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Comment Space race (Score 1) 134

"China cannot afford the cost of losing this race."

What is this mentality all about? It will ruin us all, China included. There is a way for nations to cooperate and all thrive. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, where all the rest of the world must lose in order for China (or any other country) to win.

Comment That line count sounds exaggerated (Score 5, Interesting) 281

As someone who has worked on automotive ECU firmware, I am mildly suspicious of that line count of 100 million. I wonder if a big chunk of that is a common RTOS and/or other common code, which is being counted multiple times, once for each ECU. If so, "100 million lines of code" is not really a meaningful measure of the system's total complexity.

Comment No duty to protect people from their own malice (Score 1) 288

The world is full of safety systems that will fail to protect us from harm if we maliciously override them. If we try to construct a world in which no bad things can happen even when people try to do bad things, surely we will go broke or lose our freedoms.

Comment Re:Spot on... (Score 1) 270

A pithy saying, but not helpful in Real Life.

The reality is, people are regularly discovering vulnerabilities in Open Source Software, and in code written by big companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft.

Humans are known to make mistakes. The better languages help us to make fewer mistakes. Languages like C are known for being prone to facilitating certain classes of memory unsafety bugs, such as buffer overrun bugs, which other languages help us to avoid.

Comment Intelligent design (Score 1) 84

I've sometimes heard Conway's Game of Life referred to as an example of complexity arising from just a few simple rules, as evidence against creation or intelligent design.

The glider and glider gun are certainly interesting things that were apparently "discovered" rather than created. But, the most amazing things I've seen in the Conway's Game of Life, are evidently results of human construction, rather than randomly occurring.

The Game of Life rules themselves are "fine tuned" for the most interesting "life" to exist in that simulation. Which is to say, Conway experimented with many variations of rules, and eventually settled on those rules that produced the most interesting results.

Comment Re:Watch what happens (Score 1) 96

Probably. But at least it makes their advertising of monthly prices honest. AT&T currently advertises "$50/mo. for 12 mos. plus taxes & equip. fee", and in small type, "w/12-mo. agmt. $10/mo. equip. fee applies. Incl 1TB data/mo., overage chrgs apply. Geo & svc. restr’s apply."

So, what they really mean is, "$60/mo. for 12 mos. plus taxes", so they should just say it up-front and not use weasel words to make it sound like $50/mo.

Comment Remedying low-quality dialog (Score 1) 49

Apparently the problem is low-quality dialog. Twitter is trying to remedy that problem by allowing us to shut down dialog we don't like. But shutting down dialog comes with its own problems: ideological echo chambers; divided society where people can't meaningfully connect with or understand people who think differently. The challenge is, how to get better at engaging in high-quality dialog with those with whom we disagree.

Comment Re:Good change (Score 1) 118

That is true for "universally administered addresses" (UAA). But there are also "locally administered addresses" (LAA). The difference is determined by the second-least-significant bit of the first octet of the address. So you can make a dynamic or locally-administered address as long as you make sure the second-least-significant bit of the first octet of the address is a 1.

Comment Budgeting power (Score 1) 15

The engineers estimate that the rover still has several years of power left in its nuclear power system, and will be able to continue operating beyond that with careful power budgeting.

I didn't know you could "budget" power in that type of nuclear power system. Doesn't the nuclear isotope decay at a certain rate regardless of how much power you use from it? I guess I must have an incorrect understanding of how it works.

Comment Patents grant monopolies (Score 2) 144

The FTC has accused Qualcomm of operating a monopoly in wireless chips, forcing customers like Apple to work with it exclusively and charging excessive licensing fees for its technology.

Isn't that the intention of patents? They grant a limited-time monopoly (in exchange for the design details being made public).

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