Yes, a lot of folks just read the first part of the comment and the conclusion. But some people do read the entire comment before replying.

What is so preposterous about one Middle Eastern culture referencing another culture's actual uncompleted building in their legends?

The stele is about the reconstruction of the tower, not its initial construction. The original construction of the tower/ziggurat would have been considerably earlier.

Genesis is the first of the five books of Moses. It was legendarily attributed to Moses. That would make the legendary time of its writing less than a thousand years before the writing of the stele, when Babylon did already exist. [Of course, if you agree with modern scholarship, then Genesis was written/collated considerably after the time of Moses.]

The Hebrew is not "balal", it's BBL (two "bet" characters followed by a "lamed".) Hebrew is normally written without most vowels, and ancient Hebrew was always written without most vowels; the "nikud" dot systems used to teach Hebrew vowels are no more than 1500 years old. I don't know where you got your Akkadian transliteration from. If your Akkadian is as bad as your Hebrew, it's worthless. But if your Akkadian source was better than your Hebrew source, then it's interesting that Hebrew BBL is quite close to "babili". If you were going to write "babili" in Hebrew, it would look either like "BBL" or BBLY" (the Hebrew yud character can double as a vowel.)

And the linguistics are irrelevant, anyway. Hebrew BBL has long been considered a reference to Babylon. Even if the Hebrew and Akkadian place names were linguistically disparate, BBL would still have been an exonym referencing Babylon. Sort of like Japan vs. Nippon. A modern English article that describes a site in Japan is not incorrect or mythical just because the local name is "Nippon"/"Nihon" rather than "Japan". "BBL means "Babylon" just as "Japan" means "Nippon".

[Disclaimer: I personally don't believe in the Bible. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is an interesting collection of ancient documents that reference other antiquities.]

The Russians had a reputation for rocket reliability. They previously marketed based on that reputation, releasing press releases after successful launches trumpeting how much more reliable they were. They are now rapidly losing that reputation. This will impact their competitiveness in the launch market.

And it isn't just US media saying it. After the Phobos-Grunt launch failure, Medvedev threatened to punish those responsible.

This is robotic spacecraft, not manned space. The US has not even paused in launching robotic spacecraft -- we did plenty of launches this year, and we have plenty more scheduled. And I would disagree on manned as well. The US didn't give up manned launches: we kept flying the shuttle until earlier this year, and we're on track to resume manned launches in a few years. US manned launches are paused, not stopped.

"Usually"? The recent US rocket failures have not been explosions, either. For example, the failure with Glory was a fairing separation problem.

Most elections have a bunch of offices and decisions, each with a bunch of candidates/options. How is it possible that you are consistently seeing equivalence between the various sets of candidates and options? I could understand if, in some small fraction of individual line items, your research turned up that the options were equally bad. But how can you not be voting at all?

Far more likely: you aren't doing adequate research. The options seem equivalent to you because, with minimal information about the candidates, you are unable to substantively differentiate between them. So get off your butt and do your homework.

Submitter here. Comments:

0-day refers to the time when the bug is first exploited relative to when it is patched by the vendor. It has nothing to do with whether or not the exploit yield unauthorized access. It is entirely possible to have a 0-day DoS attack.

There was no evidence on whether or not the bug was triggered deliberately. Hence why the summary referred to it as a "potential" 0-day, and said the problem "is believed to be" a 0-day vulnerability.

At the time crashes were initially occuring, no patch existed. That made it a 0-day, assuming

SANS is a well-known security organization. Hopefully folks who care about this sort of thing are aware that isc.sans.edu is not the same entity as isc.org.

This is a "news for nerds" site. Plenty of folks aren't running BIND 9 directly from isc.org at their workplaces. Perhaps they are using distribution-bundled BIND, or they're running BIND 9 at home, or they're not running BIND 9 at all and are just curious about major vulnerabilities. I know I like to read about flaws in major Internet software even for packages I'm not running.

Most recent manned flight: 2011
Next planned manned flight: 2014

SpaceX says they'll be ready to launch people to LEO in 2014. So far they've hit their schedule targets.

The intent is not "in open source, the burden is on users to fix issues." Rather, the intent is "in open source, frustrated users have a potential recourse other than relying on the developers."

Unfortunately, the usual phrasing does not make this clear.

In the closed source world, it's perfectly normal when filing a bug report to get back a polite "we acknowledge that issue, but it isn't affecting much of the user community. In the interest of prioritizing our scarce development resources, we will not be addressing that issue on our current roadmap, unless it impacts a significantly larger fraction of our paying customer base."

In the open source world, I think the intent of "use the source, Luke" is to be shorthand for something similar:

    "We acknowledge that issue, but it has not been reported by much of our user community. In the interest of prioritizing our scarce development resources, we will not be addressing that issue on our current roadmap, unless it impacts a significantly larger fraction of our user base. Please continue to report other bugs; all bug reports are valuable feedback, and we do fix many user-reported bugs based on our triage and prioritization processes. Note that, if this bug is sufficiently problematic for you, and you have the necessary skills and resources, you have the source! So you are welcome to fix this for yourself, should you be so inclined."

Unfortunately, frazzled developers are far more likely to give a curt response rather than spending the time to write up something more polite. FWIW, I'd be happy for anyone who wishes to use the wording I just used.

Again FWIW, my own experience is that both closed source and open source developers vary widely in their support level. As a for-instance, I found a problem with a certain closed-source device vendor's product not being RFC compliant, and therefore failing to properly inter-operate with an open-source management program. A coworker contacted the vendor as a (paying) customer, while I contacted the mailing list for the open-source software. The author of the open-source software emailed me a workaround within hours. My coworker is still waiting for a useful response from the vendor.

Conversely, we had several interoperability problems between a different vendor and a different open-source program. The vendor actually had already made a patch for one of the issues, but we couldn't deploy it. The maintainer of the open-source program refused to workaround one of the issues on their end, because the vendor had patched it, and we should just install the patch. While I didn't like the situation, this was a major problem for us, so I was motivated to hit the source. Because I had source, I was able to write my own patch.

Obviously, YMMV.

This reminds me that computing is unique in that a fair number of the pioneers are alive, or were until very recently. My list of major computer names is a lot longer: Alan Turing, Von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Doug Engelbart, Vint Cert, Bob Metcalfe, Ken Olsen, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Grace Hopper, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Tim Berners-Lee, John McCarthy. Of those names, quite a few are still alive right now. It's actually possible to travel around and meet them. This is a feature of computing that differentiates it from many other fields. In Math, Physics, Biology, etc., most of your heroes died hundreds of years ago.

Even if they're just enthusiasts, they don't necessarily need to follow the scientific method to produce value. They can prove their claims conclusively by capturing one live specimen and bringing it back to civilization.

It won't happen, but it's possible.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but please note that most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Hebrew rather than Aramaic. Also please note that ancient Hebrew is surprisingly readable to people who can read "modern" Hebrew. For the last 2000 or so years, Hebrew has mostly been a dead language used only for ritual and study, so it hasn't changed all that much. I haven't personally seen any of the Aramaic parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were relatively easy to read as well.

About 18 years ago, I stood in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem and read from the Dead Sea Scroll copy of Isaiah. I'm no longer a religious individual, but it's still awe inspiring to be able to piece together the familiar words from the ancient, unfamiliar lettering. Now it can be done anywhere, for free, rather than requiring a 15 hour flight.

Thanks, google.