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you need root privileges to bind to port 80

Common sense would indicate that in that scenario you either

• 1. Get the socket as early as possible in startup then setuid(2) yourself to a user with lower privileges (and chroot yourself, while you are at it) before answering any requests
• 2. Failing that, run on a high numbered port and have iptables forward you traffic from 80, which is a specific instance of the more general strategy: run as little code as possible at high privilege

What's not an answer is "run the actual process as root while serving user requests". It's shocking that this is even considered remotely like a possible solution.

What's doubly galling is that there is a loooong unix history of applications that require far more intrusive privileges using both or these techniques -- either getting what they need and immediately dropping to the position of least privilege or using a small shim or utility that runs in a high-privileged space and communicates with the rest of the service via IPC. So it's not like they couldn't draw on those examples or literally just copy-pasta DJB's code.

What's triply galling is that the fix doesn't actually appear to mentioned fixing any of this, just patching this one vulnerability.

It's fake news. Here is an article with a better photo of the whole team: https://www.cmu.edu/news/stori...

As you can see, the team is more diverse than your image suggests.

I'm not sure what year your photo is supposed to be from, but a photo of the actual U.S. team in the 2018 International Mathematical Olympiad, led by coach Po-Shen Loh, leads one to a similar conclusion.

https://www.cmu.edu/news/stori...

They won't because they can't. Here's an explainer, with TL;DR section.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/ec...

If your friend ditches the local cable company and the local fiber company, he or she will lose high-speed Internet access and may have to fall back to sneakernet: trading copies of shows on hard drives. Sneakernet dissemination of creative works has been around for a while; an older example is "tape trees" organized by fans of the Grateful Dead. It could work for movies, scripted TV series, and in-depth news magazines. It's not ideal for reality, game shows, entertainment award shows, sports, daily political commentary, and other works with a short shelf life.

Interesting. I was not aware of this. Thanks!

Signing != encrypting! Granted, SSL might make it harder to alter content but it is weak compared to signing the content.

What you are saying is like saying that since you downloaded a piece of software through SSL, you are safe enough and you don't need to check the signature.

Note that signing doesn't require encryption at all.

Some corporate environments and maybe even some countries could force you to have their certs trusted. They can then alter content at will.

So in the end, you do not need encryption at all to make sure the content hasn't been altered. You only need signing. Furthermore, encryption is a weak way to guarantee that content hasn't been altered compared to signing.

See here if you weren't already aware of that fact:
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adr...

If Apple is going to deceive you in front of lawmakers. Why not release source without the offending code, and compile and send a different branch with it.

Indeed.

Most of us even hard core open source Linux fans, will not install their applications by compiling the source.
make clean & make & make install

First, even those that do will not audit the entire source. I bet you could insert a function send_personal_data_to_kgb_and_nsa(void) and only a small number of people running ./configure && make -j12 install would notice. If you obfuscated the functionality a bit better, no one would notice :-P

Anyway, even if you did audit the source, that is not sufficient to guarantee that the compiled binary faithfully represents the source files input. To do that, you have to audit the entire compiler/toolchain. And then you have to audit the compiler used to build the compiler.

If you want to verify what is happening, then you should monitor all the wireless traffic your phone sends. Compare it in a quiet environment and one with talking. See if the data sent from the device is enough for conversations.

But the phone has storage. And it has speech-to-text, part of which happens locally. Both of those features mean that, in theory, the phone could record and process the audit and then dribble it out over the network later when you are doing some other legitimate network activity.

So if you REALLY want to be certain, you have to fill up the storage (wait, there could be a secret reserve of a few GB that are not user-accessible) and also monitor the supply lines from the battery to ensure there is no heavy speech processing that might be transcribing it to text :-D

I agree with the sentiment of your post, just like showing that there is no way around having some level of trust in the hardware/software that you use.

You can try it out on a few natural language sentence diagram applications e.g. http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/cgi... (though that server seems to be unresponsive at the moment.)

Here's one that hits many of the words listed here.

give or take point get set and mark go for good line plays make the dead run a light roll

See Hans Moravec's informed speculations like his book "Mind Children": https://www.goodreads.com/book...

Or going beyond that to the nature of consciousness and reality:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm...

And see also Vernor Vinge's various writings on a "Singularity".

That said, hedging our bets by making the world a happier and healthier and more resilient place for everyone right now before a singularity is probably not a bad idea given our trajectory out of any singularity may have a lot to do with out path into one.

Because an attacker can tamper with the raw binary object that can still be deserialized, but now has different contents and now will run differently on the other end, in a manner not expected or possibly controlled.
Yeah, and he can use an SQL statement to change a row in the data base ... or a PERL script to change a line in a text file ... what exactly is the difference?
And it has nothing to do with graphs anyway. It can be a single object, only consisting out of primitive types.

Hint: the problem is code, not data. Your explanation makes pretty clear that you don't know what the problem with "simple deserialization" is.

because deserialization ignores all that. the build in standard, yes. However you can augment it.

Preventing the problems the people here get heated up about is super simple:
https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confl...
(Original: https://www.ibm.com/developerw...)
Interesting discussion: https://github.com/atomix/cata...

The whole claim that there is a "problem" and the inventors of Java made design mistakes: is clearly wrong! They designed the ObjectInputStream and the way how objects are serialized/deserialize in an easy to adapt and change manner. In other words: they showed great foresight!

Standard CMU undergrad CS curriculum: https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/academic/undergraduate/bachelors-curriculum-admitted-2017

CMU AI degree curriculum: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curriculum

I dunno. IMO this could be a concentration or a graduate program. I think a classical undergrad CS program would be worth more to a student because it's more generic and thus more widely applicable.

Standard CMU undergrad CS curriculum: https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/academic/undergraduate/bachelors-curriculum-admitted-2017

CMU AI degree curriculum: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curriculum

I dunno. IMO this could be a concentration or a graduate program. I think a classical undergrad CS program would be worth more to a student because it's more generic and thus more widely applicable.

Sphinx4 is the decoder everyone uses, so feel free to read up on it's design. It does harness parallel processing but I don't think it uses GPGPU.

As for running it on a Pi, you need to limit your vocabulary.

Start with the CERT Secure Coding standards, especially for C programmers it covers many of the "gotchas" to watch out for.

        SEI CERT C Coding Standard: Rules for Developing Safe, Reliable, and Secure Systems (2016 Edition)
        https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/...

Apparently they them for other languages like C++, Java, Perl.

Which is hardly surprising, since C is just PDP11 assembler tidied up a bit.

Nope.

http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/doc...

The i386 architecture is not a close copy of the PDP11. You might be thinking of the 68000 which is a more plausible candidate.

C has been ported to most recent processors mainly because it was needed. The fact that it is relatively easy to port gives the lie to your assertion that it is "Macro-11 tidied up".

And, by the way, RISC sort of has displaced CISC. Modern CISC processors like the x86 and later tend to be implemented on top of a RISC core.

Didn't you pay attention? It's on F-Droid. Unless Putin has somehow "On Trusting Trust"-ed F-Droid's compiler, you can calm down.

Even if they did use Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust Attack, there is David Wheeler's Diverse Double-Compiling that can fully counter it.

Engineering software is about following industry standard best practices, including those provided by orgs such a CERT. Virtually all software engineering BS programs have security related coursework as an elective, not a requirement for graduation. Until that changes, it's going to be a ugly scene.

This and much worse.

The chip that you get from the fab needs to be correspond to the RTL that you sent.

The actual chip ROM that they program has to correspond to the ROM that you want.

The firmware programmed* onto any of the peripherals has to correspond to the firmware you want.

The compiler has to be known not to dynamically insert backdoors when compiling. And no, you cannot verify this by inspecting the compiler source [PDF].

* No, I'll recompile the open-source firmware and reprogram it. Besides the fact that you will be recompiling on an untrusted system, how do you know that are you actually reprogramming it? Because the chip reported success? Maybe their firmware allows itself to be reprogrammed but patches the incoming firmware in a few key places as it comes in?

Yeah, he won the clown car race with 16 (or was it 17) candidates by a healthy margin by differentiating himself. But polling throughout the race had him at unprecedented unfavorability ratings, with only Clinton able to even remotely complete. He polled worse than lice and Nickelback.

Also, among the groups of independents, Democrats, and Republicans, Republicans are the smallest group, and only a small subset of them voted in the primaries.

Which is why there are many questions yet unanswered. Without any mention of any other nations, American voting machines are notoriously easy to hack https://fossbytes.com/defcon-2... http://thehill.com/policy/cybe... 2012 - https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/... 2011 - https://www.salon.com/2011/09/...

2005 - https://arstechnica.com/uncate...

This is not fake news, this is not remotely deniable. I knew that the voting manchines were Internet of things easy to hack almost 15 years ago. http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/peopl...

There have been some strange happenings like in the 2012 election where Carl Rove had a public meltdown when he refused to concede the Ohio vote, expecting some districts to come through and push the Republican candidate over the edge and win Ohio. It was interesting in the aspect that Ohio had a strange even in a previous election where the exit polls gave the state to a Democrat, but the vote tally did not. The Republican response was the typical Good Republican Voters screwing with the Media. But that's just a side story, and I digress.

The big question is - with the machines having terrible security, why the hell would a tech-savvy nation not hack and alter the results to mess with an adversary nation or to put in a person they had sway with?

The tech companies are going to be in for an entertaining world of hurt if they think they can just show up and start cranking out products the way they've always done it.

Automotive, industrial, aerospace, rail and other 'life and limb' companies have done things their own way for a while for a reason. We have functional safety standards that have no 'tech company' equivalent (that I've seen). ISO 26262, IEC 61508, DO-178C, ASIL A-D, etc. From what I've found Intel and AMD don't have any chips that meet those standards.

Your phone crashes you file a bug report. Grandma crashes and dies and it's not just 'file a bug report'. The German automakers have been working on all of this stuff for a while. In grad school years ago we had some researchers from VW come in and show off all of their collision avoidance designs. I rented cars in Germany that had the auto-stop feature that didn't show up in the states until years later.

They're not just patenting stuff, they're implementing it. The difference between them and Tesla is they're very reserved in what they say it can and can't do and don't call their shots before they make them. Tesla drives up hype says what they will do and hopes they can deliver.

You think Cummins and Benz heard about the Tesla truck announcement and threw together a full prototype in a month to beat them to the punch? People are naive if they don't think that everyone is working on the exact same self driving features Tesla is. They're just not as vocal about it.

If you want to know what those companies are and when they got their start, look for the logos plastered all over the DARPA 2004/2005 vehicles. It's not like they grabbed their $1M, split it up, patted themselves on the back and forgot about the technology. All of those grad students got hired on. Startups that formed out of it got bought up by bigger players. We've all been working on this stuff, together, behind the scenes getting it right and testing it off line before we brag to the local newspaper.

If you never read this essay here it is
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~gange...

Malware is slowly moving up the software chain to where this is becoming increasingly plausible.

Slashdot ate the rest of my damn comment!

Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trust showed back in the 80's that you can have "clean" source code, and a tainted self-compiling compiler that produces tainted code from completely clean code.

5) Source code != security. Open source means it's easier to verify the SOURCE. It's not magically easy to verify the BINARY.

[PDF]

https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~gange...

There's an extremely simple surefire way to guarantee that the binary you're running was built exactly from that source code: compile it yourself.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

There's an extremely simple surefire way to guarantee that the binary you're running was built exactly from that source code: compile it yourself.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

There's an extremely simple surefire way to guarantee that the binary you're running was built exactly from that source code: compile it yourself.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

There's an extremely simple surefire way to guarantee that the binary you're running was built exactly from that source code: compile it yourself.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

There's an extremely simple surefire way to guarantee that the binary you're running was built exactly from that source code: compile it yourself.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

"Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson!

This article is about Google and Apple, both have comfortable profit margins.

In any case: https://economix.blogs.nytimes...
"Probably most people assume that the corporate income tax is largely paid by consumers of its products or services. That is, they assume that although the tax is nominally levied on the corporation as a whole, in fact the burden of the tax is shifted onto customers in the form of higher prices.
All economists reject that idea. "

From Econ101 at Carnegie Mellon University.:
Myth: Any new corporate taxes will just get passed on to consumers
Often, if taxes are raised (or other costs go up) for businesses, the owners say that they will just raise prices and pass the costs on to their customers.
This claim is often accepted as fact because many people don't know about "elasticity of demand".
Elasticity of demand is perhaps the most important basic idea in economics that many people don't know.

The FACT is that women ruled tech jobs, until men decided they were too profitable for the little ladies and took over.

When did this occur? When did women stop dominating architecture or civil engineering? When did they stop being the majority of mathematicians and chemist?

I'm not making the argument that they didn't rule these fields because of biological differences, and it very well could be because of misogyny or sexism; but making shit up doesn't make you right.

What does that or radar labs in WW2 have to do with what I wrote or Google, other than reinforcing my point. Women weren't in those jobs not because they weren't capable, but because they weren't allowed.

Plenty. It also directly contradicts what you wrote in that first sentence.

Let's see.
1. Lady Lovelace ADA invented her own analytical machine after reading about Babbage and has a language named after her.
2. COBOL the first programming language was invented by a woman named Grace Hopper.
3. Katherine Johnson was a famous mathematician who pioneered early space flight at NASA with celestial navigation on the early primitive mainframes,
4.Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli was on the Univac project during World War II for the first electronic computers.

Lady Lovelace, Katherine Johnson, and Grace Hopper were not in wartime. There is also no evidence they were forced into the field either.

Here are is my citation? Different or not, biological unfit my ass!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures_(book)

Your points consist of:
1. Simplified and completely wrong characterizations of contributions to technology between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace...
2. Simplified and completely wrong characterization of contributions to technology from Grace Hopper...
3. The dramatized version of Hidden Figures...
4. Ignoring other areas of technology where women contributed but weren't necessarily accredited as the "inventor".

All to:
1. Support the assertion that "women ruled tech". (lol not biased or sexist at all!)
2. Disprove the straw-man you've erected of "women suck at tech because of biology".

People like you are contributing to real gender discrimination nowadays. Because you've put these ideas in the head of people:
1. Is she really here because she's capable or because of HR.
2. Can I disagree with her and how do I do it without being reported to HR.

Fortunately I've been in the same area of industry before all this shit started so we don't have to deal with it...

The FACT is that women ruled tech jobs, until men decided they were too profitable for the little ladies and took over.

When did this occur? When did women stop dominating architecture or civil engineering? When did they stop being the majority of mathematicians and chemist?

I'm not making the argument that they didn't rule these fields because of biological differences, and it very well could be because of misogyny or sexism; but making shit up doesn't make you right.

What does that or radar labs in WW2 have to do with what I wrote or Google, other than reinforcing my point. Women weren't in those jobs not because they weren't capable, but because they weren't allowed.

Plenty. It also directly contradicts what you wrote in that first sentence.

Let's see.
1. Lady Lovelace ADA invented her own analytical machine after reading about Babbage and has a language named after her.
2. COBOL the first programming language was invented by a woman named Grace Hopper.
3. Katherine Johnson was a famous mathematician who pioneered early space flight at NASA with celestial navigation on the early primitive mainframes,
4.Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli was on the Univac project during World War II for the first electronic computers.

Lady Lovelace, Katherine Johnson, and Grace Hopper were not in wartime. There is also no evidence they were forced into the field either.

Here are is my citation? Different or not, biological unfit my ass!

Depending on the development environment in question, for added fun, you could still have problems even if you compile it yourself. On the bright side, things like diverse double compiling might be helpful in this area. -PCP

From the "That's today" we can read your mind link ...
Here's the actual study, "Predicting the Brain Activation Pattern Associated With the Propositional Content of a Sentence: Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States"
http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/reprin...

I've only skimmed it. This would take me quite a while to decode. But you should have a look at it; this is way cool. But it isn't what Dr Jepson is claiming. not at all.
What they're seeing is the patterns generated in the brain when reading sentences. Not thinking about things, but reading.
They record all the parts of the brain that light up during the reading given to the people in the fMRI. They discovered that these patterns are nearly the same for the people who participated. So, knowing these patterns, they can tell what sentence you had just read.
But where it gets interesting is that it's not just the sentence decode part of the brain, they're seeing the other parts where the concept representations are. I think.

From the article:

The main contribution of this article is the integrated, computational account of the relation between the semantic content of a sentence and the brain activation pattern evoked by the reading of the sentence.

The initial success of the modeling using neurally plausible features suggests that the building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are shaped by neural systems rather than by lexicographic considerations. This approach predicts that the neural dimensions of concept representation might be universal across languages, as studies are beginning to suggest [Yang et al., 2017]. In this perspective, the concepts in each language would be underpinned by some subset of a universal set of NPSFs

NPSF is neurally plausible semantic features. Hope that helps.

and in the limitations section,

"The study was also limited to the processing of visually presented sentences, and the neural signature at the end of the reading of a sentence contained the representations of all of the component concepts in the sentence. If the sentences were presented in the auditory modality, it is possible the neural signature at the end of the listening to a sentence might not be the optimal decoding window for all of the component concepts in the sentence. "

If it's a university, then entry is based upon the combination of your SAT or ACT score and your application letter. It has nothing to do with high school.

Incorrect. Some schools stopped requiring standardized test scores (SAT/ACT) years ago for undergraduate admissions. And I don't know of a U.S. university that will admit an undergraduate student who doesn't have a high school diploma, GED, or proof of secondary education. Three examples, one private, two public (not including my alma mater, which also had the same requirements):

Carnegie Mellon University

University of Virginia

University of Maryland/University College (UMUC) -- also doesn't require the SAT/ACT for "most" degree programs

I've been saying this for years: make Computer Science (theoretical math, logic, basic linguistics) a mandatory subject in K12 education alongside (applied) math, science, etc. Also, yank pre-calculus and calculus (save it for physics majors in college, offer it as a math elective in high school) and offer statistics for students advanced enough to get that far. Statistical illiteracy is one of the main drivers behind our fake news problem.

Brian Krebs agrees with me, citing this as Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia:

Compared to the United States there are quite a few more high school students in Russia who choose to specialize in information technology subjects. One way to measure this is to look at the number of high school students in the two countries who opt to take the advanced placement exam for computer science.

According to an analysis (PDF) by The College Board, in the ten years between 2005 and 2016 a total of 270,000 high school students in the United States opted to take the national exam in computer science (the “Computer Science Advanced Placement” exam).

Compare that to the numbers from Russia: A 2014 study (PDF) on computer science (called “Informatics” in Russia) by the Perm State National Research University found that roughly 60,000 Russian students register each year to take their nation’s equivalent to the AP exam — known as the “Unified National Examination.” Extrapolating that annual 60,000 number over ten years suggests that more than twice as many people in Russia — 600,000 — have taken the computer science exam at the high school level over the past decade.

It doesn't matter what your proof shows, eventually your program gets compiled and then all bets are off. It also interacts with an OS, and again all bets are off. See also Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trust". You can gain some additional confidence that your code is correct, bet never prove it. Even if you say you can prove the assembly, it gets run on different CPUs. Anyone saying they can prove a program correct probably should give that ridiculous claim a lot more thought.

Well,
a good starting site is this: http://math.nist.gov/javanumer...
And interesting papers are e.g. this two: https://engineering.purdue.edu... and an older one that is more focusing on the problems of Javas Array implementations: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~artiga...

It's important to remember that CMU's Cyrus also develops a SASL library which provides an authentication framework/layer. This is used heavily throughout major open-source projects, particularly those which are SMTP-related. Examples below are taken from the FreeBSD ports repository:

* exim -- for SMTP AUTH support (probably both server and client (unsure, I don't use exim))
* mutt -- for SMTP AUTH support (if mutt is configured to speak SMTP natively (uncommon), rather than using an MDA (common))
* postfix -- for SMTP AUTH support (both server and client)
* sendmail -- for SMTP AUTH support (both server and client)
* mongodb 3.x -- as an authentication mechanism
* memcached -- as an authentication mechanism (optional, but often default)
* squid -- as an authentication back-end (optional)
* mod_authn_sasl (3rd-party Apache module) - as an authentication back-end
* mod_webauth (3rd-party Apache module) -- as an authentication back-end

So plainly the notion that money is the absolute determinant in politics is false.

Oh no, the Republican gerrymandering is also a significant factor.

North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia all demonstrate the effectiveness of that manipulation.

Of course, they already lost in Arizona, so it won't be long before the people start taking back the power. Then what will they do?

A language with only one compiler written in that selfsame language can't be trusted very easily because all available binaries might have trojans that self-replicate using the technique that Ken Thompson demonstrated in "Reflections on Trusting Trust". The usual way to detect a "Trusting Trust" trojan is David A. Wheeler's diverse double-compiling, which starts by bootstrapping a compiler's source code on three independent implementations of a language and seeing if the process of compiling a compiler with itself converges to identical binaries. But you can't do DDC if the only available Rust compiler is written in Rust. Sure, you can use OCaml to compile the old Rust frontend and use old Rust to compile the new Rust frontend, but then you'd need multiple independent OCaml compilers so that it can be verified using DDC.

You disable all remote access until you are certain ...

You can never be 100% certain. Otherwise, we wouldn't have events like "Pwn2Own" ... and those don't even have a malicious insider involved. Give any decent hacker a year of root access on a system, then there is no way that you can ever be "certain" that it is free of backdoors without a complete wipe and re-install.

You should read this: Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust.

Father of computational electromagnetics Zoltan Cendes, named his flagship product Maxwell(tm). He is the one figured out how to remove the null space of the curl vector from the computational solutions. Before that naively applying finite element formulation to Maxwell's equations yielded garbage. His edge-vector finite element formulation is the gold standard in getting computational EM results.

This brings up what Linus said recently. One would think Maxwell's equation was all "innovation". But remember, Maxwell did not work in the vector calculus! He was working in analytical geometry, Cartesian coordinate system. Laboriously wrote out the expanded forms of the gradient operator and worked through the equivalent of the cross product explicitly term by goddammed term. I see Computational EM developers struggling to keep up with the math even with the use of Matlab and Mathematica software packages handling symbolic algebra. That he did it all in analytical geometry, for the first time, without knowing all the gibberish he was writing down will eventually lead to a breakthrough....

Is it possible other great mathematicians of his day had this idea? Probably. Some might have even pointed the direction to Maxwell himself. But, in the end, trudging through all that algebra and coordinate geometry in the long form laboriously is what made that breakthrough possible. Yes, innovation is needed as the spark. But, blood, sweat and toil contribute a lot more to success.

Back in the day we were used to time-shifting our collection of information, and the viewing of information. This was accomplished on BBSs - such as FIDONET - by up and down loading content for later viewing with offline viewers. You would just set up some automation to run during off times (while you were asleep for example). Back in those days -- even as slow as things were, your time didn't seem to be wasted as much as today.

I don't have a bad connection - I stream videos no problem - so I can only assume the problem is the advertising cruft layered on top. As a result, I'm in the early stages of putting together a web crawler of my own...basically I go to the same sites day after day -- so most of what I read comes from the same sources - so why not crawl those sites and draw down what I want to read at my leisure? I can also automagically separate the multimedia from the text, and deal with that as I want to - rather than how a standard browser decides to do for you.

Website owners and ad people have gotten lazy - and disrespectful of users; time to claim back our time.

Technical presentation on FlexRay: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece64...

I was on a large software team using TSP when the company decided to move us to a new building with an open office environment. They cited gains from "collaboration" as the reason.

I later reviewed our TSP data and found that we had a 32% decrease in productivity after the move, which never recovered. At the time, half of our team members were located in a different state and did not go through a similar move. Those team members did not see any decrease in productivity over that time period, so it can't be blamed on team workload or seasonal fluctuations.

This translates to millions of dollars in lost productivity over just one year, let alone the potential losses of delayed products. Not to mention the absolute misery of attempting to work in such an environment.

It still baffles and frustrates me to no end that managers insist on doing things like this after seeing such conclusive data.

Another one that started the same way is Carnegie Mellon University

I bet their house is a fucking mansion.

It's beyond that, it's practically a palace, room for over 300 people.

No they haven't, read the description of their implementation.

No thanks, I would rather read their actual implementation (ie open source). The only way you can even begin to trust such a communications system is if it is open source and you can build the client from the provided source. Insert oblig reference to Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" here. At any rate, the description of the implementation is not the implementation itself.

I've got a patched facebook APK which gets rid of the location tracking crap, along with some other social crapware (and most ads). It's about one version old now, so it might nag you to update. The patches are a bitch to rebase, so I only do it every few versions. Warning- self-signed APK, so trust me at your own risk. http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~sm...

I've written OpenCL kernels that have variable length loops and branches either of which could be run, and executed then in parallel.

The way this typically works is to use conditional execution, just like in ARM or Itanium, with the predicate bit being a set of bits. This is all explained in early research papers on GPUs, such as this one from the now-amusingly-named "Lucasfilm Pixar Project" circa 1984.