In 1766, the Royal Society commissioned Lt. James Cook to command H.M. Bark Endeavour to sail to the South Pacific to witness the transit of Venus across the sun from the southern hemisphere, where it would be visible. On this voyage he and his crew would become the first Europeans to see the East Coast of Australia and New Zealand.

In the closing days of 2014, the news reaches slashdot.

And in more breaking news just to hand... recent archaeological studies have unearthed evidence that European discovery of New Zealand might now be dated back to the 1640s!

And sulphur dioxide condenses into an aerosol that counteracts the greenhouse effect. Those large pollution spewing ships are actually saving the planet! Screw hybrid cars and bicycles, everyone should drive a container ship to work!

Do ya think that's what makes this stupid? Well, consider the fact that a single ship polutes the atmosphere with more carbon in a day than all the cars in the United States in a year... then reassess this idea.

Oh come on. That statement doesn't stand up to the slightest snifftest.

There are 250M cars in the US which means that you would need to have 365x250M (91 billion!) cars for them to emit as much carbon in one day as one of your ships supposedly does.

Yet road transport still emits 5-6x as much as maritime transport:
http://www.eutransportghg2050....

How many cars, buses and trucks would there need to be to emit 5-6x as much carbon as the 10s of thousands of ships there are worldwide?

I suspect you could be maybe 6 orders of magnitude out there.

OK maybe you misapplied some other pollutant? Sulphur Dioxide maybe? Ships burn very dirty bunker oil after all. Here's an article that reckons the largest of container ships can produce the same amount of SO2 as 50M cars in the same timeframe.

Now you're down to only 3 orders of magnitude (5 x 365) out - eg 50M is only a fifth of the number of cars in the US and correcting for one day vs one year.

Dude, "wearable augmented reality drone" sounds like a fucking awesome product.

Sounds like a Google Glass user.

BUT - THEY PUT THE STEERING WHEEL ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE CAR!!!!

Just, wow.

I don't even want to get into the thing about their driver going down the wrong side of the street.

How can the right side of the car be the wrong side?

But yeah they weren't on the right side of the street - I'll give you that one

didn't expect that...

Nobody does.

The point the OP was trying to make was that Linus's Law [wikipedia.org], specifically Eric S. Raymond's "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" argument, is ridiculously idealistic as it operates under the pretence that everyone has as much insight and knowledge into the software as the author(s) have, focusing solely on the quantity of eyes.

I disagree that it is a ridiculously idealistic statement. It is more of a misunderstood rhetorical tautology than anything else.

A discovered bug obviously had enough eyeballs on it, and an as yet undiscovered bug hasn't had enough eyeballs on it.

All it is stating is that more people looking is better for finding bugs than less people looking. Or another way a wider range of experiences, backgrounds, goals, biases and points of view looking for bugs is better than a narrower range.

Why wouldn't it work in practice? It would be easy enough to shut down all mosques, ban the Koran, ban Muslim symbols, etc. It would be easy enough to hamper travel to Muslim countries, and in particular ban the Hajj.

Then what? How does that fix anything? Are people going to change their beliefs because "it's the law"?

It sounds like you're playing right into hands of the dickheads wanting to radicalise and recruit impressionable kids who feel they are being persecuted and alienated - because now it's actually reality. They no longer need to select for the impressionable ones.

2. He seems to do more talking about software than he does actually writing it.

Oh I dunno about that... we (thankfully) haven't heard much from/about him here in many years, and when he does actually turn up again it's for writing some bit of software.

I had to switch the voice in my head to a different accent to get that one :)

("funghee" vs "funguy" for those unsure what I'm rambling about)

but if Debian drops systemd, what will "automagic" Ubuntu do, seeing as its very much based on Debian?

Go back to Upstart? And carry on just like it is still 2012.

You're forgetting that Ubuntu wasn't really a big fan of systemd, and it was only Debians decision that caused them to reluctantly switch anyway.

If you must insist on Python and want to avoid multi-threaded I/O bound weaknesses of the GIL, then use Jython.

I was under the impression the GIL was a problem for CPU bound miltithreaded CPython code, but that the GIL is released when waiting on I/O (or native libraries). ie I/O bound workloads are the ones that still make some sense for multithreading in CPython.

I speak fluent cunt, allow me to translate.

Thanks, we needed some help from a cunning linguist.

I think systemd should go and develop its own kernel.

Also, these so-called "scientists" claim that there will be "winter" a few months from now, but the weather today is actually warmer than it was yesterday, so I'm scratching my head...

That's nothing! Here in NZ climate scientists are claiming it will be summer in a few months!

How stupid do they think we are? All this stuff about scientific consensus is a total lie!