Neither are interframe arrival times on just about any traffic monitored, and one could easily encode a cnc to look at stat counters on the interfaces.

So really this is in the area of "horse already left the barn."

Those academic scientists at (insert school) and their money grubbing ways, always asking for a handout, feeding off the public trough.

...and they have an ample supply of cats and clown noses.

This argument is as spurious as the frames of reference and definitions needed to support it are extreme. Also the orginal post didn't say there were no flaws with "simultaneity", just that calling it "wrong" was "wrong." It's well known that any causal relationship is preserved from any frame of reference, and furthermore "events" on the macro scale don't happen at a discrete moment in time. If you have a balloon with a chipmunk suspended inside it, and you release the chipmunk so it falls and pops the balloon, it can be said with perfect accuracy that the baloon popped simultaneuously with the chipmunk falling, assuming the balloon was not on a table and the chipmunk continued to fall past the edge of the balloon.

The arguments against "simultaneity" require the precise scientific definition of the term, which should be confined to academic papers.

Do not try the above experiment at home.

The general gist of the matter is it would be technically possible to "synchronize" these clocks in the sense that with enough external data to accurately determine the frames of reference involved, we could know the time on one of the clocks as observed by an individual next to that clock from the value of another a clock next to us, even if that individual could never tell us the time on the clock because by the time any communication reached us, it would be stale. This despite the fact that the clocks are actually running at different rates on most frames of reference, not just different offsets. If that was done bilaterally, and both calculations yielded each other's input value, both parties could agree that, in retrospect, they read the clocks at the same "time".

An external observer to both clocks might see the readings happen at different times, but if they have any intellect they have to account for their perspective not being the only valid one.

It would also be possible to construct an average aggregate clock out of a group of these, the question is merely the utility of such a clock, since instead of a "timezone" you'd have a "framezone" where you'd have both an offset and an ongoing drift, not to mention the parameters of that adjustment would not be constant because phenomina like shifting planetary crust don't play nice.

We would not be able to measure the speed of light without such systems, so they obviously play an important role.

This assumes the observer is not capable of measuring the velocity to the observed system and compensating for it. Given enough data, the two observers at different velocities could calculate what time each of the two events would have occured at if at the exact time of the event the system the two observers magically teleported to the same location. The problems are agreeing on a mutual standardized location/frame and acquiring said data. You can construct systems where the former is difficult, but there are far more simple applications where it is not difficult to do so. The latter may indeed be very difficult.

Maybe I'm up too late, but this post makes no sense to me whatseoever. It's the usual "major parties both suck" substance-free mantra that gets mod points, followed by some sort of assertion that people who vote for major party candidates believe cops will know how they voted and retaliate (clue: people who believe that vote libertarian. Or well some of them probably vote for extremist parties as well.) There are reaons people vote for major parties. They may not be right or even strategic reasons, but they are not some ridiclous fear of institutional retaliation. Were they, we would not have so many registered independents.

More importantly, it means there is probably something larger than an asteriod to settle on a lot closer to us than Alpha Centauri. Of course we'd need a buttload of reactor power to survive in such an environment.

Well, IIRC it is stated in TFA with the right equipment the range could be extended up to several centimeters or perhaps more. Not sure how accurate that statement is though.

Enough to, say, be pretty disturbing if coupled to a sensor for metabolites in a urinal.

As long as the contents can be linked back to the individual, it just takes NFC communicators next to places where people put their hands to track the individual's actions. The short range gives you a bit more information than just tracing their smartphone -- e.g. if you have an NFC collector tacked to the bottom of a public keypad, you can be pretty sure that person was using that keypad, as opposed to just standing around in the region. Granted given most places can also be covered with a camera and nobody will complain, there are other ways to obtain such information, but this way can be fully automated.

He is completely confident that his underconfidence is a clear indicator that he knows what he's talking about, obviously.

No, there will always be issues where the problem lies within the code of the init system.

Traditonal Init scripts are mostly in bourne shell syntax due to inertia. Shell is a horrible, awful language. Yet people put up with that and there's a reason why they have done so: the flexibility it offered over declarative-style config files was a strong enough advantage to keep traditional init systems in play. It is an exercise in arrogance to pretend you can map current and future needs over to a set of fixed cookie-cutter behaviors. There will always be a need to modify systemd internals to compensate for this broken model.

On the bright side it has enough intertia and is enough of a break from tradition that it will shake things up, and they did need to be shaken up. There will be wrappers around systemd, suites to manage systemd without touching any systemd config files, and eventually out of that chaos something better will emerge,
where we go back to basics but without the cruft we once had.

Yeah, and then someone thought it would be a good idea to tack "Unattended Updates" onto that feature. I think they thought that would get the casual users to update critical packages. But casual users never reboot, they hibernate, so....

No that part won't likely be a problem -- it's easy to override (or even cancel) distro scripts as long as the distro does a good job of keeping the /etc/systemd directory mostly empty and puts the "stock" scripts elsewhere.

The decision to cram the configs into an INI-like format which ends up causing a proliferation of ReallyPoorlyChosenDirectiveNames to work around the cases where an INI file format cannot express heirarchy for one, and the fickle mincing of declarative and procedural contexts where somehow the order of fields with the same name matters, but you can't carry state between them without a third agency and thus variable expansions cannot work where you need them to.

The pollution of logs with gobs of output that is of very little practical use is another thing that chafes me.

Not that there is not plenty of upside to systemd, mind you.

Ok, so we give a password manager device to all the users that cannot be trusted to create strong passwords, or if given a long password will write it down, probably on a sticker attached to said device. Then, they take 4 times as long to log into things since they constantly have to unlock their password manager, and each time they do so open a window to keylogging or sideband attacks on the same password. And they leave their passwords hanging around in cut and paste buffers. Finally they lose their "physically secure device" in a public location and expose it to an offline attack, and possibly also lose their written-down copy of the master password.

Not a fan of those systems.