Older does not always equal less safe.

Chernobyl was built at a time when countries outside the soviet block who cared more about safety already had better designs. The problem wasn't that it was old, the problem was that it was badly designed. If you built a new Chernobyl style reactor today it would still suck even though it was brand new.

-- MarkusQ

most of the time I wish this wasn't true.

You're in luck. This is another case of #statisticsfail.

If all of their managers are selected to have deep technical expertise, it isn't going to correlate with success any more than "having two ears" will. This is a well known phenomenon called "sample bias" and is dearly beloved by everyone who wants to lie with statistics.

-- MarkusQ

J --

Thanks for the links!

-- M

If you don't know the difference between sodium metal and salt, I'd advise you to be very careful when cooking, as well as when posting.

-- MarkusQ

The premise of the article is fundamentally flawed.

It implicitly assumes that the US is the only country that matters, and uses this assumption to construct the case that much of the material in WikiLeaks isn't of interest because it doesn't reveal "official misconduct" by the US government. It then goes on to complain that no purpose is served by "embarrassing" other nations (that is, their leaders) by revealing what anyone not blinded by the US-is-everything meme would call official misconduct on their part.

--MarkusQ

It's even more clearly based on the mod squad logo, which predates both of them by decades.

I'm no fan of any of the parties, but it would be funny if the "infringing" logo turned out to be older (which occasionally happens).

--MarkusQ

I used to have a two word answer for this question: Use BeOS

But now it's a six word answer (*sigh*): Invent time machine, then use BeOS

--MarkusQ

Anyone else note the gratuitous dig at open source:

user can decrypt, over the air, the private data of others, inject malicious traffic into the network, and compromise other authorized devices using open source software,

So I guess everything would be OK except for those pesky kids and their free software. *sigh*

-- MarkusQ

The word "singularity" as the OP used it is, in this context, a shorthand for exactly the sort of situation you described, and with much the same justification. If you see someone talking about a singularity in this way, read it as "the thing that happens instead of the thing that obviously couldn't happen if we just did a simple minded extrapolation" or even "the point where the rules change." It's used the same way in other fields, say when talking about black holes in astrophysics.

--MarkusQ

Explain UPS then?

An Uninterpretable Power Supply is basically a honking big battery (or, in advanced models, a desktop fusion setup) that takes over when the normal electrical supply fails.

And sarcasm is a way of making a rhetorical point by stating something that is obviously untrue and yet is a plausible deduction to reach from a position you are trying to rebut.

Of course, you probably already knew that.

--MarkusQ

UPS = brown.

You may want to check your sarcasm detector to see if it was on the big recall list last spring. If not, you probably have your filter threshold set wrong (remember, 1.0 on the filter means "never detect sarcasm," not "always detect sarcasm").

--MarkusQ