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SCIENTISTS HAVE SURVEYED a World War II-era aircraft carrier scuttled off the coast of San Francisco in 1951, advancing our understanding of how thoroughly we can explore the ocean floor while providing new knowledge about how ships fare after decades under water.

The 3-D sonar survey of the USS Independence was part of a two-year project by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to find and document hundreds of wrecks in the Gulf of the Farallones and learn more about the area’s rich maritime and biological history.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/s...

New York's Roosevelt Island has had underground tubes collecting trash for 30 years. They use a Swedish system of 20" diameter tubes. It's worked well for 30 years and is still maintained. No reason this couldn't be done in reverse to deliver stuff.
http://www.wired.com/2010/08/t...

So when we get to kernel version 4.1.15, it will speak with an Austrian accent rather than Finnish?

And of course, when we see the later T-1000 form a pointy sword from its liquid metal arm and kill young John Connor's foster father, it's further proof that there's still old cruft code in the future kernel, since it's just reproducing Linus' most famous gesture.

Bill Gates never said that, btw.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/c...

the paranoid conspiracy theorists

You mean the ones who have been pretty much correct about everything?
I mean really, "tinfoil hats" don't seem stupid anymore since we found out the mind control rays were real. Have a declassified document about energy weapons. These devices are being used against innocent citizens, just like the government did with its MKULTRA project. Sorry pal, but we have plenty of documented reasons to be concerned about government spying. FFS, the pentagon is militarizing the police because they're scared of "environmental activists". Care about recycling "too much" on facebook? Send in the COINTELPRO team guys, we've got another anti-american extremists. Fire pain rays at will.

Seriously, if you want to dismiss people now you're going to have to find a different slur than "conspiracy theorist" since they have far more credibility today than the governments do.

First Elevator World runs a story on the new elevators to the WTC towers (a renevation which the 9/11 commission says didn't happen), Sandy Hook demonstrates how school shootouts can be faked, then the Snowden leaks show the government really is spying on everyone. Video analysis shows ISIS beheading videos are just propaganda. And now we find out manmade earthquakes are possible.

It's gotten to the point that it's actually a safer bet to trust conspiracy theorists over the news. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to read up some more about mind control rays.

It's already happened...

An unexpected and unwanted text message from a wireless company prematurely exploded a would-be suicide bomber’s vest bomb in Russia New Year’s Eve, inadvertently thwarting a planned attack on revelers in Moscow, according to The Daily Telegraph.

It's also happened in Egypt and a couple other countries that I'm aware of.

Oh, and some are talking about having the system 'fail deadly'. The 'easy' fix to that is that you keep the 'network connection' up, you simply disable the servers - IE no calls go into the area, nor any texts. You see signal, but all anybody calling you gets is(ideally), 4 rings and voicemail.

Except the monopoly was granted for something BESIDES network connectivity.

How is this a defence in any way? The granting of monopoly pushed us closer to Crony Capitalism, period. That government intervention was a mistake — are you trying to solve it with more government intervention?

If so, it must be clearly marked as temporary — andeven then, it would make no sense to implement it, as long as the original evil remains in place.

Companies are made of people and they change, grow up/older and move on. It is a huge company and in any such organisation it takes a long time for culture and strategy to change significantly.

Anyone who witnessed the hideousness of the SCO litigation has to look at a new Microsoft where FOSS is actively supported (even if there are strings attached) and where employees can talk about open-sourcing the OS without being fired on the spot has to accept that they are at least heading in a better direction than they were.

They already are doing that.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/d... "The front corners have built-in LIDaR."

Of course, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter to the California State Assembly.

I'll bite.

Yawn- so looking through the info, it doesn't really do much more than my Moto 360 can do, yet the Moto 360:

1) Has been available already for 7 months.

First doesn't mean best: just like with the original iPod.

2) Has inductive charging and the Apple watch doesn't.

This makes me question whether you're just a troll. In case you're being serious: The Apple Watch DOES in fact charge via inductive charging: https://www.apple.com/watch/te... (look down at "Charge it overnight. Wear it all day.")

3) Is far less expensive.

I don't know about "far" less. Quick glance shows it to be $100 to $150 cheaper than the entry level Apple Watch. That's a good difference... but it's not like the Moto 360 is $50 or something. For something you will probably replace every couple of years that difference isn't much amortized over the lifetime of the device.

4) Is arguably much better looking (for those who want round).

Firstly, I'm not sure why "round" is so desirable. Many high end watches are square/rectangular (for instance: http://www.hublot.com/en/colle... ) and all computing devices and even traditional writing devices (paper!) are rectangular for a reason: it's easy to display and read data that way.

Secondly: if we're going to be subjective I'll say that I don't want an enormous watch like the Moto 360 ( http://core0.staticworld.net/i... ). The Apple Watch fits far better: http://www.wired.com/wp-conten...

5) Works with many different phones, not just a few iPhone models.

I'll take perfect integration with a few phones over buggy connections with a bunch of phones...

So what is so innovative and impressive? A button on the side? The 360 has a button. It is not a scroll wheel, but despite what Apple's video claims, I have absolutely no problems using the touchscreen to pinch zoom, swipe, or scroll and it doesn't hurt my experience and is far more intuitive.

I suppose that it is easy to pinch to zoom on your enormous, tablet sized watch ;-). But for people who want a watch that doesn't look like they strapped a sundial to their arm they are going to need a smaller screen and a better mechanism for scrolling and zooming because of it.

The ONLY two things I saw of interest were variable touch sensitivity... which is certainly not a new technology, but it novel on a watch. And having a speaker, which I certainly have not missed. I mean, it looks like a great device, but I fail to understand why people think it is some brilliant new idea or super fantastic breakthrough.

Only Apple themselves think it's some "super fantastic breakthrough": but many of us see it as being a really solid offering that is going to enhance our daily activities.

If you own an iPhone then this should be pretty interesting to you. It's going to have great integration and tons of really useful features. Definitely enough features to justify its price.

Not everything has to be "revolutionary"... it can just be "really good" for the price its offered at... and people will buy it.

But this is a lot longer trip and a much greater up front cost.
At the very least they should should have a remote-controlled lander to execute a land, launch and recover exercise to verify that they can pull somebody back out of the gravity well
And, perhaps a series of launches with a 6 month separation so that they can create a Mars orbiting space station

Oh, and just in case you didn't see this POS from Wired
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/b...

Bill Nye is no Leslie Knope, he rocks much harder!

Cetaceans Able To Focus Sound For Echolocation

Well crustacians are able to focus sound for murder . Beat that, cetaceans!

Reason number 48372534786 why it's better just to universally block advertisements on the internet.

Apple has been leading on this front with several initiatives to protect users from malicious ads. One of them was a setting in Safari to only accept cookies from the first-party site, so when you go to cnn.com the browser accepts a cookie from cnn.com but not from malvertiser.com, who has a banner ad on the site.

This upset google because it cut into their business model of selling effective ad space. So google inserted malicious code into webpages to hack the safari browser and override security settings so it could download unwanted and potentially malicious files onto users computers. Because of this, google received the biggest fine in FTC history and is being sued for privacy violations in the UK.

Think about this for a second, and what it means. A website overriding browser security settings to serve unwanted and possibly malicious files. This is outrageous and unethical, and if it were Microsoft then the entire internet community would be enraged. Also think about it in light of this article on malvertisements, which google was actively propagating.

Apple has since taken the cat and mouse game further, so the setting is "allow from current website only". I expect malvertisers to scramble to overcome this block, but I hope that legitimate respected top tier internet companies act a little more ethically.

I wonder is this part of the lawful intercept they mention in the manual? I mean what are the odds of accidentally leaving unauthorized rsync active in the device. Who did ANTlabs get to do the work?

Lawfull Intercept
- Monitoring of Networks
- Comply with legistative requirements
- Local storage of logs

"Gaining access to a guest room through a compromised key lock system wouldn’t just be of interest to thieves. One of the most famous cases involving the subversion of a hotel’s electronic key system .. It’s not known exactly how the attackers compromised that key system.

Again, the locks were compromised by plugging an Arduino microcontroller into the DC socket on the lock. The lock then disgorged the 32 bit passcode to the device - in the clear - no encryption. A curious design decision on behalf of the locks manufacturers to say the least.

Yes, "don't outrun the bear; outrun your companion" is a fair strategy in computer security. But if you're made of particularly juicy and delicious man-meats (which would be analogous to having your name be Brian Krebs or Jennifer Lawrence or being a Google employee or having a three letter twitter handle), some bears might decide that it's worth a little extra effort to run you down instead. It's a personal decision as to how much effort you're willing to put into protecting your online identity.

Isn't 'cyber-incident' the sort of bullshit term that is more or less designed to be slippery, and thus useful for both alarmism and obfuscation as the situation requires?

And for everybody and their brother to grab power.

Schneier had a good analogy with the Sony hack, and his rubrik is a good one - take what happened online and make the closest physical-world analogy you can. The Sony hack was equivalent to somebody sneaking into Sony HQ and photocopying a _lot_ of documents.

Clearly a violation, but now the Air Force is looking at ( / may have conducted) a counter-strike? For photocopying?

That's just crazy. But since the NSA has been militarized we should be very concerned about PsyOps leading the populous into war over simple property crimes.

Then again, China might actually solve a big part of our energy problems (Thorium molten-salt reactors are a very, very good idea if we want to get away from fossil fuels). One thing about China's large, centrally-controlled government, is that if they choose to go in a particular direction, 1.3 billion people go in that direction, which no Western country can come close to - it just has to choose the right directions.

So follow up...(thank you google image search) Wired also is carrying the pictures and actually tells you what they are instead of BS like "Abandoned Secret NASA Complex"
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/c...
Number 4 is
"Shelter Dome, Rubber Room, Launch Pad 39B, Kennedy Space Center, FL, 1996. “Adjoining the Rubber Room was a Shelter Dome room with the floor set on springs to isolate the occupants from whatever conflagration may be occurring above them as they seek shelter.”

The batteries in an EV create a tremendous Eco burden, in production to disposal. A study, cradle to grave, of a humvee versus Prius showed the humvee to have less impact on the ecology of our planet.
There is a five mile dead zone around the Canadian plant that produced the majority of the refined nickel for older cells, and lithium production is not much cleaner. The components make multiple trips across the pacific to become batteries. Ed's solar cells required manufacture using rare earths mined in China by abused workers. Same for the battery components. It is all feel good social science.
The 20 year cooling trend is just a continuation of they cycle that in 1974 they said was the start of a new Ice age, and scientists looked at things like spreading lampblack over the arctic and Antarctic ice to reduce the surface ice that reflects significant light/heat back out of the atmosphere.
And the subject of the article, also changed his POV on nuclear power as well. The hot climate supporters can't explain the current cooling trend some statistics show. Except we have had abnormally low solar output (the sun cycles too) including a year with none, zilch, zero, sunspot activity. But the anti-climate-deniers say solar impact is very minimal on climate change. I am not sure how they say that with a straight face. While Patrick has "sold out"according to some, he is a trained ecologist, and wants to have a paying job. There is not much of a market outside the government (speak the politically correct truth of the moment) and business (speak the truth slanted towards what we want our customers and supporters to hear). So take it all with a 25 pound bag of NaCl and do some fact checking on your own. Want to add the least heat to the environment? Support nukes. Want to destroy various subspecies of migratory birds? Support Wind ... Like China and Korea to profit, support massive EV panels. Want to do the best for the environment? Walk. Go to sleep at dusk. And look at the cradle to grave cost of all that you buy or use by proxy. No matter what the law of unintended consequences will get you. Remember Greenland was once green land. An agricultural society thrived there. Climate cycles. We should too. Get it? See what I did there?

So, Arkansas Is Leading the Learn to Code Movement: "Currently, he [AR Governor Asa Hutchinson] says only about 20 teachers in the entire state are âoeproperly preparedâ to teach these new courses..."

If it's THAT sensitive, either have the customer pick it up from a Cisco-controlled location or have a Cisco employee hand-deliver it to the customer.

Use tamper-evident seals and use something like a "warrant canary"-like system so the delivery person can effectively tell the customer that to the best of his and Cisco's knowledge the shipment was not tampered with en route: The absence of a followup message from Cisco guaranteeing that the shipment and delivery were not intercepted would be treated as a message that it might have been intercepted.

Speaking of "canaries" I wouldn't be surprised to see specialty shipping companies or specialty-arms of big-name shipping companies use "canaries" to guarantee that their shipments were delivered to an authorized person and not tampered with en route.

There are many possible ways to explain "Reality". Einstein's is just one. The ether theories have not been disproved but simply disdained. Yves Couder's experiments can be taken as support for ether theory (he doesn't go that far, but Bohm does).

So current models are just whims. There are other possibilities that haven't caught on for purely social reasons. Similar to language rules...

Mind Control Rays are Real.
A patent for wireless mind control was filed in 1974
There seems to be a cover up.
Declassified documents in 1996 explained viability of Non-Lethal energy weapons.
Microwave weapons are now viable for crowd control.
The LA County Jail now has microwave guns.

You have been told about this so many times that "conspiracy" actually invokes the use of "tinfoil hats"... and you didn't ever wonder why that is?

I haven't personally verified the claim, but some theorists speculate that some contrails are "Chem Trails" could be caused by airplanes dumping chemicals to change reflectance of the atmosphere and combat global warming, or dose cities with traces of chemicals; Some say nano metalic particles are spread this way to increase the effectiveness of the aforementioned Nonlethal Energy Weaponry upon those who ingest the particles.

My pet theory is that if the widespread use of such secret weaponry made their exposure inevitable that their existence would be quietly unveiled outside the mainstream media bit by bit so that the general public would begin to see things like "trans-cranial stimulation", "crowd control rays", and "nano particles for mind manipulation". So far this seems correct. According to the declassified documentation, the next things you'll see are EM fields and low frequency sonic waves that have mood and emotion altering properties.

In other words: Fool, they are already abusing the tech. The stories you hear now are just whitewashing the tech's existence by allowing the average citizen to think that it was just now discovered.

P.S. Flying Saucers are real too. They're just top-secret aircraft. Oh, and the government is spying on everyone! Oh, wait, slashplebs finally accepted that fact after Snowden's leaks, as if we didn't know about Room 641A, Five-Eyes, Omnivore / Carnivore, ECHELON, etc. prior to that.

FYI: You should probably reconsider the quality of the news you've been getting.

Mind Control Rays are Real.
A patent for wireless mind control was filed in 1974
There seems to be a cover up.
Declassified documents in 1996 explained viability of Non-Lethal energy weapons.
Microwave weapons are now viable for crowd control.
The LA County Jail now has microwave guns.

You have been told about this so many times that "conspiracy" actually invokes the use of "tinfoil hats"... and you didn't ever wonder why that is?

I haven't personally verified the claim, but some theorists speculate that some contrails are "Chem Trails" could be caused by airplanes dumping chemicals to change reflectance of the atmosphere and combat global warming, or dose cities with traces of chemicals; Some say nano metalic particles are spread this way to increase the effectiveness of the aforementioned Nonlethal Energy Weaponry upon those who ingest the particles.

My pet theory is that if the widespread use of such secret weaponry made their exposure inevitable that their existence would be quietly unveiled outside the mainstream media bit by bit so that the general public would begin to see things like "trans-cranial stimulation", "crowd control rays", and "nano particles for mind manipulation". So far this seems correct. According to the declassified documentation, the next things you'll see are EM fields and low frequency sonic waves that have mood and emotion altering properties.

In other words: Fool, they are already abusing the tech. The stories you hear now are just whitewashing the tech's existence by allowing the average citizen to think that it was just now discovered.

P.S. Flying Saucers are real too. They're just top-secret aircraft. Oh, and the government is spying on everyone! Oh, wait, slashplebs finally accepted that fact after Snowden's leaks, as if we didn't know about Room 641A, Five-Eyes, Omnivore / Carnivore, ECHELON, etc. prior to that.

FYI: You should probably reconsider the quality of the news you've been getting.

Just noticed that Wired published this story today: Big Data: One Thing to Think About When Buying Your Apple Watch.

So I guess Wired is paranoid as well.

I just hope Kyocera has the balls to fight this shit and win.

It probably won't, and even if it did, it wouldn't change anything. We need to get rid of software patents altogether. The fact that Microsoft has a war chest of profitable patents for cell phone software pretty much should disabuse anyone of the notion that software patents are necessary in order to compete and innovate in the market. They're nothing more than leverage for extracting licensing fees from others for solving software problems in the same obvious way that your patent happened to solve a problem. Copyright is more than enough to protect a company's intellectual property.

With such a volume of software patents, the problem for developers in navigating patent minefields is growing beyond all reason, as it's all but impossible to avoid accidentally infringing. It's holding back rather than helping innovation. The entire *point* of patents is not to establish or assert some natural rights of inventors, but to protect innovation by artificially granting an time-limited monopoly. The fact that everyone is forced to cross-license patents from each other, or the invention of software "patent pools" shows how far we've come from that ideal. It's beyond absurd, and it needs to stop. When both the EFF and Forbes are both in agreement that software patents need to go, can we just get rid of the damned things?

"then one of the brave pilots managed to dial in a rough turn to home into the autopilot before either fleeing the cockpit or dying"

The plane turned and tracked perfectly to the longest runway in the area - Pulau Langkawi

Pulau Langkawi is on the east side of Malaysia, a LOT longer than KL and has an easy ocean approach. KL is on the opposite side of Malaysia to the flight and there are 8000 foot mountain ranges in the way.

After passing Pulau Langkawi it seems to have been blown around by high altitude winds and got itself into (and stalled out of) coffin corner.(*)

Much of the "skirted around islands" shit was down to various countries refusing to admit that it went straight overhead without setting off their alert systems and the remaining tracks fit the known wind directions that day.

This insistence comes down to "Loss of Face" - Indonesia eventually admitted they had no records for the aircraft - not that they'd tracked it flying around their territory - and that admission involved greater loss of face than their initial denials.

All in all the most likely explanation is some sort of catastrophic failure which overwhelmed the crew between the time they turned around and the time the plane reached the field (easily explained by a fire fed by the cockpit oxygen system(**)). The pilot was known to be fastidious about planning and to have kept alternates programmed into the autopilot for each leg of his flights.

"What this all screams to me is that planes should be sending a regular report up to the satellites."

Many do. It's an added cost option on 777s and Malaysia airlines declined to spend the money for it. Such squawks are how the Air France debris was initially located.

MIA was facing major cutbacks after massive losses. Airline staff in all areas were reported to be lacking morale and there had been a large number of safety incidents both in the air and in maintenance shops (including a major cigarette-started fire which destroyed a lot of stuff in a heavy maintenance hanger, in an area which is non-smoking). The odds are high that this was another such event.

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/m... - remains the most compelling theory.

The only conspiracies which need to be considered are those of coverups - both within MIA and within various neighbouring countries military as they don't want to admit how badly they dropped the ball.

Having seen airlines go out of their way to deny culpability (Air New Zealand TE901), I'm quite prepared to believe that manglement would throw the pilots under a bus to save their own wretched skin.

(*) The electrical fire theory (possibly oxygen fed(**)) could have dumped all sorts of random garbage into the autopilot, but the general feeling is that after Pulau Langkawi the plane was simply flying "straight and level" (which will inevitably result in altitude changes unless manually corrected) and no bearings set, so crosswinds would cause directional changes - and all the known changes match prevailing winds at altitude.

(**) http://www.iasa-intl.com/folde... http://www.skybrary.aero/index...

There was an article in Wired quite awhile ago by a pilot. He said if there was a sudden change in direction, it was probably because the -experienced- pilot who was familiar with all the airports in the area, was looking for a safe airport. In that direction was a 7,000 foot runway. He theorized there was a nosewheel fire, the pilot turned and then everyone was overcome by smoke so the plane continued on untl running out of fuel.

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/

Why was this modded up? It's just another idiot theory that cannot be proven until the plane is found. Until the aircraft is recovered in par or in full, no one knows what happened. Period. Here's someone eviscerating the author: http://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/20sasb/very_concise_debunk_of_chris_goodfellows_theory/

There was an article in Wired quite awhile ago by a pilot. He said if there was a sudden change in direction, it was probably because the -experienced- pilot who was familiar with all the airports in the area, was looking for a safe airport. In that direction was a 7,000 foot runway. He theorized there was a nosewheel fire, the pilot turned and then everyone was overcome by smoke so the plane continued on untl running out of fuel.

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/

Yep, that's right: smash it to little pieces, videoing the entire action .. and then post it to Youtube.

Wait and see which government agency comes whining around trying to arrest you for destruction of government property.

Remember this? http://www.wired.com/2010/10/f...

Of course now _I_ am open to charges of conspiracy to destroy government property, interfering with police actions, and who knows what else?

[fingers monitors]

IT is 8 pages of regulations, 300+ of justification:

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/f...

Also it is the GOP holding up its release:

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/f...

But last week, three FCC Commissioners voted to saddle the internet with a new set of constraints so complex, vague and problematic that it took over 300 pages of explanation to justify eight pages of rules. While we haven’t seen the full text yet, we do know a lot about what’s inside.

Also it is apparently the GOP FCC members holding this up:

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

Why is this modded flamebait? Is it because there's no "pretty-accurate" mod?

I recall an article a while back about the huge corporate shift within LEGO when they started working with tie-ins. Yes, kids were quite content with building... but they're even happier to be building with their favorite pop-culture characters and settings. The bottom line was the bottom line. Ultimately, LEGO faced a decision whether they would keep their mediocre sales figures and their original characters, or whether they'd cash in their fanatic followers as targets for the movie marketing drones.

It turns out the latter choice wasn't nearly as bad as was feared. LEGO is iconic enough that they can hold their own in negotiations with brands. There are (almost) no remastered LEGO sets, no special promos, and no enforced storylines. Tie-in LEGO sets are still LEGOs, but with some familiar characters. Of course, LEGO still has their original material, which has seen a significant increase in sales because the tie-ins have served as a means to attract new customers. Perhaps surprisingly, LEGO has maintained its fanatic customer base, and yes, that often leads to supply shortages and expensive collector-oriented sets.

I'm afraid I can't find that article now, but here's an informative image.

In the past the local network dropped to an older standard depending on the version of the IMSI catcher and the network standard it used?
A few projects have been mentioned to help understand the local network conditions and then show the user changes.
Phone Firewall Identifies Rogue Cell Towers Trying To Intercept Your Calls (09.03.14)
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/c...

In fact, my first reaction was "the dress is obviously white and gold in a terrible photograph, what kind of idiot would say it is blue and black?" I saw people attribute it to various effects that really cannot account for such a huge disparity, concluded they are all crazy, thought this was an interesting subject that I should post on, and then did research, which lead me to increasingly suspect that extremely few people actually initially believe that the image looks anything like royal blue and black, but they either read Wired's analysis of problems with the color balance (unlikely), or saw the designer's stock image which has good lighting and clearly shows the dress to be blue and black (likely), and then either disingenuously claim that they thought it looked blue and black all along (because the dress the original image has a slight blue tint), or they simply say "it's blue and black, duh!" without explaining that the "duh" is "searching for a better photo." And at the same time people are shouting "it's light blue-grey, I can tell by the pixels, dumbasses!" and others are construing that to support their position of "white" (of course! it's a bluish photo of a white dress!) or "blue" (exactly--the pixels are blue, because it's a blue dress!). Few people know what question is even really being discussed, and those that completely explain their answer (Wired) are either ignored or skimmed by everyone else, whether readers or bloggers.

The blog article in TFA, which is actually under the banner of the Washington Post, walks straight into this fallacy. Presumably the other media commentators are as well, or the WaPo blogger would have noticed. They see the furious difference of opinion on the twittersphere, or whatever crap they're using for "research," and then indiscriminately repeat it all, along with some people smugly pointing out how everyone is getting the wrong answer (to a question that they haven't bothered to define). The implicit conclusion is that the image has some mystical property that makes people deranged, though most of them are too stupid to realize it (even as those people are thinking something similar), until the WaPo blogger finally badly quotes a Wired blogger who actually figured out most of the truth. They realized that the common conclusions about what is wrong with the white balance are inconsistent over the whole image, and that if they balanced it from assumption that the darkest point should actually be black, the dress surprisingly turns blue and black. The WaPo blogger ignores most of the subtlety, because like everyone else, they just want to say "the dress is actually [blue and black] because people are too dumb to account for [the brain]" instead of "the color balance of this photograph is skewed in a very unexpected way that combined with its obvious background overexposure, leads most people to guess that it is a white/gold dress in underexposed overly-blue lighting--a very common white balance problem--instead of a blue and black dress in extremely overexposed lighting with disproportionate red saturation, which we were only able to realize after repeated filtering attempts." The real answer is apparently too long to be supported by the bulk of the combined twitter-/blogo-sphere, and so the "controversy" continues.

The many degenerate properties of the infamous photo are interesting, but mostly this "controversy" seems to be a fairly common, if unusually clear illustration of the problems with human mass-communication. Everyone gets a little information, leaps to a conclusion, sees that people disagree, and starts generating rationalizations to explain how the bulk of humanity is morons, except for them. Well, extremely few people are actually "morons," but a whole lot of people really are terrible at both receiving facts from communications and in turn, explaining them in their own communications. In f

Actually, my source of info is wired... http://www.wired.com/2014/06/n...

Did Bush’s Broadband Deregulation Upend His Own NSA Wiretapping? Now that the regulations have changed, the situation is different.

At least, when it comes to Tokyo.

I've met CS grad students (grad students!) that have never programmed assembly language, or really anything lower than Java. I've worked with other freshly minted CS majors that have barely gotten a taste of machine organization, computer architecture, or any of these lower level concepts. Or, they were exposed to it, they did the bare minimum to survive the architecture class with no intention of retaining the material. And, I've worked with others that were stellar and knew their stuff inside-out.

Sure, the better schools do a better job of covering computer architecture basics. But it seems a fair number cover this material rather perfunctorily.

In any case, this is a bit off the topic. I expect CS folks to know their job and their curriculum, and complaining about schools with shoddy CS curricula vs. schools that do CS right is missing the point.

Bill Nye's complaint is that most software writes (and he included that in a rather generic list of occupations, as opposed to singling them out specifically) aren't terribly scientifically literate. That has almost nothing to do with Computer Science, and more to do with how many folks fall for pseudoscientific claims and hokum.

Silicon Valley has a unusually high concentration of anti-vaxxers. Explain that. No amount of compiler theory, digital logic, virtual memory, pipelining, algorithm analysis, or big-O notation can fix the scientific literacy gap that anti-vaxxers fall into. And it's that sort of scientific literacy Bill Nye was going on about.

Microsoft needs to grow a pair and lay down the law to any company that wants to be an OEM for their products. Apple wouldn't let the carriers pull this stunt on their phones.

I think Apple prohibiting carriers from doing this sort of stuff is more about keeping competitors under their thumb, not about protecting users. They're not above pulling this crap themselves at their users' expense. They surreptitiously slurped up users' location and wifi SSID data to build their own wifi map (the following year, they dumped the company they'd been paying to lease such a map). You know, the same thing Google got in trouble for because they went to the trouble to try to do it the right way, and had their own employees drive around doing the data gathering (not their Android users), then found out later they'd recorded a lot more than SSID.

Have you seen Particle Fever? It's possible to make a movie about technically complex topics that's also accessible to a wider audience. Human drama is probably the most important element in any successful movie, but you can also surround that drama with technical information. People become more receptive to it that way, rather than eyes glazing over.

But whatever. Companies that are successful hardly ever fire. Toyota keeps hiring. Google keeps hiring.

WHAAAAAAA?

You might wish to let these ex-Toyota workers know. Or these ones. Or the 4,000 ex-Motorola-turned-Google employees Google laid off because they were - wait for it - exiting a line of business they didn't think they wanted to be in anymore.

Good companies get out of bad businesses all the time. Usually they fire the people who worked in that business. It sucks but it's true, and to think that good companies never exit lines of business or lay people off is insane.

Java on the client has been dead for a very long time already. When the FBI wants to pwn you, they use Javascript security flaws. about:config javascript.enabled=false

Note that the term Schizophrenic is often wrongly applied to people who merely investigate corruption and have distrust in the powers that be.

Take, for example, this declassified document which lists details of "non-lethal" directed energy weaponry, including the ability to transmit a voice into the head of another individual (V2K, voice to skull).
It uses the microwave auditory effect:

This Heat wave crowd control is maturation of tech listed in document above.

Here we see the weapon fitted for use in LA County Jail.

MEDUSA would apply microwave auditory effect instead of the heat wave.
wiki link

It's difficult to tell the difference between a schizophrenic and someone who is being targeted by government agents for uncovering misappropriation of funds, or evidence of a conspiracy. To dismiss individuals concerns and medicate them for such claims without hearing them out is heinous, yet that is what psychiatrists do. I mean, here's a patent for mind influencing device. Is it really that far fetched? Even when the citizenry has trans-cranial tech that can keep people from speaking? It's safe to assume the government has more advanced tech than this... right?

Sure, there are probably more schizophrenic people than those targeted by their own governments, but I put it to you that it is no longer correct to assume by default that a person hearing voices, having strange sensations, and emotions, etc. is insane. At least LOOK for evidence of manipulation. Often these individuals attempt to present a video of a sweeping AM radio tuned to static which can detect EM interference signals along the nonlethal energy weapon beams (just as you get when you put the radio near a microwave). However, such evidence it is summarily dismissed out of hand and not sought in the least by our medical "professionals" despite the growing complaints and demonstrations of such technology's use. A massive disinformation campaign has been ongoing since the mid 70's to keep the use of such tech against the citizens under wraps, and it is now a widely used tool in anti-extremist / anti-protester response forces.

Just like they were right about the government spying on everyone and even seeing through walls the conspiracy theorists were right about tinfoil hats. Yet, the average person still dismisses even the possibility that some people wearing them aren't crazy.

Who's the one that's brainwashed by media? It just might be the psychiatrists.

Pfft! ALL of those things were invented by others. Musk is only good at jumping on others coattails. He has no revolutionary impact on anything. And Tesla is about to crumble.

Here is an innovator.

Here is another

Musk is just a dipshit who got REAL lucky and he is nothing compared to those two I mentioned.

Variety Jones, perhaps the true mastermind behind Silk Road, had the perfect level of involvement. He was disconnected and impossible to track, which means he ran this empire through a patsy. This isn't meant as an insult to Ulbricht. It's too hard to do everything right at that level of involvement. Jones's mistakes only had negative ramifications for Ulbricht. You could say that his only error that might come back to him was that he didn't explicitly tell Ulbricht to keep logging disabled for his Tor chats, which allowed Jones's writing habits and estimates of his schedule (time zone) can be analyzed and perhaps mapped to his other (less obscured) online activity in a manner similar to Ulbricht's Facebook notes about Thailand.

Who knows, perhaps Jones, who was quite arguably the true architect of Silk Road, is now serving the same capacity in another similar enterprise.

"As Ulbricht's trial unfolded over the last month, one character appeared again and again in the chat logs prosecutors pulled from the laptop seized from Ulbricht at the time of his arrest: a man calling himself Variety Jones, and later, Cimon " ref.