Let me share this:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
display: none !important;
}
}
Nothing speaks louder than a deafening silence.
Going live in 3, 2, 1
The missing micron is quite a bit funnier if you've just skimmed another recent story submission:
[Philae's] seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.
We don't even need to bring up Tepco, which is just as well since plutonium is a different beast. We are talking plutonium, aren't we?
However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbfÃ--s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (NÃ--s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, causing it to pass through the upper atmosphere and disintegrate.
No worries. Better theirs than ours.
If News for Nerds still can't handle Unicode in 2015, I think the human race needs to pull in their horns, and stick to long baths and the companionship of bright-yellow rubber duckies.
Currently I have a business level account account that I write off 100%.
Is that a synonym for costs nothing? Sign me up.
I dearly love my old Compaq keyboard, but he's a gap toothed beast ever since the "pivotal" moment where I hooked my fingernail under the exposed edge of my right-hand Windows keys and the key cap went catapulting through the air.
Another "pivotal moment" in my career was when I finally learned how to quickly hack together a user style to eliminate annoying bling on any web page I happen to visit.
I have close to 150 tiny user scripts in my inventory now, and no longer see any "social" buttons on any web site I frequent or any slider animations. As I don't actually use any social networks "share" decorations are just a visual plague so far as I'm concerned.
The worst web sites I've visited come up completely red with a giant profanity across the screen (those that pretend to offer something useful, but the hoops exceed any possible utility one might derive).
Just half an hour ago I coded up this user style:
body a {
background: yellow;
pointer-events: none !important;
cursor: default !important;
}
This makes all links on all tabs non-clickable, for when I want to select link text using MakeLink to copy into my wiki. It's damn annoying trying to select clickable text. I pretty much always use double-click drag (whole words only) for the main selection gesture. This simply doesn't work on links. Correction. It simply didn't work on links. Of course, I have to turn it on and off manually. I'll work on a button later.
Oh, yes, another pivotal moment was when I took control over USB insertion events to prevent a certain device from auto-mounting every time I put it on the tit to juice up. That initiative required several freakish lines of syntax, but at the end of the day was entirely worth the effort.
Huh. That's funny. There seems to be a pattern here. All my pivotal events, pretty much, are when I finally suppress some irritating pimple-glint love child auto-bling from imposing itself on my happy cocoon.
Server: Supermicro mainboard, Xeon 1230v2, 32 GB ECC, 3 * Constellation ES in three-way mirror, SSD system volume, 2 TB NAS drive for
Laptop: Recently purchased and refurbished Thinkpad T500 with PC-BSD, CoreDuo 9400, 8 GB DDR2, 256 GB SSD. Obviously this wasn't purchased for trim waistline, but rather for abuse tolerance.
Upcoming desktop replacement: Supermicro mainboard, Haswell Xeon E5-1620 v3 with quad-channel 16 GB DDR4 ECC (expandable to a boatload more), also planning to run PC-BSD if the laptop experiment pans out.
Existing desktop: Aging CoreDuo with 8 GB DDR2, Sapphire Radeon HD5670, with three heads (all circa 22" at 96 PPI, two in portrait, one in landscape). Presently running an older version of Mint that needed to be upgraded ages ago, but I decided to hold off for a usable PC-BSD instead.
All my PSUs are premium Seasonic, and most of my cases are Antec P280 series. My ZFS server presently has over 2 years of uptime. Almost all of my system boards were purchased behind the technology curve, but with superior inductors, capacitors, and trace thickness.
I really can't remember the last time something resembling an electrical glitch took any of my systems down.
Lack of global foresight is very nearly our last remaining common ground with every other species on the planet—now or before—and sure enough we're just itching to get rid of it.
Humans. Bah, humbug.
If there are no large open source PHP projects that have good security, it doesn't give me confidence that I can understand PHP well enough to avoid security vulnerabilities.
Last I checked, MediaWiki was still written in PHP, though Lua is gaining. Though perhaps in your world it's not a large project, just a large deployment.
Part of gaining confidence about your security practices is being good at conjuring up exemplars of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Whatever list you file it on, MediaWiki should have been on your "what PHP can really do or not do" list.
I take a lot of notes in my own personal wiki. For general knowledge subjects, I often copy a few paragraphs from the Wikipedia lead, and then trim it down to just the bits I care to remember.
There's a few things that I almost always redact from articles concerning people: Day and month of birth. Nobility and rank. (Even FRS.) These blatantly elitist and self-promotional Seminal J. J. Tractatus or Timothy Erasamus Highbrow or Jagadish Q. Deepocket professorships. (I even trim mention of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics.) If I named my toenail clippings, it wouldn't pass notability in Wikipedia. Why then do the names of these blasted chairs pass notability? It's not obvious to me.
I would seriously propose making the display of these ridiculous named professorships a user preference, so that for those of us who choose to unclick the Ivy League Liberace flag, the article just says that Donald Merlin is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, or something plain-spoken and useful of that general nature.
Those who actually work at a university and don't wish to make a career-limiting faux pas by not knowing this vital data or who harbour strange dreams of becoming a named chair themselves can leave their Ivy League Liberace flags alone.
(My apologies to Liberace, who never once—so far as I know—actually named the piano bench he perched upon.)
The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
Not if they can help it. When they can get away with it, they produce terrible outcomes for society. Ironically, it was a lot harder for them to get away with it before everyone started parroting Adam Smith for Dummies as tautological.
Turns out Adam Smith's insight lacked an intriguing quality of meta-robustness. When you feed it back into the system as an assumption, as we started to do beginning with the Reagan–Thatcher–Greenspan–Rand cult, it ceases to remain valid.
I sure hope the lesson for future chairmen and -women of the Fed is "trust, but verify". When you allow greedy assholes to have the run of a giant black box, pretty soon you find yourself underwriting a trillion dollars.
I have a different version of the question.
Has the general public set aside empiricism as a standard against which to judge funding appropriations in the name of fundamental scientific progress?
I say no.
The public has not set aside empiricism as part of the social contract through which public money is directed at research institutions. Once the public understands how tenuous empiricism has become among research physicists, the tiny trickle we already provide will only get smaller.
So here's my message to all the modernist physicists out there ready to bury Karl Popper (there were one or two in this year's Edge question): speculate all you want about the non-falsifiable multiverse, but use the Templeton Foundation to fund your chalk supply, and whisper sweet nothings on bent knees so that they also fund your chalk boards, bean bag chairs, and baloney sandwich cafeteria.
It's not like public research funds have nowhere else to go. Proteomics, as difficult as it is, has not yet broken free of its empirical yoke (the complexity of this field begins with the water molecule, and ramps up from there).
We should start with the auto-immune diseases which ought to be simpler systems—if, in fact, they are indeed auto-immune diseases after all.
There really ought to be an entire chapter in Kahneman's next book devoted to the human psychology quirk through which an otherwise sensible person willingly exchanges ten of twenty free physical parameters for 10^500 fiendishly complex initial conditions and calls it a good deal.
Wow, just wow
When you're dealing with some obstreperous functionary who is leaning on status and authority rather than knowledge or competence, it will no longer be possible to think to yourself:
this asshole, too, will soon be departed
With the loss of life's great equalizer, about the first thing to happen is that the entire population goes into legacy mode.
It'll be like all those crappy ISA cards with jumper blocks in the back of your ugliest junk drawer that you never get rid of because, technically, they still work perfectly fine.
Only it will be the humans with ugly jumper blocks (slavery, racism, sexism, elitism, ageism, gated-community-ism) that live to be 10,000 years old and never "get with the times" because "the times" themselves have shuffled off their mortal coil.
If I wanted ritual in my life, I would have become a priest and pursued my career with extreme political ambition so I could vote for the freaking pope.
I guess you've never read an article in your life about mobilizing the voters who are too lazy (or metabolically downtrodden from their Cheetos and Coke diets) to physically show up at a polling station?
Paper is a physical token. Reliably obtaining exactly one unambiguous, untamperable physical token with confidentiality from each adult member of society—the vast majority of which are collected on the same day—hasn't exactly proven to be an easy problem, especially when broadened to include public trust—that every voter understands and believes the process to have all of these properties (to at least a substantial degree).
Electronic voting vastly reduces the complexity on the collection side, but then the tamperability problem looms supreme, but this could almost be solved with enough crypto cleverness, except that the public trust story then requires a tiny bit of numeracy beyond grade six math.
Ritual, however, is accessible to a four-year old.
The same four-year olds who are unfortunately not yet equipped with fully functioning batshit detectors.
I don't want to abolish ritual. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
This is the same asshole who buys a pretty little property out in the countryside, and then after a year or two launches a farm practices complaint to shut down the neighbouring farms (which have only been there for two hundred years) because they smell like farms.
Then he shows up in town council explaining that only sociopaths raise farm animals.
What an incredible self-interest bullshit configurator this man possesses.
Get the fuck off my moral lawn.
The only assumption you should be making is that nothing is secure.
I'll file that right beside "In the beginning, God created the universe, and it was good."
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
