Brady Haran is neither, but he puts actual scientists on his YouTube channels, and they talk about honest science (and occasional amusing trivia), with no CGI or celebrity required. No politics, no manufactured quotes, many Nobel prizes.

I enjoyed the first few, but the latest book was rubbish and I've entirely lost interest in the story thanks to the pace of his writing. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of original plot ideas, so it's mostly about character moments, and you have to keep that sort of writing coming for me to stay interested in those characters.

The series, however, I rather enjoy. While it's probably the first series to ever make me say "there is such a thing as too much gratuitous nudity", the pacing is vastly better than the books, the important character moments are all there, and the gaps between seasons aren't so long that I forget who everyone is.

It's the only thing that can scale, unless fusion ever stops being "just 20 years away". Think of the energy needs of 11 billion people at American consumption levels (~40 TW), which isn't at all a far-fetched projection and of course it won't stop there. Even ground-based Solar hits scaling issues there - it's one thing to shade everything that's already paved, and maybe all the salt flats, but at some point you get significant ecological effects.

Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.

The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.

It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In Seattle, not so much - even on the 12 clear days each year, you're too far north for much efficiency.

Really you have two options here. Either that Martian life would be entirely different to us in which case it is unlikely going to be even able to survive on Earth let alone devour anything or it is somehow similar to life on Earth in which case would it really be any worse that the collection of highly infectious, nasty bugs we already have in labs around the planet?

Certain science fiction loves to go on about alien superbugs because they make good stories but I expect that in this regard reality will be a lot more boring, and safer, than fiction.

Turns out: not so much. As was predicted by the security community, there are flaws, and after a couple years the flaws were exploited, and the PIN is retrievable. This cycle has repeated (is chip-and-PIN in its 3rd generation now? it's at least the second).

Chip-and-PIN means only that the bank makes you liable for your stolen money, claiming "the card couldn't possibly have been stolen because magic". It solves a problem for the banks, and makes it worse for the consumer - shocking, I know.

Interesting. I was confused by this since I was taught as a kid that The Hague was the capital of the Netherlands and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, that is still where the government sits even though it seems that Dutch law defines Amsterdam as the capital (which was something I'd never heard of until today). So apparently at least in the UK we used to be taught based on the definition of capital, i.e. where the ruling government presides, and not whatever local laws would like to call a capital.

And AAA vendors don't. Adobe products are simply shady back-alley freeware as proven by their installer. Java too, of course.

Slashdot supports too few entities to do this right, and forget about UTF8. But you can get sorta close.

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Unless someone can do better?

For lack of mod points let me just say: beautiful!

It's like this in any engineering discipline:
* The apprentice doesn't do things by the book, for he thinks himself clever
* The journeyman does everything by the book, for he has learned the world of pain the book prevents
* The master goes beyond the book, for he understand why every rule is there and no longer needs the rules

Or put another way - the apprentice thinks he knows everything, the journeyman known how little he knows, the master knows everything in the field, and still knows how little he knows.

It's a problem when the default ASSERT macro expands to code with such #ifdefs (no joke - that was the norm everywhere I worked with C/C++). At one place it got so bad that we made using the ASSERT macro a firing offense (not sure why we couldn't just fix the macro, some corporate thing no doubt).

And I've been there and done that with the "no resource leaks" in C++. When you provide library code that's easier to use than doing it the wrong way, it's easy to enforce the standard in code reviews (since then it's only the new guy who hasn't seen how easy the tools are yet).

For example, if you have a good FileHandle class, it's simple to educate people to write FileHandle foo = fopen(...); instead of FILE, and then that's it, the file closes when you exit scope. Works perfectly as a member variable as well - no need to remind people that the destructor isn't called if the constructor throws, as members are always cleaned up.

Actually I would think it depends more on how intelligent and how advanced it is. Microbial life on Mars will hardly instill much fear but a lot of curiosity. An advanced space craft appearing in orbit and contacting us will generate far more fear...but still a lot of curiosity about their technology. So I'd say that curiosity is the one constant regardless of what type of life we find. Whether we fear it will depend on the details.

We've seen a web server running on a Commodore 64. Wasn't that a 12 kB OS? It's been a while, but IIRC the OS was in memory from D000 to FFFF.

I've worked on mainframes where the "recovery OS" fit on one tape block - a hard 32 kB constraint (used for disaster recovery - it would load a program that also had to fit in 32 kB which would restore a system from backups). The normal OS wasn't much bigger. Most device drivers weren't memory resident, for example, and shared 4 kB by swapping in and out, which could lead to some mighty odd behavior by today's standards.

My point is though that without knowing the width of that distribution you have no idea how wide the 'middle' is: if your average time to evolve intelligence is 30+/-20 billion years we are still well within 2 sigma from the mean. This could make intelligent life sufficiently rare so that we could easily be the first in our galaxy given the age of the universe. With billions of galaxies there could still be more advanced intelligent life in a galaxy far, far away but we would never know about them.