Scientists found indicators that not only the first floor is burning but even the second floor seems to be.

Meanwhile people in the hallway are telling people with 2nd degree burns in the rooms itâ(TM)s fine - because the bricks of the building have been molten lava at some point in history and science is obviously still out on how bad the fire is.

They're also yelling about how maybe the first floor isn't actually on fire because if the scientists weren't sure about the second floor then well, they might be wrong about the first floor and anyway my face isn't turning black and crispy why do you ask?

I am an Aspie and I don't always recognize humor. So is this supposed to be a joke?

I ain't and I can't tell either.

Anyone who was born between 1970 and 1985 has seen how quickly climate is changing. From glaciers receding to winters with no snow and then the occasional unseasonal dump of snow.

Those born after 1990 have always seen climate as getting warmer, but may not realize as recently as 1986 weather was consistent across north America and Europe.

Between 1930 and 1986 weather was rather predictable. The earth warmed as much between 1930 and 1986 as it did between 1986 and 1996. This correlates with the price of oil. Go figure. So until we run out of extractable oil, the planet is just going to keep being miserable.

Anyone born before 1970 who is still alive has by definition seen everything a person born after 1970 and 1990 has seen, plus they have a lot more perspective than their younger counterparts. Ask the older people what they thing of climate change and they will tell you they've seen it all before.

What we should be reaching for is a *slow* rate of change, one that human societies and natural ecosystems can adapt to smoothly. It doesn't matter if the climate ends up where it was five million years ago ... if that change takes a million years. But if it takes a *thousand* years, that's 1000x the rate of change. That thousand-fold difference makes a huge economic and environmental difference.

When I was a kid we had native brook trout in the streams near my house, but they were threatened by pollution. Then came the Clean Water Act of 1972, and now the rivers are clean enough for brookies, but the change came too late, the population was wiped out. You can't restock them because over the course of the last fifty years climate changed, and summer temperatures routinely reach levels these fish can't survive. If the *same* change from the last fifty years had occurred over fifty *thousand* years -- a rate that falls within the ranges of rates we see in the natural paleoclimate change record -- that's a very different situation. The trout wouldn't be extinct here in *my* lifetime, and in the year 52021 the range of the species would be about the same size, just a little north-shifted. Here at the southern end of that range we might even see heat tolerant subspecies emerge.

The brook trout is just a charismatic but economically unimportant species, but the same *kinds* of stresses are happening to ecosystems wholesale, and affect jobs that are tied to those ecosystems. Habitats are being overtaken by species that are disruption-tolerant -- poison ivy and oak, bark beetle, and fungi like coffee leaf rust. Now if the disease-free range of coffee were to shrink over a thousand years, nobody would notice; the price of coffee would gradually rise until it became something people drank in historical novels. But if that happens in *a hundred years*, coffee farmers lose their livelihood, economies are destabilized, and consumers experience loss.

I am not sure why people bother with WhatsApp, especially with Signal and Telegram out there, both of which have decent security. Even if WhatsApp passes muster with end to end encryption and messages not remaining on servers, the fact it is owned by FB and the privacy policy changes should get people to go find something else.

I have a feeling WhatsApp and FB Messenger will likely merge completely, sooner or later. All the more reason to find something else.

When I was growing up, programmers often were limited to 64 KILOBYTES or less of RAM. Often "tricks" were employed to pull off some truly amazing shit (check out the C64 demo scene)

Maybe this is a good thing, as programmers will have to be more skilled and efficient with code, rather than expecting the user to throw more ram and cpu at the problem they've created.

Now if websites were given stricter limitations on resource usage. :-\

This week at work I went to install a program that checks an input string against a list of a million "disallowed" strings.
I had glanced at the code and it looked like the programmer was reasonably competent.

When I ran it, I saw it used about 300MB of RAM and took over 80 milliseconds for each lookup.

I spent two hours writing my own version that uses 12 MB of RAM (for the .Net library) and takes 0.6 milliseconds.

So it's 100X faster and uses 20X less memory, by - having a clue how to program. As in, actually knowing WTF I'm doing.

I could have made it faster by using a binary index file for the textual list, but I decided I liked to have all the data easily human-readable in any text editor.

If someone is writing software for an iPad and they're using more than 5 GB of RAM, more than 5 BILLION bytes, they just might be fucking clueless about programming.

the SSD is fast enough to stream the fscking audio samples real time.
it's high time for these people to learn how to code properly, instead of just porking out

They really are this stupid. Even those in techncal fields have a nasty habit of doing some really stupid things. Security briefings stating "do not jog o the jet runway", using .rhosts files for sensitive data systems and "our last audit showed over twenty administrators usng password as their password" really and truly do not inspire confidence.

Almost two decades. Does it take that long to muster up courage? Or have the rules changes in the meantime to make it easier to complain?

If my CEO did something against regulations, I wouldn't complain because I need a job. Once I've left and had a few good entries on my resume?...sure. However, if I reported something right now, I risk getting fired and it's REALLY tough to find a new job when you've been fired. Your employer will most likely lie about the reason you were terminated, so you need to go to court to get that straightened...

Imagine a woman who hypothetically was propositioned by the CEO. OK, her employer says she was fired for poor work. So she walks into your office and when asked why she left her previous job after a few questions she admits she left due to sexual harassment and is suing them...your HR dept calls and says she was terminated with cause for subpar work. What do you do? While this is happening, another person applies for the job 2 weeks later who is 98% as qualified as this first candidate. You have a choice between largely equivalent candidates except one has a good recommendation from their past employer and the other burnt bridges and tells you a story about being propositioned by the CEO and that she has a pending court case against them...which do you pick? Do you take the risk that the woman could be lying & could be toxic...or go with the no-drama candidate? Accusations don't need to be remotely true or even plausible to harm you. After all, when you hear Richard Gere and rodent, what comes to mind?....a wild story with no credibility...but you're still thinking about that instead of "An Officer and a Gentleman"

I was let go from a contracting gig for filing too many bugs against the woman who was blowing my boss's boss when I was in my early 20s. I didn't know until I was let go she was having an affair with him, but the bugs were legit and carefully and professionally documented...she was a nice woman who I got along with, but she did bad work...however, I made her look bad and he demanded I must go. Fortunately, it was a shitty job and I wasn't there long, but it was tough finding my next job because all of my references were from my previous job or peers. Since I was young and new, they wanted to hear from my previous boss and he didn't want to get in the middle of it. I finally landed a great job because I did well on the interview and they didn't care about my past, but it took me a few tries and we were in a recession at the time. I was pretty terrified.

So yeah...if Bill Gates tried to shove his dick up my ass, I'd wait VERY long until reporting it and would certainly not be the first...the first accuser always gets the most scrutiny. As they say, "you'll recognize the pioneers by the arrows in their back."

The thing I don't get is how people seem all surprised.

You and I have similar UIDs so we're technically speaking old farts who have been on slashdot for nearly 20 years. So we remember all the blatantly illegal shit Microsoft did under the leadership of Bill Gates back in the day, not to mention the not proven illegal but deeply skeezy stuff. Then spent 15 years trying to buy redemption with his ill gotten gains.

And now people are all shocked Pikachu face that Bill Gates is in fact a massive asshole.

And we already see the results of that. Specifications that are good enough for European developers are sent to India and you get back something really strange.
You specify a duck-billed animal living close to water and expect a duck, but get an angry platypus instead.

Requirements documents are supposed to be written in natural language, from a business point of view. How many requirements documents have YOU seen that clearly described what the software should do? How many of them are even readable?

So-called natural language programming will never be easier to do than writing good requirements documents. And that's a very tall order, based on what I've seen!

That basic principle of human nature should not be forgotten.

Immigration to the US is a privilege to be earned. It may be difficult to understand but citizens have an ownership stake in their country not held by outsiders. All practical intel should be collected on outsiders and all Constitutional intel collected domestically.

The world is a very bad place and humanity evolved to be so savage we only have global peace thanks to Mutual Assured Destruction. Think about that before childish (therefore stupid) idealism.

That basic principle of human nature should not be forgotten.

Except no, if anything, history shows human nature is very much trustworthy on a large scale. Most people are not psychopaths or sociopaths. Most people aren't murderers or thieves. Most people aren't spies. Most people aren't cheats. Immigration was fine long before social media.

They haven't caught anyone of note with this mass surveillance social credit system. Those who have been caught doing stuff like sending data back to foreign governments have been doing so with complete social media transparency.

Yours is the stupid childish idealism that people with the intent to do harm on a nationwide scale would brag about it on their social media handles. Shame on you, and all those who voted you "Insightful".

Why are Triple-A games considered top secret classified black site projects anyway? What's the problem with details being leaked? Maybe we're better off fostering a culture where people get to see the progress and understand that what they're seeing probably isn't going to be the final product. This pointless insanity around total secrecy makes no sense whatsoever.

Marketing departments have their own schedule with teasers, feature reveals, hiring famous youtubers, posting memes, etc. If something leaks prematurely, that messes up those plans and can reduce the impact of those events.

The RIAA really doesn't like the fair use provisions. I'm pretty sure some music casually playing in the background would get laughed out of court in most jurisdictions.

Probably not, depending on use.

Here's the thing, though: a lot of streams have periods where they're not really streaming anything due to a necessary break. For example, it's general practice to have a "pre-stream" before the actual stream starts. This is a period when the "real" stream isn't happening, but they're still streaming audio and video. The purpose here is to give people some time to start watching and a chance to make sure their setup is working before the "show" actually starts. There also tend to be breaks that happen like that during a stream - pauses for setup of the next part or to allow the streamer to take a bathroom break or whatever.

And these "pre-streams" and "mid-stream breaks" tend to show static images or a slide show over music. And streaming complete music tracks with nothing over it is definitely not fair use. You're essentially being a radio station at that point, and it's fairly clear that radio stations have to license the music they play.

Of course, there are also times when copyrighted music gets used in video games, and the game has the rights for that music to play in the game, but does not have the right to allow that music to be re-streamed. This type of use is more likely to be "fair use" (and also have game sound over the music) but it's not necessarily the type of content the strikes are being issued for.

I don't really want to side with the RIAA on this, but remember: Twitch isn't free. It's ad-supported and people can pay to subscribe to channels as well as donating straight to the streamer through Twitch. That means that a lot of the music being streamed on Twitch is pretty much being done for commercial use without compensating the original artists. (Not that paying for licensing would necessarily do that, but that's a different issue.)

Oh, and of course, it could turn out that these strikes are all for in-game licensed music which you can barely hear over the streamer talking and game sound effects, which would be more likely to be actual fair use. But without knowing what the actual strikes are (and Twitch isn't saying) it's impossible to know.

Playing a ten or twenty second clip of music is one thing. Playing the entire song, unedited, is another.

And our first RIAA shill. Welcome to the conversation.

So, thank-you for the comment. I can imagine your're shocked....SHOCKED that someone would have the temerity to play a whole song! My God! The humanity! However, the actual legal test isn't the percentage of the song that is duplicated (though that has been used as one metric - more on that below). The actual legal test is, how transformative is the work. A song happening to be played in the background when the actual focus is something else entirely, especially when speaking, game playing, sound effects, etc etc are the primary focus of the end work, that would likely be ruled fair use. In that case, the collective work may have incorporated copyrighted material from other people (and very little that is ever recorded in this world any more doesn't) but unless the music in question is a significant part of the final piece, it's not infringing. Copyright ownership does not give you dictatorial rights to say where and when any copyrighted piece can be used.

Where clip length comes into play, and when it is a major factor in a court decision, is when a song is being reproduced at its full quality and tone with no other transformative processes going on. As in a review of a song. Then clip length is a major factor. But music happening to be played in the background of a bunch of kids playing a game where they are talking over it, sorry my friend, the RIAA's outrage notwithstanding that is just not actually infringing.

Simple questions. Did the owner of the song give permission to anyone to play that song without compensation?

See above. The law says I don't have to. Using another part of the same law, designed to be a bat to enforce cases of clear and undisputed infringement as a weapon doesn't make something that isn't infringing into something that is. Too many people see a DMCA notice and get afraid.

Did the owner give away their right to control how the music is used?

The owner never had the kind of control you are asserting. Fair use is still fair use. And I will make fair use until and unless it is legislated away. I recommend you read up on fair use and transformative use.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of fundamental stuff we don't know about, but I *also* think when we learn that new stuff it won't invalidate most of what we know in the contexts we have studied those things -- just like classical mechanics is still perfectly useful.

And along exactly those lines one detail in the reports coming from the Navy leaps out at me: the UAP is reported to move at high hypersonic speeds -- by "high" I mean above Mach 70. The "thing" (assuming it is a thing) may have been exotic matter and have exotic propulsion, but the air it's moving through is still plain old air, and there ought to have been an observable trail of superheated, ionized gas.

This leads to me to think that the way the scenarios were strung together doesn't fit any explanation of a single "thing" tying togther all the observations made. If you told me someone set of a nuclear bomb over the Eiffel Tower, and I look out the window and see the Tower still standing, I'm pretty sure that didn't happen because it should have left observable consequences. It doesn't mean you didn't see something, but whatever it was, wasn't a bomb.

What has changed? Money.

There was a time when you could put in a modicum of effort [cheaply] for securing your network and still be relatively secure.

Now... It does not matter how small you are, it is insanely expensive to secure systems properly. "Properly" has always been a matter of debate, but whatever your definition, "properly" is a lot more expensive now than it was 10 years ago.

Let just look at Google Maps. How would you provide that sort of experience, outside of going back to 1990 and running the Microsoft Streets exe from your CD-ROM? I think a very nice map tool, where you can slide, zoom, toggle layers, do a search that drops pins on the map, click on those pins and get information about the business, switch to street view so you can get a real idea of what you expect to see as you drive up....those are all insanely valuable features, and I like being able to do it via a website with nothing to install. Dedicated native mobile apps partially fill that role, but I find the desktop web based maps a much nicer experience (plus, for all I know, the mobile apps may well be just a wrapper around the web app anyway). So how would you propose to do an experience like that?

Our political and corporate leaders are rewarded for solving problems.

They are not rewarded for preventing problems.

I wish the liberal media would stop trying to paint the Chinese genocide of Uyghurs as a "hacking operation." The end game is the extermination of all non-communist ethnic groups in China. Full stop.

But... cheap goods... so the rest of the world turns a completely blind eye.

The last guy talked a good game when it came to China, but then completely failed to follow through. This guy doesn't even talk a good game, and will also do nothing. But the results will be identical.

The trouble is the BBC is mainly a bunch of journalists whose main training is to ask "And how does that make you feel?", which unfortunately means they lack the skills to understand anything like physics, maths, logic, err, you name it.