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For the past 24 years, the Royal Statistical Society has published a wickedly difficult Christmas quiz to entertain puzzle fans over the festive break – and this year’s challenge, set by Dr Tim Paulden, may well be one of the toughest yet. Cracking the thirteen problems below will require a blend of general knowledge, logic, and lateral thinking skills – but, as usual, no specialist mathematical knowledge is needed. Because we all need a little distraction about now
I just think it's a kicker that there's actually a website for Stats Life. Now I'm picturing a bunch of mohawked statisticians in cut-off jean jackets.
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Attackers bypass HTTPS encryption protection by registering new TLS certificate. Mental note: add to 'security firms not to hire' list
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Apple is being sued for its App Store logo by a Chinese clothing brand called Kon that has a similar logo We're trademarking triangles now?
"Kon is a clothing brand founded in 2009 based on the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK". Because nothing says 'Anarchy' like suing someone.
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Apparently, the letter 'i' wasn't good enough.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: We're trademarking triangles now?
When applied against the jerks that sued over a patent for "rounded rectangles"...yes.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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Blockchain development is the second-hottest skill in the job market today, growing more than 200% since this time last year. "Fashion, turn to the left. Fashion, turn to the right"
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And all this time I thought there was only miner growth in the blockchain industry...
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Ouch. I hope that one hurt you as much as it did me.
TTFN - Kent
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You can't run a Hype Train without a conductor...
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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A word of caution: Never, ever run any of these on a production system. They will harm your system. Don’t try this at home! Don’t try it at the office, either. Just a reminder that April 1 is only a few months away
Start planning those "amusing" command aliases now.
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Quote: rm -rf /
Want to ruin a Linux system in no time flat? You can't beat this classic "worst command ever." It deletes everything—and I mean everything—from your system.
The good news is that it doesn't complain about another process having the files locked
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More subtle is rm -rf .*
This achieves the same thing as rm -rf / but to the unwary looks like its only going to remove the hidden files and directories in the currrent directory.
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That reminds me of the biggest c**k-up that I ever made on a server.
I had always used HPUX where a command like "cp SomeExecutable /bin" would copy SomeExecutable to the /bin directory.
I then tried this on an AIX box only to find that the good people at IBM are somewhat more literal than those at Hewlett Packard. Why is there noting in /bin? Because /bin is now some executable file, of course! The damned thing had done exactly what I told it to do.
Such is UNIX - with great power comes a great ability to destroy.
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
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This move is likely because Opera Software ASA — sorry, Otello Corporation — wants to distinguish itself from its browser business, which it sold to group of Chinese investors in 2016. They did something other than browsers?
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Catchier headline might have been "Fat Lady sings for Opera browser" if they wouldn't get hung out to dry by overly sensitive social media hounds from a phrase used back in the "prehistoric" days.
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Either you don't have a need for tuples, or the support that's been built in the language has not been that great for it. A tasty mix of chick peas and roti? Oh wait, that's doubles. I misheard (and I'm a bit peckish).
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Is a Tuple bubble forming?
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Technologies from several projects will provide a pipeline of new capabilities in Java 10 and later versions. All the features they cut while working on 8?
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It believes it didn't get a fair shake amid fears of Russian influence. If someone won't buy your product, sue?
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Clearly it is all a misunderstanding. They thought the government said "My fear is russian influence in your product." When I believe the correct interpretation is "Mafia is russian influence in your product." It happens to me all the time when my kids think I'm asking for a pizza paper.
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The new chip design, published in the journal Nature Communications, details a novel architecture that allows quantum calculations to be performed using existing semiconductor components, known as CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) - the basis for all modern chips. Except for the pixie dust required to make it work
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Come with me if you want to live!!
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Ohhhh...CMOS...
...that's really new technology, ain't it?
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As part of the December 2017 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has shipped an Office update that disables the DDE feature in Word applications, after several malware campaigns have abused this feature to install malware. DDE - the gift that keeps on giving
I had actually forgotten that it was a thing.
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Wow... I remember using that years ago to solve a lot of problems...
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