But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing...
...it would be a stupid waste of billions of dollars. Humans can't do anything from Mars orbit a machine (specially a 2030s machine) can't do much better. Actually, I'm not a big believer on Mars missions at all. I think the Moon is a better near-term target, and asteroid mining a much better long-term approach. We don't need more gravity wells.
Right on! I tried forever to figure out how to remove the battery from my iMac!
your iMac CMOS battery will die eventually too, how easy is it to replace?
in Italy TVs have been sold measured in inches since the very beginning, and Italy is as metric as they come. Fun random fact, they are actually said to be xx 'thumbs' wide (pollici)
it might not have made sense in the past, but given how nowadays evolution and climate change are most certainly "unpopular" in certain states it seems like tenure protection there would be quite helpful for teachers wanting to teach them as opposed to what is currently mandated by the local curriculum, otherwise if a student in your class asks you a question along the lines of "what does science say about x" you will have to worry about your job if you answer truthfully.
Of course as usual when there is a discussion on social safety nets and worker rights in general in the US there will be plenty of n=1 anecdotes about how this change will improve things for everybody because "deadbeats" will finally get their due, but in the end for every "lazy" teacher fired because of this change I am sure there will be many many more fired because of politics and other reasons.
If people in the US stopped focusing on the small % of people taking advantage of something (universal healthcare, pensions, union protections, safety nets in general) and instead of on the large % of deserving people benefiting from that something society would be so much better as a whole...
not so sure it's a great idea to do your taxes on the computer you browse the internet with, just saying...
which is already concerning, as fine motor skills are very important, the other sentence in the article that worried me was the mention that kids now have trouble memorizing even simple lines for a play, since they are used to information being easily always available so they aren't putting in the effort of learning it.
As much as easy global information access is great, unless you learn the basics it's quite difficult to make sense of what's available and to have an informed opinion. Just because you have a river of information always available it doesn't help if you can't relate to it, it makes you that much more susceptible to being influenced, because since you are not able to discriminate between quality information and misleading or wrong information, any page/blog/article of somebody with an agenda can just point to "studies" that support their point (no matter how objectively wrong that point is) and it transforms informed discussions into popularity contests.
I don't think it's tinfoil hat time in terms of there being some sort of overall arching conspiracy about this, but it sure is concerning when you have a society like ours where media has many orders of magnitude more funding and impact than academia, I mean, even the word "academia" nowadays is overlaid with negative connotations (at least in North America) rather than the respect it should evoke: these days an actor/model stating an opinion can easily counterbalance hundreds of scientists/academics with fact-based studies.
Before the internet there were just as many crackpot theories around, however they were not presented as if they were the same as science, if you went to the library you wouldn't find in the astronomy section geocentric books shelved together with heliocentric and general relativity ones: now with your browser on the "internet library" you can find professional-looking sites pro/anti everything and without the tools learned in school/university how can you make sense of which is right? especially in cases where the science is counter-intuitive for a particular issue?
The C64 came out in 1982, the Commodore Amiga, and Commodore 128 came out in 1985
6 months after the C64 came out were there already rumblings that the Amiga was on its way? Obviously in a decade where you went from the ZX80 to the 486 there were new computers on a fairly regular basis, but it was really not the same as it is today with yearly PC updates (cpu/video), yearly phones, yearly games,
I laughed at the joke, but it is actually true, you can't compare the feeling one got in the early 80s when computers were new and mysterious (and expensive) and they got a C64, the vast majority of things now are commodity, there is going to (predictably) be a new and (slightly) improved model next year or in a couple of years at the most, there is not as much attachment as there used to be.
When the C64 came out, you didn't already know that next July/September the C65 was going to come out, and the year after the C66, etc. you didn't need a credit card to play your C64 games, you didn't need to pay $0.99 every 5 games of Archon or wait 1 day for the 'crystal' to 'recharge', most games were not thinly veiled attempts to nickle and dime you to death. You didn't have Archon 1983 knowing that Archon 1984 was going to come out next year with slightly reskinned pieces, and Archon 1985 the year after that with maybe a rule tweak or two.
In order to have nostalgia you need a unique time to think about, and nowadays electronics (and increasingly games) are anything but unique: there is no money in fostering feelings of attachment to what you bought, the money is to make you want to get rid of it and get a 'better' model basically as soon as you got home from the store.
and btw, funding is good, but funding does not buy you a good software development process: for that you need to actually focus on finding a good process first, and use the funding to achieve what you are planning without forgetting that if it's a critical piece of infrastructure nowadays it will be attacked by adversaries with much larger pockets than yours no matter how large yours are, so the process has to take into account that any development is done in a completely hostile environment, where a-priori you cannot trust ANYTHING, you can't trust your compiler, you can't trust your system libraries, you can't trust your fellow developers and you can't trust the repository you are using.
How do you deal with this? That is definitely a question you would need some of that funding to answer correctly, but it probably would include a lot of redundancy and testing: the advantage of the OSS model is that you can actually do this out in the open where everybody can see what you are doing and vet it every step of the way (a lot of those eyes are unskilled in your particular domain, but still it's a lot better than not having those eyes available at all).
this does not have anything to do with open source and all to do with the software development process (or lack of) used here: something like this could've happened in a closed source library just as easily, the only difference would be that rather than source analysis you'd have used other tools to find the vulnerability: if a new addition to a protocol comes in and you have bad intentions of course the first thing you do is to see what happens if you feed it invalid data, if you did that here you'd have found this extremely quickly (and probably faster than if you were trying to do source analysis).
The main issue here is that you should not be able to commit anything to something like OpenSSL with only one reviewer looking at it, period. The secondary issue is that for anything this important there should be a LOT of unit tests for everything and that absolutely everything everywhere should be tested with invalid input to make sure the library is solid: QA-ing a crypto library is a job as important as writing it in the first place and should be funded just as much, there unfortunately does seem to be a bias against QA being as important as development among developers, until this bias is removed this kind of issue will keep happening.
QA and development are two faces of the same coin for critical software, some people are better at writing something, others at finding issues with things other people developed: there should be no stigma for people preferring focusing more on QA, but in a lot of companies QA is seen as much less prestigious than development and the first thing to outsource, which leads to substandard testing, which creates more problems (because the tests are not good but give you the false impression that your software is ok).
that is the typical OSS strawman, if you don't like it why don't you do it? if you are complaining, are you volunteering? if not you are not allowed.
We are not talking here of a random OSS project, I have contributed to some of those over the years in my off hours when I feel like working into some other environment than what I do at work, we are talking about a library that most of the internet depends on for security: do you really think it should be volunteers that should be working on it? don't you think that Google, Amazon, ebay, paypal, and all the major world banks could take 0.0001% of their profits and put together a fund to hire competent people to do this full time? and not just security researchers, project managers, QA, technical writers, etc.
OpenSSL/GnuTLS/... development is not something to be done in off hours, at off times in your company when you don't have other projects to do, it has to be done as your primary job description with no rush, no pressure, just making sure that things are done right and stay done right, with a proper process, proper QA and proper project management.
I have many years of defensive C development under my belt, I especially love passwords and associated issues, I have worked with crypto software before, but it's not something that I would want to risk doing at night when I am tired after a day at my "real job" and my brain is not at 100% efficency, hence why "I am not volunteering I see".
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
