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.

The (very small) UPS is there, really, to help me over the 20-second lag it takes the generator to kick in. God bless the wife's annual bonus -- a generator when you're in rural(ish) NH is a really good thing come winter storms.

There is a world of space between telling people what they want to hear and " telling people your view of the truth bluntly". If you are qualified to offer an opinion and one has actually been sought you should offer your actual opinion, that is how you add value. If it differs from that of others you do so diplomatically.

For instance, lets say someone says, "I think we could deliver that in six weeks" and you know they forgot about issue $X. You don't reply "Well you forgot about issue $X so I don't think that will work."

You allow them to save a little face, and you say something like: "Sounds a little tight, I think you have underestimated how long $X could take, because we know it can fragile and will need extra QA testing attention"

They can cop to having for got all about X or not, you haven't completely shot their idea down but if they are a decent thinking person they correct the course. You know "a little tight" means "way the fuck off" and they do to but others might not need to known and you have not rubbed it in the face in even if its just between the two of you.

Just being some yes man does not do anyone any good though and those people usually only rise as far as the bottom rungs of the decision makers because eventually folks realize they just agree with everyone all the time and don't really offer anything.

Which is insane, but if it looks like special treatment it usually is. Denying our own senses takes us away from reality, it prevents us from recognize something that actually is unfair when we see it. We spend all our time solving imaginary problems rather than addressing real ones.

There is this huge push to get girls into STEM, encourage them to do science and math etc; because what apparently they can't be expected form their own ambitions and desires in the presence of all the societal messaging.

Yet on flip side we don't see a big push to encourage boys not to enlist in the armed forces. Nope despite all the glorification war in movies (almost always shown be fought by men) GI Joe, video games where you play soldier clearly marketed almost exclusive to men and boys, men are still expected to think for themselves. The idea of encouraging our girls to go into this high risk line of work is given lip-service at most.

Oh sure there has been lots of news about women in the military but you don't see the recruiters chasing the girls down the side walk outside the local high school.

Lets face it if it was really about getting rid of gender stereotypes we would stop calling attention to gender stereotypes. Rather than going oh look "SHE is a successful software developer" we would start saying oh look "Jane is a successful software developer" We should put the emphasis on Jane and not her sex. We would not "find female mathematician" to speak to the girls in the class about math, we would find the best mathematician willing to talk about their work to class of students regardless of their gender to do it.

Kids are not stupid, showing Barbie "can be a computer engineer too" or having a chapter in the computer science text about "women in the field' or something does not play as "see girls can do computers" it plays as "see you won't be the only freak out there, girls can do computers but its still kinda weird"

Finally we need to stop framing thinks as women's issues that are not. Early voting for example. Pelosi tried to push the idea the women for some reason are unique in the obstacles they face getting to the polls, because I don't men apparently don't have events in their daily lives that make it hard to abandon their usual routines on a particular Tuesday, nope that's girls. Then we see how she treats a female fellow democrat that might happen to vote in away she does not agree with, the instance she seeks the right to vote by proxy. Hint she is denied.

So either women don't need special consideration for voting or the do which is it? Oh that right the answer is obvious they don't or if they do the need it no more and no less than any male. Still Nancy was perfectly willing to portray her gender as needing special accommodate when it was politically useful but she knows perfectly well the need is imagined, and discards the idea when its not politically useful.

Yea, honestly the lesson I would want a child to take away from this book is that life isn't fair. Barbie is a bimbo she hasn't got to neurons to rub together but she is pretty and charismatic, she will be able find other people like boys in this book to sponge off and carry her anywhere she wants to go.

This isn't a gender thing either. Pretty boys gave the same advantage although it might show up a little later in life. I have worked lots of places and seen one male manager who is near totally incompetent leading a vastly less successful and productive team than his counter part and their team get selected for promotion to some role like director or CIO/CTO over and over again. Why because that guy was taller and better looking and maybe if he possessed any skills at all its knowing how to tell others what they want to hear.

People need to understand that they may come up against the Barbies and Kens out there and depending on the situation it might not be a fair fight. They might need to recognize they are Barbie or Ken and learn to lever that too.

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-) )

Your failure to manage resources is not the school or tax payers or tuition payers in the case of a private school's problem. All of that stuff could have been downloaded once (perhaps over night) and passed around the room on an $8 usb stick you most likely could have expensed.

Agreed,

I don't see this as much of a solution. The Grandparent is right transport encryption is a requirement but I am not sure its first step. encryption and authentication are part and parcel. One really isn't useful without the other and might be more dangerous alone than nothing.

At least with HTTP I *know* there exists the possibility what I am receiving isn't coming from who I thought it was from, may have been undetectably altered, and others know I am viewing it. Just as anything i send, might be altered or not go where i expect it to.

The big problem today is all those shitty domain validated certs, are cheap ticket to every spammer, fraudster in the world to appear legit.. Not to mention if I can find some stored-reflected-xss or even just content injection via iframe, or img tag on a legit site say "example.com, I register a name like uberCDN.com and host the sourced content at example.com.uberCDN.com and the typical victim user will have virtually no chance to detect anything is up..

Honestly we need to solve the trust problem as step 0, than we need encryption and integrity + authentication as step 1.

Funny I think a world in which you did face liability limited to your ownership would make for a lot nicer America. So you have 25 shares of XYZ corp, if XYZ if fined, has unpaid debts etc, incurs a civil liability etc, you should be proportionally responsible for that after XYZs assets have been exhausted. If the remaining debt is 5 Billion and you own .000002% of the shares out standing than you should be on the hook for 10K.

My guess is if the owners could be held accountable, we would have boards of directors and shareholder votes targeting very very different qualities where selection of top management is concerned.

There is no proof of that, not that there is proof of any of this. My point was the media acts as a gatekeeper. Had he responded with a reasoned argument citing statics about the rate at which assaults by uber drives actually compares to those at the hands of other public and private transportation operators and staff there is no guarantee at all Lacy would print it.

What is a better headline? "Some uber drivers caught assaulting passengers!" or "There is a vanishingly small risk your uber driver could assult you and its probably very comparable to the risk you face from everyone else!"

Ah but many of the folks he needs to reach don't watch Fox. Just like many of the people who do don't read left leaning media. So its not one group but the intersection of the groups getting smaller and smaller. When the groups no longer over lap its just a bunch of silo shaped echo chambers.

One of the many ways the news media has abandon the few vestiges of integrity it ever had, has been the move toward tailor the message to the audience.

I blame the media though. The "news" media has never exactly been objective but once upon a time they at least offered up most of the facts and some reasoned analysis. This gave them some appearance of objectivity which sat better with folks and also put most of the facts out there so you could reject their conclusion and form your own.

Now almost all the news media is very closely tied to the interest of their corporate masters. So much of the media now at least appears to have axe to grind, even when its not clear whose axe that is, I can understand the concern.

Put yourself in Uber's shoes, you are running a company and getting somewhat hostile media treatment, perhaps you deep down to your core believe the criticisms are inaccurate, and deeply unfair. You try to rebut them but you are simple not given the same air time the critics are. What should you do just bend over an take it, let them damage your business. I for one would much rather erode peoples faith in the source, and opposition research is how you do that!
 

Does the robot worm sleep?

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.