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I understand logically how the thought of killing another living thing and eating it can be stomach turning. I am surprised at my own reaction--that eating artificially-grown flesh is creepy to me. OTOH, using real meat to make busts does creep me out whereas I would have no problem with artificial meat sculptures.

So, the best you can do is just judge people by their individual merits instead of worrying about group X or Y.

Unfortunately, people will look at a book and decide not to read it because a women wrote it. As several commentators on Slashdot has already mentioned: "the best science fiction is written by men." In fact, some women writers wrote under a pen name because of this obvious bias.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5077952/women-who-pretended-to-be-men-to-publish-scifi-books

It's a pretty common misconception that glass flows like a liquid

Oh I am sure it doesn't cost Valve anything other than some developer time to explore the idea so it's no skin off their back, but even the tweenage argument doesn't make a lot of sense in the age of shared Netflix and Prime accounts. My kid's had their own Netflix profile on my account for years, works great.

Sure, my kids can watch Netflix, but if they want to rent "Leprechaun 3" they can use their Steam money (or maybe it is available on Netflix?) and get used to doing that and maybe never bother getting an iTunes account or whatever other options are out there.

(I tried very hard not to mention that "kid's" is either a contraction of "kid is" as in "My kid's a credit to his school" or is the possessive form of the singular "kid", as in "I hate my kid's friends". I just couldn't let it go. I guess I am a jerk. http://gizmodo.com/study-peopl... I obviously need help. I have little doubt that there are greater errors in my own writing.)

In our system of Cartel Capitalism - there really isn't a difference between the government and the large companies that buy influence.

That's just populist mind-killing tripe.

There's a significant difference. The US Gov has to pretend to follow the US Constitution (don't forget that many of those working in Gov still believe that too) and other "nice stuff". The Large Corps don't.

Where's your 2nd amendment in Disneyland? Where's your freedom of speech in Facebook? Good luck using the Freedom of Information Act on Apple. And you can't even pretend to vote for/out the CEO of Monsanto.

Your beloved Bill of Rights and Constitution may become more irrelevant once you stupid folk get the Small Government many of you keep asking for. Obsessing over quantity instead of quality.

Anyway back to the topic: http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/...
The tech industry seems rather fond of Hillary Clinton.

See also: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-em...

Popular Mechanics
The funny papers
Walt Disney
The Monsanto corporation
Parliament
The Jetsons
The U.S. Air Force
Gerry Anderson
George Adamski
James Bond
Several World's Fairs
Movies
Syd Mead
Nikola Tesla
Canadian Avro Aero corp
Television
Paul Moller
Sun Ra
George Van Tassel
GM

Pretty much everybody that wasn't warning us of IMMINENT ATOMIC DEATH from the COMMIES. And half of them, to boot.

Popular Mechanics
The funny papers
Walt Disney
The Monsanto corporation
Parliament
The Jetsons
The U.S. Air Force
Gerry Anderson
George Adamski
James Bond
Several World's Fairs
Movies
Syd Mead
Nikola Tesla
Canadian Avro Aero corp
Television
Paul Moller
Sun Ra
George Van Tassel
GM

Pretty much everybody that wasn't warning us of IMMINENT ATOMIC DEATH from the COMMIES. And half of them, to boot.

How big will they be in 10 years?

The world currently has a 370-inch (939-cm) Tv. The smallest commercial-grade cinema screen is 360 inches, with 480 inches being popular. This record-breaking Tv is double the size of the previous record holder. (The 300-inch Tv on 'How I met your mother' was fictional.) A live elephant standing in front of this, would block less than half of the screen.

You probably mean one that can be bought at Walmart: The problem is Tv size has stagnated, people aren't buying ever-larger televisions. This is because most people want a Tv to occupy a small part of their vision. So a bigger Tv means standing further away, meaning using a bigger room. It's difficult to make a room bigger, which is the real problem.

...is not this one. This one seeks to curtail privacy, remove encryption, punish whistleblowers, and use the Espionage Act and Treason against any and all (except their own David Petraeous and Hillary Clinton).

Their own OPM was the subject of the worst hack of its time. http://www.computerworld.com/a...

This administration and our government in general have NO CLUE how to protect systems, and the word 'cyber' isn't used by anyone who isn't ripping off the government for money. The word used to mean 'sex'. http://io9.gizmodo.com/today-c...

I have great faith that if the Obama Administration wanted to do something useful that they would have come out AGAINST the Feinstein draft bill, that they would have come out against forced decryption of iPhones; that they would not charge Edward Snowded with treason, or in the alternative charge Hillary Clinton with treason.

Absent all those, this is hardly more than pissing in the wind.

E

Instead of reaching out and asking if these people would want to become a sanctioned event, or a simple, could you please work with us to not violate our IP, they chose to instead swing the FUCK YOU hammer.

Lawyers are garbage.

Yup, that would have been good all around. Let them license the terms so Disney doesn't have copyright issues; the event holders could even put in a nod to Disney thanking them for being decent enough to work out a good solution. However, they instead decided to bring out the Death Star...

For me, the classic example how to do it right in such a situation is how Stevens Aviation settled with Southwest over the "Plane Smart" slogan. Stevens Aviation CEO Herwald challenged Southwest CEO Kelleher to an arm wrestling contest over the name. "Malice in Dallas" raised money for charity and provided a PR boost for Southwest and Stevens Aviation. A good writeup is at

http://gizmodo.com/how-an-arm-...

Unfortunately you've been bitten by the progressive non-scientific but called Gender Neutrality which views both genders as being the same in all areas, and blaming of culture for corrupting them into gender stereotypes. Here is some scientific articles that you won't read that explain why you are not correct.

http://www.livescience.com/226...

http://www.bustle.com/articles...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5879647...

The problem is, that we tend to take the outlier as the rule, when trying to break norms. We should accept that norms are those for a reason, while not excluding those that are outside those norms. There will be girls who like trucks, and boys that like dolls. Blaming stereotypes solves nothing and doesn't actually progress understanding.

I thought this was interesting so I searched around a bit and it seems this idea has been dis proven. Wired had a piece also. Some interesting tidbits in there like "For example, women’s speech includes more personal pronouns (I, you, she), while men’s uses more quantifiers (one, two, some more). If someone listening to a voice interface hears a male using feminine phrasing, they are likely to be distracted and distrustful. "

(*) I'm using the term "literal" by it's dictionary definition.

You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Ages ago I watched a young boy play Super Mario Brothers. He ran along some path, stopped at some seemingly random location, banged his head on the brick 8 times, a gold bar fell out. Pocketed the points and ran along. I asked him, "how did you know there is a gold bar on that brick?". He said, "Well, you keep banging your head on every brick in the wall to see if there is something?". "You banged your head on EVERY brick eight times on this tunnel?", He goes, "nah, I banged some 30 or 40 times, this brick needs only 8 hits".

He should have hit it 4,294,967,303 times, just in case.

It's not the first time this happens to Microsoft.

I can't imagine the level of stupidity required for Google to make such a request. Google's own reports (which they resist being required to provide) show quite clearly that human drivers are frequently a very necessary supplement to their autonomous systems:

"Between September 2014 and November 2015, Google said there were 272 occasions when a technology failure forced the test driver to re-take control."
https://ia.acs.org.au/news/goo...

And this request comes shortly after a Google car was found fully-responsible for crashing into a bus:

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

And that's not a one-off... Google's small fleet of self-driving cars are getting in numerous accidents. 8% is the last figure I saw. Google spins it as the fault of everyone else except its own vehicles, but that claim is specious at best:

http://gizmodo.com/self-drivin...

There's ample evidence that self-driving cars do several things which (while they MIGHT be safe if all cars were autonomous) cause clashes with existing human drivers on the road:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

Even the much-simpler task, of drive-by-wire in existing automobiles has proven too unreliable to trust human lives with. Toyota screwed this up badly, and it has cost them dearly:

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

The only way I could vote for Bill's wife is if she is opposed by a candidate one lab accident away from a supervillain...

It was all more fun back then because everything was NEW. It was AWESOME. Today ... meh.

But to your point about what the world would look like without Stalman ...

[rant]
1. No GPL. So Linus would have released his software under his original license, which was free for home users, paid for commercial users.
2. No GPL hassles. Anyone who wanted truly free software would build upon the *BSDs.
3. Given a choice between (1) and (2), businesses would all have opted for (2), because they can actually build upon it to make products users will pay for, like Apple (OSX) and Sony (Playstation 3/4) do.
4. Anyone else could also build upon the *BSDs, and either release the source or sell the combined software, or whatever combo they wished to do.

The printer driver problem that Stalman ran into was not really all that big a deal. Someone gives you state of the art equipment to play around with (a cutting-edge laser printer) and they would naturally expect that if there were problems, you would tell them, they would fix them, and improve their product. No just give you and everyone else the source code to that other companies can use it without any sweat equity.

Stalman's snit shows just how juvenile his thinking really is. He took personal offense because they exercised their freedom to not give the source. He doesn't want freedom - he wants control under his terms. F*ck you, Stalman.

The same people who decry closed software don't object to closed software for games, or for making closed software when they can make a buck out of it (apps apps apps). Stalman thinks everyone should live like he did, living in his university office, because making profit from working on/selling proprietary software is somehow evil ...

Until around 1998, my office at MIT was also my residence. I was even registered to vote from there.

and

I was just kind of curious. I can be "strange/non-conformist". I don't do deodorant. Don't do telephones (e.g. i rarely carry my cellphone and only use my landline for recruiters to spam my phone). I tried natural toothpaste because I don't like the effects of fluoride.
I don't feel so bad. Richard Stallman doesn't look like he bathes, shaves, plus he lived out of the MIT lab. Some people are stranger than me.
Bot Berlin
July 15th, 2008 2:28pm

Yes, and Charles Manson kills people -- that doesn't mean we want to compare ourselves to him.
SaveTheHubble
July 15th, 2008 2:29pm

The guy is an asshole. Remember when he wrote this:

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

s/Jobs/Richard Stalman/g

The GPL actually helps companies like Microsoft maintain their preeminent position because you can't make any real money selling GPL software, so development lags, there's no promotional budget, manufacturers don't care if your software runs on their devices or not. So guess who gets market and mindshare, even for open source software? It's why the free screen readers on Linux are crap compared to this free windows one. It's why decent text-to-speech and speech-to-text on Android actually works - Google is making their profit by getting their apps in front of everyone. If they had tried to sell android, they would have been up against the entrenched players - sun, microsoft, nokia, rim

The Shara Desert is where the Morocco government is building out a 585-megawatt, half-million solar panel power plant that covers 6,178 acres.

Concentrated solar power plants use the Sun's energy to heat water and produce steam that spins energy-generating turbines. The system at Ouarzazate uses 12-meter-tall parabolic mirrors to focus energy onto a fluid-filled pipeline. The pipeline's hot fluid—393 degrees Celsius (739 degrees Fahrenheit)—is the heat source used to warm the water and make steam. The plant doesn't stop delivering energy at nighttime or when clouds obscure the sun; heat from the fluid can be stored in a tank of molten salts.

http://gizmodo.com/watch-a-massive-solar-power-plant-take-shape-in-the-sah-1752261396

Apple makes so much money yet has such an ugly history of mistreating the people with whom they do business in a variety of ways large and small: Mistreatment of workers who build their products (continuing in 2015 only changing due to activist and journalists compelling them to), copyright infringement, ebooks that won't work on jailbroken iThings, turning a blind eye to environmental degradation, making it needlessly hard for owners to take apart their products, teaching store staff twisted psychological manipulation, avoiding US corporate tax (which is already quite low), and more. Now we can add conspiring to fix prices. Hardly surprising given how unethical, illegal, and pernicious Apple has been.

He's refuting he said that he supports the FBI.

He has very slightly backed off, claims that people have misinterpreted his position:
(see the "update:" in this gizmodo article: http://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-... )

But here is Gates' actual quote from the Financial times article; what do you think-- was he misinterpreted?
  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3559...

“This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case,” Mr Gates told the Financial Times.

“It is no different than [the question of] should anybody ever have been able to tell the phone company to get information, should anybody be able to get at bank records. Let’s say the bank had tied a ribbon round the disk drive and said, ‘Don’t make me cut this ribbon because you’ll make me cut it many times’.”

Also wrong,

"it could no longer be considered as a standalone theory to explain the universe."

It's not a stand-alone theory anyway, it requires quantum theory...

Article can say it better:
Why can't Einstein and Quantum Mechanics get along?

In the first place, it is hard to avoid the impression that many anti-nuclear campaigners do not have a firm grasp of the scientific facts and figures. Rather, they have a powerful feeling of impending doom: they somehow feel that radiation is unseen, deadly, and threatening, and therefore must be banned. But whatever the means of generation, power sufficient to run modern cities and nations is capable of immense harm. Consider Buncefield, for example: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5899376... Or even the danger of a relatively modest amount of fertilizer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As for the future potential of nuclear power, the WAMSR seems promising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Failsafe, and uses existing nuclear waste as fuel! It's estimated that WAMSRs could provide the whole world with all the power it needs for 80 years, just using today's stocks of waste. And at the end of that time, the waste would be gone.

For the longer term, the recent German and Chinese breakthroughs in fusion are very promising. It's quite fallacious to assume that, just because people have tried to do something for many years and failed, it cannot be done. Consider for how many years men tried to fly - and then, 110 years or so ago, they succeeded.

I know the prices of shoes fell thru the roof once the Chinese started making them. I can now get a pack of Reebok's or Nike's for $4.99 and the price is dropping every day. Too bad child labor and environmental damage in China but at lease Chinese made shoes are so cheap now!!! Thank you communist China labor and all the useful idiots in the US who support this.

Actually, the price of shoes has fallen dramatically as measured in weeks of work to afford them. If you insist on paying for Nikes maybe it hasn't fallen by as much, but for generic shoes and everything else, price fell. And there is less child labor in China today than before the Chinese started making them. See article at Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com/5313690/why...

The solar plant is near Ouarzazate, which I estimate is about 300 miles from the southern tip of Spain. It's on the edge of the Sahara Desert, which should be a good location for more sunshine. Ouarzazate gets a little over 3,400 hours of sunshine per year while Gibraltar gets about 400 hours less. Also, as you go poleward, the sunlight is spread over a wider area, meaning that it's less intense at any given location. Gibraltar is at the southern tip of Spain, so this gets more pronounced if you go farther north. If you go north to Madrid, you can subtract roughly another 200-250 hours of sunlight each year while being nearly ten degrees latitude farther north. There's also a whole lot less seasonal variation in the amount of sunlight at Ouarzazate than at either location in Spain, making it more suitable for a constant supply of electricity that doesn't require being supplemented by something else.

The solar plant is actually at a great location, so it probably makes sense for Spain to by their electricity from Morocco than to build their own solar plant. In cold enough climates, the electricity demand might be high enough during winter that, if it can't be met with solar, it would be necessary to build another type of plant to supplement it or to buy the electricity from another country. It's much more cost-effective to have the plant in Morocco.

By the way, the original plan was to build the plant with European funding and supply the electricity to Europe, but the partners in Europe pulled out requiring the African Development Bank and the government of Morocco to save the project. Obviously the approach made sense to Europe at one point and, now that the plant is being built, might still be lucrative to them.

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07, 2016 @10:39AM (#51457111)

Same AC here. On that, you're right, my mistake. I posted in good faith and screwed that up, I apologize. That would be the correct terminology for a power inverter, and I was thinking of that when I posted my comment, which of course takes DC and outputs AC. However, I stand by the basic claim that cheap USB chargers may result in slow charging, could damage hardware, and even be dangerous. You're right that they are supposed to maintain a constant voltage. Apple's charging brick has been tore down and the basic conclusion was that they went above and beyond what was necessary for safe and fast charging. Other name brand chargers aren't quite that expensive but are probably good enough. Some of the cheap ones, though, are a problem. I don't expect to find a quality charger at a dollar store. And yes, it should maintain a flat line, and cheap USB chargers are much more likely to produce voltage fluctuations.

Here's a link showing the components in Apple's charger: http://gizmodo.com/5911904/why-apples-iphone-charger-is-so-expensive. And they note that it's well filtered to maintain a constant voltage and not produce spikes and dips.

and

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07, 2016 @11:18AM (#51457315)

Yes, how dare I make a mistake thinking of power inverters (DC->AC) instead of power supplies (AC->DC) while the basic premise is correct about cheap power supplies, and then apologize profusely for the error. I'm glad to know you've never made a mistake before. A proud day for you and your family, AC.

Oh, wait, you didn't. What was that about clueless posting?

Same AC here. On that, you're right, my mistake. I posted in good faith and screwed that up, I apologize. That would be the correct terminology for a power inverter, and I was thinking of that when I posted my comment, which of course takes DC and outputs AC. However, I stand by the basic claim that cheap USB chargers may result in slow charging, could damage hardware, and even be dangerous. You're right that they are supposed to maintain a constant voltage. Apple's charging brick has been tore down and the basic conclusion was that they went above and beyond what was necessary for safe and fast charging. Other name brand chargers aren't quite that expensive but are probably good enough. Some of the cheap ones, though, are a problem. I don't expect to find a quality charger at a dollar store. And yes, it should maintain a flat line, and cheap USB chargers are much more likely to produce voltage fluctuations.

Here's a link showing the components in Apple's charger: http://gizmodo.com/5911904/why-apples-iphone-charger-is-so-expensive. And they note that it's well filtered to maintain a constant voltage and not produce spikes and dips.

For those who don't want to visit Forbes, a site with a history of malware in their ads but insists that visitors disable ad blockers (and script blockers like Noscript)...

Here are a few links with more information than you'll get from Ethan's article, plus they don't require disabling ad blockers:
http://www.space.com/31079-giant-magellan-telescope-groundbreaking-travelogue.html
http://gizmodo.com/the-giant-magellan-telescopes-fourth-mirror-melting-is-1736954773
http://www.gmto.org/resources/

The technology is pretty damn cool, especially the adaptive optics to deal with atmospheric turbulence. It's worth a read, especially when you don't have to try to visit Forbes.

I really wish the Slashdot editors would stop letting this crap through. But because they do, it's a good service to everyone if users can provide alternate links that are better. In this case, there's a hell of a lot of good information on the actual GMTO site.

This estimate says you'd need 130 GPa to be in the right range. As of the writing, (three years ago), that was about as strong as nanotubes had been made, but only in incredibly small lengths. Scaling that up to 100,000 km is the hard part.

or you can spend $500 on about the best headphones money can buy
 
You don't know much about headphones, do you?
 
Granted, for 500usd you can easily pick up a pair of Seenheiser HD650s and that's about as much as an adult with reasonable average hearing can expect as far as definition anyway but even at that you're still going to need either and amp or a receiver that is beefy due to low impedance. And the 20 dollar radio shack headphone amp isn't going to cut it. You can get something passable for 200-300 dollars.
 
And if you really have better than average hearing even the HD650 cans don't cut it. There really isn't a lot in the landscape for less than 1200 dollars at that point. Anyone who claims to be an audiophile who can't tell the difference between a 500 dollar set of headphones and a 1500 dollar set of headphones is living in a fantasy land.

It is FEDERAL LAW.

Though Statists might equate them, laws of men — unlike laws of nature — are changeable. This particular one appeared, because it was believed, the cell phones can interfere with the aircraft. That belief has been demonstrated wrong many times — or, to put it in other words, that myth was busted.

You understand nothing.

Darling, mind your tone.

ATC needs to know who is who because they have to control them if they are on an IFR flight plan.

ATC might need to know, yes. But whatever passes through the ATC, can be encrypted and sent to other planes — encrypted for each one — as well. This is a solvable problem, one just needs to acknowledge, it exists. And you do not...

In order to be considered a player, you have to actually *play*.

Nationwide, this is what billions in subsidies bought us: via Gizmodo.

Huffington Post has some numbers for New York specifically... they aren't even at 50% (as of mid last year).

"Some of them have yet to be opened. "They were collected in the vacuum of the lunar surface, placed inside vacuum sealed tubes, and remain that way to this day.""

You mean, ASIDE from the ones a couple of interns laid out and had sex on, right?
http://gizmodo.com/5242736/how...

break a series of encrypted emails held on Blackberrys modified by Canadian firm Phantom Secure

Conclusion: (a) don't get phones modified by a shady third party with government connections, and (b) don't take Slashdot summaries at face value (but we never learn that one, do we)

One must beware of folding it too many times.

it's called fracking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

the techonology was first achieved by the rogue state of oklahoma. we have not yet received their list of demands. however, they have shared the dangerous technology with the unstable province of alberta, which has recently upped the ante of horrors:

http://gizmodo.com/shattering-...

Funny thing is netflix says copyright is not why they don't offer it. http://gizmodo.com/the-real-re...
"According to Neil Hunt, Netflix's Chief Product Officer, Netflix users won't be able to handle the complexity the added choice will bring."
Apparently us consumers are too dumb to handle one more choice after being given the choice of a few thousand things too watch herp de duur.

Although I have to admit a few months ago I had to explain to someone that they had to have internet service to use netflix for whatever reason they just couldn't seem to grasp that all the stuff on netflix wouldn't fit on a ps3...So Maybe in a few months netflix will drop everything but house of cards. That would simplify things. With the added bonus the entire catalog would fit on a ps3.

The North Korean test produced results similar in size to a past test they did of a fission bomb. Other than their claims, which have been known to be exaggerated (unicorns, anyone?) there's nothing to indicate that the latest was in fact a thermonuclear bomb.

So what about the part where the supposed unicorn story was proved to be Western propaganda?

"The most serious flaw is located in the mediaserver Android component"

No, the most serious flaw is the model where security updates are not available for more than 85% of the Android devices that exist.

http://gizmodo.com/study-85-of...

>[Kylo Ren] was less of a badass, and more like a bipolar emo kid with daddy issues.

That's exactly the point.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/kylo-re...

The Star Wars movies have always featured villains who are cold, calculating and in control of their emotions. Vader, the Emperor, Dooku, Maulâ"the Sith always acted with a chilling precision. But Kylo Ren is anything but precise. Heâ(TM)s brash, raw, sullen, and just bursting with emotion. This is something we've seen before in the Expanded Universe of books and comics, but never in the movies.

Kylo Ren howls and loses his mind, whenever anything goes wrong.

Kylo Ren harbors a bitter resentment for the expectations thrust upon him in his former life as Ben Solo, Jedi-in-training and a son of legends. Even his lightsaber itself is unstable and angry, flickering with sparks and heat-just like its owner.

Without some really strong evidence, why would anyone believe these 4 million new members aren't 99% AI-controlled bots? Or at least 99% of the new female users.

Well, a number of things.

(1) The argument that 99+% of female users were bots never quite made a lot of sense. It's true that men cheat more than women, but by a factor of something like 2:1, not several orders of magnitude higher. Even internet porn use is nowhere near the claimed level of asymmetry by gender on AM.

(2) The actual person who made the claim about the massive percentage of female bots actually admitted her data analysis was completely bogus and that she had no idea what she was doing in interpreting the database fields.

(3) A number of reputable news sources after the story came out actually went out and interviewed real women who had used the site. I'm not going to bother looking for it now, but I remember a BBC story who even interviewed two lesbians from neighboring towns or something that met on AM. If the 99+% bots claim was anywhere near true, it would be nearly statistically impossible for two REAL women to even find each other on AM.

(4) Even if the database analysis in the original (widely reported) story was based on a correct interpretation (which -- see point (2) above -- it wasn't), the data was also obtained from hackers who were intent on destroying the business model of AM. It would be to hackers' benefit to make things look bad for AM, and making it look all male AM users were doing was talking to a bunch of bots would be a really ingenious strategy.

(5) Even if the database analysis was correct (which seems unlikely), there are plenty of reports of users who joined after the hack to find out if their spouses were on AM. That number alone could explain a significant portion of the 4 million increase -- and those women are likely to be real women... even if they have no intention of being active on AM, they would still be new accounts.

Ultimately, I don't really care. I'm sure there may be some bots involved (at least tens of thousands existed before the hack), but I find it exceedingly unlikely that 99+% of new accounts are fake, since the original claim was bogus anyway.

BTW -- I find the whole idea of the site revolting, but I found the bot story weird enough to follow for a couple days -- until it utterly blew up and turned out to be based on a faulty analysis (as I thought was likely anyway). Of course, that never got reported widely, because "there probably are quite a few women on AM anyway" isn't nearly as interesting or sensationalistic as news as "99% of AM female 'users' are fembots and all these guys who are being embarrassed by the account leak were even greater morons than we thought!"

http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madi...

It's even older than that!

Nicknamed the "hambuger" icon, it goes all the way back to the Xerox Star.

"... Amazon can and does hire geniuses..."

Amazon can and does do foolish things. Abusing Amazon employees is just one example. A few links:

Dear Amazon interns, some advice from an old man who has been at Amazon way too long. Quote: "Amazon's work-life balance is awful."

Inside Amazon's Kafkaesque performance-improvement plan

Inside Amazon's Bizarre Corporate Culture

Glassdoor Reviews of Amazon

Amazon Is a Time Thief, by an Amazon Employee.

Working for Amazon Sounds Utterly Soul Crushing.

Life in an Amazon Warehouse: Fear and Efficiency at 35 Orders Per Second

"... Amazon can and does hire geniuses..."

Amazon can and does do foolish things. Abusing Amazon employees is just one example. A few links:

Dear Amazon interns, some advice from an old man who has been at Amazon way too long. Quote: "Amazon's work-life balance is awful."

Inside Amazon's Kafkaesque performance-improvement plan

Inside Amazon's Bizarre Corporate Culture

Glassdoor Reviews of Amazon

Amazon Is a Time Thief, by an Amazon Employee.

Working for Amazon Sounds Utterly Soul Crushing.

Life in an Amazon Warehouse: Fear and Efficiency at 35 Orders Per Second

Whoops, fixing the link.

So does NASA... Goes to show how horrible imperial is

Hmmm ... interesting: NASA criticised for sticking to imperial units

“The Shuttle and US segments of the ISS were built using the English system of measurements,” says NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma. “And much of the Ares launch vehicle and Kennedy Space Center ground systems are legacy hardware built in the English system, too.”
US law

NASA recently calculated that converting the relevant drawings, software and documentation to the “International System” of units (SI) would cost a total of $370 million – almost half the cost of a 2009 shuttle launch, which costs a total of $759 million. “We found the cost of converting to SI would exceed what we can afford,” says Hautaluoma.

“Given these budget constraints and the need for consistent units throughout the Constellation Program lifecycle to minimise risks, and to contribute to mission success, we’re revising the previous management directive to a primarily English-units-based program,” he says.

Question: What is this?

A) Assembly line for Imperial starfighters built using metric? Or ....

B) Assembly line for metric busting SR-71 built using imperial?

Answer: It's a trick question, there are no Imperial starfighters. The answer is B: an assembly line for SR-71s built using imperial.

Something to ponder on my 5km walk.

I very vaguely remembered something about this so I had to look it up. This t-mobile thing could have something to do with the Netflix Open Connect as documented on the Netflix site:

The Netflix Open Connect Initiative provides our millions of members the highest-quality viewing experience possible through efforts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to most efficiently deliver content. We partner with hundreds of ISPs to localize substantial amounts of traffic with Open Connect Appliance deployments and have an open peering policy at our interconnection locations.

Also I found this old gizmodo article.

It wouldn't surprise me if T-Mobile and netflix simply negotiated a deal to provide one of these appliances. And/or the special t-mobile edition of said appliance uses some kind of proprietary compression algorithm optimized for mobile bandwidth.

Obviously I'm only speculating but it would explain why this can't simply be applied to any/all video sites: the Netflix content is coming directly from a t-mobile data center as opposed to an unknown caching location or across the internet. Not sure why t-mobile can't simply say as much. Maybe they think it would make the net neutrality debate/complaints that much worse or maybe there's some kind of exclusivity deal and they can't discuss it?

[It would be a problem if sea level were rising...]

but it's not.

to the contrary, it is.

http://www.tribune242.com/news...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://gizmodo.com/miamis-alre...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...

The fact that sea level is rising is not even controversial; and it's not particularly new information. The harder, and more controversial question is, is that rise going to accelerate due to melting ice?

The connection between blocking the internet and the Marco Civil da Internet (in English: "Civil Rights Framework for the Internet") stated in the summary is not clear in the actual articles linked.

The gizmodo article linked in the summary states: Under the Marco Civil da Internet — Civil Rights Framework for the Internet — approved in April 2014, which includes full-blown net neutrality, this kind of denial of service is illegal. Even before the regulation took effect, it was not considered kosher, which is why previous block orders were overturned before taking effect.

That seems to state the opposite of what it stated in the summary.