Dateline: Millions of light years (even faster parsecs than the Kessel run)

Lede: Scientists in the Dark; Does it Matter?

Today scientists announced that they can't see anything happening with stuff they can't see, but think is there, because otherwise the math is no good. After receiving directions to his laboratory on the phone, I went to see an authority on dark matter. During the interview, Dr. Seemore Lichspittle told this Any Paper, Any Time reporter that the thing about dark matter that one has to understand is that "it goes to eleven." When confronted with the observation that the sensing instruments only had scales from 0-10, he responded "Yes, yes, that's exactly it. The numbers... the numbers only work out in the dark. When the instruments are off. Matter of fact, it's all dark, really." At that point the interview was cut short as two lab assistants in white coats hustled Dr. Lichspittle into his own custom white lab jacket. Late for an important meeting, no doubt. As he left, nodding, he called back "it's really quite dark." Food for thought! Leaving Arkham, I was struck by the picturesque beauty of the stonework, and very appreciative of the tight security. We can rest easy, knowing that national treasures like Dr. Lichspittle work in such a safe enviroment.

And this is why closed source combined with black-box development is so much safer than open source. Sigh.

I really don't mind -- actually, I think I'd be kind of of flattered -- if people were able to look at my code, go "hey, I can use that" and then proceed to use it. And in fact, I've written a fair bit of code I think would fall into that vein. I think I could write something book-length in the line of "cool coding stuff" and quite a few programmers would find it quite useful. I've been doing this since the early 70's. I write signal processing, and image processing (but I repeat myself, sorta) and AI code, with a strong background in embedded and special-purpose systems, a bunch more.

But because a lawyer might look at my code, and use it to screw me, and through me, my family and employees quite harshly?

Bang. Closed source. The opposite of furthering progress by virtue of passing along what I've learned. I give away some of my work product such as this, but you will never see my source code because of the legal environment.

As far as I'm concerned, if I wrote it without referring to "other" source code, then no one else has any claim on my work. I don't have any idea how to fix copyright and patent and still retain the supposed commercial motivation to create, but fact is, as it stands, it's completely fucktarded.

Pisses me off, it does. :/

Fast; efficient; not bloated; not buggy; respectful of the user's privacy; hardened with regard to hacking if that's relevant; not encumbered by dependencies; adequately featured; well supported; well documented for the end user.

As far as I'm concerned, if you can't hit those 00001000 or 00001001 targets, you should be looking for different line of work.

Of course it is lovely if it's easily read code, well commented, well structured -- but if the former list is covered, I'll give the 00000011 latter a pass.

Adding weight to the airplane reduces its range and/or capacity for carrying paying passengers so it would be an ongoing cost.

Who says it has to add weight? Use modern materials for the partition; carbon fiber structures can be ultra tough and very light weight, for example. And probably not used in any near-current design as aircraft take a very long time from paperwork to production. A door in the fuselage weighs about the same as the fuselage; thicker in the middle, thinner at the edges. It might even reduce weight by creating more open space in the cockpit. You can argue that it would reduce passenger capacity, but inasmuch as US passenger aircraft are typically not fully loaded, it doesn't add cost in most cases either. No matter what, it wouldn't cost as much as the TSA does, between the actual money spent and the huge amount of people's time they subtract from pursuits that would actually benefit the economy. Not to mention the level of irritation and the follow-on effects on productivity and civility...

Always wondered why they didn't design the passenger seating to be removable and collapsible and just pull all the empty seats out as a pre-takeoff action after the aircraft is fully loaded. Be a heck of a weight savings. Plus they could probably leverage it to reduce the anti-passenger effect of the seat designs created by the one-armed, one-legged engineer that all the airlines seem to hire.

Typically the booth babe at RSA's booth at the RSA show is Rivest (I don't think I've seen Shamir or Adleman there.) Usually he's been working on something interesting and is having fun showing it off, but he's also there for fanboi value.

They were a really clear indicator that the occasional companies that hired them seriously didn't understand their audience, and hadn't brought anybody who knew anything technical to their booth, probably not even any marketing people who understood the product, so you could pretty much skip them, because they were pretty much always useless as well as unprofessional.

On the other hand, you can totally bribe us with chocolate or especially coffee, and we might sit through your silly magician act for a raffle ticket for an iThing as long as there was technical content at your booth, and we'll pick up blinky tchotchkes with your logo on them. The woman I'd rather talk to at your booth is the one who developed the cool product, or can explain it well.

When my company's been at trade shows in the area, about half their staff are booth-running professionals, rather than product-related, from the people who set the thing up and make sure all the marketing content is there to the people who herd customers in, figure out what they're interested in (even if it's just at the buzzword level), bring them over to the right part of the booth or find the right person if they need to, scan your contact info, get the speakers on and off the stage, etc., and about half are either main-office or local people who know something about whatever we're trying to sell. They seem to do a good job on the mechanics of it (I've occasionally ended up as local booth staff), and they're seriously good at respecting the audience.

They're the ones over in the NSA booth, showing off the cool Enigma machine, and handing out other spook agency trinkets. Sometimes other groups of Feds are there (Homeland Security or whoever), and they don't understand that, unlike the NSA who are evil but cool, they're evil but not cool.

None of those even comes close to two heads of state declaring that sovereign Ukrainian land belongs to Russia.

No one needs to. They've already taken what they wanted. Fait accompli.

You're really letting this stuff fly right over your head. Odd. Russia -- and the US -- are the 800 lb (~363 kg for you victims of the metric system) gorilla of international "we did it, you can suck it" politics. Approval from others is not something that changes the course of much in particular, although it's typical when some kind of externally facing benefit is desired from them.

Germany, on the other hand, was a small, massively industrial country between the size of the 4th and 5th largest US states (Montana and New Mexico) and smaller than Severo-Kavkazsky federalny okrug, the second smallest of the nine federal districts of Russia. Germany was very busy trying to consolidate a starting foothold for a major, vicious, multi-country land grab. The remainder of Europe as a whole was terrified. Initially, they did what they thought they had to do, true enough, but in the end it was nothing but deterrent-free conciliation, just as many actions aimed at Russia today are. The specifics of the act mean very little; it's the nature of it that guides future action.

"$7,000" ... "The assumption it takes a year"

The point I was making rather explicitly, which went right over your head, is that 7k is a good return for a short bit of work. 47k is excellent. The complaint about 7k of income as made in the GP is only valid if the development takes a long time. If it takes a week to put together an app, a not unreasonable amount of time for something of moderate complexity (assuming, again, that one is competent, and continuing not being the least bit concerned about those who are not), 7k is a thousand bucks a day, assuming you work all seven days.

Another thing is that if a dev spends a whole lot of time on a poor idea, then perhaps the message isn't so much that "this work produces a poor return" as it is "you suck at this work and/or you suck at figuring out what people will buy", and in either (or both) cases, this is simply the market's way of telling you to consider a more remunerative line of effort.

I highly recommend that you talk to HR about your compensation.

Retired, my home is what amounts to a small castle (ex-church), multiple vehicles, 200" home theater, no mortgage, no loans, investments a-plenty, two wholly owned, profitable businesses that run themselves, and the software that put me here now available for free to anyone...

Yeah, sorry, no time for your HR person. What was it they wanted from you? Ten years experience in rehabilitating sentient AI bartenders, a no-compete / no-disclosure / no harassment / must-wear-panties contract, daily drug tests and cavity searches, you provide your own insurance, move to India and obtain Indian citizenship, be paid in rupees+curry, and no pets in the office?

I'm sorry, I'm just a bit cranky today. Was thinking one lousy assumption deserved another, albeit with a little humor thrown in. :)

And the US has plenty of those, as well as accidents with less dire consequences.

Yeah, actually it is 9/11 stupidity.

Solution would have been armored cockpits rejiggered to include food service, bunks and restroom sufficient for cockpit crew, separate, external door (doesn't open to the passenger section) into the aircraft for the pilots. An expensive 1-time cost. Instead of half-assed conversions and the open-ended expense, inconvenience, and dignity trampling of the TSA and associated rules and strangulations.

The current situation is a band-aid, and a pretty poor one at that. It does no good; it offers great potential for harm. As we have seen here.

And inasmuch as it is extremely unlikely that any load of passengers will ever again let a terrorist take control of an aircraft, knowing that doing so could lead straight to their death without passing go, so action is now always the better choice -- and terrorists know it -- the whole thing is basically wrongheaded from start to finish.

The most serious problem was commercial aircraft being used as guided kinetic weapons. That will likely never happen again unless the aircraft is transporting several terrorists and no one else but a load of first-year brownies. Perhaps not even then.

You should keep this in mind -- Russians embraced dash cams well before the US did, and in considerably greater numbers (mine is still the only one I've seen in my smallish town of 3000 people to this very day.) There were motivating insurance / liability / responsibility issues -- even some fairly widespread scamming. This inevitably means that more accidents have been and are being recorded, and of course, to make the video, the most sensationally fucktarded ones are chosen. Don't you believe for a moment that US drivers don't do similarly crazy things. On a drive back from Billings, Montana to my home, about 300 miles, on a snowy, icy day, we counted over fifty cars in the median, one- and two-car accidents, plus one really serious multiple-vehicle one involving a semi. There were actually more people in the median, having slid there, than there were on the road with us (I drive a 3/4 ton 4WD drive pickup, and you'd better believe I was in 4WD and going s...l...o...w... Horrific accidents make the news fairly often too, here and elsewhere -- but no dash cams. I have yet to "run into" dash cam footage for a US accident on the news though there must be some out there somewhere.

Face it. If Russians were as crazy as that video makes them seem, there wouldn't be very many Russians left.

the situations are very different.

You think so? consider this, for instance. And this too. And this. No appeasement? Hardly. You just don't see it in the news. You'll read more about it in the histories when this behavior is revealed as part of the present diplomatic pattern, and what it led to is in the rear view mirror. Just as we did with Nazi Germany.

It's a shell game. Nothing is quite what it seems, and sure as little green apple seeds make little green apples, no one is eager to tell the public what is actually going on.