Exactly. Also, Taubira (who used to be a person with integrity) completely caved-in when the absolute bastards running the how (President, Prime Minister, etc.) passed the most intrusive, anti-privacy, mass spying, "we will listen to everything you say and there is nothing yo ucan do about it" law France has ever seen.

She cannot be trusted, alas, and Snowden and Assange should consider all this hoopla about asylum as so much hot air from a discredited governement.

Good luck crossing the British Channel with a jetpack while being tailed by the RAF... ;-)

More like penis envy: the NSA does it, so we have to do it. Only worse.

And all in the name of terrorism, of course. And to lock up dangerous nazi pedophiles. Or something.

Brings to mind many skits by Bill Hicks. He would have had a field day with the kind of moronic behaviour we see so much of these days.

Don't worry, we have got you covered.

xoxoxoxo, the NSA.

True, but the problem is employers define jobs in terms of tool use. You can be good at JavaScript and happy manipulating the DOM to your heart's content, but if you don't have node.js or some other library/API on your resume' they won't look at you.

To give an idea of how bizarre it has gotten, I'm seeing a ridiculous number of job ads for senior software positions that list "git and GitHub" as either requirements or nice-to-haves. To me that's like asking for the ability to use a pencil and paper in an engineering design position. Anyone remotely qualified will have said experience, or be able to come up to speed on it in a day or three. It's like HR just has to make that list of tools as long as humanly possible.

Take anyone who has used Mercurial or any other modern distributed source control system and sit 'em in front of git and they'll be fine within a very short time. Take anyone who has used Eclipse and sit 'em in front of Visual (or vice versa) and they'll be able to do the job adequately almost immediately. They won't know all the stupid Visual tricks that someone who has used it since 6.0 days knows, but so what?

And if a person is not capable of that, you've made a bad hire, because technology and tools change all the time, and if the can't adapt to your toolset they won't be able to adapt to the future. So there is absolutely no loss to a company in hiring someone unfamiliar with their specific tooling. There might even be a gain, because if they fail to adapt they can be let go painlessly while still on probation.

So long as companies continue to use toolprint matching for hiring, schools will focus on teaching the tool-du-jour.

The summary, as usual, is terrible. The missing files were calibration data for the engine controllers, not executables of any kind.

However, the article says some astonishingly stupid things, like: "'Nobody imagined a problem like this could happen to three engines,' a person familiar with the 12-year-old project said."

Well, duh.

Since the human imagination is known to be almost completely useless as a tool for understanding reality or predicting the future, this has to be the most obvious observation since the dawn of time.

Anything that can happen, will. Since we have finite resources, we have to guess what is most likely to happen. If we have data, we can run predictive models to inform our guesses. The one thing we know with near-certainty is that what we imagine might happen is completely irrelevant to what will actually happen.

The human imagination is no better at understanding or predicting today than it was when people were imagining bloodletting balanced the humours. It makes as much sense mentioning it in this context as saying, "Our astrologers and scriers never saw this coming!"

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you "alen (225700)", exhibit A in the chapter: "Our brains cannot process major threats to the survival of humanity". Oh, and: "The Koch Brothers Foundation spent ____ (ungodly number of billions) attacking the existence of global warming... and it worked!" chapter, too.

Oh, the irony.

This being said, I am not too worried about mankind: it will probably survive global warming. And the survivors may well learn their lessons the hard way.

(If you think global warming does not exist, or is not that bad, or... or... or... yadda, yadda, yadda, please don't bother answering me, mmmmkay?)

I'm pretty strongly supportive of both technological (nuclear, solar/storage) and political (carbon tax/tariff) approaches to climate change, but as a computational physicist I agree with your evaluation of models. They contain a lot of good science, but the non-physical parameterizations they depend on make them non-predictive, certainly with regard to the details of regional climates.

Unfortunately, this published dataset reflects the hubris of climate scientists that they actually have predictive models, and plays in to policy planners and the public's unsupported belief that climate models are good guides to local policy (as opposed to sufficient to say, "We really shouldn't be dumping gigatonnes of greenhouse gasses into the air regardless of the detailed consequences, because our economy is finely tuned to the current climate and even relatively small disruptions could do Very Bad Things.")

My prediction is that in 20 years time most of the predictions in these models will turn out to be badly wrong. It would be almost miraculous if models that parameterized away as much of the physics as our current ones do, and imposed important constraints like top-of-atmosphere heat balance by hand, came close to the real climate. No one who has spent their career modeling systems that can actually be tested in the lab believes anything other than this.

There is no shortage of Linux devs. If there were, two things would be true:

1) salaries for Linux developers would be going up

2) people with two decades of Linux development experience would have no trouble getting a job

Neither of these is true. Ergo, there is no shortage of good developers with Linux experience.

Pretty much every Linux job I've seen posted in the past few months requires (that is, not "nice to have" but "requires") a dozen other skills that make up a combined skill set that only one in a million people have. Got Linux experience plus sockets plus Python plus git (this is a clue to what's going on...) OK, you also need experience with OpenGL and have three years CG coding on major animation projects.

People aren't looking for workers, they're looking for replaceable parts. The "git" thing gives it away: rather than burn, I don't know, an hour or two teaching someone the basics of git, or asking them to read a book on it, they won't consider anyone who can't simply sit down and start working.

The specific-industry-experience requirements are likewise a give-away: it isn't enough to have 3D experience, it's gotta be in animation, or they won't touch you, because those skills, man, they aren't transferable in any way.

Bytes used in animation are totally different than bytes used in medical imaging, and your understanding of one kind of processing pipeline precludes you from learning any other. You'd have to unlearn all that other stuff to make room for the new, and it would be at least a couple of days before you're a 110% productive member of the team! We can't have that!

[This is a synthetic example of things I've seen over the years, but it's all too prevalent an attitude and seems to be getting worse, and all the while the whining about "no devs available" gets louder.]

Oh, please, CaptainDork, let us keep a certain politeness on Slashdot. That's MISTER (or MISS) Anonymous Cowardly Bastard(ess) to you.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Have a good day, Sir.

No one who knows anything about nuclear power is going to be "excited" by anything the BAS releases on the topic, because they are a purely political anti-nuclear organization with a radical anti-nuclear agenda.

Whatever they have released, the odds are so overwhelming that it's nothing but a propaganda tool in their war on nuclear energy--a war whose success has helped create our current climate crisis--that it isn't worth anyone's time to even look at.