I also subscribe to the "great filter" theory. About 25 years after the radio was invented, we were busy gassing each other in trenches, followed closely by a global pandemic, then mass genocide, then teetering on the edge of nuclear war. That's not a very wide window for aliens to notice our presence, if they rely on artificial radio waves to detect intelligent life.

My take is that technological improvements make radio sound like noise after a few decades. Early radios systems are very simple things which have signals (CW, AM, FM, ...) that are very distinct from electrical and thermal noise. Their signals were both drastically different from, and drastically stronger than, the background, enabling simple detectors to separate a signal's information from all that chaff.

Modern radios (such as spread spectrum systems, especially OFDM) squeeze nearly the Shannon Limit out of precious bandwidth (and also be frugal with transmit power) by using nearly all of it to carry information. This makes them virtually indistinguishable from a celestial object with a little extra heat (buried among things like stars, which have a LOT of heat).

It was only about 120 years from when Hertz and Tesla started making easily detectable radio waves to the Analog Television Shutdown, a significant milepost in the decommissioning of easily detectable radio signatures. I expect that, within anther few decades, the Earth will be emitting very little that might be recognizable as a radio signature of intelligent life, unless we expend a bunch of energy sending such a signature deliberately.

So my solution to the mystery expressed in the Drake Equation is that L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) is short, not due to the falls of civilizations, but to economic incentives to use the aether only in ways that are no longer noticeable at a distance.

Assume for a second, that you have a pond. And a new type of algae has been introduced into the pond. Algae grows quickly, so let's assume a doubling time of a day. 24 hours. The concern is that this new algae is gross and smells bad and nobody wants to have a pond full of this disgusting algae. Unfortunately, treating the algae is expensive and nobody wants to treat the entire pond.

The question is: One week before the pond is entirely covered in algae, would enough have appeared that you would even notice? At a "gut instinct" level, we'd guess that perhaps a quarter or a third or at least a tenth of the pond would be covered in algae, but that gut level instinct would be completely wrong. Just 1.56% of the pond would be covered - right about the point where it becomes noticeable at all.

The point is this: information processing capabilities, globally, aren't just growing exponentially: the rate of growth is itself also growing exponentially. Just about exactly at the time where we notice actual, verifiable intelligence of any kind is just about exactly the time where we have to assume it's ubiquity.

Previous discussions talk about the number of cross connects and how far away we are from the mark without commenting that the Internet itself allows for an infinite number of cross connects - my laptop can connect directly to billions of resources immediately with an average 10-25ms delay. Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth. It's why 401ks are so universally underutilized, why credit cards are such big business, and why the concept of the "singularity" seems like such hocus pocus at the gut level.

Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly

Why limit it to nations? Major corporations are as capable as most countries, and only a little bit more endangered if caught.

Despite the "only security through obscurity" meme, you need to understand it, not just say it.

There are only two types of security:
1) security through obscurity,
and,
2) security through inaccessibility.
They can, however, be intelligently combined.

Please note that private key encryption is security through obscurity. Cutting the phone line is security through inaccessibility. Saying that "it's secure because they can't get the prime factors of that key" is security through obscurity.

Despite the meme, security through obscurity is widely and properly used. What's wrong if false obscurity, which is common. If you don't properly assess just how obscure your secret is, then you have a security failure.

So having a monoculture is reduced security, because that means that there are a much larger number of entities seeking to discover the secret...and any breach in security cannot be easily contained. If you don't have a monoculture, then a single breach cannot be as widely damaging, and is thus also less valuable to find. This is a sort of network effect.

OTOH, a diverse community means that more effort needs to be devoted to security, because each branch is a separate thing to be maintained. So it's not all benefit or all loss, it's a mixture.

FWIW, I choose not to have flash installed on my system, despite the fact that it would have some utility, because I consider that the weakness that it presents is not worth the benefit. The ability of refuse to have such a service installed allows increased security...at a cost. For some people the cost is higher than they are willing to pay. This reduction of the attack surface is a form of security through obscurity mixed with security through inaccessibility, i.e., I have become inaccessible to some forms of attact, and I have reduced my visibility to many attackers.

Most of the answers to your questions are "it depends" I don't understand what you mean by a "software shop" - is this a consulting company, a company that produces a large scale product, a company that produces a small product, an online service or what?

Your ratio of junior to senior developers depends on the kind of product you're producing. If you have an application that has a big, overarching architecture and then lots of relatively simple modules for specific cases, you want many junior developers to pound out those simple modules (e.g. different types of data entry screens).

Coding standards and standardization are always good. For a small shop you're best off looking around for one that you like and adopting it rather than trying to make your own from scratch because it is not a revenue producer and you can burn endless hours in meetings arguing about spacing, comment style, etc. Make an executive decision and move forward.

Tools and languages, again, it depends. Use the right tool for the job.

Since you don't know any of these things or how to make the tradeoffs, what you need is to hire a director of engineering who does because if you try to hire some developers and apply the vast depth of wisdom that you've acquired from this thread on Slashdot you're probably going to fail miserably.

Actually, my company has been seeing a particular airport having a lot of power outages that has seen at one field workstation be lost per outage (not hardware dead, but the PC has to be re-imaged). Considering how long the UPSs I have will last (and I got the UPS for my PC for like $80 and my network equipment for like $90), its worth it considering the thousands of dollars they are protecting and the headaches they are saving. Data loss is my bigger concern, especially since I am in an area prone to brown outs. Before I got mine, I lost things several times because of a random ass power outage.

How do you get the different countries committed to the same climate change ... and to hold their decision long enough to have a desired effect?

I think the politics are too chaotic and short-sighted to make geoengineering feasible, even if there weren't a great need to avoid mistakes.

And there's nothing in North America except trees and savages. What a short-sighted view you have.

There's a lot of value in having humans along. Currently, launch costs are so high that the costs of bringing along the life support for humans is prohibitive, but if it got cheaper many things would work better.

Consider Philae - if it had landed a few meters in another direction it would still be working. If it had been a manned expedition, that wouldn't have been an issue.

Or look at the Mars rovers. Great stuff, but there's little ability to improvise. Think up a different experiment you want done? Well, it'll have to wait for the next rover because that one can't do it.

I'm still waiting for a truly open-source, unlocked, user-controllable phone. Like a successor to Open Moko. (Building a closed platform on a base of open software doesn't cut it.)

Is anything out there or in the works?

(It's particularly acute for me just now: My decade-old feature phone started to flake out last week.)

I don't see why your BeagleBone black example is systemd's fault. It has a convoluted way of managing network interfaces because it uses connman, a network-management daemon from Intel that is not part of systemd.

I installed ubuntu 14.04 on my BBBs. (Had to upgrade the kernel a little later because the 3.13.0 kernel wasn't ported to arm-on-bone in time to go out with the original 14.04 distribution and the 2.whatever they shipped didn't handle a class of USB device I needed, but it's fine now at 3.13.6-bone8.)

Changing to a specified, fixed, IP address was just a matter of editing /etc/network/interfaces, which was commented well enough (in combination with the man page on my ubuntu laptop) to make it easy.

(Main problem was that DeviceTree overlays weren't supported by 3.13.0-6, so I had to hack the boot-time base device tree to reconfigure for the onboard device functionality I wanted, rather than just overlaying the deltas during or just after the boot procerss.)

Lots of things have happened since the dinosaurs flew away

I love that formulation.

(And just coined a related one: "... since the dinosaurs gave us the bird" B-) )

See, anybody who has a CS degree will be motivated to HATE boot camp guys. Employers who want more (cheaper) labor will be motivated to LOVE any force that lets them hire more people at less cost.

As a self-taught programmer myself managing a 10+ year project that's highly profitable, you'll probably guess which side of that divide you'll tend to see me on.

That's such bullshit. We didn't understand the atom until a little over a century ago. Quantum mechanics even later. Just because it's been thousands of years and we haven't figured something out doesn't mean that it's unknowable.