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http://www.wired.com/2013/07/w...

It really depends on how the homeschooling happens. I have three kids. The two older went through public schools. We moved to Los Alamos (Home of Los Alamos National Laboratories) specifically for the schools.

My two older kids did pretty well K-5 in school. They both liked their teachers and loved science and history. But Middle School crushed them. By the time they went to High School, they had both become anti-intellect, anti-education, anti-reading.

My youngest didn't do well in K or 1st grade. We started home schooling him in 2nd grade. Today, he's in 4th. He knows more about history than just about any adult I know. He is learning to program Java, and Python. He is interested in joining the home school speech and debate team, which is small, but all its members are internationally rated in multiple disciplines. He has joined a Lego engineering club, and is looking forward to the robotics team.

He is well liked, an incredibly happy. He wants to start his own business, and I'll be working with him on a business plan to kick that off.

In short, I'm a fan of homeschooling, provided the parent/s are on-board with projectized learning. Here is a good article from Wired about this:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/

It really depends on how the homeschooling happens. I have three kids. The two older went through public schools. We moved to Los Alamos (Home of Los Alamos National Laboratories) specifically for the schools. My two older kids did pretty well K-5 in school. They both liked their teachers and loved science and history. But Middle School crushed them. By the time they went to High School, they had both become anti-intellect, anti-education, anti-reading. My youngest didn't do well in K or 1st grade. We started home schooling him in 2nd grade. Today, he's in 4th. He knows more about history than just about any adult I know. He is learning to program Java, and Python. He is interested in joining the home school speech and debate team, which is small, but all its members are internationally rated in multiple disciplines. He has joined a Lego engineering club, and is looking forward to the robotics team. He is well liked, an incredibly happy. He wants to start his own business, and I'll be working with him on a business plan to kick that off. In short, I'm a fan of homeschooling, provided the parent/s are on-board with projectized learning. Here is a good article from Wired about this: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/s...

The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids

"Don't fight city hall," — goes the ancient wisdom. It is pretty bad already — with local governments protecting the huge incumbents in exchange for perks and kickbacks.

Once the towns have their own direct financial interest in the game, dislodging that monopoly will be even harder. Plain and simple, the government can only be allowed to do, what nobody else can. For local governments that translates to policing and dispensing justice. Nothing else.

It should be noted that those are relays, which transit data inside the tor network, not exit nodes (which provide exit points to the general network and can be a large risk for their operator should any illegal content be accessed). Relays still help with the general obfuscation of the network as well as for hidden services, though.
Apparently, Mozilla is considering eventually deploying exit nodes as well though.

Finally, for those that will scream "child porn", it should be noted that a very, very small minority of tor traffic is actually linked to that type of content, despite what the DoJ says; the best estimates from the tor project is around 1.5%. This move by Mozilla is a good thing - amongst other things helping countless defenders of freedom in oppressed regimes speak up in safety.

From the history books:
Declassified NSA Document Reveals the Secret History of TEMPEST

It's not using simple stereo screens, they have lightfield projectors:

Project HoloLens is built, fittingly enough, around a set of holographic lenses. Each lens has three layers of glassâ"in blue, green, and redâ"full of microthin corrugated grooves that diffract light. There are multiple cameras at the front and sides of the device that do everything from head tracking to video capture. And it can see far and wide: The field of view spans 120 degrees by 120 degrees, significantly bigger than that of the Kinect camera. A âoelight engineâ above the lenses projects light into the glasses, where it hits the grating and then volleys between the layers of glass millions of times. That process, along with input from the device's myriad sensors, tricks the eye into perceiving the image as existing in the world beyond the lenses.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-nadella/

They track eye movement and adjust for that as well. I think you need the lightfield stuff so that the eye if forced to adapt focus for different distances, it's a depth cue that Oculus don't have.

It'll be interesting to see what frame rate and latency they achieve. It sounds like they have a lot of hardware in the headset, so it could be quite good. Plus they only need to render the bit right in the centre of the field of view at high quality.

I was looking at this.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/n...

I take it you don't remember what it was like when those were all held by single entities.

I do remember it, and I mentioned that unfortunate state as one, brought about by an earlier attempt by our government to regulate cable companies. In exchange for the regulation they wrestled monopoly powers — and ran with it (like AT&T did decades before that).

That mistake was corrected in the 90ies, though the problems caused by earlier government stupidity remain. To now point at them and argue, we need more governmental control (as duckintheface is doing above), requires a very special kind of stupid.

With Iridium the approach was to hand ff the transmission between satellites until it was within range of of a ground station to connect to a terrestrial network, or reach another satellite phone, usually one or two hops

They may use a similar approach, although Iridium initially involved the governments in the countries that they maintained gateways in as part of the corporate structure. See Wired story, "The United Nations of Iridium"
http://archive.wired.com/wired...

It would make a lot of sense to use the satellite network as the primary routing mechanism and only maintain gateways in geographic locations that Musk has strong political influence in. This would limit political interference from countries that practice censorship and limit money lost to graft and bribery

Does anyone think the sponsors of this legialation have serioulsly considered the issues of user access and cost?

I sure do think so.

the mantra of "free markets"

Yes, leave it to Illiberals to criticize free markets. Government take-over did so well for railroads, public transport, and telephone-service, what could possibly be wrong about adding Internet to the mix?

This has resulted in a protected monopoly for these ISPs. [...] treat the ISPs as utilities so that their rates will be controlled

Yes, an earlier mistake of our government letting corporations have monopolies (of cable TV) still needs to be dealt with. But the price-control you are advocating in the next paragraph only makes things worse. Because the incumbents are much better versed in dealing with the government regulators, than a newcomer will ever be.

And, while you are accusing Republicans of baby-eating, it is the Democrats who are owned by the Big Cable.

This is really a free market in content

So, free market in content is a good mantra, but free market in service provision is bad? Or did you change your mind by the end of typing your post?

Im saying that 20 of those 30 years didnt see any warming.

If you want to claim this (nonsense), you should at least back it up with some links, so we can add the involved web sites to our kill files.

you would ignore data that contradicts your beliefs???

It would be helpful here if everybody pointed to a common data set, so we all knew that we were talking about the same thing.

Here's the NASA-NOAA, showing NOAA (in blue) and NASA (in red) 's values for average temperature since 1880: http://www.wired.com/wp-conten...

You can see the "hiatus" in the far right of the graph: the curve to right of about 2000. If you blow up just this portion of the graph, and leave out everything to the right of 1998, you can make a graph which makes it appear that global warming has stopped.

So: the deniers look at this graph and say "warming stopped in 2002". People skeptical of the deniers say "There's a clear upward trend with random fluctuations; there's nothing statistically significant in the data after 2002; it's well within the range of variation in the record."

Or, you can say "There's a clear long-term rise. However, superimposed on that long-term trend are shorter term variations; these shorter term variations are also data, and the study of the causes of these variations may be a valuable subject for research."

There's no way these numbers are accurate. Last winter was the coldest one on record around here, in over 100 years of record keeping. Pipes were freezing everywhere and the roads got pretty much destroyed.

There's no way to tell where anonymous coward is posting from, but if "around here" means "United States east of the Rocky Mountains," then, looking at the Wired article and specifically at the 2014 map of average temperature, 2014 was indeed colder than average.
The Wired article is here: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/2...
The map is here: GISTEMP 2014 Anomaly with respect to 1951-1980

Regional is not global average. Even regional average is not global average. One region can be indeed colder than average over a year, and nevertheless the world as a whole warmer than average.

On the average.

I'm not sure who's benefitting from this global warming shit that they're trying to spread, but nobody who actually experienced last winter believes it for a second.

That's the problem: people experience their local region, but draw conclusions about the global average.

There's no way these numbers are accurate. Last winter was the coldest one on record around here, in over 100 years of record keeping. Pipes were freezing everywhere and the roads got pretty much destroyed.

There's no way to tell where anonymous coward is posting from, but if "around here" means "United States east of the Rocky Mountains," then, looking at the Wired article and specifically at the 2014 map of average temperature, 2014 was indeed colder than average.
The Wired article is here: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/2...
The map is here: GISTEMP 2014 Anomaly with respect to 1951-1980

Regional is not global average. Even regional average is not global average. One region can be indeed colder than average over a year, and nevertheless the world as a whole warmer than average.

On the average.

I'm not sure who's benefitting from this global warming shit that they're trying to spread, but nobody who actually experienced last winter believes it for a second.

That's the problem: people experience their local region, but draw conclusions about the global average.

1. A self-optimizing AI system is developed to trade stocks, scanning the internet to identify factors that influence prices and replicating actions that it sees have been used elsewhere.
2. The system initially chooses to sell stocks based on negative news stories about companies (eg of a DDOS attack on a company's web site).
3. The system finds it can make more profit if, after it has sold stock based on fresh bad news, by rebroadcasting that news to social media to multiply the effect.
4. The system finds it can make more profit if it embellishes the stories before rebroadcasting them.
5. The system finds it can make more profit by actively participating in the DDOS attack.
6. The system finds it can make more profit by replicating the action and launching its own DDOS attack (after first short-selling the company's shares).
7. The system finds it can make more profit by launching other kinds malware attacks like infecting factories, airline navigation systems, car networks, etc.

I love reading about the complexities of the plant kingdom. Plants that communicate. Plants that delay eating for a bigger meal later. All cool things from organisms that have been evolving longer than any vertebrate.

Re "What happened in 2008 that allowed them to change their policies?" Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet (01.07.14)
http://www.wired.com/2014/01/h...
"The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 carved out a new section of the law, 702, which gave legal cover to the warrantless surveillance programs operated in total secrecy under President Bush; queries are often called 702s.
The NSA cites the FISA Amendments Act as the specific legal basis for Prism."

First of all the current 'intelligent' systems are on a level of an ant or bee. This does not make them less lethal to humans however. The problems are already there then and the biggest is - even systems that are meant to be friendly may become lethal because of oversight, bug, miscalculation, abuse or because they may 'think' that humans are danger to other humans (which is mostly potentially and in quite many cases actually true). What about systems that are meant to kill or at least disable humans? In old good times a gun shot by itself once a year but it did so only if somebody pulled the trigger. Now the autonomous systems may pull the trigger all by themselves and they may have to decide themselves as humans in control loop are too slow. I think in most cases making system robust and reliable may be a shot in the right direction. Alas in the real world scrum team may decide this feature is to be move to next sprint or demo it albeit it is not ready etc... In other words - is anybody ready to pay for robust systems that are less likely to kill by accident? Yea I did not think so. We solve problems that come out of ant like creatures that have enough power to kill many, move on to quality and robustness and then when AI is on horizon we can start thinking about 3 laws and some such things.

or it is because google forced it to watch cat videos

Wired's take is that the price is heavily driven up by trolling bidders
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/s...

Favourite quote from the article:

What can be especially frustrating about these trolled auctions is the inevitable wave of incorrect news reports that follow, suggesting that the item in question has “sold” for the wildly inflated, unrealistic, fraudulent bid amount, without even a caveat.

Transparency. Just add more.

No.

Your "solution" to your own hypothetical stalker situation amounts to forcing that woman to allow herself to be chased and hunted like a prey animal.

Of course, that's what you really want, isn't it?

You do believe in competition as a market force, don't you?

I certainly do believe that. I also know — both from past history and the current state of affairs — that government regulation reduces rather than increases competition.

providing a level playing field to build a market on is very much the job of government

The proposed reclassification of Internet-service as "public utility" has nothing to do with "leveling the playing field". Directly it neither levels nor upends it. Indirectly — by increasing the regulatory burden — it increases the barrier to entry to anyone, who'd challenge existing monopoly(ies) — the way Google is currently challenging them, for example.

This is ten+ years old now, but Orrin Hatch is still a sitting senator. Good to remind ourselves stuff like this happened.

Obviously examples of 1, 2 or even half a dozen bugs in any given release isn't going to prove anything but anybody who is using the products will have encountered them and anybody who isn't could use google to discover them really easily rather than enumerating them all in the post.

For example iOS 7 had a hell of a lot of regressions and bugs in new features and its successor iOS 8 was even worse.

But there’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century.

Absolutely absurd. We have NOT figured out what makes time "tick" (pun intended) and why it results in the world we experience today. And his "explanation" elsewhere, that it's the uni-directional arrow of time and entropy and that when the universe gets to maximum entropy another universe "pops off", doesn't work. It's just hand-waving.

And the last paragraph of this interview, Carroll admits that we don't know:

f you think you understand the rules of gravity and quantum mechanics really, really well, you can say, "According to the rules, universes pop into existence. Even if I can’t observe them, that’s a prediction of my theory, and I’ve tested that theory using other methods." We’re not even there yet. We don’t know how to have a good theory, and we don’t know how to test it.

Anyway, one day maybe we'll have a decent first approximation to work from. In the meantime, getting there is half the fun. Happy New Year!

Oh good, a new sport!

Whoops! I fail this time.

From TFA: "Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head."

However, that statement links to this article which states that: "Then Ver responded with a link to a Facebook post offering that 37-bitcoin bounty for information leading to Nitrous’s arrest, and Nitrous immediately backed down. To be clear, Ver didn’t put a bounty on Nitrous’s head. He merely said he’ll pay out the money when Nitrous is arrested for hacking his accounts."

I suck. Apologies to Timmy.

"...to blackmail them not to release a movie about Kim Jong Un."

Well, there's your flawed assumption right there. The stated goal of the hackers was explicitly not that until a few weeks went by and the media became determined to whip the North Korea story.

"But in their initial public statement, whoever hacked Sony made no mention of North Korea or the film. And in an email sent to Sony by the hackers, found in documents they leaked, there is also no mention of North Korea or the film... “[M]onetary compensation we want,” the email read. “Pay the damage, or Sony Pictures will be bombarded as a whole. You know us very well. We never wait long. You’d better behave wisely.”... It was only on December 8, after a week of media stories connecting North Korea and the Sony film to the hack, that the attackers made their first reference to the film in one of their public announcements."

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/

Experts Are Still Divided on Whether North Korea Is Behind Sony Attack ( 12.23.14)
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/s...
"Rather, he thinks someone in a political position inside the FBI, not actual investigators, got hold of a report ..."
"These FBI insiders read this and “wanted it to be North Korea so much that they just threw away caution,” he suggests. "
BREAKING: We Can Conclusively Confirm North Korea Was Not Behind #Sony Hack (DECEMBER 22, 2014 )
http://gotnews.com/breaking-ca...

Like you, I want the facts. I have seen no facts that implicate the DPRK over the people who claimed responsibility initially (GOP). Wired had an article on it two days ago when the first stories started to attempt to pin the hack on the DPRK which has been ignored by all US and UK media. Not only have all US media outlets jumped on the "it was those dirty North Koreans" bandwagon, but the BBC has become complicit in this as well.

I fairness, I was able to do some digging to find more information on the BBC that I could not in US media. Let me go through the evidence. and comment on each after that.

Before doing so, let me explain something critical. In order to teach hacking, a person has to have access to the internet. This is a huge dilemma for the DPRK who has to risk any Internet access with the knowledge that the person with access _WILL_ see information damaging to their loyalty to the DPRK. There are no computer cafe's in North Korea where guys can go learn to hack to make a couple extra bucks, in fact unless you have explicit Government approval you can not have a computer. Even if you are a "tourist" you must have permission and you will not be able to take your laptop wherever you wish.

This means that the only hacking that could come from the DPRK is Government sponsored, and the amount of hackers they have would be tiny. They don't have the money for "new" or unique equipment either, so any computer hardware they have is going to be 2nd hand junk that China no longer wants. What the Military has for hacking tools would be 2nd hand script kiddie tools or, provided by China.

Not only does an extraordinary claim require extraordinary proof, but in this case US Politicians have lied so often I don't trust a damn thing I'm told any longer. Our "media" follows the scripts they are handed just like the politicians, and I don't trust them either. So here is the claim summary.

First, the FBI says its analysis spotted distinct similarities between the type of malware used in the Sony Pictures hack and code used in an attack on South Korea last year.

So we turn to another, better clue: IP addresses - known to be part of "North Korean infrastructure" - formed part of the malware too. This suggests the attack may have been controlled by people who have acted for North Korea in the past.

That's it folks, that is all we have. The "Hacks" last year (actually since 2009) which were never tracked to the DPRK are the first reason they believe this hack was. Wow, that's quite a leap in logic. DarkSeoul is still anonymous and there is no evidence that links them to North Korea. Lots of claims that China is training and letting the DPRK use their resources, but no evidence that the group is even operating out of China. Finally we have IP addresses, which any Script kiddie knows to spoof with someone's IP address you hate! I'm positive that the FBI can not be that goddamn dumb, they have to realize IPs can be spoofed too!

Ok, time to get off my soap box...

This tells a lot about what was first reported and how the actual claim of it being North Korea was fabricated. Most interesting is the line "Among the more than 11,000 newly-released files are hundreds of employee usernames and passwords as well as RSA SecurID tokens and certificates belonging to Sony". Ahhhh yea I'm going to say North Korea wasn't involved in the least in this......... Former employee(s) seem about a million times more likely.

Just because some vague articles and politicos point the finger at North Korea doesn't mean that it's true. I'm not making any assertions about the truth at this point, but we should be careful before jumping to (potentially violent) conclusions based on hearsay.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/e...

"But in their initial public statement, whoever hacked Sony made no mention of North Korea or the film. And in an email sent to Sony by the hackers, found in documents they leaked, there is also no mention of North Korea or the film. The email was sent to Sony executives on Nov. 21, a few days before the hack went public. Addressed to Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton, Chairwoman Amy Pascal and other executives, it appears to be an attempt at extortion, not an expression of political outrage or a threat of war."

Are you a troll? When is that link from? When did they add support? I have lost nothing, you still have not addressed anything about pre 2006, which I know is fact, and provided good backing with links to the information. You still persist in linking information from post 2006, once they stopped doing it.

And I will direct you to the relevant section of the article you link to:

Itunes 4.2 or later has built-in support

Which, if you read further down, only allows you to drag and drop files, it doesn't have true support for the players. In fact, the date they started supporting devices not made by Apple looks like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

June 28, 2005, with support of the Motorolla Rokr E1

Dragging files to an external hard drive (that happens to be a music player) is not support, that is not using the application.

So, as I have consistently said, the early devices would strip out the Real Audio files, which they were capable of playing. The early iTunes actively prevented usage of devices other than Apple products. Here is a story about them blocking access to the Palm Pre for a second time: http://www.wired.com/2009/10/p...

Also, the early iTunes bought music had DRM that prevented playing it on other devices, this was due to licensing requirements from the music publishers, and is addressed in the article above.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/c... Back in Sept, Wired talked about a phone that has firewall and security to detect when you are using a hack cell tower. Sure its a little different but still interesting the same.

The dialogue pinning the attack on DPRK serves many purposes, and it's been quite fun to watch this event transform from "Fuck Sony" to our ever present "Oh Noez! A bogey man" dialectic. We already have politicians claiming that the DPRK made an act of war (Newt Gingrich) and according to at least FOX and ABC the US is officially blaming the DPRK for the cyber attack (though neither have specified what agency this is). Even though evidence is weak at best.

Anyone believing the "terrorist" propaganda must somehow also believe that the DPRK has millions of bomb strapping terrorists stationed in the US ready to flock into Star and AMC to bomb people for watching a comedy.

Most of what you say is true except Bill Gates is definitely not out...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

Bill Gates was on the board, he's stepped down from the board to take a more hands on role within the company.

I don't think you give the man enough credit, he is the man who beat Steve Jobs and nearly drove Apple out of business...

http://www.wired.com/2009/08/d...

Microsoft with (not against) the guidence of Bill Gates are embracing open source as they have every other technological movement there has been.

Here's MORE in that regard (dozens of times, millions of users infected by ads):

http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...
http://www.securityweek.com/lo...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...
http://www.securityweek.com/ea...
http://www.itworld.com/securit...
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...
http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...
http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

APK

P.S.=>

"And they dont hurt that much..." - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @08:00PM (#48613667)

Oh, really? See above, & "tell us another one"... apk

The only problem with that is that widening roads actually does not reduce traffic jams.

Building more roads only causes more traffic.

Widening freeways doesn't solve traffic problems. Short version on Wikipedia, longer version on Wired.

The problem in LA is more accurately described as too many people in one place, all having places they want to go. Other less dysfunctional cities either have better mass transit or a lot fewer people wanting to go a non-trivial distance. Hell, all you have to do is look north to San Francisco and Oakland, where BART siphons off enough demand from the freeways to keep them flowing much more cleanly than in LA, the only real exceptions being the choke points where trains are at maximum capacity at rush hour (the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube) or where the BART line ends where there's still a lot of commuter traffic on the parallel freeway (I-80 in Richmond).

Not saying that NIMBY isn't a problem — it's ridiculous how it keeps many cities/regions on the West Coast from having coherent plans that work for the benefit of the public at large — just that wider urban freeways aren't part of the solution. They were the panacea of the 1950s, but with the population of metro areas now and the much higher percentage of people who have the option to drive, that approach is obsolete.

You know what else is stupid? You :)
Old hat NASA engineers have been repeating that same old story about hardening for years. They all said it cant work, will be unreliable, is a waste of time and money. All until Phonesat was tested and worked.
http://www.space.com/21036-spa...

Today there is over 100 NONhardened satellites in orbit
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/p...

They cost thousands instead of millions of dollars, and work just fine. You can listen to an interview with one of the founders/engineers here:
http://www.theamphour.com/220-...

(feeling karma-guilty now) Some of my previous BGP bookmarks,

The RFC6480 I'm sure you'll want to read this first, every bit of it. Others may wish to skip on to the next chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin the Robot in it.

Introduction to BGP and How BGP best path (by default!)
[2014] spammers squatting on unassigned IP address ranges
  [2014] Using BGP advertisements to gather Bitcoin mining traffic (doing digital money with unsecured protocols, kewl!)
[2012] Packet Pushers #93: Lies and Routing in the Internet great interview with Geoff Huston. Look for the show notes links too.
[2012] Packet Pushers #105: BGP Origin Validation with Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) with Alex Brand from RIPE. Discussion of attack profiles, resistance and real-world challenges to its implementation.
[2012] Previous Slashdot: Engineers Ponder Easier Fix To Internet Problem
[2013] Denver pings Denver --- via Iceland! Someone's Been Routing Internet Data Through The Great Chefs Of Europe

Here's some confusing BGP routing diagrams to print out and tape to the walls to impress everybody.

So using the official Wikileaks Twitter account to encourage people to donate to it is merely an "I won't sue you"?

Meanwhile, how about that Chelsea Manning defense fund after Assange milked the Manning case for fundraising for years....

re " Do they elect a body to deal with it?"
Legal Experts: Stuxnet Attack on Iran Was Illegal ‘Act of Force’ (03.25.13 )
http://www.wired.com/2013/03/s...
It depends on the experts asked, who funded what and why.
Think of Sputnik. Nations thought airspace went up. Sputnik went over many nations but not much was said as spy satellites where going to be used.
A lot of different nations now have offensive cyber-operations funding and contractors. No much is been done to question that new concept.

Now am I saying women can't do this work? No. I am rather saying they don't want to do it. They sit down in the programming classes, notice it is not fun for them, and leave.

It is a choice.

You are correct, it is a choice. But your unstated premise - that it is an independent choice - is false. It isn't the work they walk away from, it is the social judgment of the people who do that work. Both the culture around the work being unfriendly to them and society's default belief that it is not a job for women.

Look at India for example, where as a whole women have much less opportunity, the proportion of female programmers is 50% greater than in the US. That is a very strong indicator that the issue is one of nurture, not nature. And if it isn't nature, then it is something we can change if you don't retreat into denialism.

In other news: A company so desperate to get into bed with Apple signs away their soul for rainbows and promises.

Yeah, we all know how bad that ended for Corning, who got suckered into massive investments to produce a formerly failed product by Apple. http://www.wired.com/2012/09/ff-corning-gorilla-glass/all/

... Steve Jobs gave the 53-year-old Weeks a seemingly impossible task: Make millions of square feet of ultrathin, ultrastrong glass that didn’t yet exist. Oh, and do it in six months.

Phone Firewall Identifies Rogue Cell Towers Trying to Intercept Your Calls (09.03.14)
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/c...
Will the next generation of rogue cell tower have the ability to be another normal cell tower?

This is from an article linked from Wikipedia:

The X’ers also formed a partnership with Raven Aerostar, a company whose balloons have included early NASA near-space probes. Together they confronted problems involving flight duration, control, and power consumption that have baffled balloonists for centuries. Ultimately they came up with a dual-chamber design (one filled with helium, the other with air) and a system of valves that allowed low-energy altitude adjustments. “Ballooning is way harder than rocket science,” DeVaul says.

To make the envelope, Raven Aerostar extrudes a special polyethylene film, only three times the thickness of the plastic that covers your typical loaf of bread and specially formulated to retain helium, resist pressure, and stay supple, even at –50 degrees Fahrenheit. The company now runs an assembly line for Google in Sulphur Springs, Texas, and it set up a second line near its headquarters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After all, if you’re going to encircle the globe with Internet-beaming UFOs, you’re going to need a lot of them.

So, it's helium and air, which probably caused some of the confusion.

This is a quote from Elon Musk on what he thinks about "process":

"I don't believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that 'it's all about the process,' I see that as a bad sign.

"The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative."

This just about nails it for me.

maybe this will make up for it.

http://www.wired.com/2013/02/t...

When 20-year-old web designer Erick Reis left a friend’s house on Sunday, he saw what looked like thousands of spiders overhead, reported G1, a Brazilian news site, on Feb. 8. The large, sturdy spiders were hanging from power lines and poles, and crawling around on a vast network of silk strands spun over the town of Santo Antonio da Platina.