that straddles the NSW/VIC border. The town had about a dozen houses, a sawmill and a dairy farm, there were no other humans for at least 50km in every direction. The first few nights I found it difficult to sleep, bellowing cows, a chorus of frogs, barking of wild dogs, squealing of feral pigs, owls hooting, etc, all combined to make a huge racket all night long. Midday was the quietest, the mill was silent due to lunch and the birds were quiet because of the midday heat. The sheer volume of the morning chorus of birds while walking to work is something I will never forget. Since the 80's I've spent a lot of time in the bush, camping with my kids, etc. Never have I come across another place with such prolific (and loud) wildlife. I feel privileged to have lived and worked in such a place and even though it meant losing my house and job at the time, I'm glad it is now a national park.