As this is a more or less duplicate top-10 style list to the one posted yesterday, among many other "biggest foul ups" and "worst dressed" articles, the floor is open for meta-discussion.

I get that laughing at others' misfortune and fuckups makes sad people feel better about themselves and sells lots of glossy magazines, but you've got to admit it's all a bit depressing that we can't get past the psychology of school yard bullies and instead have at least one in five of these top 10 lists be about the greatest medical, quantum physics, and space exploration breakthroughs of the previous year and what's on the horizon for the next.

Celebrate good times, come on.

> No kidding. I had to look through dozens of "flashlight" apps
> to find one that didn't want my calendar, SMS, internet access,
> and GPS.

F-Droid is your friend.

As always, FOSS means you don't have to put up with the bullshit.

F-Droid build all apps they ship from source, including some sort
of grep filter on permissions to catch (and then remove) any code
which is not in the user's best interest, or at minimum flag and
explain the issue in detail to let you decide for yourself.
Otherwise-good apps with flagrant ad-ware or cripple-ware in it
simply gets patched.

Ok, ok, you're not going to look it up so here's the link,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE_Mizar

"Smolinski and his associate, Harold Blake, were killed in the
resulting fiery crash."

> Perhaps you should ask Google what "citation" means.

It's old Spanish which translates roughly to mean "painted horse".

As another poster pointed out, Android already is running the Linux kernel. If you want the GNU-ecosystem OS on top of the kernel all you have to do is install a chroot environment like "Lil' Debi" and you're done. (requires root)

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=info.guardianproject.lildebi&fdpage=13

Same goes for those very nice and very cheap long-life Chromebooks.

People give RMS lots of grief for calling "it" GNU/Linux, but he ain't no fool. Linux can be many things besides the kernel for the GNU OS, and see the Debian ports for the familiar GNU environment running on BSD, and yes, Hurd kernels instead of the Linux one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

This is a bit like asking physicists to come up with a reason that newtons apple falls that DOESNT involve gravity.

That could be considered apostrofal.

The ability to spot a scam is VERY easy, here is how:

You'd do better to learn from the master:

Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit

http://www.xenu.net/archive/baloney_detection.html

the laws of physics care not what Al Gore thinks or does.

it does not matter if it is Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co., or Colonel Fucking Sanders who points it out: internalising the market externalities around the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest tool we have to do something about this before it is too late.

we know pretty much how many barrels oil, gas, and coal we sell (and so extract and burn) each year. We know quite well how many molecules of CO2 that will release. We know, pretty much, since the mid-1800s (starting with Fourier) what effect that CO2 will have on our atmosphere. We monitor it both in amount and radioisotope and it matches expectations pretty much spot on.

arguing over the minute details or the character of the messenger is both totally irrelevant and short sighted, not to mention intellectually dishonest.

A cap and trade marked based solution worked beautifully for SO2, there's absolutely no reason it wouldn't work for other pollutants as well, beyond intentional and sociopathic sabotage that is.

no, it really is largely irrelevant. here are the numbers up to and including last week:

http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/siv_annual_polar_graph.png

are you so obtuse that you can't see what's happening here?

http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/siv_september_average_polar_graph.png

or are you purposefully keeping your head in the sand until this all blows over?

If nothing else, I hope we can agree that the outlook for polar bear cubs born today is pretty fucking grim.

To put this in some context, have a look at Jim Pettit's "spiral" graphs and consider that the grey zone in the NSIDC plots linked from the summary are still two standard deviations from the norm, and this year we're almost touching that (if that doesn't mean much to you now would be a good time to brush up on your statistics). So compared to last year we've gone from holy shit batshit insane outlier to just plain old holy shit.

https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-volume

To anyone about to complain that the number of samples is too short, 1) these measurements start when humanity invented the satellites to measure it - can't change that, and 2) we have deep Greenland ice cores for a pretty good idea of what was going on before.

> Our corporate fascist system is failing us badly and if we won't put
> them all in check soon, consequences of their misdeeds, greed and
> corruption will hit us hard.

If this article and many of the other stories we see on Slashdot every-friggin-day are anything to go by, apparently they already are.

> In that case you just go with whichever runs fastest.

Not quite, optimizing to "result = 1" will be fastest, but obviously not correct. If you know -Ofast will degrade numerics compared to -O0 you do know something.

So you do a sensitivity analysis and learn what parts of the results you can trust and what parts you can't.

Or you re-run your forecast models from 10 days ago with what-you-knew 10 days ago and see which ones got closest to reality. After doing those hindcasts for a while you can build up some confidence about model performance.

That doesn't work so well when trying to model a 1 in 500 year storm which you have no hindcast experience with, but it's better than nothing.

Oops, it's in the sensible-utils package.