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Comment Re:I don't see the problem. (Score 5, Insightful) 667

False equivalence.
 
Sides are not equally wrong, and truth is not somewhere in the middle. There is a very clear wrong side - Russian equipment operated by Russian-sponsored terrorists and/or Russian military misidentifying civilian aircraft and shooting it down. Anything else is intentional misinformation.

Comment Re:'Vulnerability" is rubbish. (Score 1) 151

Ok, so best-case scenario is that OpenBSD has additional sources of randomness and that issue simply weakened crypto instead of outright breaking it.

For ignoramus that downmoded my GPP - all cryptographic functions heavily rely on random numbers being both unpredictable and computationally indistinguishable from true random. It can break two ways - first by broken seeding, where it becomes predictable. Second by having algorithm that has non-uniform (e.g. some numbers have higher chance than 1/u). Both of these can be exploited to break strongest crypto. Why? Because all our crypto is deterministic.

Comment Oversimplified answer (Score 4, Insightful) 509

Common dangers to your career and wages are:
1. Outsourcing
2. Automation
3. Disruptive innovation
4. Boom and bust economic cycles

Ways to protect your career and wages are:
1. Merit and Knowledge
2. Restricted professions & credentials
3. Union or government position

Not all dangers are avoidable, for example disruptive innovation is all but unavoidable, but boom and bust cycles are easier to survive in a bigger industry.

Not all way to protect career are available to everyone, for example merit and knowledge is unobtainable goal for significant portion of population (merit, by definition, it is zero-sum game). Additionally some have drawbacks - proximity to government or union usually has negative effect on one's maximum earning potential.

Now for more practical advice - a technical profession that interfaces with government, requires accreditation, and deals with local or critical infrastructure would be most stable long-term position. Civil engineer, food inspector, dentist are some typical example.

Submission + - College Majors and the Jobs They Lead To (sciencemag.org)

Jim_Austin writes: Late last week, the U.S. Census Bureau posted an excellent interactive infographic that connects college majors with the occupations people with those majors end up in--and vice versa. For example, it shows--to no one's surprise--that people with majors in computers, mathematics, and statistics end up working as computer workers about half the time, with significant numbers going on to work in math and statistics (and a few in other science fields). More surprising is that nearly half end up doing work unrelated to science, tech, engineering, etc. It works the other way, too; by mousing over the "computer worker" category you see that the largest chunk of computer workers come from computer, math, and statistics majors, with another large chunk coming from engineering. But significant numbers also come from several other majors.

Some of the insights are startling. Only about a fifth (to perhaps a fourth) of physical science majors end up working in any scientific or technical field, and fewer than 10% of physical science majors work in the physical sciences. And only about an eighth of all graduates in the broad category of biological, agricultural, and environmental scientists end up working in fields related to science, engineering, and technology.

Submission + - @Congressedits tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits from Capitol Hill (arstechnica.com)

mpicpp writes: Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter “bot” that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament’s internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress.

“The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool,” Summers wrote in his personal blog. “So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them.”

The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.

So far, @congressedits hasn’t caught anything scandalous; most of the edits caught have been stylistic changes rather than factual ones. The most interesting edit found so far was to the Wikipedia article on horse head masks—adding a reference to President Obama shaking hands with a man in such a mask on a recent trip to Denver.

Comment Re:Intelligence isn't always advantageous (Score 1) 157

Yes, gathering bananas and chasing tail. Intelligence does not increase your reproductive fitness past some baseline number, as a result we see regression to the mean. Why mean? Because it used to be optimal. It still might be optimal, because you don't see driven, successful people out-reproducing average bears.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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